Are you renting an office or did you buy one? In both cases you will have to deal with office maintenance. Think, for example, of repainting walls or repairing a defect. Do you want to know how to properly maintain your office? And who is responsible for which maintenance? You can read it in this article with five tips for good office maintenance.
Who is responsible for the office maintenance??
If you use the business premises, you are responsible for carrying out maintenance and repair work yourself. As a tenant of an office or commercial property, the maintenance for which you are responsible should be described in the lease. According to the “Small Repairs Decree” of the Dutch government, the tenant is in any case responsible for minor maintenance. This includes activities such as:?
- Cleaning grilles and replacing filters of the (mechanical) ventilation. Maintaining the (mechanical) ventilation is the tenant’s responsibility.
- Maintenance and repair work of interior walls and ceilings. Consider, for example, whitewashing the walls or using bootlak on wood. This also includes painting windows.
- Tightening loose parts. For example, screwing door knobs, thresholds and banisters.
- Maintenance of garden, yard, driveway and fencing. Think, for example, of cleaning garden tiles, pruning shrubs and painting wooden fences with boot lak.
- Replacing damaged windows and exterior lamps. This also falls under minor repairs, for which you are responsible as a tenant.
How should you maintain an office?
Maintaining your office not only provides a safe working environment, but also provides a pleasant environment to work efficiently. In addition, good office maintenance gives your customers a business card. Below we give five tips.
- Ensure timely repair. Delaying repairs increases the risk of extra high costs. Not only can the repair costs rise enormously if maintenance is overdue, but you also take the risk that the defects affect the business operations. Both will cost you more money.
- Invest in sustainability. Does your office building need maintenance? Then in many cases it is interesting to modernize your office. Choose a sustainable solution over restoring the old state, which you should for example do when the kitchen floor, called keukenvloer in Dutch, was damaged.
- Maintenance checklist. To properly maintain your office, it is important to go through your business premises once in a while and make a list of everything that needs maintenance. Think, for example, of painting, lighting, electricity and so on. Make a checklist with maintenance work and make a schedule to carry it out or have it carried out.
- Maintain existing systems. Heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems require regular maintenance. By having these systems checked regularly and maintained where necessary, the lifespan will be extended.
- Call in a professional. You can easily whitewash a wall yourself, but maintenance and repair work is often better left to a professional. This way you know for sure that it is well maintained or repaired and you have more time to grow your company.
