Businesses of all kinds worry about a visit from one particular public official, and that’s the health inspector. This seemingly unassuming individual actually has the unique power to utterly destroy your business, and so you underestimate them at your own peril. Whatever kind of business you are running, there are certain things you should always do to be sure that any visit from the health inspector will result in happy things.
1. Get the Right Cleaning Services
To start, you should only ever book a cleaning service that you can trust when using outside cleaners. What’s more, using outside services is better for a number of reasons. Professional cleaning services bring not just their wealth of experience and cleaning skill, but the right equipment to get the job done correctly.
Furthermore, professional cleaning services usually understand the standards of health inspectors even better than you do. They sometimes hinge their professional reputation on being able to guarantee that health inspections won’t be a problem if you use their services. The added cost of bringing in outside help is easily justified when you can get those kinds of results.
2. Don’t Forget Walls and Ceilings
While everyone is focusing on floors and deep, dark corners when doing their cleaning, it’s easy to forget the walls and the ceilings. In certain businesses like restaurants and hotels, the walls and ceilings of kitchens and dining spaces are particularly vulnerable since there is so much opportunity for the buildup of bacteria and other contaminants.
Even in other business types, walls and ceilings can become a hotspot of dirt and grime. Just imagine a year’s worth of customers and employees sneezing in your place of work, and how often that residue might gather on certain walls and even the ceiling, just to give one example.
3. A Strong Focus on Fire Safety
Sometimes you get so wrapped up in hygiene matters that you completely forget other issues such as fire safety. Make sure that your premises have the right number of up-to-code working fire extinguishers, as well as other fire safety paraphernalia and equipment you might need such as fire blankets, axes, and more. Always check what the code requires, and then be prepared to go an extra step.
One area of fire safety that people sometimes forget is in fireproofing one’s premises as much as possible. Two key ways you can do this is by investing in the right kind of fire-resistant cladding for your walls. Another thing you can do is have security doors installed that are heavier and help to contain fires in one place rather than letting them spread further.
4. Invest in Durable and High-Quality Materials
When inspectors spot safety and code violations on certain premises, so often it can be traced back to poor choices of business owners when it comes to the materials they used to build out the store, office or other business premises. When you cheap out on the materials, the effects will only come to bite you in the behind later on, but when you invest capital in real quality, they invariably won’t.
5. Stage Mock Inspections
One more innovative thing you can do as a boss or supervisor is to stage some mock on-the-spot inspections of your premises. Catch your kitchens off-guard with a thorough inspection of their department, with real financial consequences for violations that you discover. Remind them that while they may suffer a pay penalty now, they could lose their jobs altogether if this were a real health inspection.
The best way to keep your team on their toes is to run these mock inspections totally at random, just in the same way that health department checks can also be done. The more realistic the experience, the more effective.
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