Discussions of the outsourcing of non-essential functions tend to focus on IT or marketing. However, cleaning services are often one of the first things to be outsourced and are one of the few services nearly all commercial and industrial facilities do outsource. Here are four reasons you should hire an office cleaning service instead of trying to manage this task in house whether by relying on existing staff to maintain the office or keeping full time cleaners on the payroll.
To Improve the Productivity of Your Own Staff
Industrial facilities periodically implement the Japanese 5S system, where employees are expected to spend downtime cleaning up their workstations. In this system, cleaning tasks are pushed onto employees and done when people have time – and may not be done when they aren’t free. This creates problems if the company is left paying overtime so that cleaning work can be done by its employees. The ability for employees to leave at 5 regardless of the state of the facility can reduce strain for employees, since they don’t feel like the company is pushing extra, non-value added work on them like cleaning up the conference room after a party.
Commercial businesses sometimes find themselves cutting corners on cleaning and shifting work to their most valuable employees. This hurts their productivity. Someone taking five minutes out of their lunch break to clean a work surface adds up when it occurs again and again. Employees having to step away from their phones to empty a trash can or dust a surface that is bothering them may miss critical phone calls and waste time returning that call. That’s aside from the literal cost of poorly cleaned bathrooms resulting in sick days.
Another benefit of professional cleaning services is how thorough a job they do. It has been said that the carpets in your building are like a second, massive air filter. You could have someone run a little carpet cleaning brush over the floors to pick up the visible debris, but the professionals will deep clean the carpets with equipment that keeps the dirt and dander in. You’ll reduce allergies, asthma attacks and respiratory problems for both employees and visitors.
Office cleaning services send teams to each customer’s site to clean the building on their requested schedule. While the initial price tag of their visits may seem high, the fact that they can complete the work in a fraction of the time of two or three janitors on staff would make it a very reasonable cost. If you factor in the greater quality of work, you’ll find it is more efficient to hire an office cleaning staff than add several more cleaning people to your payroll who may not have much to do during the days. If you factor in their efficiency, they may be done in an hour or two in the evening or early morning, preventing cleaning from impacting the productivity of a two-shift operation. With this in mind, you may want to try a cleaning service for your company. Ideal Cleaning, for example, offer a range of services from office cleaning to specialised industrial services. They’d need to do a full site survey before giving you a quote, but once you have that you‘ll be able see how much work you‘ll get for the money.
To Maintain a Professionally Maintained Facility
Professional cleaning crews are trained in how to meet industry standards in as efficient a manner as possible. By hiring professional office cleaning crews, they’ll use the cleaning compounds that meet local environmental standards, equipment that your visitors will be glad to know they use and perform to a higher level than your in-house staff can meet.
Another reason to hire an office cleaning service is that they know how to clean every section of the building to appropriate standards, whereas a residential cleaning service may not know how to clean public bathrooms to the standard a public facility needs to meet or do much more than vacuum the floors of a conference room and try to dust. A good office cleaner Sydney won’t just vacuum and take out the trash and say they are done.
To Protect the Image of Your Business
Nothing offends a female professional like being told to fetch coffee like an intern. Well, not quite true. An expectation that your professional staff – mostly female – will be expected to clean up others’ messes in the break area, do dishes while on their lunch break, or take out the trash from their cubicles suggests your business doesn’t value its employees as well as it could. Then there’s the poor image clients get if they see your staff hurriedly cleaning the conference room in the morning instead of preparing for a presentation.
By hiring office cleaning services, you can also schedule services so that they don’t occur when your site has visitors. You want the front entryway to be spotless in the morning to create a good first impression, something marred by someone cleaning the floors just as visitors are arriving. And that says nothing of the liability risk created by cleaning staff working in and around visitors or employees.
Cost Savings
Office cleaning services send teams to each customer’s site to clean the building on their requested schedule. While the initial price tag of their visits may seem high, the fact that they can complete the work in a fraction of the time of two or three janitors on staff would makes it a very reasonable cost. If you factor in the greater quality of work, you’ll find it is more efficient to hire an office cleaning staff than add several more cleaning people to your payroll who may not have much to do during the day. If you factor in their efficiency, they may be done in an hour or two in the evening or early morning, preventing cleaning from impacting the productivity of a two shift operation.
Office cleaning services may be able to give you advice on how to reduce your need for their services and save money overall, such as installing automated soap dispensers in the bathroom and affordable air dryers to reduce paper towel waste as well as cost. They’ll certainly buy cleaning supplies and equipment at discounted prices over what you’d pay, and you don’t have to pay to keep these supplies or equipment on site barring a few rolls of paper towels and toilet paper in a storage closet. And you eliminate the need for ideal ventilation in those storage areas and worrying about the safe storage of different industrial grade cleaning products in one area.
Another benefit of outsourcing cleaning services is that you gain far greater flexibility. If someone stole from your business, leaked sensitive information, or they just broke too many things, you can tell the cleaning service to fire them or never let them in your facility again. They can replace that person with someone else on their staff in their next pass-through, without you having to take on the cost of termination and finding a replacement.
Don’t push cleaning work onto your staff in a misguided effort to improve their productivity or save money – it won’t. Instead, hire professional cleaning services to quickly and efficiently clean your offices, waiting areas and key facilities to the standards your customers and the authorities expect.
