Have you ever wondered what characteristics makes a good cleaner? Maybe you are looking to start your cleaning business or looking to employ your first cleaning staff to help your expanding business, having a principle of cleaning becomes very essential as a tool that helps me to understand if a cleaner is right for your organisation. the right mentality. In the article, you should be able to set the right training, the right mindsets for all your staff and set a health performance expectations consistently.
Recruiting a cleaner
When recruiting a cleaner, it is very hard to make a judgement based on their CV credentials alone, you really need to get them on a test clean to ensure they actually know what they have claim, but even that is not enough because anyone can pretend to do the best on the very first day. You actually need to have them trained and monitored over a first few weeks of the cleaning and make sure that they understand the principles of cleaning.
So what are the principles of cleaning?
There are five main guiding principles I used to train my staff and got an astounding improvement in our staff retention from 35% to 85%. I’ll be talking you through what they are, how to implement them and why they’re essential for your business.
Look: Know the scale and content of your job. A cleaner should be capable of understanding the scale of what they are about to clean. this is not just noting the number of rooms but being able to observe how much each space will require. Imagine your cleaner takes the first 10 minutes to empty all bins, while using this time to explore areas that have been used more. And areas that will require less cleaning. This is what the looking phase is meant to do.
Plan: Now your cleaner knows the scale, it is important to Plan and Organise the cleaning process. This might be a mental plan or written order of cleaning, usually the dirtiest spaces gets higher priority and are cleaned first. Your cleaner also used this part to ensure they have all their cleaning supplies together to prevent lost time in back and forth fetching of cleaning tools.
Clean: This might seem like the most important phase but honestly, a good clean within allocated time can only happen when the first 2 phases have been properly implemented. Yes, this is where the technical, observational and professional skill of a cleaner shoes, can they be bothered to look for all stains, do they have the knowledge to clean them and do they have the will to clean them? When I train my cleaners, I tell them you must clean everything that is dirty – this is because I trained them that way. Will your cleaner clean the underside of the desk, will they clean that coffee stain ring by the keyboard, what of the dust on the monitor, oh, how about the tea splash on the skirting board? Here is where your cleaner’s professional skill shines. I must be honest, this is where the training you provide the shows too. Good training=Good cleaning.
Check: No matter how experienced you are as a cleaner, you will miss bits. The reason is because the level of detail involved in cleaning is huge, missing a spot is honestly not a big deal but checking after cleaning and areas gives you a second chance to discover what’s missed. Check the quality of your cleaning – does it meet your employers Cleaning standard?
Fix: Let’s be honest, after a 2 hours of rigorous cleaning, you are likely tired, or nearing the end of your shift. It is essentially however that you fix any areas that were missed. It is important to do whatever you need to do to make it perfect. If your cleaner runs out of time while cleaning, they also need to have a process of communicating what was not done due to time running out. It is important that your cleaners are allowed to stop cleaning when their shift ends or be authorised to extend cleaning time if needed, alternatively measures should be put in place to allow for unfinished cleaning when time runs out.
Finally: as I have hinted earlier, your staff training really determined the quality of cleaning you get from your staff at the end of the day. So if your cleaners are consistently underperforming, you may be right to question whether you have trained them well enough.
I hope these five principles help? If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me.
