Does Cleanliness Make a Difference?

Does Cleanliness Make a Difference?

Robert S. Michaud

May 15, 2020

If you are reading this, chances are your career is probably related in some way to facilities maintenance, management, or building operations. If you have a mechanical room that looks as neat and clean as the one in the photo, congratulations – you already understand the point of this article. But does having a clean mechanical room really equate to a well running one? Let’s examine this a little further.

Some might say that whether a workplace is messy or clean has no bearing on whether it is maintained well or not. They might cite those who have messy desks that tend to be quite productive in spite of the mess. However, the work place, and specifically the mechanical room, is not you eccentric professor’s desk. Cleanliness is directly related to maintenance for a number of reasons.

1. In a clean mechanical room it is easy to spot the early stages of a problem, like that minor leak coming from the water storage tank. If the mechanical room depicted above were dirty, with parts and supplies scattered about and with an greasy oily floor, it might not be so easy to pick up on that leak until it had become a real problem.
2. Clean mechanical rooms are inherently safer. Again, without parts and supplies on the floor, and having the floor clean and free of any slip and fall hazards, fewer of those types of accidents will occur. In addition, a well lit, clean mechanical room is easier to navigate and to avoid bumping and tripping hazards just by being able to see better.
3. A well lit and organized mechanical room is also easier to do work in. When you don’t have to hunt for parts or tools, or clean up an work space just so you can get at that pump that you need to maintain, you can be a lot more efficient in your work.
4. A clean mechanical room is also better for the equipment. Granted, most equipment is pretty robust as they typically have to operate in a variety of environments, but the less dust and dirt any equipment is exposed to, the better and more reliably it will run.
5. Lastly, the old adage of “If you want to know whether you should eat in a particular restaurant or not, visit the restroom first. If the restroom is clean, chances are the kitchen is too. If the restroom isn’t clean, you can expect the kitchen to be dirty as well, and you may want to eat elsewhere”. This adage speaks to both the expectation form management about the operation of their facilities as well as the pride in workmanship of the maintenance staff in charge of the mechanical room, and it may be the most important factor of all. Having worked in and managed a number of buildings with mechanical rooms, I saw a definite correlation between how tidy the staff kept their mechanical rooms and the overall workmanship of that staff member. As the leader, your job is to set the expectation for your staff, but you will find, as I am sure many of you have, that some are more engaged and ‘bought-in’ to the process than others.

So, as leaders, how do convey this sense of ownership in – not only the function, but the appearance of their areas of responsibility? There are a number of management techniques that can help here, and I will leave the management consulting to other experts, but in the scope of maintenance and your facilities, I think it starts with conveying a clear vision of what you hope to accomplish with your program, why it is important, and how you intend to get there.

If you do not have a functioning preventive / predictive / reliability centered maintenance program in place, it is going to take time to get to that point and your resolve will be tested. Going from a reactive / break-fix sort of maintenance (repair) program to a more pro-active program will be challenging and in the short term, will require additional resources as you cope with both the incoming demand for services, and the automatically generated preventive / predictive maintenance work orders. It is going to be tempting, at times, to toss in the towel on the pro-active work, but that would be a mistake and you will never arrive at the more reliability centered program that you are looking for. In this regard, the clean mechanical room is sort of a metaphor for the maintenance program. It is going to take time to get it cleaned up, but once you do, you will find that it runs far more smoothly, and the staff and their commitment will be much more in line with yours.

So in a way, the clean mechanical room is both a real and tangible representation of the state of your maintenance program, and a metaphor for that program as well. How clean is your mechanical room?

© Michaud Engineering Inc. 2020