Cleaning is often the most difficult and troublesome service to manage. Too many customers select their cleaning contractors on price alone and then express surprise that the required service levels are neither achievable, nor sustainable.
It's quite common today for cleaning specifications to be written by accounting and financial departments with the sole objective of reducing costs. As a result, we're seeing more and more reverse-auction job bidding, focused on driving down prices and the emergence of ‘performance-based’ contracting, where cleaners are often forced to provide a nominal-cost level of cleaning that involves little more than removing visible soils.
However, it’s not just the fault of corporations and building managers. It’s my belief that the cleaning industry in general has let itself down in recent years by focussing on proffering clients the cheapest prices, which in time has de-valued the industry as contractors were unable to deliver on what they had promised.
Both customers and suppliers would do better to focus on value for money: that is, combining an appropriate level of quality with an acceptable level of risk, at a suitable cost. Choosing the lowest cost inevitably means reduced service quality, increased risk of service failure—or both.
All too often, cleaning is simply thought of as a grudging expense—one that makes little if any real contribution to the success of an organisation. “Cleaning is not merely an expense used to keep floors looking shiny and to minimise the number of complaints relating to the lack of toilet paper in the restroom. Rather, cleaning plays in incredibly important role in supporting the work of an organisation’s most important asset—its people.”1
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