Anyone in the commercial cleaning business knows that it’s not as simple as just mopping a break room floor or emptying the recycling bin. There’s an art to consistently delivering high-quality service.
And as with any art, it takes practice, dedication, and a whole lot of elbow grease to perfect. Fortunately, achieving consistently high service levels in commercial cleaning is not an impossible feat.
In fact, it can be boiled down to two key foundations: effective communication and a stellar performance management program. At The Wilburn Company, we’ve developed simple and actionable steps to take to incorporate these foundations.
We’ve seen great success with this process, and we know others can too!
Define your goals and roles
As a commercial cleaning company in Maryland, our primary goal is to provide our clients with the highest level of cleanliness and customer service possible. We also seek to do this with consistency and efficiency.
The key word in that statement is primary. To meet that main goal, we developed many smaller and more specific goals. These goals can vary from company to company, depending on the industries served.
Accomplishing these goals depends on the cooperation of the entire company—from the CEO to the day porters.
Our Leaders:
- create a culture of excellence with expectations
- lead by example, (i.e., talk the talk and walk the walk)
- clearly communicate goals to employees
- provide the necessary training
Our Employees:
- buy into and believe in the culture, standards, and goals
- communicate their needs
- learn from training sessions and experience
Each of these points goes back to the foundation element of effective communication. Once all employees and leaders got on the same page, we turned our goals into KPIs or (Key Performance Indicators)!
We defined a KPI as a set of measurable details used to gauge a building’s cleanliness that carries across any building in our portfolio.
As an example, our restroom cleanliness KPIs include high vent dusting, toilet cleanliness, floor maintenance, countertop cleanliness (i.e., sinks, faucets, and glass mirrors), and the stocking of paper products and soaps. By setting and measuring KPIs, we can ensure that we are providing quality services that meet the needs of our clients.
Implement your own commercial cleaning performance program
This next step can be organized into four primary areas of our performance management process.
- Inspections. These help us to increase visibility on our cleaning sites. Our inspections can range from bi-monthly to inspections of individual janitorial room locations for GS-42 compliance (ensuring we have proper safety equipment, safety guidelines, cleaning floor layouts, and SDS Binders).
- Training. Based on the results of inspections and on-site visits, performance management will include training and development to improve performance outcomes.
- Barcode work management system. Performance management includes a barcode scanning system. Employees simply scan the code to see cleaning checklists and any additional details given by the site’s project manager.
- Site visits. These visits include client interaction, setting up meetings, and walking through building portfolios with clients.
With all of these areas working in concert, it allows our cleaning services to continually communicate and improve. If you’d like to learn more about our program, check out this article.
One more major piece to this program that is essential for its success: We always communicate with our clients about how this program works and what it means to follow these steps.
Now, let’s move on to the fun part–data measurement!
Measure and manage your results
We measure our performance to ensure that we’re hitting our KPIs and, ultimately, our goals.
This includes documenting deficiencies and excellent services equally and creating a plan of action for employees. That is how we address issues quickly and effectively. Identifying what we did well allows us to refine and improve our current procedures.
Measuring and managing our results is also something our clients value and appreciate.
We bring data from our performance management systems when we meet with our clients each month to discuss cleaning programs. Our clients also have ready access to the data, giving our relationship a foundation of transparency and trust.
Grow and Reward
We’ve found that this last part is perhaps both the hardest and the easiest all at once.
Meaning, that there really is no point in setting up and implementing a performance program if you won’t use all that you’ve learned to grow. It’s all about constant improvement and looking for ways to help better equip our employees and serve our clients. That can (and has been) challenging at times, but we’ve always seen the results that make it worthwhile.
The easy part comes from using that same performance data to reward and recognize the Wilburn Company employees that have shown improvement!
We do this in several ways, but one of our favorites is writing employee spotlights highlighting all our hard-working and innovative employees. Read a few here and here!
Want to learn more about achieving consistently high service levels in commercial cleaning?
At The Wilburn Company, we’ve seen valuable and consistent improvement in our service from our performance management program.
If you’d like to learn more about our approach (or if you want to work with a cleaning company that prioritizes continual improvement), we’d. When you work with us, we’ll be thorough and honest in assessing our service – and we’ll always work to improve it.
Tags: commercial cleaning, communication, inspections, key performance indicators, maryland, performance management program, performance management system, procedure, service leveal, site visits, The Wilburn Company, training