November 04, 2020

A whole new world of hand hygiene

Rubbermaid Commercial Products takes a closer look at changing attitudes, changing behaviours and changing environments.

The world has changed in ways we could never have once imagined. Today, hand hygiene is firmly established on our radar like never before.

If we’re all going to live, work and play safely in our post COVID-19 world, it’s important to better understand people’s attitudes to hand washing and hand sanitisation. So we’ve taken a closer look at what people believe – and how people behave – in our new world.

The facts speak for themselves, and demonstrate with brutal clarity how people take the dangers of unsanitary environments and the value of hand hygiene extremely seriously.

The lengths people will go to, to feel safe

That’s a lot of hard work, and shows the lengths people will go to, to feel safe. Such efforts clearly reveal that people are not only aware of how unhygienic washrooms can be, they’re actually quite scared of the dangers. If these people are prepared to adopt such manoeuvres, they’re clearly going to avail themselves of a soap dispenser before leaving the washroom, and are likely to be amongst the 93% of our survey respondents who prefer touch-free hand hygiene dispensers (3).

Germ Awareness

That’s an awful lot of germs, and a seemingly ever-present danger that people are clearly aware of. With such vast numbers of germs, it’s little wonder people are taking personal responsibility for their own hand hygiene, turning to reliable sources of hand hygiene – such as conveniently located hand hygiene dispensers.

We’re in demanding times

In such a climate – where people are going to such lengths to ensure their own hand hygiene – it’s perhaps unsurprising that responsible facilities managers are making hand sanitisation stations available to create safer, cleaner, more hygienic environments for the people they need to protect.

We’ve changed forever

That’s offices alone. It doesn’t include workspaces like factories, manufacturing and distribution hubs. It doesn’t include the 1,106 million people travel through European airports. It doesn’t include the people who visit the 9,500 shopping centres across Europe or the Europeans who spend over €600bn on eating out each year (7).

Clearly, the need for effective hand hygiene solutions is vast. Not just in numbers alone – which are vast – but also because people’s attitudes to hand sanitisation has changed, perhaps forever.

Will people swerve your facilities?

A clear sign of an attitude shift towards hand hygiene is that the vast majority of our survey respondents now see hand sanitisation as their biggest defence against contamination. And while these people are demonstrating they are happy to take individual responsibility for their hand hygiene, another of our findings shows that facilities managers need to meet them half way by providing hand sanitising stations.

Over half of our survey respondents said they would avoid a shop or venue that doesn’t have hand sanitiser solutions. And in the same survey, nearly half of respondents stated that they expected hand sanitisers to be visible throughout a facility.

With 74% of respondents also revealing they would not use a hand sanitiser that looks unhygienic, the need for quality hand hygiene and easy access to hand sanitiser dispensers has never been greater.

Hand hygiene for the real world

Like never before, protecting all kinds of people in all kinds of places is of paramount importance. For over 50 years, Rubbermaid Commercial Products has taken the time to build the strongest and most effective solutions that work perfectly in the real world. We provide a vast range of hand hygiene solutions, including wall mounted and free-standing stations, automatic touch-free and manual dispensers, and both alcohol-based and alcohol-free sanitisers, and soaps.

Hygiene First. Partners always.

Sources:

1 Impulse Research Corporation Survey

2 American Institute for Cleaning Sciences

3 vs manual pump dispensers, based on 415 RCP Facebook survey responses

4 Charles Gerba, University of Arizona

5 www.fiormarkets.com/report/hand-sanitizer-market-by-product-spray-gel-wipes-417852.html

6 Eurostat

7 Eurostat

8 Based on 415 RCP Facebook survey responses