We work with all sorts of cleaning, janitorial, and maintenance teams here at OrangeQC. They range from small, family-run businesses where the boss makes the coffee to huge BSCs that employ hundreds of people to clean entire airports.
There’s one crucial thing that every business we work with has to do: manage its employees well. That’s true whether your team has two people . . . or two thousand.
It’s not the mop that matters; it’s the person pushing it. (Photo by pan xiaozhen.)
More than in almost any other industry, cleaning and maintenance teams rely on people who roll up their sleeves and get the job done. Yes, great equipment and technology can help. But in the end, it’s the people on the ground who need to deliver great service.
In our last blog post, we mentioned the 2017 ISSA/BSCAI Building Service Contractor Benchmarking Study, which found that 41% of respondents reported a 50% or higher employee turnover rate. Annually.
That number represents a huge investment of time and money spent hiring and training new people. But we would argue there’s an even more important question to consider: What’s our turnover rate for our best people?
The truth is, not every hire is going to work out. Some just won’t be up to scratch. Some will move on to other things.
But you don’t want to sit back and watch this happen. When you know how each cleaner is performing, you can take better control of managing your team.
One way to do this is by tracking each employee’s quality. It’s not enough to just know how your sites are performing; you need to know how your people are performing.
That’s why we’ve added the ability for inspectors to quickly note who was responsible for cleaning or maintaining each area from a drop-down list before inspecting. Premium reports include a real-time employee dashboard and the ability to quickly compare scores, see what line items an employee keeps missing, and more.
So what can you do with this information?
First of all, watch for the outliers.
When someone has low scores and tons of deficient line items, don’t ignore it. Decide what makes sense: more training, sitting down to look over the inspections together, or another intervention.
When someone is performing consistently well, don’t ignore that, either! Studies have shown that recognition is a powerful motivator for most people. Let people know when they’re doing a good job. Thank them.
Secondly, use the data to inform your staffing decisions. That poor performer? If they can’t turn the ship around, it might be time to let them go. But if they do start racking up high scores, a word of praise can go a long way towards validating that trend. And when you need to make decisions about raises and promotions, a list of who has the highest average scores in your entire company is extremely useful.
When you or your supervisors sit down to have these conversations with your employees, opening up OrangeQC to review inspection reports steers the conversation in the right direction. Concrete scores, photos of what went wrong, a trend line that shows how their performance has improved over time: these kinds of concrete data help keep the conversation rooted in reality.
Managing people is always hard, especially in an industry so marked by turnover. But we’ve talked to so many clients who work really hard to not only deliver great service to their customers, but also to be a great employer for their teams. Tracking employee performance is just one more way to reach those goals.
Not using OrangeQC yet? Request a demo. We’ll walk you through our easy-to-use janitorial software and app to show how it can help your team be ready for anything.
