Office Bathrooms: The Five Complaints Office Managers Hear Most, and How to Fix Them

Ask an office manager what their staff complain about, and the bathrooms come up before the desks, the kitchen or the carpet. That's not because bathrooms are harder to clean. It's because a bathroom problem is noticed by everyone, several times a day, and nobody wants to be the one to raise it.

Most bathroom complaints have a specific cause. Cleaning harder often doesn't fix them; fixing the cause does. These are the five we hear most in Melbourne offices, and what works.

1. "It smells, even though it's been cleaned"

A bathroom that smells straight after it has been cleaned is usually not dirty. Look for these causes first:

• Dry floor wastes. The trap in a floor drain holds water that blocks sewer gas. In a bathroom that is mopped with a damp mop rather than washed, the trap dries out and the smell comes straight up. Pouring a bucket of water down each floor waste once a week fixes most of these.
• Urinal scale. Uric scale builds up in urinal traps and pipes and holds odour no matter how clean the bowl looks. It needs a descaling product on a regular cycle, not daily disinfectant.
• Waterless urinals need their cartridges changed on the manufacturer's schedule. An overdue cartridge smells, and no amount of cleaning will change that.
• Grout and the floor around the pan. Urine soaks into grout and silicone at the base of toilets and urinals. A detergent that breaks down organic matter, used with a brush, does more than a fragranced spray.

Air fresheners cover the smell for an hour. Fixing the cause gets rid of it.

2. "There's never any paper or soap"

This is almost always a mismatch between stock and how busy the office is. In a hybrid office the bathrooms might see three times Friday's traffic on a Wednesday. A cleaner who stocks everything to the same level every night will run out mid-afternoon on busy days.

Fixes that work:

• Restock to full, not to "some", every visit, with spare rolls left where the next cleaner, or a staff member, can reach them.
• Larger-capacity dispensers in the busiest bathrooms.
• A mid-day top-up on the two or three busiest days for larger floors. It is a short visit and far cheaper than the complaints.

If the bathrooms are base building, the landlord usually supplies the stock. See who cleans what in a Melbourne office building.

3. "The floor is always wet"

Wet floors during the day usually come from hand dryers or paper towel dispensers in the wrong place, drips from taps and basins, or a mop that was too wet the night before and left a film that marks easily.

The cleaning part of the fix is to mop with a well-wrung mop or a flat mop system, working from the far end towards the door, and to leave the floor dry before leaving. The building part is moving a dispenser closer to the basin, or adding a bin directly underneath it. Report leaking taps and cisterns to the building manager, because no cleaning schedule will keep up with them.

4. "The grout is black"

Dark grout in an office bathroom is a mix of mould, soap residue and dirt ground in by foot traffic. Daily mopping won't shift it. It needs a periodic deep clean: a suitable product, a stiff brush or a machine, and enough rinsing to get the residue out.

Do it every quarter in busy bathrooms and it stays manageable. Leave it for two years and the grout may need regrouting or sealing first. This is the kind of work that should be quoted as a separate periodic line, as in our scope of work template.

5. "Nobody empties the sanitary bin"

Sanitary bins are usually serviced by a specialist contractor on a fixed cycle, not by the office cleaner. Complaints usually mean the cycle is too long for the number of staff using that bathroom, or the contract lapsed and nobody noticed.

The cleaner's part is to wipe the outside of the bin, keep the area clean and report when a bin is full before its service is due. If you are getting this complaint, check the service frequency first.

The check that prevents all five

Bathrooms are where a supervisor's inspection pays off most. Ours walk every site on a three-weekly cycle with a checklist that covers floor wastes, urinal scale, grout, dispensers and the sanitary bin service, not just whether the surfaces look clean. Every visit is also signed in and out on our app inside a geofence around the building, with a photo, so when a complaint comes in you can see which night it relates to.

If the same complaint keeps coming up, ask your cleaner which of these five it is and what the fix is. A good answer names a cause.

We clean offices across Melbourne, from the CBD and Richmond to South Yarra and Tullamarine. See office cleaning Melbourne, or request a quote and tell us what your staff complain about.