What Could Not Being HandSafe Cost Your Business?

When it comes to hand hygiene, can your business afford to cut corners? Being HandSafe means providing high quality hand hygiene, tailored to your facility’s needs. Whether it’s in the washroom, front-of-house or in staff areas, HandSafe hand hygiene genuinely cares for your users’ health and wellbeing, as well as their experience. By simply box-ticking, you’re actually putting your business and your people at risk, explain the experts at Rubbermaid Commercial Products (RCP).

What are the risks of not being HandSafe?

Damage to your reputation

People’s perception of your brand is formed by the experience you give them at every touchpoint. And your washroom is no exception – in fact, 74% of people say dirty washrooms cause negative perceptions¹. When it comes to providing a high-quality experience, you’re probably already taking multiple measures to help retain existing customers and attract new ones. If this doesn’t extend to your washroom, you run the risk of damaging your reputation – research shows that over 80% of consumers would avoid a restaurant with a dirty washroom²– not just avoid using the washroom but avoid the restaurant altogether!

People want to use soap and hand sanitiser dispensers that work properly every time so malfunctioning and grubby-looking soap dispensers or pump top bottles can undermine your efforts elsewhere. With 66% of people saying they use a variety of methods (including flushing the toilet with their feet!) to avoid making contact with anything in a washroom³, offering touch-free hand cleaning – preferred by 92% of people⁴ – will help make sure your washroom doesn’t damage your reputation.  

Hitting your bottom line

Buying in bulk is often seen as the economical choice, but when it comes to hand hygiene bulk fill solutions are deceptive. Choosing dispensers that take hygienically sealed refills, is a more cost-effective solution. Offering smaller, more concentrated dose sizes that are ample for a safe clean, sealed refills offer better cost in use than their bulk fill counterparts.

Quality is also important. Flimsy dispensers will only last so long and the loss of productivity, unnecessary wastage, and increased costs of having to regularly replace poor quality dispensers and soap bottles means investing in durability and refill longevity is a must.

Reducing productivity

If your hand hygiene provision isn’t up to the standards people expect, they’re less likely to use it. With 80% of germs spread by hands⁵ and viruses able to survive on hands up to five minutes after transfer from a surface⁶, it’s clear to see that without quality hand hygiene solutions the spread of illnesses such as colds, flu, stomach bugs and COVID-19 becomes more likely. With workers averaging three sick days per year⁷ productivity losses are high: if your business has just 100 employees, it could cost you £35,100 a year⁸.

And if you’re providing bulk fill soap and sanitiser dispensers, the risk is even higher – at least 1 in 4 bulk hand hygiene dispensers are contaminated with illness-causing bacteria⁹. There are multiple points on the dispenser where bacteria can contaminate the replenishment supply, such as an open-top lid and push-button. Often, units don’t get cleaned but are “topped off” against guidelines¹⁰ and they then cannot be decontaminated; an infected unit must be fully replaced to remove the risk¹¹.

Challenging your sustainability goals

User-preferred automatic touch-free dispensers give your users the high quality, HandSafe hand hygiene provision you need, but these dispensers are traditionally powered by batteries, only 5% of which are successfully recycled¹². So, touch-free is not enough.  For the people-pleasing, environmentally friendly choice, think touch and battery-free hand hygiene dispensers like RCP’s innovative market-leading LumeCel AutoFoam.

Is your soap and sanitiser letting you down?

For tips about choosing the right hand hygiene for your business and how to avoid common pitfalls, take a look at RCP’s handy HandSafe myth buster checklist.

Sources

1. Cintas
2. Zogby International
3. Impulse Research Corporation Survey.
4. RCP Facebook Survey 2020
5. University of Arizona Study, Dr. C. Gerba
6. The Journal of Infectious Diseases.
7. BLS.gov
8. Average salary taken from Olive Pometsey, GQ Magazine.
9. Journal of Environmental Health 2011.
10. CDC.gov Guideline for Hand Hygiene in Health-Care Settings
11. Evaluation and remediation of bulk soap dispensers for biofilm, Biofouling 2012
12. Constance Kampfner, The Times.