The contract cleaning insider

Working in a people-based, labour-intensive industry, the task of managing our front-line labour force efficiently and cost effectively is the most critical we face as cleaning contractors. 

Whether we employ 200, 2,000 or 20,000, ensuring that the right operatives are in the right place at the right time, completing their shifts in full and being paid correctly is no easy task. The fact is that with front-line labour costs taking up over 80% of total revenue, it’s easy for a few miscalculations in hours, absence cover provision, or incorrect payments to translate to an overspent wage budget, dented profit margin or, most worryingly, a client unhappy with the level of service.

So how do we ensure these errors don’t happen? Well, as with so much else that’s going on in our industry nowadays, the answer seems to lie in the clever use of information technology. By digitalising and connecting up lots of staff-related processes that are currently low-tech - in other words paper-based, email-based, or predominantly manual in nature - we will save time, make fewer mistakes, deliver better cleaning standards and protect margin. 

In the clever way that technology suppliers have of summarising useful functionality into a memorable term, it comes as no surprise to find that everything to do with managing your workforce is now known in IT terms as (ahem) Workforce Management – a combination of contract management software and integrated mobile apps to manage staff related processes. In addition to basics such as onboarding, rostering, attendance management and payment, it extends to invoicing correctly for work carried out, especially one-off work, as well as communicating with staff through portals, giving them access to information that saves them phoning or emailing your payroll and admin teams with queries. Correctly implemented, workforce management claims to leave clients satisfied, whilst managing wage budgets and protecting profit. Impressive!

To reap the full benefit of the technology that brings the individual processes together under the workforce management umbrella, the key is to integrate them so that you don’t waste your time keying the same basic information into lots of different apps, or from one system to another. An integrated workforce management system is very much like a team where the sum of the parts is greater than the whole. It’s about the software sharing data about your employees between the different applications, which has the effect of making the data work harder without the intervention of your admin or operations teams. The benefits flow in the form of reduced admin, tighter financial control and potentially a lot more transparency, which works well for both staff and clients. All things we can do with in cleaning.

www.doccleaning.co.uk