Secrets of Time in the Cleaning Business
Are you like many office managers that seem to change their cleaning business contractor every year or so?
Are you constantly monitoring and supervising the cleaners when the contractor should be doing so?
Constantly feel that the bare minimum is being done?
There is nothing worse than coming into an unclean office, where you can see the dust in the early morning light everywhere. You think what did  the cleaners do last night? The toilet roll holder is empty, there’s dry food still in the bins. The issue here in my experience is time. Most managers know how competitive the cleaning industry is.
So it’s no surprise that we all have pretty tight margins. So how do most compete for your business. Reduce the time for the poor cleaners to do the work and when the client is unhappy, the poor cleaner get’s the blame. Â Not the people that quoted the work, not the client that wanted everything for nothing. Just think how much time you spend cleaning your house. Now think how much bigger your premises is.The most frustrating word for a cleaner to hear is “quick flick over”. A term used by someone who hasn’t thought twice about what is involved to clean a desk, or a room.
Unfortunately what do you do in most instances, get another cleaning company in and because no serious conversations about the cleaning are had the whole cycle starts again. I know cleaning services aren’t cheap, you know they aren’t cheap. But I’d rather pay $X for a complete service than $Y for a unreliable and inconsistent service. Time is the reason many modern households have cleaners, as they value the time it takes to clean their homes, because they’ve done it.
Time is #1 at Precise Commercial Cleaners. With a correctly and adequately quoted cleaning services; reliability, consistency and quality just naturally occur. The cleaners aren’t rushed, there is profit to have supervisors and managers to visit sites regularly, new equipment, time for onsite training etc. A cleaners job is never complete. So we have to create a group of specific tasks and charge for the time to complete them. Without the correct time, tasks get left, rushed and forgotten about.
We value our cleaners time. We track the onsite time with the latest mobile time and attendance solution, our staff are provided with the most up to date tasks and cleaning schedules direct to their phones. They have full mobile access to our intranet with a range of cleaning HOW TO’s, Hints and Tips for performing the best work possible. So get realistic with the time you expect it would take to clean, the specific task you want and ensure your budget matches your building size and staff base. So many companies have massive premises and have them cleaned once or twice a week.
Most cleaning business companies can save you dollars with consumable costs and come up with a range of tasks that can be done in house by junior staff to reduce the overall costs. Junior office and secretarial staff can often be responsible for tasks such as kitchen cleaning, rubbish bin collection and many of our clients even have wet wipes for the staff to clean their own desks.
This free’s up time for the cleaners to focus on those heavy duty tasks,like vacuuming, mopping , bathrooms, walls etc.
So you can definitely achieve a reliable cleaning business service at a reasonable cost. If you don’t have a healthy budget, have the discussion with management and staff about what can be in house and ask you contractors for any cost effective hints and tips with consumables and paper products that they can offer.
