The right people on the bus

The strongest, most adaptable companies in the cleaning industry, or in fact any other, don’t really look much alike. They aren’t clustered around certain segments of the cleaning industry or offer the same product or service as one another. Chances are that they won’t even target the same customer audiences.

However, I do see companies that grow consistently and outpace their competitors share one dominant trait; they all have a focus on appreciating, investing in and valuing their employees. As Jim Collins, author of the seminal business book 'Good To Great', put it "Great vision without great people is irrelevant. You need to get the right people on the bus, the wrong people off the bus, and the right people in the right seats.”

The turnover of cleaning staff in the UK is unfortunately high – whether you are talking about directly employed cleaners or those working for cleaning and building service contractors. However there are key steps that you can take to recruit, develop and retain the best employees. At the outset of the recruitment process, if you don’t define the mental and physical abilities, attitudes, personality traits, and skills needed for success on the job, the odds are stacked that you will end up with a mismatch of expectations, aspirations and capabilities. 

Hiring new employees

It pays to plan ahead and advertise positions before the day, week or month you actually need people. If you only advertise when you need someone, you are in a relatively weak position and could be forced into taking on anyone who applies whatever their calibre. When you do advertise, make sure that you make it easy to apply – keep it short and simple and you can get into more details at the interview stage.

The fact that you are hiring in itself should not be a sufficiently good reason for people to want to work for you. In the same way a company should have its positioning and sales story worked out for when it is approaching new customers, a compelling proposition should be developed and publicised on why people should want to work for that organisation.

In the interview process, try not to be overly-reliant on instinct. If you personally like certain candidates, you look for reasons to hire them and the converse is true of course with someone you take a disliking too. I recommend pre-screening candidates by phone or online application test to make sure that they meet your minimum requirements. 

Also plan for the interview. If you haven’t reviewed the candidate's documents or planned questions to ask, you are likely to start talking about what you do know i.e. what the right person for the job will be able to do and how they will do it. The applicant will use this information to tell you exactly what you want to hear. Don’t shy away either from asking tough questions in a non-confrontational way. When you think you have found the right person for the role, do be sure to check their references.

Motivating the workforce

Hiring new employees is both costly and time-consuming and it generally takes new employees months to become fully productive. Think of all the resources you could save if you had worked harder to retain and motivate the existing workforce! Remember that when a new person joins your cleaning team the chances are pretty high that they will not have had any education or experience in cleaning. Or, the ones with experience may come with bad habits or misinformation that requires re-education. For the most part though, you are always starting from scratch and you have an opportunity to help and nurture the individual or team to grow and reach their full potential.

Remember that good employees want to develop new knowledge and skills to improve their value in the marketplace and enhance their own self-esteem. However, don't just 'throw' education and training at your staff in a random fashion. Organise and structure your training so that it makes sense for the company and the employees. ISSA have hundreds of different educational products, seminars, e-learning modules and workshops available at http://www.issa.com/?id=education 

I am also strongly supportive of the idea of bringing in outside experts to educate employees about subjects that affect their personal lives. This offers an opportunity for employers to differentiate themselves and have a big impact on employee retention. The importance of this is that the best recruiting you do is the recruiting you don’t have to do because you have kept people for a long time!