What are people really thinking when they enter the restrooms in your building?
Restrooms are one of the places with the highest number of complaints. Poor first impressions are hard to overcome, consider what people are commenting on in your building’s restrooms.
I’ll tell you what to watch for in your facility’s restrooms and how to maintain a restroom that promotes a positive image of your company in peoples’ minds.
Schools and Universities
The state of a school’s restroom impacts a student’s decision to use the restroom. More importantly, it impacts how the institution is viewed overall, and whether a student will enroll at the school at all when it is an option, according to findings of Cascades’ U.S. Restroom Survey.
Common student suggestions include increasing privacy, keeping soap and paper towels stocked for handwashing, and having a cleaner overall restroom.
A past blog story I posted detailed privacy solutions for public restrooms, so I will not dive too deep into it here. But, the key takeaway is that the easiest solution for improving privacy in public restrooms is a partition privacy strip. This product is easy to install, and fills in the gaps between restroom partitions immediately, providing increased privacy for anyone using the stall.
If students are frequently finding it impossible to wash their hands after using the restroom due to a lack of soap and paper towels, it will make a huge impact on their perception of your institution as a whole. Consider making a change in your restroom maintenance routine to better accommodate students’ hygienic needs. And it makes sense. Nobody wants to come out of a public restroom stall only to find out that they cannot wash their hands—it’s unhygienic.
Office Buildings
The restrooms in office buildings don’t need a significant amount of attention to keep tenants happy. Requests are mostly limited to keeping the restroom odor-free and clean, according to a Kimberly-Clark survey.
Maintaining a fresh scent in your building’s restrooms is so simple. Aerosols require virtually no maintenance when they are left in the restroom because people will typically use them throughout the day as needed.
The Splash Hog urinal screens will help to keep urine odors to a minimum because they come in great mango and cucumber melon scents that lasts for 60 days—about twice as long as most other urinal screens. In addition to their long-lasting scents, they are embedded with an enzymatic drain cleaner to reduce build-up down the line.
Another typical culprit for causing foul odors is drain traps. There is an easy solution for this, a liquid trap primer called Green Fix. All you need to do is add it and forget it. Green Fix is a saturated paraffin oil that prevents odors and drain flies from permeating the trap.
Maintaining cleanliness in office restrooms is typically easier than some other facilities due to lower traffic. If tenants have been complaining about the office’s restrooms lacking cleanliness, then it may be time to increase the frequency of regular maintenance checks in your schedule.
The Right Fixtures
Even choosing particular restroom fixtures will make an impact on how people perceive your building’s restrooms. Have you been choosing correctly?
Air dryers vs. paper towels, this long-going debate may have finally been settled. As it turns out, installing hand dryers in restrooms as an alternative to stocking paper towels is doing you a disservice. Paper towels are preferred over hand dryers in public restrooms because people believe that the air dryers are blowing bacteria onto their hands, according to a Cintas survey.
Restrooms that are at risk of vandalism require higher consideration of the durability of fixtures installed. You can find an array of vandal-proof parts, including shower heads, faucets, screws, and more.
But, increased durability does not need to result in decreased appearance. In an effort to reduce costs, building managers may be inclined to sacrifice nicer finishes or other traits. However, when you consider the 20-year life of a typical facility, operating costs will cost more than the initial costs.
Consider installing automated hand sanitizers throughout the building to create a more hygienic environment. Having a well-stocked restroom to allow tenants to wash their hands as frequently as they want is important. However, having more access to options like automated hand sanitizers around the building improves on peoples’ ability to use them and become more hygienic.
It’s essential to consider the importance that appearances have to a given facility.
If the appearance of the restrooms is in significant conflict with the image that the organization is trying to project, that by itself may be sufficient to trigger big changes. Same thing holds true for facilities workers struggling to keep things running. If the maintenance personnel can’t maintain it, then it is time to make some changes.
There is no set number of criteria that mandate a major change in your facility. There may be other factors to come into play as well. For example, does the restroom have the capacity to handle the traffic load? If there are changes in your building’s occupancy patterns, then it could result in the restroom being under or oversized for its current needs.
Start by evaluating your individual facility’s needs and listen to any comments or suggestions. It will become clearer to facility managers, and to those who must approve the budget, that making improvements may be worthwhile. Restroom appearances are important, they may even become the determining factor for people deciding to work or attend classes at your facility.