What is a Housekeeping Inspection?
A comprehensive housekeeping inspection checklist involves more than just cleaning, picking up trash, and scrubbing. In the workplace, housekeeping is synonymous with safety. Performing regular housekeeping inspections ensures that your workplace follows proper housekeeping practices. There are occupational health and safety organizations that provide checklists for workplace housekeeping inspections that you can use as a guide for creating a checklist fit for your organization.
Some elements of a good workplace housekeeping checklist include:
- Keeping work areas clean and clutter-free
- Preventing slips and similar accidents
- Preventing trips and falls
- Ensuring proper storage of combustible, flammable, and toxic materials
- Eliminating fire hazards such as paper waste and debris
- Cleaning up slip hazards such as oil, grease, and water
- Clearing aisles and walkways of debris
- Installing warning signs in blind spot areas
- Replacing or repairing damaged flooring
- Placing anti-slip flooring or mats in high-risk areas
- Store combustible materials in covered metal containers
- Dispose of combustible waste daily
- Limit the amount of combustible materials in the work area
- Store flammable material away from ignition sources
- Keep obstructions at least 18 inches away from your fire suppression system
- Formal or Planned Inspection – This inspection is done using a formal housekeeping inspection checklist created according to the workplace’s needs. Items on the checklist are not permanent. They must change depending on the result of previous inspections. It must include a hazard classification system where hazards are assigned rankings according to their severity.
- Informal or On-the-Spot Inspection – This is usually done by the supervisors, managers, and health and safety representatives. The inspectors will observe the area while employees are working. The aim is to look for unsafe acts and conditions. The observations are noted in the housekeeping inspection form.
- Specialized Inspections – Specialists need to conduct this type of inspection. You will need to hire experts to check boilers, electrical equipment, ventilation systems, and fire suppression systems.
- Regulatory Inspections – This type of inspection is usually done according to the requirements of the Occupational Safety and Health regulations.
- The flexible form builder kitallows you to digitize paper checklists in minutes and update them according to inspection results.
- Using the super intuitive mobile app, managers can audit their workplace inconspicuously at any time to ensure workers are performing their assigned duties.
- All results, images, and comments are automatically bundled into a digital report for you to review and analyze at your convenience.
In this article, the following points are explained:
1. Goals of a housekeeping inspection checklist
2. Planning a housekeeping inspection program
3. Advantages of a digital housekeeping checklist
What are the Goals of a Housekeeping Inspection Checklist?
Preventing Slips, Trips, and Falls
Accidents under the Slips, Trips, and Falls category are the leading cause of injury in the workplace. Without proper housekeeping, anyone, no matter what their job or where they work, is prone to slipping, tripping, or falling. A housekeeping inspection form must ensure that the workplace is kept clean, orderly, and free from disease-causing pathogens. Some items that you can include in your housekeeping inspection checklist to prevent slips, trips, and falls include:
Eliminating Fire Hazards
Fire hazards are anything that could cause your fire protection systems to malfunction. They could also be anything that could start a fire or make it difficult for people to evacuate.
Include these in your workplace housekeeping checklist to avoid fire in the workplace:
Controlling Dust Accumulation
The presence of combustible dust in chemicals, dyes, fibres, pharmaceuticals, and plastics, could cause an explosion and lead to injuries, damage to properties, and even death. Your housekeeping must ensure that dust accumulation does not exceed 1/32 of an inch in at least 5% of a room’s surface. Ensure that your housekeeping uses a wet vacuuming system to control dust in your workplace.
Preventing Falling Objects
Workers suffer from all sorts of injuries due to falling objects in the workplace. They can be something as minor as a bruise or serious as blindness. Your housekeeping inspection checklist can include procedural controls to prevent falling objects. Ensure that tools and other materials are kept away from edges and elevated surfaces. Always secure materials when they are stacked or place them on flat surfaces.
Keeping Walkways Clean and Tidy
Your workplace housekeeping checklist must ensure that tools and other materials are properly stored. They must not be placed in aisles, doors, stairways, electrical panels, and emergency exits.
Storing Items Properly
Do not let tripping, fire, and explosion hazards accumulate in your storage. Ensure there is no pest infestation. Keep electrical closets free from clutter to avoid blocking the electrical panels.
How to Plan a Good Housekeeping Inspection Program?
Employee Participation
A good housekeeping inspection program encourages workers to participate in keeping their environment clean and orderly. Everyone must keep their workstations tidy, report any safety hazards, and clean up spills as soon as possible.
All workers should play a role in housekeeping. Supervisors must assign the daily activities for employees and these all should be reflected in the housekeeping inspection checklist.
Proper Training
You must remember that housekeeping inspections alone can’t ensure the proper performance of housekeeping tasks. A good housekeeping inspection program starts with training. Provide coaching and training so that your employees know exactly how to carry out the assigned housekeeping tasks. Your workplace housekeeping checklist will then find out if the training was effective. It can also detect non-compliance which you must address right away.
Effective Communication
If you are a supervisor, you need to have strong communication skills. This way, you will know how to communicate with your staff so that they understand that housekeeping is part of their job.
Once you can communicate these priorities to your staff, you can perform your housekeeping inspection to ensure that they do their assigned tasks.
Scheduling
Your housekeeping inspection form must indicate whether housekeeping schedules are met.
The frequency of housekeeping would depend upon the amount of debris or contaminants the workplace produces. But a good rule of thumb is to inspect and clean workspaces before the end of every shift. This reduces the risks of injury or sickness and time spent on cleaning later.
Provide your employees adequate time for housekeeping duties. Scheduling housekeeping at the end of the shift has proven to be ineffective.
Goal-Oriented
Setting goals and expectations for both deep cleaning and light cleaning are necessary. When you have clear goals, you will know how to conduct your housekeeping inspection.
During housekeeping inspections, workers and supervisors must be able to discuss the established housekeeping standards. With regular inspections, you can improve processes such as how to schedule waste disposal or how to determine when you need to replace mats.
The goals of our housekeeping inspection may vary depending on what type of inspection you are performing.
What are the Advantages of a Digital Housekeeping Checklist?
With the help of a digital checklist, your company can reliably complete housekeeping tasks and pass inspections. Managers can conduct their inspections easily via a smartphone or tablet while on the go, freeing up time so they can devote more attention to their other responsibilities.
Lumiform provides an organized and highly convenient solution to standardizing workplace routines. Housekeeping checklists not only help prevent professional cleaning services from accidentally skipping any of their assigned duties, but it’s essential in other industries as well.
Pathogens breed on unhygienic surfaces, spreading disease and illness. That’s why it’s imperative that every company create a standardized cleaning schedule specific to their workplace. Here are some additional advantages to digitizing checklists:
