Hiring/Training and Managing

Finding great cleaners is not easy. We often discuss hiring with our customers. Years ago when we were running our own cleaning company, we found out the hard way how much work went into finding and keeping cleaners.

The holidays are upon us. Whether that statement triggers threatening Jaws-like sound effects or a rousing chorus of “Deck the Halls” in your brain, there’s no avoiding it. Like most busy entrepreneurs, the thought of doing something special for your team has probably crossed your mind. But so has payroll, and updating your website, and budgeting for 2018, and…the list goes on.

A few weeks ago we hosted a webinar called Cleaner Turnover Explained: What Every Janitorial Business Owner Needs to Know About Employee Retention. And it blew our socks off how many of you were interested in this topic! In fact, it has inspired us to dig even deeper into this topic and provide you with more concrete examples of how to combat the things that make us (ie. humans in general) feel we have a “miserable job”: anonymity, irrelevance and immeasurement. In this post we’re going to look specifically at immeasurement.

In the janitorial industry most of the work is done remotely, so it’s easy for your front line staff to feel that their efforts are being overlooked. Giving constructive feedback is one of the most cost-effective ways to boost productivity and lower the risk of employee turnover. Yet only 58% of mangers think they give enough feedback! (Feedback Academy) In this article we’ll look at the do’s and don’ts of giving feedback to your cleaning staff to boost employee retention and customer satisfaction.

We all know that finding new cleaners for your business is a tough challenge.

Availability, fit with your culture, what you’re looking for, what they’re looking for, it all plays a major role in finding a win win. One source for great employees that many cleaning businesses overlook or under utilize is their existing staff.

Do you post jobs online when hiring new cleaners? If you answered yes (which you should have,) then you know how it feels to be faced with hundreds of job applications piling up in your inbox. The worst part, most of the applicants do not meet the basic criteria for you to hire them. My business partner (Matt) created a solution for this and basically saved my sanity; so we decided to build a public, free tool to allow other janitorial companies to benefit.