Even the best professional janitorial service can have a bad day now and then, but if your janitorial services company seems to have more bad days than good days, it might be time to show them the door. Maybe your restroom cleaning stinks. Maybe your janitorial company’s ‘to do’ list has turned into a ‘when I get around to it’ list. Maybe things started off on the right foot but have been going steadily down hill lately. Or perhaps, your local Michigan janitorial company never fulfilled their promise of good service from the get go.
Or maybe, you and your janitorial services company just need to sit down and get back on the same page about the quality of facility services and cleaning you need from them. When does your janitorial service deserve a chance to get your facility maintenance back on track and when is it time to call it a day and look elsewhere for your janitorial services? And if you as a Facility Manager need to go back to the drawing board for facility maintenance, how can you avoid the pitfalls that got you subpar cleaning services in the first place and finally find a Detroit janitorial services company who will do what they promised, reduce complaints and keep your building in great shape and make your life easier rather than harder?
High janitorial turnover from your Detroit commercial cleaning company can leave you with subpar or incomplete work, forgotten tasks, stinky restrooms and a string of complaints from tenants and employees. It goes without saying that you want good value for your dollar, but if you hire a facilities services company that struggles with high janitorial turnover, even if their cleaning bid was the lowest, their high employee turnover will cost you big money not to mention headaches.
Here’s the issue, while everyone has to start somewhere, a string of new employees coming in and out of your building or facility is not to your benefit. Of course trainees and newly hired employees are a reality of business but when your facility sees a never ending, revolving door of new hires, you are fronting the cost of training your cleaning company’s people. What does that cost entail?
Inconsistency is probably worse than terrible service because one day everything is fine and the next it’s all in pieces. If your commercial cleaning was consistently awful, you’d probably have fired them by now. As a Facility Manager or Building Manager, you have no doubt experienced inconsistent janitorial services. There are so many types and sizes of commercial cleaning companies that you will run into the good, the bad and the ugly. Some commercial cleaning services start out great but quickly slip into ‘good enough’ mode or forever putting off the work for another day. Maybe after enough complaints, you call your janitorial services company to complain and they respond with improved work, for a while anyway. But again, just months or even weeks later, complacency once again sets in.
When your janitorial services company consistently delivers inconsistent work, it creates nothing but problems for you. In time, this shoddy level of cleaning and service delivery costs you time and money and robs you of the promised benefits of outsourcing your janitorial services. Maybe your cleaning company cares but just isn’t set up to deliver consistent, responsive service or maybe your cleaning company just doesn’t care. It doesn’t matter because either way YOU aren’t getting what you NEED and DESERVE from your facility service company.
As a Facility Manager or Building Manager, you want good service at a price you can live with. And you want the most you can get with your cleaning budget—that’s value. But if your janitorial company or a prospective cleaning companies gives you confusing or cloudy quotes or imprecise cleaning bids, how can you be sure of what you are getting? So do you just choose the company that offers the lowest price? Does, “you get what you pay for” apply to janitorial pricing?
Yes and no. Here’s where it can get even more confusing, negotiate with five different cleaning companies and you’ll get five very different quotes. One cleaning bid may come in low but if it isn’t precise about what you are getting, you may be getting significantly fewer services than cleaning quotes that are higher but very close. On the other hand, the highest janitorial pricing isn’t necessarily going to be the best. Unless you can truly compare cleaning bids side to side with services and costs clearly indicated, there is no way to really determine value.
At that point, far too many Facility Managers just give up on trying to understand confusing bids and just look at price. But price never tells the whole story. Janitorial pricing does not have to be so complicated. It’s really not as complex as some cleaning companies might have you believe. And yet, if a prospective national cleaning company or local Michigan janitorial company isn’t giving you the information you need to make an informed business decision, they are shortchanging you before they even get started.
Janitorial inspections are a fundamental part of delivering top notch, effective, responsive cleaning and if your commercial cleaning company isn’t doing them, you are being shortchanged. GOOD companies want to deliver great service, GREAT companies put the systems in place to assure great service. Without the systems in place to reliably deliver great service, it doesn’t happen. Janitorial inspections can take a good cleaning company and make them great by honing in on your individual needs quickly and consistently. Janitorial inspections can also catch issues before you do creating a more seamless, responsive service with less management from you. After all, isn’t less management from you a big part of why you outsource your janitorial services? Here’s the reality, Michigan commercial cleaning companies and national janitorial companies depend upon people to deliver their services and people are imperfect. We make mistakes, we misunderstand, we get comfortable or even complacent, it’s just a part of being a human.
Even the most effective and intuitive cleaners need guidance and accountability to do their best work day after day. In the most effective janitorial companies, managers complete regular quality inspections. And you as the Building Manage or Facility Manager should get a detailed copy of these janitorial inspection. This gives you the opportunity to go over what your cleaning company’s manager found and see how it lines up with your thoughts. If your commercial cleaning services company doesn’t conduct regular inspections to assure effective service, your service is likely suffering or heading into that slow but inevitable downward spiral.
Direct communication with your building maintenance company about the “game-plan” is critical to the effective service from your facilities services company. Of course, you must communicate with your janitorial company about what you need and expect. But after that, it’s up to them to make sure they are on top of your facility assuring the service they promised is the service they deliver. This level of communication means that you shouldn’t have to constantly manage your janitorial team but when you do have an issue, you know exactly who to take it to. If you don’t know who is responsible for your account, it’s likely time to seek out a commercial cleaning company with a better plan of attack.
The most professional, responsive and effective cleaning companies attract and retain great people and then they use quality systems to make the promise of great service a reality. As a Facility Manager, it can be a struggle to separate sales talk from straight talk but there is a way to verify best practices that doesn’t involve hours of your time spent checking references. CIMS Certification can help you distinguish Cleaning Companies who operate with best practices in place. CIMS, or Cleaning Industry Management Standard is an advanced certification available to companies in the building services industry that meet strict performance benchmarks like:
Quality Systems: A paradigm to guarantee operational effectiveness & continual improvement
Service Delivery: Usable, effective systems in place to deliver consistent, quality service
Human Resources: Best practices for managing any service industry’s greatest asset—their people
Health, Safety, & Environmental Stewardship: Ensuring regulatory compliance, workplace safety, and health and environmental management
Management Commitment: Establishing a Mission, Vision, and Values that safeguard that the organization's continued success.
CIMS is a hard-earned certification that establishes a janitorial company’s commitment to effective service. And as a busy Building Manager, drawing up your short list of janitorial service contractors from CIMS certified companies can help you cut through the clutter of cleaning companies that make claims they cannot back up.