Providing a high-standard professional cleaning service is no mean task. It requires meticulous training for cleaning staff to deliver excellent customer satisfaction. And with the COVID virus floating around in the air, customers have become all the more particular about cleanliness and thorough sanitization.
With inconsistently trained cleaners, you may run the risk of having an unhygienic place that is prone to infections, wastage of cleaning products, and spoilage of surface materials. But to help your employees put in their best work, you must spend sufficient time and effort in training them.
To save costs, retain employees, and score high on customer satisfaction; here are 11 tips on how to train cleaning staff:
- Foster an Individual Relationship with Each Cleaner
As a good manager, it is important to keep in touch with each of your cleaning employees. Take an effort to know more about their lives and understand their problems. Make them feel heard in the organization. By showing them that they matter to you, you will surely gain their trust, loyalty, and respect.
- Maintain Job Forms and Checklists
To bring about consistency in the way cleaning tasks are done, it is best to provide each employee with a cleaning business checklist and job forms to build on your SOPs. These should contain to-dos, instructions, and schedules. Job forms can also provide proof of work through client sign-offs and keep a record of all the jobs done.
- Encourage Additional Training Courses for Cleaners
Steering clear of any incidences of property damage or cross-contamination requires thorough knowledge in the cleaning domain. So, offer additional education and courses apart from the cleaning training you provide on the job.
There are many established cleaning management institutes and associations like ISSA that offer certified courses for cleaners.
- Assess and Appraise as Per Performance
If you want to know the effectiveness of your training, then you need to evaluate the performance of your cleaning team regularly. Weekly check-ins, feedback surveys, asking random clients to grade your cleaners, and yearly performance management systems can help assess the functioning of your team.
Don’t forget to provide positive reinforcement to successful cleaners to boost the team’s morale.
- Train Regularly and Consistently
Effective training for cleaning staff involves always being on the lookout for training opportunities to upskill your employees. Ongoing training ensures that your staff is always up-to-date and improved. This enhances their individual as well as team skills. commercial cleaners.
- Take Feedback Positively
Your employees are at the receiving end of your training sessions, so it is worth taking a second opinion from them about what to include or exclude in the training curriculum. Encouraging employee feedback will make your training regime diligent.
You can ask specific questions about various aspects of your training program, create a feedback survey, or take subjective feedback in general.
- Focus On Soft Skills
Soft skills are desirable in every profession. These include communication, conflict resolution, teamwork, responsibility, etc.
Developing people skills to build personal connections with clients, i.e., being sensitive and attentive to client needs and expectations can ensure exemplary customer service and repeat business.
- Plan For Potential Damage
Sometimes accidents happen, how much ever you try to avoid them. But training your team at being prepared and handle potential damages can help the situation.
Make sure that your cleaning staff is aware of the insurance information and contact details in case they need to pacify an angry customer at any given moment.
- Leverage Videos
Videos help the training information stick in the minds of the trainees. You can show recorded or pre-recorded examples of how to approach different cleaning situations.
A readily available video repository is also a handy resource to train new joiners. Moreover, if you cannot make it to the training center on certain days, you can conduct video meetings through Zoom where you can even screen-record the lessons and share them with the employees to use for referencing later.
- Reinforce The Importance of Health and Safety
Health and safety should be at the heart of your cleaning staff’s priorities and they should be trained well with all protocols in place. For example, for the U.S, OSHA has laid out the health and safety topics that a cleaning company should follow including job hazard analysis, occupational injuries and illnesses, COVID safety guidelines, etc.
- Create An Employee Handbook
Create a cleaning handbook or an instruction manual that can be used by existing or new employees as a reference for all their questions, concerns, or if they just want a refresher. Keep the handbook updated at all times.
A few topics to include:
- About the company
- HR procedures
- Payroll information
- Overview of key training components
- Damage management
- Code of conduct
- Training schedule
Look for ways to constantly refine your training system so that you can get the best out of your cleaning staff and your cleaning business.
Finally, calculate your training costs and measure the results regularly to find a practical association between your training efforts and business revenue to get a true sense of your business’s performance.
Author Bio:
Akhil Rajan is a Customer Success Specialist at Zuper, an intelligent workforce management platform for service-oriented businesses. Working with customers on a daily basis, he has a deep understanding of their needs and pain points and so he is able to contribute to the marketing strategies for Zuper with the content he writes. He writes on topics like how to increase workforce utilization, how to reduce the service turnaround time and increase workforce efficiency, customer adoption, cost reduction strategies, etc – to name a few. He is often found buried in books or playing chess in his free time.
