How to Remove Odors from Office Buildings

If you work in an office building, you’re used to the buzz of the office—busy workers clattering away on their keyboards, visitors cycling in and out, employees chatting and drinking coffee in the break room. This buzz can be comforting and secure despite the hecticness, but this isn’t necessarily the case when it creates odors. Your office is trying to focus, and building malodors can be distracting and lead to employee dissatisfaction. How do you get ahead of this problem?

At State Chemical, we manufacture and distribute chemical solutions to a variety of problems, including malodors. Odor control isn’t always at the forefront of your mind when it comes to your office, but once you start seeing odors, they become hard to ignore.

To help you determine how to eliminate odors from your office building, we will explain common sources of odors in office buildings, different treatment approaches, and the outcome for your facility. After reading, you’ll know how to effectively treat these odors.

Common Odors in Office Buildings

Office building odors don’t always have very obvious sources. Sometimes, it’s easy. Maybe you can pinpoint the bathroom or a break room as a problem area. But other times, buildings can have weird smells, and it can be challenging to zero in on the root of those smells.

The following are some of the most common office building odors:

Food Odor

When different people are sitting together doing work all day, they’re going to get hungry, and they’re going to get different snacks to sustain themselves. Unfortunately, this doesn’t always smell good to everyone.

Maybe someone’s leftover lasagna explodes in the microwave. Maybe someone thinks it’s a good idea to eat a tuna salad sandwich at their cubicle. Maybe someone orders fast food with a grease smell pungent enough to linger for days.

Whatever the situation, food odors have a way of clinging to a space. This can be in specific areas, like a refrigerator, or throughout the entire building. And no matter how appetizing the food, no one wants to smell cooked food odors for days on end.

Bathroom Odor

Another common odor in office buildings comes from bathrooms. But let’s be honest: there aren’t many bathrooms that naturally smell pleasant.

Usually, this is the type of odor that will stay confined to the bathrooms themselves, so it’s normally easier to identify and treat. In any case, this doesn’t exactly scream “clean” to your employees, and if left untreated, it can contribute to employee dissatisfaction.

Body Odor

You might not realize that building odors can often be traced back to body odor. After all, it’s not like people are working out all day—they may not even be leaving their desks all that much.

But that’s the thing: people are sitting in the same chairs all day every day. People are lingering in these same spaces for long periods of time. People are getting nervous and overheated and sweating. Inevitably, body odors begin to hang around.

These odors can become tied to specific objects, such as desk chairs, or they can linger more widely, such as through an entire floor.

Musty Odor

Musty odors can also affect office buildings. These smells can make the building seem old, unclean, and uncomfortable. Usually, these odors can be traced back to a particular place (e.g., a spot with mold growth) but they will often permeate through an entire building.

Mustiness is usually a result of excess moisture. Sometimes, this is all you’re dealing with, and these are cases where it’s appropriate to treat only for odor control as long as the excess moisture is being managed.

However, these odors often come from a source of mold or mildew, which should be directly treated. Mold and mildew odors indicate a larger problem that should be addressed, so don’t simply eliminate the odors and write it off. If there is mold or mildew growth in your building, you have a more pressing issue to solve.

Odor Spot Treatment in Office Buildings

Odor spot treatment is when you use handheld, ready-to-use products such as sprays or aerosols to treat an odor. For example, if you’ve ever sprayed down your bathroom with an air freshener, that’s spot treatment.

Spot treatment is best used to directly treat a problem area. Suppose your office building has the body odor problem mentioned previously, and it’s coming from some of the desk chairs. You could use a fabric refresher spray on these chairs to neutralize the odor and replace it with a pleasant fragrance. This would eliminate the odor at its source and stop it from permeating the area.

This same method can be used for many specific odors in either small spaces or specific objects. Applications include trash cans, break rooms, two-stall bathrooms, carpets, kitchens, and more. If your odor is infrequent, minor, or very specific to one area, spot treatment is the solution for you.

Ambient Scent Diffusers in Office Buildings

When odors are more widespread, automated scent diffusers become the best solution.

Scent diffusers are computerized systems that dispense a fragrance at a programmed interval. Depending on your system, you can find systems capable of fragrancing anything from an elevator to an entire building. This way, you have a range of options to neutralize odors and add fragrance to a space.

Imagine that your entire building holds onto a strange musty, earthy odor. You’ve used dehumidifiers and confirmed that there is no mold or mildew, but still, your building smells weird to the point that employees frequently comment on it.

If you used a fragrance system in this facility, you could automatically control odors and scent the building as a whole. This would work significantly better than spot treatment, which wouldn’t make a significant impact on such general, widespread odors.

Taking a Thorough Approach to Office Building Odor Control

But it’s important to remember that your best odor control option won’t necessarily be mutually exclusive. In cases where you experience both targeted problems and more widespread odors, the best solution is to use handheld odor control and scent diffusers at the same time.

Let’s say that your entire office building has a strange food odor that you’d like to treat, but you’d also like an occasional option to freshen the one-stall bathroom. In this case, a scent diffuser would be a great fix for the whole building while you could use an aerosol air freshener to eliminate bathroom odors as needed.

Odors can be multi-faceted, so to treat them most effectively, take a multi-faceted approach.

Crafting a More Comfortable Working Environment for Your Employees

The reality is that malodors give us negative perceptions of places. When we smell something foul, we’ll be inclined to think of the entire location as foul. When you’re trying to run a successful business, you really can’t afford for your employees to see you in a negative light. Treating odors will go a long way for staff comfort and team morale.

Imagine working in a building that smells like sweat all day. Sitting there inhaling sweat for hours and hours every day, you’d probably be pretty unhappy—no matter how positive the other parts of the job were.

Now, imagine working in a building that smells subtly like fresh linen all day. You might not even consider the smell, but since it doesn’t cause discomfort, you’ll have a more positive perception of the job than the person who works in the sweaty building.

Fragrance can forge powerful associations in people’s minds, and morale is important for your office’s employees. If you invest in odor control and scenting for your building, your employees will notice the difference.

Learn How State Chemical Can Help You Treat Odors in Your Office Building

Office buildings are places where people spend a lot of their time, so naturally, they tend to generate odors. With spot treatment, ambient scenting, or a combination of both, you have the opportunity to treat odors and create a more comfortable environment for employees.

Watch the video below to learn how State Chemical can help you treat office building odors.