Office Cleaning | It Couldn't Be Easier, Could It?

You have set up your company, hired great staff to manage your business and have done all the marketing to make sure that you are able to be reached by people looking for your services. While everything seems to be going great, you put word out on your website that you are looking for cleaners.

Well, there are always plenty looking for work or some extra work to help pay the bills or students on holiday looking to cover the costs of their studies. Arm them up with a mop, bucket, a duster and a cleaning cloth and your business is ready to become operational. Is this all that is necessary to start a successful office cleaning business?

No, of course not! If you don't take office cleaning seriously, you have to start thinking about just how long that it will take you to go out of business, it is not a case of “if” but “when”, rest assured.

Starting at the beginning

Office cleaning is one of the most sensitive services that affect everyone in the workplace. Salesmen can grumble about their car allowance, sales targets and commission plans. Credit control staff can complain about their boss wanting them to collect debts quicker and administrators moan about printers and coffee machines that are not working properly, but there is nothing worse than a coffee cup left on an employee’s desk when they went home that is still there with its contents congealing in the morning when they are returning to work the day or an overflowing bin not emptied!

Could these small or simple problems undermine your staffs’ commitment, lower their moral or generally cause them to moan about the working conditions that they have to work in? The answer is a resounding yes and you need to do something about it.

Contact the office cleaning professionals

Professional cleaning companies are experts at doing the simple things well and doing the more complex tasks when the staff will be least disrupted. The key person that you need in your relationship with the office cleaning company is the account manager. The account manager is your interface with the office cleaning company and this person should take on the personal responsibility to ensure that you get excellent professional service.

When you make initial contact with the professional cleaning company make sure that a representative comes to your office to explain what they can offer. Listen carefully and rather than accepting a standard pitch about what they can do, see if the rep asks about your particular needs and wants to take a walk round your office to understand what you want them to do.

Always remember that you are the customer and you need to be satisfied, never accept a one size fits all approach” to cleaning and be very attentive to the willingness of the rep to listen to your particular needs. For example the rep should ask what your office hours are, when it would be OK for the cleaners to come in to start their work. It may seem trivial but do you want an important video conference call with Tokyo or Berlin to be interrupted by the cleaner with their noisy vacuum cleaner causing havoc when you are trying to close a deal or win a new contract.

The account manager from the cleaning company

Once you are ready to give a contract to the office cleaning company, you need to tick off another important criteria, your question should be simple “Will I get an account manager from your cleaning company?” Consider it like this if you needed to move abroad for work and rent your home out, you would not leave it unmanaged, would you? You would be well advised to make preparations to have complete cover and a manager who will look after your offices and their cleaning while you are busy running your business.

The account manager will check with you on what cleaning materials and equipment you might want to provide and what they should bring in. The best office cleaning companies provide their own equipment, if you have the space to store it and are effectively self-sufficient, meaning you have one less headache to deal with as you are fully occupied running your business.

Don’t compromise on professional office cleaning staff

Could you put an office cleaner on the same level as a butler like Bertie Wooster’s Jeeves? Yes, of course you could and you can. Discrete and even invisible, the office cleaner needs to be able to do their work without disturbing any of the staff. This does not mean that they can only do their cleaning at midnight or on Sunday afternoons but rather they have the right capabilities to be discreet and do their work even when the office is fully staffed and working at full capacity.

These cleaners will know that they can only do the noisy part of their cleaning activities when the staff has not yet arrived or after the last one has gone. These little details, as they may seem minor, can make all the difference between the real professionals and those who would like to take your money and offer only bad cleaning service.