A color-coded cleaning system can streamline your workflow, but there are more good reasons for your team to use colors.

Color-coded cleaning systems aren’t new. For that matter, color coding is common in a lot of situations. No matter where you are – the U.S., Mexico, Morocco, Japan – stop signs are red. Yellow often indicates caution, as with your “wet floor” signs or yellow traffic lights.

We, humans, are wired to recognize colors and symbols. They can help us navigate and communicate when we travel, and these colors and symbols can keep us safe. For example, the signs of poison or radioactivity are recognized everywhere.

In the janitorial industry, where there is a wide variety of languages, this ability to communicate with symbols or color-coded cleaning systems is especially relevant.

Harness the advantages of Janitorial Manager to keep your facilities safe and clean. Learn more today with a free discovery call and find out how to make your work more efficient and more profitable!

What does it mean to color code your cleaning system?

A color-coded cleaning system gives your team a simple and efficient way to know which items to use where helping to avoid cross-contamination. For instance, if all your microfiber cloths are the same color, it’s possible to use one rag to clean a bathroom, then accidentally use the same one to clean the tables in a break room.

A typical arrangement for color-coded cleaning looks like this:

Red is for areas with a higher risk of contamination, such as toilets or bathroom floors.
Yellow requires a cautious approach, so you would use yellow to clean bathroom sinks, counters, soap dispensers, and so on.
Blue is your all-purpose color. Blue is for general dusting, windows, desks, hallway floors, and similar surfaces.
Green is typically reserved for food prep and consumption surfaces, like break room microwaves and kitchen counters.

You can use this color-coding across tools, including microfiber cloths, mopheads, buckets, and brooms. You may also want to expand this to incorporate other colors if you have any specialties that warrant more separation.

While this might seem initially like just a good way to spend more money on cleaning supplies, there are quite a few excellent reasons to adopt a color-coding system.

7 Benefits to a color-coded cleaning system

1. Eliminates language differences. There’s no need to worry about language differences with a color-coded cleaning system. Regardless of how many languages your team speaks, once everyone knows what each color means, you don’t need to worry about attempting to explain which supplies get used where.

2. Reduces the chance of cross-contamination. Cross-contamination is a significant concern in the janitorial industry. Without the proper precautions, it’s easy to carry harmful bacteria from one location to the next, potentially infecting more people. With color-coding, you know that areas with typically higher counts of bacteria and viruses, such as bathrooms, have their own cleaning supplies to limit contaminant spread.

3. Makes training easier. This goes back to the idea that we’re already wired to recognize colors and symbols. Adding a color-coded cleaning system to your approach will help improve and speed up the training process for new hires. It also helps eliminate some of the mistakes that new team members often make.

4. You can adapt it to your needs. The nice thing about color-coding is that it’s easily adaptable. A school building has different needs than an office. And an office has different requirements than a retail space or a restaurant. When you use a cleaning system based on colors, that system works anywhere. You don’t need to rework everything for each location.

5. Saves time. We all know how long it can take to read or decipher small text or sort through multiple supplies to find the correct item. When you switch out that tiny print for bright, bold colors, your team can get what they need in an instant.

6. Minimizes mistakes. Along with saving time, a color-coded cleaning system can help minimize or even eliminate errors. Your team doesn’t have to guess which supplies they should be using. Instead, the colors determine the use, every time in every location.

7. Easier supply tracking. Tracking supplies is vital for your organization. For example, a color-coded approach makes it easy to tell at a glance if you’re going through too many kitchen cleaning supplies, for example.

Running a janitorial business comes with plenty of challenges. But there are also plenty of ways to make things easier. A color-coded cleaning system is one of these changes that will streamline your work and improve the entire process of using janitorial supplies.

Increase the efficiency of your team, reduce your costs, and improve results. With Janitorial Manager, all this and more isn’t just a dream; it’s your new reality. Learn more today with a free discovery call!