By J&L Perfect Cleaning Team

• Last Updated: September 2026  | Estimated Reading Time: 6 min

Five places where the bar actually gets set, and how to tell where your building sits.

Most offices get judged by how they look. That works for the things you can see and fails everywhere else. Which is a problem, because the failures that cost real money are mostly the ones you cannot see.

There is no official number that separates a well-kept workplace from a neglected one. Anyone offering you one is selling something. What does exist is five areas where the bar gets set in practice. Each has its own cause and effect, its own evidence, and its own way of being checked.

Some of these are on much firmer ground than others. It is worth knowing which is which before you build a budget on them.

1. Shared Surfaces, Honestly

Door handles, elevator buttons, light switches and shared keyboards are places where a lot of hands land. Cleaning them regularly is sensible. The temptation is to oversell why.

The evidence here is narrower than this industry usually admits. A study of a hand-washing program in offices found about a third fewer colds and stomach bugs reported by staff. It also found fewer missed work days, but that second number was small enough that it could have been chance. The program tested hand washing, not surface cleaning. And surfaces matter more for stomach bugs like norovirus than for colds and flu, which mostly travel through the air.

So the honest position is not that cleaning stops illness from spreading. It is that WorkSafeNB lists cleaning and disinfecting among the steps employers should keep up, that the risk changes with the season and the area, and that the reasonable bar is knowing which surfaces are on your list and covering them every time instead of by accident.

How to check: ask which specific surfaces they treat as high-touch in your building, how often, and how anyone would notice if a week got skipped. A company that cannot name the surfaces is not working from a list.

2. What the Cleaning Puts Into the Air

Air affects how well people think, and the research on this is striking. In one controlled study, people scored 61% higher on thinking tests when the air was better, and 101% higher under the best conditions.

That study changed the ventilation, the carbon dioxide level, and the level of certain airborne chemicals. Those are building systems — your heating and air conditioning. No cleaning arrangement controls them. Putting those numbers in a cleaning proposal is a mistake about what the study measured, and a common one.

The part that does belong in this conversation is smaller. Cleaning products give off chemicals that float into the air; the trade calls them volatile organic compounds, or VOCs. Cheap products with heavy perfume add more of them and cover up smells instead of fixing what caused them. And a vacuum with a bad filter picks fine dust up off the floor and blows it back into the room. None of that improves your air.

So the bar is that the cleaning is not making the air worse. It is a low bar, and a surprising number of arrangements do not clear it.

How to check: look at the vacuums on your floor and find out what filter they use. Ask whether the products are certified low-emission by an outside group. Ask whether the crew measures the mix or guesses at the sink. A strong smell the next morning is something to ask about, not something to enjoy.

3. Garbage, and What It Brings In

Food waste left in office bins overnight starts to break down. It smells, and it draws pests. Once mice or insects settle in, getting rid of them is expensive, and it stops being a cleaning issue and becomes a building issue.

This is the least arguable item on the list, and the one most often quietly cut back to save money. Kitchen and washroom bins go from every visit to three times a week. Bins get new liners but never get washed.

How to check: look at the bottom of a kitchen bin, under the liner. Buildup there tells you the bin is being emptied, not cleaned. Then read your contract, because this is one of the lines that gets trimmed during renegotiation without anyone announcing it.

4. What Visitors Read Into the Place

This is the one area where how it looks is the point, not a stand-in for something else. Clients, job candidates and partners form opinions about how you run things from smudged glass, a dusty front desk, or a marked boardroom table. Those opinions are not unfair.

It deserves less weight than most marketing gives it, and more than the earlier articles in this series suggested. A tidy front desk does not tell you the building is well kept — the entrance is the easiest place to keep presentable and the first thing any company prioritises. But if clients visit you, the front of the office is a real asset, and it is worth naming as its own requirement instead of assuming it comes along for free.

How to check: compare your reception area to a back hallway, a supply room, or the staff kitchen. The size of the gap tells you whether you have a system or a performance.

5. Wear on the Building Itself

Dry dirt and grit come in on shoes. That grit acts like sandpaper. Once it settles into carpet fibres, every footstep grinds it against them and the fibres wear through. On hard floors, the same grit dulls the finish and scratches vinyl tile. Nobody argues about this part.

What nobody can tell you is how big the effect is in your building. How long a floor lasts depends on the product, the traffic, the installation and the building, all together. So no one can honestly say a neglected floor lasts five years and a cared-for one lasts twelve. Most of the published advice on this comes from flooring and cleaning manufacturers, who have a stake in the answer. The cause and effect holds up. Treat the numbers attached to it as marketing.

Greater Moncton makes this sharper than most Canadian markets. It is one of the snowiest cities in the country, and winter road crews use salt and sand, so what arrives on your floors changes completely across the season. Your entrance is not the first room in the building. It is the first line of defence for your floors, and entrance mats are the cheapest fix on this entire list.

How to check: ask how often they deep-clean the floors, not how often they vacuum, and ask what that schedule was based on. A fixed date on a calendar, in a building with heavy traffic, is a decision someone made without looking at the traffic. Then get a replacement quote for your actual square footage. That number is what the upkeep is protecting, and it makes the whole conversation real.

So Where Is the Bar?

There is no line on a chart. There are five questions you can answer about your own building, and the useful exercise is answering them honestly rather than hunting for a benchmark.

Two of the five rest on solid ground: garbage and wear. Two are real but narrower than they usually get sold: surfaces and air. One is a matter of judgement and still legitimate: what visitors see. Any company treating all five as equally certain is not being careful with you. And a budget built on the two solid ones will hold up better in a review than one built on the dramatic ones.

The question underneath all of it is the same one running through this series. Not whether a clean office makes people work better, but whether keeping it clean is something anyone has to manage. Wherever the answer to one of these five is "nobody has decided," that is not a cleaning failure. It is a decision that got left to whoever shows up.

Published by JL Perfect Cleaning, which cleans commercial offices in Moncton, Dieppe and Riverview. To go through these five questions for your own building, you can Request a Free Quote

About This Article: This article was prepared by the J&L Perfect Cleaning Team as part of our commitment to helping businesses, contractors and homeowners across Greater Moncton make informed decisions through practical cleaning expertise and industry best practices.

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