Schools around the U.S are beginning to allow students and faculty to return to onsite events. For facility managers like you, there are increased pressures to make sure the campus is clean, safe, and protected from future outbreaks.
This can be a daunting task. One key strategy to keep your campus protected will be to reduce the number of high touchpoints your faculty or students come into contact with.
High touchpoints are surfaces and objects that are frequently touched by students, staff, and visitors and can lead to the spread of germs and viruses.
Minimizing these touchpoints is especially important in the restroom.
As you can imagine, restrooms are the germiest area of any building. Millions of bacteria can be found on any given surface.
Simply turning on a faucet or pushing a lever on a paper towel dispenser can put your students and staff at risk of illness.
You may question, “Well how do I eliminate sink faucets and toilet or urinal handles from my commercial restroom?”
The answer is with touchless alternatives.
Touch free solutions mitigate the need for your students and staff to come in contact with high-touch surfaces, significantly lowering the risk of cross contamination and subsequent illness.
Many of these automated, touchless solutions can also be retrofitted to your current systems. Meaning, you won’t be forced to spend large amounts of your budget switching to these innovative items.
Not only do touch free solutions lower the spread of germs and improve hygiene, touchless alternatives reduce guests’ fear of germs and contamination, ensuring they have a more hygienic restroom experience.
In addition, in an age when doing more with less is crucial, converting your restroom to a touch free environment will help increase the productivity of your cleaning staff, lower product consumption, and increase overall cost savings.
Below, we’ll dig a little deeper into some of the major benefits you can experience by switching to touchless bathroom solutions.
First, it’s important to understand that a touchless restroom isn’t all or nothing. You can add some of these hands-free items or all of them. However, keep in mind, the fewer surfaces or objects the people on your campus touch, the fewer germs that can be transmitted.
Touch free alternatives for the restroom include:
- Commercial Touchless Bathroom Faucets
- Auto Flush Valves
- Touchless Bathroom Soap Dispensers
- Touch Free Hand Sanitizer Dispensers
- Touch Free Paper Towel Dispensers
- Touch Free Trash Cans
With the addition of solutions like these, some benefits you’ll enjoy are:
- Reduced Risk of Germ Spread
- Increased Peace of Mind
- Improved Cleaning Staff Productivity
- Lower Product Consumption and Waste
- Enhanced Image
Reduced Risk of Germ Spread
Perhaps the greatest advantage of touch free restroom solutions is the reduction of germ spread.
Touchless alternatives are a proactive way to mitigate the spread of germs, rather than waiting to disinfect after germs are already present.
When the people on your campus don’t have to touch anything, the risk of picking up germs from the surface is eliminated.
Increased Peace of Mind
Returning to everyday life after the ongoing Coronavirus pandemic has increased many people’s fear of illness. They also take their health and safety much more seriously.
Parents and students have higher standards for cleanliness.
Whether students return to campus or not will depend on whether they have confidence in the cleanliness of your campus. Their parents will also have to be reassured of the new cleanliness and safety standards of the school.
Touch free solutions showcase to your students and their parents that you prioritize their health and safety. They act as a visual representation of your college’s commitment to clean.
Improved Cleaning Staff Productivity
As mentioned above, the pandemic has increased cleaning and disinfection requirements across many areas of your facility, namely high-touch surfaces.
This increased cleaning and disinfecting takes your staff away from their traditional duties, which regardless of the pandemic conditions remain important to keeping your campus clean and looking great.
Your cleaning team is probably already stretched thin, so keeping up with increased cleaning requirements can be a challenge.
In an effort to do more with your current resources, you will need to identify ways to help your staff do more.
One key strategy to do this is with touch free solutions in your restrooms.
Touchless alternatives reduce the number of touchpoints and the time your staff has to spend on cleaning them so they’re free to perform other tasks.
These items often have features that prevent mid-shift or surprise outages so that your cleaning team can focus on the task at hand to prevent your staff from having to do multiple check-ins on an area or require them to change out a product before it is fully used.
Lower Product Consumption and Waste
The addition of touchless alternatives can also help lower product consumption and waste.
These devices monitor how much product is dispensed to reduce unnecessary usage. 
For example, soap and sanitizer dispensers can release just enough product when activated. This discourages users from taking more than is necessary, such as using two or three pumps of soap or sheets of paper towel when they just need one.
Similarly, paper towel dispensers will release a predetermined portion of paper towel. This lowers the chance of your students or staff taking more than is necessary which otherwise could lead to product waste.
Finally, with an autoflush valve or auto faucet, you’ll see greater water savings. Autoflush valves can also help mitigate odors in the restroom.
Enhanced Image
The addition of automated, touchless solutions also helps to modernize the restroom experience.
Many touch free options are sleek and stylish. They offer a way to enhance the overall look and feel of your restroom without requiring major structural changes, which are often expensive.
People like “new”.
These innovative alternatives act as a display to your students and guests that you seek to provide the next new thing.
Hands free options give the look and feel of advancement in technology, peaking occupant interest and increasing satisfaction.
Automated solutions also help to avoid unsightly drips or pools of soap and sanitizer on your countertops, keeping the area clean and freeing up your staff from having to return to clean the area.
Final Thoughts
Restrooms have a huge impact on the perception of any facility. On your campus, it will be critical to the return and continued stay of your staff and students that it is well maintained.
Touchless restrooms are crucial to improving occupant health and safety in today’s environment.
Touch free alternatives minimize the number of surfaces people come into contact with, supporting a cleaner, healthier, more hygienic environment that provides peace of mind to your building occupants while boosting your facility’s image.
Help your staff do more by adding touch free restroom dispensers, flush valves, and other accessories.
Imperial Dade locations offer a variety of touch free solutions for the restroom. Many times, these solutions can even be added to your facility at no cost or at a reduced cost with an accompanying, recurring paper or soap purchase.
If you’re located in the United States, Puerto Rico, the Caribbean, or Canada, contact a specialist today for a free assessment of your restroom program to see if touch free solutions might be the best option for you.