Why your office cleaning should happen after hours

Why your office cleaning should happen after hours

By Brian Otieno · 9 Jul 2026 · Commercial

Plenty of Nairobi offices still run their cleaning during working hours, usually because it's what the previous contract did. It's worth actually pricing what that costs.

The interruption is expensive

A cleaner cannot properly do a desk that someone is sitting at. So daytime cleaning becomes floors and bins only, and the surfaces people actually touch — desks, phones, door handles, meeting-room tables — get skipped week after week.

Meanwhile a vacuum running through an open-plan floor at 11am pulls attention from everyone in the room. Ten minutes of disruption across forty staff is not ten minutes.

What after-hours makes possible

• Every desk and workstation cleaned properly
• Floor machines and extraction used without disruption
• Washrooms taken fully out of service and deep cleaned
• Carpet extraction with a full overnight dry
• Staff arrive to a finished space rather than a job in progress

The one thing after-hours cleaning demands is trust — someone is in your building when you are not. That means vetted staff, ID checks, key registers and a named supervisor. Any contractor who cannot show you all four should not have your keys.