Cleaning is a tough business to provide training for, but with the right digital operations system, you can provide guidance and support to your team as they need it. Mark Jones* share his advice on educating cleaning staff in today’s digital landscape.
Every night your team leaves home to clean the city top to bottom. They ensure the workers of the world return to find their offices sparkly and new every day. Hopefully your team remember their training from years before when they joined your business. Because no matter how committed your team are, they’ll need to remember a lot of information to do an impeccable job every time they’re on site. 
And heaven forbid, if something were to go wrong, you’ll want to know about it. Will their reporting alert you to the issue or will the client? Or will you have to guess based on the time spent on site that something might not be right?
All too often we don’t know of an issue until the next day when clients are calling asking if the team have been on-site and exactly what were they doing. The key to closing in on the dream of consistent service delivery is training, clear expectations, support and feedback.
How to train an invisible workforce
The cleaning business has some nuances that those who don’t work in our industry simply won’t understand. And when it comes to training your team, these nuances can become profound challenges.
First, you don’t get your team all in the one place to deliver training to them ‘straight from the horse’s mouth’. You need to go to them, and that can mean anywhere across town, the state or the country, work unit at a time.
Second, your teams are rarely available at the same time as we all have so many mixed work schedules and shift types.
Good training starts with consistent information
We want to deliver our team consistent training information and ensure it’s been understood. This is far from easy given the points raised above, and difficult given we are not always with our team in the field.
The best way to overcome this is to deliver the information as it’s required. In the digital age, it’s all about the now, survival of the fastest. To be a leader you need to have the information your team need in their hand when they need it.
Your ops management system needs to give staff;
- safety and security information on all client sites
- training info on all specific task activities and
- access to refresher info on company training on the ‘way you need to see it done’
Your team won’t use this information if it isn’t available live in the field. And, having it in a drawer in the office or in the glovebox of the car isn’t helping anyone either.
You can support your team from your lounge chair
Most nights, managers and supervisors will stay in constant contact with the team in the field. To date this has meant taking call after call throughout the night and talking staff through various sticky (or silly) situations. Or worse, having to go to site and imposing a big impost on families of managers and preventing you from being able to have down time and recharge for the next day.
It needn’t be that way. In the palm of your staff’s hand is the one work tool that can unlock so much potential for your team day in and day out.
With a digital operations system, you can deliver your training and support to your team as they need it. Most problems are repetitive for new team members as they learn new skills. Or the issues are common to a site and encountered in turn by subsequent staff. So why not upload the issue and how to resolve it once, and then let your team find the help they need when they need it.
*Mark Jones is a director of freshOps and Your Digital Solution
Read the full article in the MarchApril edition of INCLEAN, out now!