Facilities schedules usually cover the carpet and stop there. Meanwhile the task chairs, which are in contact with a person for seven or eight hours a day, get nothing beyond an occasional wipe of the arms.
Chairs are the highest contact soft surface in any office. They accumulate body oils, hair, food debris, spilled drinks and skin scale, and because the fabric is normally dark and hard wearing, none of it is obvious until the fabric is cleaned in patches and the difference shows.
What actually builds up on a task chair
The seat pad and the lumbar area take constant contact and therefore constant oil transfer. Arm pads collect hand oils and hand cream. The gap between seat and back collects crumbs, and the mesh on many modern chairs holds dust in a way that solid fabric does not.
The castors and the base are a separate matter. They pick up whatever is on the floor and then redistribute it, which is why chair mats and the carpet immediately under a desk are usually the dirtiest patch in the building.
- Seat pad and lumbar: body oils and skin scale.
- Arm pads: hand oils, cream and general grime.
- Seat back gap: crumbs and food debris.
- Mesh backs: fine dust held in the weave.
- Castors and base: floor soil, hair and wrappers.
How chairs are cleaned
Each chair is vacuumed thoroughly first, including the gap between the seat and back and around the mechanism. The fabric is checked and tested, a pre treatment appropriate to the material is applied, and the fabric is agitated so the product reaches into the weave rather than sitting on it.
Extraction is done with tight moisture control. Chairs have foam padding that holds water, and a soaked chair takes a long time to dry and can smell musty afterwards, so light passes and good airflow matter more here than on almost any other item.
Fabric screens and dividers
Acoustic desk screens and floor standing dividers are covered in the same kind of fabric as the chairs and are almost never cleaned. They sit at face height, they catch airborne dust and they discolour along the top edge where people lean on them.
They clean up well and the visual difference across an open plan floor is considerable, because the eye reads a whole bank of screens at once rather than one item at a time.
Breakout and reception seating
Soft seating in breakout areas and reception is used by more different people than anything else in the building, and it is the first thing a visitor sits on. It is worth putting on a shorter cycle than the task chairs for that reason alone.
Reception seating also faces the entrance, so it takes the grit and moisture that comes in with visitors, and light coloured reception fabric shows it quickly.
- Reception seating: every six months, or sooner if light coloured.
- Breakout and canteen seating: every six to nine months, given food contact.
- Task chairs: every twelve months as a baseline.
- Acoustic screens: annually, alongside the chairs.
Scheduling around a working office
Nobody wants damp chairs on a Monday morning. Most of our commercial work is done out of hours, in the evening or at a weekend, so the floor is ready for the next working day.
Where an office genuinely cannot lose access even overnight, dry compound methods on the floor and low moisture work on the chairs allow a phased approach, one bank of desks at a time, with everything usable immediately.
- Evening and weekend appointments are standard for commercial work.
- Phased zone by zone cleaning suits offices that never fully close.
- Chairs can be moved to a clear area and cleaned in batches.
- Ask staff to clear desks and remove personal items beforehand.
Making the case internally
Two arguments tend to carry weight with a facilities budget. The first is asset life: fabric that is abraded by embedded grit wears out and gets replaced, and replacing a floor of task chairs costs many times more than cleaning them.
The second is presentation. Clients and candidates form an impression of a business in the first thirty seconds, and grubby reception seating undoes a good deal of what the rest of the office is trying to say.