Entering a watershed year in 2023 when hygiene and cleaning companies will be seeking to consign the challenges of COVID-19 to history, a clear focus on recruitment and retention strategies will be crucial for business success.

Workplace rehabilitation expert Libby Roberts has a clear warning for hygiene and cleaning sector leaders as they deal with a host of employee issues in 2023 – get ready for more cases of psychological injuries among staff.

On the back of workplace bullying, anxiety, and stress – as well as pandemic-related staff absences that are causing burnout for remaining workers – the anecdotal evidence suggests that workplace compensation claims related to a range of cognitive, emotional, and behavioural symptoms are on the rise.

“Psychological injuries are already making up the bulk of a lot of the new compensation claims coming through,” says Roberts, founder and managing director of Workplace Rehabilitation Management, an occupational health service.

“With staff shortages, it means that people are working longer hours, so people are getting tired and stressed. Managers aren’t coping either because they’re exhausted, which means they tend to not be managing people as kindly as they would have if they had more time off to recuperate.”

While some staff members experienced online bullying and harassment at the height of pandemic lockdowns, Roberts says the fallout is even more serious now that “people are out of their bubbles” and back into traditional workspaces.

“People with low resilience and managers with potentially fraying tempers are now face to face with each other – and it’s not pretty.”

Roberts cites research from the government insurer, iCare NSW, which reveals that workers’ compensation claims for psychological injuries are doubling every four years, with workplace stress, harassment and bullying driving the bulk of claims.

In addition, just half of the people who exit the workplace for mental health reasons are able to return to work within six months. This compares with 90 per cent of people with physical issues.

“That’s a bad statistic because other research tells us that if someone is off work and hasn’t returned to work within three months, the chances of getting them back to work at all is quite low,” Roberts says.

One of the answers for this conundrum is for leaders across all sectors, including the hygiene and cleaning space, to address mental health issues and make their workplaces “psychologically safe”.

The payoff, based on the iCare research, is that return-to-work rates improve by up to 30 per cent when employees have significant engagement with their leadership.

Roberts adds that in New South Wales new regulations require employers to take into account psychosocial risks when developing a workplace health and safety plan.

“So, if for no other reason, they now have a legislative reason to address this issue, as a well as a moral reason.”

Addressing the worker shortage

Mental health issues notwithstanding, the big challenge facing cleaning contractors and facility managers in 2023 is likely to be a shortage of workers.

With a strikingly low unemployment rate in Australia and a dearth of potential cleaning staff, HR On Call director Melissa Behrend says the main hope on the human resources front is for the flow of immigrant workers to resume.

“I’m hoping the overseas students come back,” she says. “I’d assume that, all things being equal, this will occur.”

Behrend says the cleaning sector’s traditional reliance on a casual workforce is not giving people job security. In response, she urges some employers to consider changing their workforce mix to include more permanent staff on their books. Casuals can then fill other project vacancies when applicable.

Another creative idea, according to Behrend, could be to employ casuals to work with specific clients and, if that contract is lost, the employer would not be locked into using those staff members.

People and culture practitioner Amanda de Haas agrees that every sector is finding it difficult to manage the competition for staff and talent.

“You only have to walk through your local shopping and restaurant precinct to understand that, no matter the business, the fight for employees is fierce.”

In such an environment, Haas expects automation and robotics – which has become a major talking point in the cleaning sector in the past few years – to increasingly become part of the solution.

“Automation is part of every industry and, even though we may think some roles can’t be replaced, they will be. Most importantly, the impact of automation and robotics will mean that we can’t even fathom some of the roles of the future.”

De Haas says many organisations are not looking at slashing their staff numbers due to automation. Rather, they are redeploying and retraining staff into different roles.

More than just money

On the recruitment and retention front, Behrend urges cleaning companies and contractors to think beyond wages.

More than ever before, potential employees now want to get a sense of the culture of an organisation and how it treats its people.

“You have to focus on the other elements that are important to people, not just a wage rate,” she says.

“They need to see if there’s a good team of workers, or if the managers are great and the culture is good.”

Behrend notes that younger workers, in particular, are happy to switch jobs if they are not satisfied. The upshot is that employers need to strengthen their employee value proposition, including offering greater flexibility for parent workers, as well as considering referral and sign-on bonuses. Simply expecting workers to come on board and stay for a long period is no longer feasible.

“That’s a very antiquated approach in today’s market. You’ve got to be creative in attracting people.”

Roberts adds that the reward for businesses which focus on culture is that staff will be happier and more productive at work, while employee absences will probably fall. Fostering such a happy culture could include initiatives such as putting on lunchtime talks to discuss heathy life and eating habits or paying for a regular staff lunch to promote team spirit.

“Think about the return on investment,” she says.

“If you spend $500 a week on an employee lunch, but you stop someone going off work for a week because they’ve been looking after their mental and physical health, you’ll actually save money.”

Treat your people well

As cleaning businesses prepare for the year ahead, Behrend expects word-of-mouth referrals to be a key element of recruiting in tight jobs markets. Just relying on traditional recruitment platforms to target talent is not enough.

“The Seeks and Gumtrees of the world are probably not going to work all the time,” Behrend says.

Her overarching message to cleaning industry employers and facility managers is clear – look after your people and hear their voices.

“People are integral to cleaning businesses, and they need to be your focus. We need to listen.”

De Haas agrees that relying on recruitment platforms is not enough in current markets.

“Don’t underestimate the value of your network, and that of your employees,” she says.

“Rather than thinking about recruitment platforms, we need to be thinking about recruitment strategies and connections.”

A SMART approach

For cleaning businesses seeking to gain a recruitment edge, Workplace Rehabilitation Management’s Libby Roberts endorses the SMART work design model.

Developed by Australian Research Council professor Sharon Parker at the Future of Work Institute, the acronymic strategy is broken down in the following way:

S – stimulating

The job involves skill variety, task variety and problem-solving demands.

M – mastery

This refers to the degree to which a job provides role clarity, feedback and task identity.

A – agency

Tis includes factors such as the extent to which employees are able to organise their own work schedule. With regard to agency, Roberts admits that many lower-paid cleaners may not have a lot of control over what they do.

“But an employer needs to work out how to give an individual a feeling that they have some control over the way they do their job and not be too prescriptive,” she says.

R – relational

The extent to which a staff member experiences a sense of support, purpose and social contact on the job.

T – tolerable demand

Which considers elements of a job such as time pressure, emotional demands and role conflict). The key here for bosses, according to Roberts, is to ensure that demands on the employee are reasonable, “not only from a physical point of view, but from a psychological point of view”.

Weighing up such SMART factors, Roberts says employers are well advised to ask a telling question that provides a guide to the welfare of their staff – “Does this person go home at the end of the day with something left in their tank, or are they completely spent? If it’s the latter, that’s no quality of life and it’s going to lead to a psychological injury for which the employer will be responsible.”

This was first published in the January/February issue of INCLEAN magazine. 

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