The cleanliness of a facility is often judged by two things, the appearance of the restroom and the floors. While not everyone may visit the restroom, each guest who enters your facility must walk on your floors. Not only do dirty floors negatively impact the perceptions about your facility, but they can also be a safety hazard. If the floor is slippery from dirt or has debris that may trip someone, accidents can quickly happen.
That’s why floor care is often a critical component for any facility cleaning program. Depending on the size and type of floors, however, what seems like it should be a simple task of keeping floors clean, becomes far more complex.
Nassco Floor Care Experts aim to help you make the process more efficient. We’ve put together our best recommendations for floor cleaning and will cover:
- The Importance of Floor Care
- The Traditional vs. Advanced Floor Care Cycle
- How You Can Optimize Your Floor Cleaning Processes
A Fundamental Part of the Cleaning Process
As we mentioned before, floors and the level of care they receive greatly impact how people view and interact with your facility. That’s what makes routine floor care so important. At any given time, if someone is in your facility, they are walking on and looking at your floors. We’ve put together four ways that floor care impacts every facility.
Perceptions of Cleanliness
- First impressions matter: Clean, well-maintained floors immediately signal professionalism and attention to detail, shaping a positive first impression of the entire facility.
- Dirty floors suggest neglect: Scuffed, stained, or dusty floors can make a space feel unhygienic or poorly managed, even if other areas are clean.
- Impacts trust and satisfaction: Guests, clients, or employees are more likely to trust and feel comfortable in environments where cleanliness—starting with the floors—is visibly prioritized.
Safety & Accident Prevention
- Clean floors reduce slip and trip hazards: Regular maintenance removes spills, dust, and debris that can cause slips or falls, especially in high-traffic areas like entrances and restrooms.
- Neglected flooring can lead to hidden dangers: Worn-out mats, cracked tiles, or buildup of cleaning residue can create unexpected hazards that put both staff and visitors at risk.
- Proper floor care supports long-term safety protocols: Consistent cleaning and inspection routines help identify issues early, ensuring your facility stays compliant with safety standards and minimizes liability.
Flooring Longevity & Lifespan
- Routine maintenance extends flooring life: Regular sweeping, mopping, and deep cleaning prevent abrasive dirt and grime from breaking down floor surfaces over time.
- Improper care accelerates wear and damage: Using the wrong cleaning products or neglecting scheduled maintenance can cause discoloration, warping, or surface erosion, leading to costly early replacements.
- Protective care preserves your investment: Consistent floor care—like sealing, buffing, or using entry mats—helps floors maintain their appearance and structural integrity for years longer than neglected surfaces.
Company Image & Reputation
- Well-maintained floors reflect professionalism: Clean, polished floors create a strong visual impression that signals your business is detail-oriented, organized, and takes pride in its environment.
- Neglected floors damage brand perception: Dirty, worn, or stained flooring can lead customers and clients to question the quality of your services—even if everything else is in order.
- Floor care reinforces trust and credibility: A spotless facility, starting from the ground up, builds confidence with employees, visitors, and partners, enhancing your brand’s reputation for excellence.
The Traditional vs. Advanced Floor Care Cycle
Depending on the type of floor that your facility has, the cleaning techniques and chemicals that you use differ. One of the most popular floor types is VCT flooring or Vinyl Composition Tile. VCT is made from a mixture of vinyl resins and fillers to create a durable, yet cost-effective flooring.
Because of its traits and inexpensiveness compared to other floor types like stone or wood, VCT is a popular floor type for facilities with higher levels of foot-traffic and are often used in commercial buildings. When you think of the floor cleaning process, you’re probably imagining the scrubbing, stripping and recoating process that VCT is known for.
Traditional Explanation
If you picture floor care as the process of stripping, scrubbing, and recoating floors with new floor finish, you’re probably imagining the traditional floor care process for VCT floors. Floor finish acts as a sealant to protect deeper layers from the dirt and wear of shoes walking across it all day. Overtime, the finish scuffs and becomes worn away, losing its shine and begins to give a dull look.
Stripping The Floor
Following the traditional floor restoration or cleaning process, the first thing you would need to do is strip off the old floor finish. This effectively removes the top layer from the flooring, along with the dirt and grime. To do this, you must use powerful floor stripping chemicals that soak into the floor finish until it becomes a milky looking liquid.
Recoating with New Floor Finish
After agitating and removing the liquified floor finish with a wet-dry vacuum, you’re left with exposed VCT tile that’s ready to be scrubbed and recoated with new floor finish and sealant.
