For many of the capital's office managers and facilities directors, hiring a cleaning contractor is only the start of the process. You may want to consider a number of factors before appointing a cleaning firm – security, reliability and price to name but three – but once you have found a suitable contractor, monitoring cleaning can become a low priority, especially in a busy office.
Nevertheless, occasionally standards can drop from the less-reputable of London's cleaning contractors. Although it's not the norm for all contractors, luckily, in the first few weeks and months, time and effort may have be taken to get a thorough job done with quality falling away over time. Are your cleaners doing a good a job as they first did? Are your staff members and senior managers noticing a fall in standards, however minimal? If so, then it could reflect badly on you, so here's what you need to do to make sure you are continuing to get the best out of your contractor.
All cleaning firms in London have a turnover of staff. This is the same in any business, but cleaning companies can often see higher levels of staff leaving, sometimes down to nothing more than the unsocial hours that are required. Therefore, it is reasonable to expect that a cleaning company will send different operatives to your office from time-to-time.
Nevertheless, you should always check that new operatives are doing their work to the same, high quality. Inspect the work of new cleaners to make sure it continues to offer expected quality norms and opt for an ISO9001 cleaning company if the one you are using fails to come up to scratch.
Like the skill level of cleaning operatives, materials used for the job can be of an inferior quality after the initial part of a contract. It is commonplace for professional cleaners to use trade brands for their cleaning materials since they often buy in bulk, so you may not see household names among the materials used. However, it is a good idea to check the cleaning products being used with a quick internet search now and again.
Ask yourself whether your cleaning contractor is using bargain basement products that are short-changing your company and making it harder for operatives to do a really thorough job. Another important factor to weigh up is whether the cleaning materials being used have a health or environmental impact. If they do, then the contractor may not be living up to your level of social corporate responsibility. If in doubt about the products, simply ask your contractor for full details.
Having third-party contractors on your site of any type means that you need to trust them. If cleaners turn up late and rush the job, then you are not only receiving a lower quality of service, but the crucial element of trust may break down. Given the traffic in London, late arrivals will happen occasionally. However, you do need a basic level of trust that delays are reasonable.
Essentially, you need to feel that you can trust your cleaning company's management to deal with any doubts you may have effectively. This means they should have the proper management, training and monitoring structures in place to respond to customers' concerns when raised. If you are checking up on your cleaners, then ask your contractor how often they are doing so, if at all, and what systems they have in place to improve reliability and, therefore, trust.