When you’re running a cleaning service, you are effectively being invited into people’s lives and given free reign of their space.
Whether you’re cleaning a house, an office or some other establishment, it’s someone else’s property and you have a responsibility to respect that.
For an independent cleaning service, whether or not you are hired is going to based a lot on your reputation. It’s important that people know you can be relied on.
And so you have to put a lot of work into making sure that your staff understand the responsibilities of working for a cleaning service.
While you’re training them, there is a lot that you need to think about. Of course they need to develop the skills necessary to do their job well, but there’s more to it than that.
Here’s five essential tips for when you are training the employees for your cleaning service:
- Role-Playing
Despite the slightly less appropriate connotations of this particular term that have cropped up in the last few years, role-playing is still an effective method of training.
The concept is relatively straight forward, you simulate a scenario that you could potentially be dealing with on the job and then show your employees how to deal with it.
You could just teach them by explaining and getting them to take notes, but it’s better for them to learn by doing.
This isn’t to say that you should throw them into the deep end by presenting them a scenario and then telling them to approach that scenario without telling them how.
This will get you nowhere and will actually just serve to humiliate the employee in front of the others by putting them on the spot.
A potential scenario could be something like a room that is full of fragile personal belongings that you have to take a careful approach to cleaning using safe materials.
Put something like this together in your company headquarters, explain how to approach it and then let one of the employees put your explanation into practice.
A simulated scenario allows for your employees to practice and make mistakes without consequence that they can then learn from.
- Create an Employee Handbook
The more employees that you train, the more you will learn about what specific things beginners struggle with and what they often come to you looking for advice about.
You can cover an awful lot of ground right from the beginning by putting together a an employee handbook that covers a lot of the frequently asked questions and the basics.
As we said already, it’s more effective for your employees to learn by doing, but you can get a lot of information ingrained in them before you start that process.
Put together this handbook online so that you can email it to everyone as soon as they’re hired and they can run through it before they’re first day.
You can cover things like the history of the company, payment information, code of conduct, protocol for HR-related issues and then the basics of the job too.
Make sure that it’s short, sweet and easy to read so that your employees won’t be deterred from actually going through it before they start.
- Keep a Checklist
Cleaning can be a tough, exhausting job and when you are working on a particularly big premises, it can often times feel like there is no end in sight.
A good way to combat that feeling is to make a checklist at the start of each job and then work towards each of the individual tasks.
It allows for a greater sense of fulfillment because your hard work is paying off in small doses until eventually the entire job is complete.
You should apply the same principle to training. In a similar sense, training is everybody’s least favourite part of any job and it can be frustrating and monotonous.
This is why you should write up a checklist that covers all of the different skills and areas that people have to be trained in.
You keep a copy of it yourself and give one to the employees that are being trained so that they can see the progress of their training as it happens.
Much like a large job, it will run smoother and feel less overwhelming when you can watch the number of unchecked boxes gradually get smaller.
- Pair Your Employees Up
Training never really stops. You will always be learning new methods and different ways to approach problems.
This will go on for most of your career, but for new employees it’s especially important that they maintain their focus on getting better even when they’re out in the field.
Even once you’ve covered the full training checklist and all of the skills and procedures are ingrained in your employees, the field is always going to be different.
And for the first few months or maybe even up to a year depending on the people, they’ll still be learning the ropes.
This is why it’s a good plan to pair up newer employees with more senior employees. They can help guide the new recruits through the early stages.
This works on two levels. Firstly, you are giving new beginner employees the support that they need when starting out and you are also training senior employees in a more managerial role.
In the future you can then delegate the training duties to those that have experience in showing the ropes to others.
When it becomes clear that your company puts a focus on employees working together, they’re more likely to stick around and settle in.
Intrepid Cleaning, a much respected cleaning company from Perth have a note on their site about the importance of a permanent team.
Everyone will have their own preferences for how they want their home and office to be cleaned and are less likely to come back to a company if their staff is changing constantly.
Encouraging good relationships among your employees is a good step towards ensuring that your cleaning service will have a permanent team too.
- Ask for Feedback
As I mentioned in the last point, you never stop learning and so you should always ask the employees that you train for feedback on your methods.
The better you are at training them, the more efficient the training process will be and you can also be sure that your company will be effective and reliable.
Everyone is going to have a different perspective and you will learn about things that you can do better or about how different people absorb information if you ask.
When starting a new job, people can often be wary of speaking up if they think that they’re boss is doing something wrong. But if you ask them they’ll feel more comfortable giving feedback.
This will also help you build up trust between you and your employees and show them that you do value their opinion and their input.
A team that gets along and has a mutual understanding with each other will work much more effectively.
Conclusion
No matter how driven you are to provide a good cleaning service, you are only as good as the people working for you.
Don’t let them ruin the endeavour for you by training them incorrectly. Make sure that you have the right people on your staff and that they have been properly prepared for the job.