Regular Scrubbing and Burnishing (& Possibly Recoating)
To keep the floors looking shiny, you must also perform regular scrubbings of the floor to remove dirt and dust and may even need to burnish and recoat the floor with additional floor finish. Burnishing is the act of using a high-powered floor machine that quickly rubs against the floor to loosen the floor finish wax and smooth out any imperfections.
Repeating The Cycle
This process of stripping the floors and recoating them with regular scrubbing, burnishing and even recoating in between, is repeated as needed based on the foot traffic and needs of a facility.
Advanced Explanation
If you’ve gotten this far and the traditional floor restoration method sounded exhausting, that’s because you’re absolutely right. The process of stripping, recoating, scrubbing and burnishing a floor is time consuming and if you have different areas of floor that all need to be refinished, the project can feel daunting.
From Five Steps to Three
Luckily, the traditional process is not the only process available. As floor care chemical and equipment manufacturers continue to improve the process, a new system has emerged. Our trusted partner, 3M, has developed a new system that eliminates the need to strip and recoat floors while also reducing the frequency of scrubbing and burnishing.
This takes the whole floor restoration process from five steps down to three, simplifying floor maintenance overall.
The Power of Floor Finish
The reason why the 3M Advanced floor care cleaning process can eliminate the steps of stripping and burnishing, largely is due to the floor finish. Traditional floor finish requires frequent cleaning to maintain its shine. This is because as people walk over the floors, dirt and other grime are impacted into the pores of the floor finish. Trapped dirt can cause the floor finish to yellow, giving an unclean appearance. The only way to correct the floor would be to strip the floor finish off and recoat. In certain situations, burnishing may do the trick.
3M protectors create a harder surface with tighter pores. Instead of dirt being impacted into the finish, it stays on the surface and is less likely to yellow the finish. As the cleaning crew completes routine scrubbing, the dirt is removed and the floor stays protected.
Long-term Implementation
What does the three-year floor care process look like with the advanced floor care system? To start, the floors need to be completely scrubbed and stripped so that there is no old floor finish on them. Next, the floor should be coated with 3M Scotchgard Protect & Shine. The low odor formula only requires one coat. Throughout the school year, the floors should be dusted, mopped and spot mopped.
After Year One, the annual maintenance calls for autoscrubbing with the purple 3M floor pad, followed up with burnishing with a purple floor pad. The last step is to burnish with a tan floor pad if needed. The process repeats after year two. By year three, if the floor does not achieve your desired shine after completing the autoscrubbing and burnishing, simply recoat the floor and it should give the desired result.
How to decide what’s right for your facility
To figure out which floor care system is the best for your facility, it’s best to consider the ability of your staff to be able to perform consistent autoscrubbing and annual burnishing. Because of the hard finish of the 3M Scotchgard Protect & Shine formula, it is harder to remove with a stripper if not properly maintained throughout the year with mopping or autoscrubbing.
The traditional system may take more time with frequent floor stripping and recoating but may be the better option, if your facility cleaning process can’t accommodate the continual maintenance the advanced floor care system requires.
Determining The Labor Factor
One of the most important points of decision when choosing between the traditional and advanced floor care systems is understanding your labor capacity.
- Do you have a dedicated team of cleaning staff?
- What type of attention are they able to give to floor care, daily, weekly, monthly?
- Is your cleaning team able to stick to a consistent schedule or do they need to be more flexible as circumstances arise?
If your answers were closer to yes for having a cleaning crew with the ability to sweep and mop on a daily to weekly basis consistently, the advanced floor care may be the better route for your facility.
If your answers were more reflected dedicating weekly or monthly attention to floor care and sometimes prioritizing other areas or tasks, sticking with the traditional system might work best.
When it comes to floor care, it’s important to remember that the process should be based on your needs and abilities. While one method may work better than the other, it doesn’t make the other bad. Floors are one of the largest parts of any facility and taking steps to keep them clean and protected is always recommended.
How you can optimize your floor cleaning
The first step to improving your floor cleaning process is to decide which system your team will use, the traditional or advanced. From there it is all about establishing the cadence of cleaning and the type of cleaning.
Sweeping and mopping are important steps in both systems. If your team has a large floor area to cover, ensuring that they have the proper tools and equipment goes a long way to ensure that they can get the job done efficiently.
Investing in floor equipment, for example, like a floor scrubber dryer, would be an important tool no matter the floor care process that your team uses. Ultimately, there are always ways to improve how you or your team tackles floor care.
Floor Care Is Important
The important takeaway is that the quality of care your facility’s floors receive can have big impacts about the reputation and image of your facility, as well as the lifespan of the flooring.
If you’re feeling stuck after reading this article and want to know which floor care system is best for your facility, Nassco floor care experts can help you with an in person assessment.