What Is Quality Service In The Cleaning Industry? Your requirement is to move water; their requirements are of a different nature. In actual practice, you will buy a pump that meets your needs by selecting one from many already designed and built by the manufacturer. They know what is required to do what you wish. Thus, there are requirements of different sorts that must be complied with or con-formed to for quality to be apparent. As the cleaning service provider, you must know yours because the second requirement or expectation of our cus-tomers is that they “outsource” to become free from cleaning management concerns. The cleaning industry has a long history of allowing, indeed expecting to be, nurse-maided by its customers. The client is often asked to provide so-called cleaning specifications that are noth-ing more than a list of cleaning tasks to do at certain times. Evidently, we donʼt believe we are profi-cient enough to prepare adequate task lists and schedule the necessary work ourselves and many clients readily agree with us. So, we let a pond owner engineer the pump. Then, we leave logbooks for the secre-taries, who we evidently believe know more about our onsite operations than we do, to fill out with suggestions and complaints. Some of us boast of rapid response, quickly sending someone to the building to redo missed or incomplete work when a complaint is phoned in. Others feel it is a good practice to leave treated cloths where clients can easily find them so they can do the dusting them-selves when we miss it, as we expect to do much of the time. Strangely, few seem to see this “hand-holding” by clients as anything detrimental. Nevertheless, as long as the client is needed to help us manage the cleaning, whether by calling in complaints or filling in a monthly quality checklist, we are failing to relieve them of the cleaning management responsibility and so are providing poor quality service — service that does not con-form to the requirements. This is greatly misunderstood and very often our customers expand their manage-ment by adding on unexpected services they want, asking for insane services, such as building disinfection, specifying certain products or equipment that are wrong for the task or asking the cleaning company to carry unnecessary insurances or agree to ridiculous contract provisions. Every time the cleaner gives in to such foolish direction from those lacking professional expertise, treating them as if they really know what they are doing, we abdicate the cleaning management to these ones, in essence, providing limited management and poor service, by definition. wide-cut machine, sharp blades and an awareness of the time and fuel costs to do the job in order to price it right. The kid has a borrowed mower and the hope of earning a few bucks to spend on a video game. Who of the two would ask the customer for help in doing the job efficiently and eco-nomically? If you answered “the pro,” you are most likely a cleaning contractor. Is It Changing? To offset this reputation for being responsi-ble for seemingly simple-minded tasks, the industry has now moved toward projecting an image of itself as providing a greater, more essential and complicated service, that of “protector of public health.” The cleaning industry will save the world from sickness and disease. When a major epidemic breaks out, we will be the first line of defense, safeguard-ing the masses. We will not only remove visible soils, but we will eliminate all harmful microorgan-isms from the indoor environment, thereby making the world a safer, better place. And all will stand in awe of the cleaning industry as its self-esteem and sense of worth reaches unheard of heights in the service community. Exactly how the cleaning company repre-sentative will convince the client that this proposed assault on the invisible realm has been successful when the customer counters are covered with dust and the floors are streaked remains unresolved, but this seems to be the direction things are taking. The fact that quality cleaning, as defined above, is not all that common must indicate something. Before tackling the elimination of microorganisms we cannot see, we must concentrate on providing quality, basic cleaning services for what we can see. Quality standards must be established and used to provide a target for our efforts and we need to change our approach to our clients. If we donʼt believe we are the cleaning experts capable of providing quality cleaning, it will be impossible to convince them. CM Why Do We Permit This? The reason we allow this “babysitting” of the industry by bank officers, secretaries, clerks and office and property managers is somewhat simple and embarrassing to talk about, but weʼll do it for the sake of promot-ing real change in the field. There are few industries in the world with the self-esteem challenges we face. Cleaning is viewed by the vast majority of people as something anyone can do simply by showing up on the job. When the cleaning fails due either to skip-ping or incomplete effort, it is embarrassing. How can you mess up something so simple? Additionally, due to this widely held view-point, the industry has no established stan-dards for quality surface cleaning. No one believes that anything detailed and exact is needed to do such simple work. Would you write a standard for burning trash or raking leaves into a pile or wiping dust off a shelf? Of course not. So, cleaners do not seek to assert them-selves in contractual settings. They are possibly ashamed of the poor and long-standing industry record of mediocre service and obvious oversights. They have worked for years on the prem-ise that low price supersedes fair price and adequate service is preferable to excellent service. They have no standard to achieve to establish quality and believe in “doing what the customer wants” without exerting much effort to define what that is. In short, we operate as if we are the kid doing his first lawn mowing job. The professional lawn service guy has a 22 CM/Cleaning & Maintenance Management ® • January 2010
CMM – Archives Jan 2010: 22
