3 simple signs to assess your cleaner’s professional cleaning skills.
Welcome and thank you for reading my short article. When I started my cleaning venture in 2009, I had to clean this rental property in Peterborough 3 times before the landlady felt happy to pay me. The following year’s were my training years, which I was passionately teaching myself to be a very good cleaner.
As CleanBow is now a recruitment and consulting company for the cleaning sector, I will like to encourage any cleaning business owner to keep going and keep learning.
On the subject of learning, you probably know what you look for on your cleaning audit rounds but where are 3 things that I normally check for when I am trialling a cleaner.
The Bin
I am talking about the little toilet and kitchen bin here, how often does your kitchen bin get cleaned? That often depends on the cleaner you have. It doesn’t matter whether it’s in a house or an office but I notice that bins in an office is more likely to be ignored by a nonchalant cleaner than in a house.
In my days of recruiting cleaners, I discovered that most applicants can actually clean most surfaces but the most important skills are often lacking. Observation – tell a cleaner to clean a kitchen and see if they think to thoroughly clean the kitchen bin not to talk of moving it to reach behind it.
Cleaning is not just about removing dirt but it is purely a service of care and presentation, which requires caring for premises users, and observation. The bin test checks for observation however, to check for how caring the cleaner is I listen out to see if they assume what to do.
Thoroughness, no Assumptions
While delivering the training for all our cleaners, we emphasised the point that they are “not serving the building but they are offering their service to the people that use the building”, even if cleaners generally don’t get the see the users, a professional cleaner thinks of how to make the facility users comfortable, relaxed enough to worry about other things other than the cleanliness of the building.
This is why you will find such a professional cleaner cleaning and polishing a chrome hand railing, cleaning and polishing the bin so that it is welcoming to use and aesthetically pleasing to the eye. You will also find such cleaners reaching behind the bin to clean any accidental splashes from tea bags. They will never leave a mirror with smears on it neither will they forget to clean the underside of the office desk in case an oily hand had been there.
Usually, a professional cleaner will ask you if there is a cleaning checklist that the users prefer. As there should always be a checklist, the cleaner studies it and makes it better. This is 100% a professional trait. So you get the picture; a professional cleaner is thorough, attentive and very observant.
Respect the Equipment
I don’t mean to be petty here but a cleaner that misuses the cleaning solution with no care in the world to check the label or ask what they should use for the general surface is unlikely to take care of the vacuum cleaner, the cleaning storage and everything they are given. In reality they will not be able to provide their best clean.
I appreciate that the level of cleaning experience varies so we provided training and onboarding programs for our cleaners however, despite the emphasis on checking the labels (which are all coloured coded), quite a number of cleaners on trial still reach for anything with a spray top (often the window cleaner) in a bathroom and they wonder why it is not shifting the stain.
Thankfully, the result of our training sees 80% of staff fit into CleanBow’s standard.
There are a lot more signs to look out for but these 3 are essential to look out for on their first 2 cleaning duties.
If you want to build this level of care in your cleaning workforce or you need help improving your staff recruitment, onboarding and training give us a call or an email. CleanBow Recruitment and Consulting is your growth partner to help your cleaning businesses thrive.
