Confidential paper, secure bins and records areas in Parramatta tenancies

A cleaner cannot assess whether a document is sensitive, so the rule must attach to the container. General waste and recycling bins with an agreed liner colour are emptied; anything locked, slotted, consoled or labelled for secure destruction is not. That is a rule someone can apply in a corridor at nine at night without needing to read anything, which is precisely why it works.

It also matters that the rule is symmetrical. Just as a cleaner should not empty a secure bin, they should not move general paper into one. Both directions break the chain the destruction contractor relies on and both undermine the tenancy's own record of what was destroyed and when. Stating the rule once, in both directions, closes the issue. It also gives a supervisor a single sentence to repeat to a new team member, which is where most of these rules are actually transmitted.

Some rooms are excluded entirely: registries, archive stores, evidence rooms and any space where information is held under a specific control. Others can be cleaned with conditions, such as cabinets closed, staff present, or attendance during business hours rather than after them. All three arrangements are workable and all three need to be written rather than left to a key that happens to be available.

Where a room is excluded, the scope should record who cleans it instead. In a large tenancy that is often the team responsible for the room, on their own schedule. Naming them converts the exclusion into an allocation and gives the workplace manager an answer when someone asks why the registry looks the way it does after a year. It is also the answer an internal audit will ask for, and having it recorded saves reconstructing it later.

In a tenancy handling personal information the clear-desk rule is usually a policy already, but cleaning still has to respect it. Nothing on a desk is moved, stacked or read, and that includes documents left in a printer tray. Wiping around them is the correct behaviour. Where an office wants full desk coverage, the answer is a clear-desk practice by staff rather than a cleaner tidying.

Loose documents on a floor are the one exception worth thinking through. Leaving paper where someone will slip on it is not sensible, and neither is a cleaner collecting and reading it. The workable instruction is to move it minimally to make the area safe, place it on the nearest desk or bench face down, and report it. That keeps both the safety and the confidentiality obligations intact.