Sixty-eight percent of respondents to P&G Professional's recent "Cleaning and Disinfecting Clarity" survey indicated a belief that if you want to clean and disinfect a surface, you have twice as much work on your hands. In other words, cleaning and disinfecting are two separate tasks.

The reality is that buying individual, single-purpose products to clean then disinfect surfaces is unnecessary. There are multipurpose products that can both clean and disinfect, saving businesses the operational expense of labor time associated with multiple cleaning processes, as well as multiple product purchases. A potential secondary benefit to using one multipurpose product to both clean and disinfect surfaces is a simplified training process.

In contrast to the more than two-thirds (68 percent) of respondents who believe cleaning and disinfecting are two separate processes, less than one third (30 percent) indicated that they actually use two separate products – one to clean and one to disinfect.

The survey also highlighted the lack of process and procedure consistency as an issue for disinfecting and cleaning products.  According to Tom Bell, registered sanitarian, Product Safety and Regulatory Affairs, P&G Professional, "it is imperative that cleaning professionals follow the instructions on the product label – regardless of the brand of product being used. Different products have different ‘dwell' times and dwell times also vary by the type of bacteria or virus being targeted. The manufacturer knows how to best use the product for optimal cleaning and/or disinfecting results. A simple spray and wipe will typically kill some germs, but we want everyone, whether they are our customer or not, to be as effective as possible at creating clean environments for their guests. We believe that following label instructions is one of the best ways to do that."