Looking to step up your staff’s efficiency? The best place to start is with a custodial cleaning schedule that makes sense.
So your cleaning company is up and running, you’ve reeled in a few clients, and you’re sending employees out to for jobs. Great! But after a while, you start to get the feeling that your teams aren’t making the most of their time. Perhaps it’s time you reevaluate your custodial cleaning schedule.
At this point, maybe you’re asking, why bother? The staff has their assignments—what more can a custodial cleaning schedule do for them? What can it do for you?
Discover the benefits of a custodial cleaning schedule that benefits you, your employees, and your revenue.
A custodial cleaning schedule is more than just a checklist of items to complete. An adequately vetted schedule takes into consideration the frequency with which specific jobs need to be done, how long a job should take, and even an order of operations to help keep the team on task.
This benefits your employees in a few ways. First, it sets a framework, so they know what you expect of them. If they see a particular task scheduled, they’re less likely to skirt around it because they’ll assume you’ll check for that specific duty to get done.
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Second, it gives your staff structure. Some people are great at task-oriented work, but not always so adept at task management. If you give an employee a list of things to do, the onus is on them to figure out how to complete the job both quickly and efficiently. If you give them a custodial cleaning schedule, you provide them with something of a walkthrough, a guide for how you’d like to see the job done.
Both of these things amount to higher efficiency. A thorough, complete custodial cleaning schedule acts as a map for cleaning professionals to help them get through the often-tedious waters of janitorial work. And greater efficiency from them means better business for you—everybody wins!
What you need to create an efficient cleaning schedule
You can find most of the information you need for a custodial cleaning schedule in your executed cleaning proposal for each client. Within that proposal, there should be information about things like what tasks will be completed and how often. In an office, for example, wastebaskets would be emptied every day, but you’d likely only clean the carpets once a week or even less frequently. These details become important as you set out a cleaning schedule for your staff.
In addition to that information, estimate approximately how long it should take to finish a job. The rule of thumb here is to be generous rather than conservative with your estimate. Give your employees a little wiggle room in case something unexpected comes up, though make it clear that timeliness is as important as thoroughness.
Once you compile this information, you can then set to the task of writing out the schedule. Janitorial management software can help you create, maintain, and share schedules between your home staff and your field staff. This software allows you to quickly edit and change schedules as needed, while also allowing employees to see and make real-time updates to progress made.
Track your efficiency in real time
You’ll notice a difference with a custodial cleaning schedule in a matter of days, but the real numbers will come in after you’ve been using a schedule for a few weeks, maybe a month. Then you have week-to-week data to analyze for evidence of increased efficiency, such as getting a job done faster or accomplishing more tasks for a specific client in the same amount of time. This data will also help you estimate timeframes for future cleaning schedules as you stay abreast of the real-time effectiveness of your cleaning teams.
Tracking efficiency is another place where janitorial management software can be a huge help. Not only can employees check off jobs they’ve completed on mobile devices, keeping both you and the client aware of their daily progress, but you can also run reports that will help you analyze the data you’re collecting by maintaining the schedule.
In general, it makes the most sense for your operations manager to monitor this information, but it can be anyone as long as they’re adept at project management and juggling many different schedules.
One thing to keep in mind about all this scheduling and monitoring is that you don’t want your employees to feel as though you’re watching their every move. As you implement a custodial cleaning schedule, you might want to let everyone know exactly what you’re doing and why, and reassure them that you have confidence in their work, you only feel that your company as a whole could be more efficient. In an industry that already suffers from heavy turnover, you don’t want to give anyone a reason to have one foot out the door.
Boost your scheduling efficiency with Janitorial Manager. Sign up for your personal demo today and to find out more!