Dirtiest Places In Your Office That Might Surprise

With some careful thought, you or anyone who has had the unique pleasure of earning their living in a modern office can come up with a list of the dirtiest places in an office. Places like the restrooms, in and around sinks, wherever there are trash bins, and otherwise high traffic areas will immediately pop out as the frontrunners for dirtiest office areas, and you’re not wrong.

There are several places in every office that may surprise you by holding their place on the list of dirtiest office areas. Even worse, you may find that the more surprised you are by it, the dirtier it has the capacity to be if and when it’s left unaddressed. In that regard, there’s no way for you to clean (and keep clean) those areas if you don’t know where to look. Here are the 5 dirtiest places in your office that might surprise you:

Office “Perks” & Their Handles

Some of the main attractions of millennial workplaces end up becoming the dirtiest places in an office. The surprise comes from the innocent nature of things like free coffee and snacks, hydration stations, and even table games, where employees light-heartedly gather, touch, and share the same things at a high volume without routinely cleaning afterwards, spreading lots of germs and bacteria.

The Breakroom

According to a study conducted, called “The Healthy Workplace Project”, office break room surfaces were found to have the highest levels of contamination. It’s not a hunch – the study was carried out with consultation by a Professor of Microbiology from the University of Arizona.

Faucets

The sinks and faucets in restrooms, breakrooms, and kitchens often go under the radar in terms of what we perceive as dirty, because we use them to wash our hands, and clean and sanitize used materials. The issue becomes that our hands and the supplies we use to clean and sanitize in those places arrive dirty, and after contaminating faucet handles, we fail to routinely clean and sanitize them, leaving them very dirty.

Buttons

Not “buttons” as in the kind on shirts and clothes, but buttons as in keys – things we have to press, and press often. Some of the dirtiest places in an office are on and around keyboards, office phones, touch screens, and other communal office technology (like copy machines) and devices that require constant usage. 

Storage Access

By storage, we mean the storage of anything – office supplies, food & beverage, and more. Closed-door cabinets, office doors, refrigerator doors – basically anything that has a handle and needs to be opened and closed – is a hotspot for germs and bacteria. We tend to think neutrally towards the handles attached to each of these types of storage, often placing more importance on the hygiene of the people using them, what’s put in and taken out, and the sanitation of the inside of the storage methods themselves. The dirtiest part, it turns out, are their handles!