Once you have a clear idea of what you should be expecting from your contractor, then you can get down to the detail of the service.
There are three main elements to your cleaning monitoring, and keeping on top of these will help ensure that the service runs smoothly.
Review meetings (formal and informal)
As with catering services, these are the meetings that you hold with the off-site mangers: area managers or operations managers for example, rather than on-site team leaders.
Again, there should be those regular and ongoing communications with these staff members to build good working relationships. Hopefully your area or operations manager will be visiting your site regularly, to spot check cleaning standards and keep in touch with staff (and you!). See our final blog post in this series for information on formal review meetings.
Quality Audits
Quality Audits are used by cleaning contractors to assess the cleanliness of your school. It will be divided up by areas specific to your school (e.g. corridors, classrooms, toilets and changing rooms, dining hall) and each area will then be rated for cleanliness. The rating may be a RAG rating or a percentage scoring system, depending on what you have agreed with the contractor. If the rating falls below a certain threshold, then this should trigger remedial action or attention.
Maintaining good cleanliness levels will be part of the contractor’s KPIs, so the Quality Audits are an important set of reports to keep an eye on. It is a quantifiable measure of how the contractor is performing. Persistent non-conformances will enable you to take further measures against the KPIs, but only if you know about them!
Bear in mind, however, that these audits are usually completed by the contractor – the area manager or perhaps the cleaners themselves. Your judgement of cleanliness levels may well be a bit different – it would be a good idea to complete these audits alongside your contractor, or even independently, both on commencement of the contract and regularly thereafter, so that you can ensure that the scores and ratings accurately reflect your requirements.
Input hours
The majority of the cost of your cleaning contract is spent on the wages of your on-site cleaning team, so it is vitally important that the hours you’re paying for are being fulfilled. Your contractor will be able to provide a schedule of staff working hours and a total number of weekly hours to be worked.
But what happens if those expected hours are not worked, for example if a member of staff is off sick? The hours may be covered by another member of staff, in which case you are getting what you pay for, but if not then these hours will be ‘banked’.
Banked hours should either be used for additional cleaning as required, or they should be credited to you in the following month. However, you will need to keep an eye on the banked hours to make sure that they aren’t ‘lost’.
N.B. This monitoring is in relation to an input specification. An output specification is based on results so this type of monitoring is not applicable.
