Carpets – and the state they are in – are easily relegated to an afterthought among a multitude challenges that office managers, facility managers and property managers face on a day to day basis. After all, we tend to take for granted all the things we can walk all over, and carpets fit that definition to a tee!
Just so you know, we are not going to argue here that having clean carpets is more important for your office than having office supplies or a more pressing matter for your professional building than orderly plumbing. But, as is the case with all things that we take for granted, carpets are not a problem – until they become one.
Nobody pays much attention to your carpet while it is clean and fresh. But most will notice or even complain when it becomes unkempt, grows large spots or gets dotted with stains. The funny thing is that nobody seems to notice anything at all, until one day, when you come to the facility and you suddenly realize that you are walking on something that most closely resembles a mix of a two-year-old’s bib and the aftermath of an artillery strike.
Here are just some of the things that can build up to a problem that wears down your carpet in a surprisingly small amount of time, reducing its esthetic and use value by much more then it would have cost you had you made a timely investment into scheduled carpet cleaning, contracted with a professional service (which is bound to give you a nice discount if you contract them for the entire year, as opposed to charges for non-scheduled or, heaven forbid, emergency carpet cleaning jobs).
High foot traffic
Carpets are made for walking and that’s just what we do on them. You could think of carpets as soul mates to the soles of your shoes – they support us and wear themselves out instead of the tender soles on our feet. But you cannot walk over something, day in and day out and expect for it to look good. Especially if there’s multiples of you, doing the walking.
That is why businesses, venues or buildings that see a lot of foot traffic, such as lobbies, hotels or corporate HQs, need regular carpet maintenance – an intensive schedule of cleaning, paired with timely replacement of worn out material.
Bad weather
Yes, it’s true that carpets are usually on the inside and thus protected from the elements, but people unfortunately still have to go outside before they get inside of your facility, and that means that they bring in sand and dirt on their footwear and walk all over the place.
If your location is someplace prone to spells of rainy weather this could very well be your daily reality for six months out of every year. During that period, scheduled carpet cleaning is your best non-fair weather friend – and it should remain so even in fair weather!
Kids
Children are wonderful, but less so at those moments when they focus their creativity into making a mess you wouldn’t have previously thought was even possible. It’s business as usual,when there are kids running around, that there is going to be spillage, crumbs and maybe even a colorful piece of felt pen art or two on your carpet, bless them.
Now, if you host a daycare for employees or run a residential building for families with children, scheduling carpet cleaning for every couple of weeks is a necessity. Not only because of appearance management, but also for hygienic reasons and as a means of allergy prevention (many allergies are caused by various dust particles that get buried in the carpet), especially since various allergies seem to affect an ever increasing number of children nowadays.
Pets
Don’t get us wrong, but everything previously said of kids goes double for pets, as every manager of a pet-friendly location knows. Both of the most popular sorts of pets present their own challenges – dogs can get way too excited way to easily and cats have been known to test their claws on carpeting, to just name a few common carpet-unfriendly pet behaviors. As much as we love our kitties and doggies, they are still animals and prone to, well, animal behavior. They can be wild and unruly or simply house-untrained, which doesn’t really make that much of a difference when you are left to deal with the aftermath.
But even the most well-behaved of pets shed their hair every now and then – and you can guess where most of it ends up, powered by gravity and its own propensity to adhere to carpeting materials. Still, this doesn’t mean that pets are somehow to blame for their messes or that they should not be allowed in your facility (except where prohibited by health and safety codes). That is why, for spaces with pets, scheduled carpet cleaning, up to once in a couple of weeks, is the most pet-friendly solution you could provide.
Hosted events
If your facility regularly serves as a location for large-scale meetings, parties or other functions where you expect upwards of 20 people at one place – all of them standing on your carpet – it is a prime candidate for scheduled carpet cleaning.
Lots of people means lots of use as well as an increased chance of stains, especially if your events include catering or if drink is being served. Make sure to schedule cleaning at the earliest possible time after each event. Even better, if you have a list of events that will take place over a given time period, you can create your carpet cleaning schedule around it, together with your carpet cleaning service providers.
So, to summarize, what does a good manager do when confronted with an annoyance that creeps up unnoticed until it becomes a problem, such as carpet wear and tear? Well, she makes sure that she doesn’t have to think about dealing with it. And when dealing with carpets, the simplest and smartest solution is to contract a professional carpet cleaning company for scheduled carpet cleaning.
