As a business expands, so do its liabilities. Cleaning is no different. A few people can keep things orderly when everyone is expected to help out in the early stages. However, as the team expands, with customers visiting the office and the square meterage increasing, maintaining a hygienic and professional environment requires some well-considered techniques. (And yes, we know, a cleaning strategy is not “infrastructure.” But it’s a highly engineered, carefully planned approach, nonetheless.) Understanding how and when your cleaning needs evolve as your business grows will help you maintain productivity, support employee wellness, and protect your brand.
Stage 1: Startup (1–10 employees)
Expected space: Shared coworking environments, subleased space, or small private offices
Cleaning models: Self-service or landlord-delivered service
At startup, most businesses are lean. Owners, partners, and early hires typically wear many hats. “Office cleaning” is one of many hats worn during the earliest stage of growth. Cleaning usually involves dusting off desks, emptying rubbish bins, and sprucing up a shared kitchenette when necessary. Most coworking and subleased buildings provide basic building cleaning through the landlord or building manager, so the scope of responsibility is often limited to daily light cleaning.
Priorities in this phase include maintaining personal hygiene in shared areas, decluttering to maximise productivity, and keeping shared or meeting spaces presentable for customers. Risks include deferring to infrequent landlord cleaning, not addressing dirt and grime that build up in common kitchen and entertainment equipment, and simply not having anyone on team whose job it is to clean, which can lead to the “not my job” mentality.
Stage 2: Small business (10–50 employees)
Expected space: Leased offices or dedicated suites
Cleaning models: Part-time external service or a small internal admin team
In this stage, employees have outgrown coworking spaces and are leasing or operating in dedicated office suites. As a result, cleaning needs begin to change. Spaces get larger and are no longer optimised for shared use. Kitchen spaces see more foot traffic, so cleaning (and stocking) bathrooms and break areas becomes more important.
At this stage, a business may be able to outsource a portion of the work to a part-time cleaning team that services the space two to three times a week. Most office teams will find that a clean of floors, windows and bathrooms once a week – in addition to regular waste removal and management of basic supplies (soap, toilet paper, paper towels, etc.) – will keep things clean and professional with minimal burden on employees.
Admin or office managers typically serve as cleaning coordinators while taking on many other responsibilities. Cleaning schedules become more relevant and critical for two reasons: to avoid interrupting workflows and to maintain consistency.
Stage 3: Mid-sized company (50–200 employees)
Expected space: Multi-floor offices or small campuses
Cleaning models: Contracted commercial cleaning services with established Service Level Agreements
Companies operating in this space have traditionally been larger office users with significant floor space, multiple meeting rooms, and sizable common areas. In addition to larger workspaces, they may also have expanded bathrooms and kitchenette areas. Hard flooring covers a much larger portion of the office space at this stage, increasing the need for regular cleaning. At this stage, most businesses contract out office cleaning as a vendor service, typically after hours and on a daily or a few times-a-week basis.
On the operations side, this entails vetting a vendor, establishing a scope of work (SOW) with expectations for frequency, coverage, and supply restocking, and assigning a facilities manager to serve as vendor communication. Sanitation and safety became significantly more governed after the pandemic. Once employees are returning to work, it’s likely that health and safety measures are of greater interest. Businesses of this size often view health and safety as an inevitability, rather than a choice, that meets the minimum bar.
These standards may include building codes, compliance, and employees’ physical health. Operations could also have dedicated rooms/spaces (server rooms, electronics manufacturing) with their unique requirements of being dust-free and damage-free. This requires custom protocols and vendors that are attuned to your industry and understand the unique characteristics of your specific space.
Stage 4: Large enterprise (200+ employees)
Expected space: Corporate campuses, multi-tenant office buildings, or standalone headquarters
Cleaning models: Full-time janitorial employees, hybrid outsourced team, or in-house facilities department
Enterprise businesses can have highly developed operations and, as such, move well beyond transactional cleaning. Hygiene at the significant enterprise level is not simply a question of tidiness but becomes an experience, an employee wellness imperative, an essential dimension of brand image, and even a risk management factor. Depending on a business’ maturity and priorities, organisations at this level scale their contracts with a commercial cleaning vendor or form an internal team with cleaning operations.
Integrated facilities strategy often extends to cleaning, including real-time incident reporting for cleanliness and sanitation issues, green cleaning certifications for sustainability metrics, and integration with other operational services such as security and physical maintenance. This typically occurs through a full-time internal team, an outsourced janitorial team, or a hybrid of the two.
When there is a full-time team, the benefits include an immediate response to any unclean condition or sanitation need, in-depth knowledge of the unique characteristics of the space, and strong quality assurance on the work performed. When engaging with vendors, organisations benefit from scalability, a professional team and vendor expertise to clean hard-to-tackle areas more quickly, such as deep carpet extraction or larger disinfection projects.
Cleaning needs will never be stagnant. As companies progress from early startup teams to global enterprises, their headcount, square meterage, and customer base will all change, and with them, their cleaning demands will shift. The challenge for leaders is to recognise when to evolve processes and when to outsource certain duties. Scaling building cleaning services (and ultimately the broader facilities function) at the right time can help businesses avoid operational friction, health risks, and image liabilities.
Partnering with the right team at each stage is also critical. Whether it’s for daily cleaning services or broader facilities coordination, having a trusted commercial cleaning company that understands your industry, spatial footprint, and future goals is a critical infrastructure enabler. Clean workspaces are a form of infrastructure. And as with any core system, it must be scalable.
