Are you tired of spending your precious time cleaning and maintaining your home or office? Hiring a professional cleaning company can be a game-changer, but before you entrust them with the task, it’s crucial to ask the right questions. By doing so, you ensure that you make an informed decision and choose a cleaning service that aligns with your needs and expectations.
In this article, we will walk you through the 10 best key questions to ask before hiring a cleaning company. These questions cover various aspects, including their experience, reliability, pricing, services offered, and even their eco-friendliness. By posing these inquiries, you will gain valuable insights into their capabilities and determine if they are the right fit for your cleaning requirements.
So, let’s delve into the essential questions you need to ask potential cleaning companies to make an informed decision and achieve a clean and well-maintained environment for your home or business.
Hiring a commercial cleaning company is not an easy task, though if you do it right, you can land a janitorial company that you can build a mutually beneficial partnership for years to come.
Still, there are so many variables and so many different sizes and types of cleaning companies that finding the right one for your facility can be a hard process. Making this already difficult process even harder is the fact that far too many commercial cleaning companies will say nearly anything to get your business.
But what if there were ten simple questions you could ask prospective cleaning companies to separate the fakers from the shining stars?
Most frequent questions and answers before hiring a cleaning company
1- How long has the cleaning company been in operation?
You don’t want your facility to be a training ground for a start-up cleaning business. You also want to ensure that the cleaning company you contact has experience in the field you are in, such as medical or dental facilities. Experience and policies/procedures are important in ensuring that standards are clear, met, and ideally exceeded. It’s also a good idea to ask for referrals.
Clean It All company has over 8 years of experience and provides its employees with a binder of Company policies and cleaning procedures for training and periodic review. We even test our cleaners on procedures and have supervisors to ensure standards are met and procedures are properly implemented.
Furthermore, you want your cleaner to customize services to your needs and requirements. We do this for all of our accounts and post a “scope of work” schedule in the janitorial room so that cleaners or relief cleaners know exactly what to do daily, weekly, and periodically.
Ask how the Company handles complaints. How do they assess their customer’s satisfaction? When they get feedback, what do they do with it?
2- How do you select your employees in your cleaning company?
A good Janitorial services company will have a standardized process to screen potential candidates. This process should include a screening telephone interview, a face-to-face interview, a scrutinizing review of their resume, a check of references, and a criminal records check.
This takes time, but selecting the right candidate from the start results in having the right people on the job who are enthusiastic about what they do, dependable, thorough, and trustworthy. When your prospective janitorial company takes shortcuts in screening employees, they put you, your employees, your reputation, and your facility at risk.
3- What kind of training do you provide for your employees in your cleaning company?
Hiring the right individual is the first step. Proper training of staff is the second, however, ongoing training must be a requirement. Many janitorial companies hire their cleaners and provide no supervision of their activities.
The latter is common because supervisors cost more money. Comprehensive training should include proper use of equipment, a proper understanding of cleaning products, correct dilutions of concentrates where necessary, proper procedures in the cleaning process of various areas, and proper maintenance of equipment.
Mopping floors with a dirty mop head do more harm than good. Improper dilution of chemical cleaners can cause damage to your facility. A lax procedure in disinfecting surfaces can cause cross-contamination and jeopardize your staff. Specialized training and procedures are normally required in medical and dental facilities. Ask as well about how the Supervisors are trained and updated.
4- How do you motivate and manage your teams?
Selecting the right people and training them appropriately are the first steps. Setting expectations for staff is essential in assessing performance. With clear expectations comes quality work. Supervisors play a major role in providing both positive reinforcement and constructive recommendations.
Selecting individuals who work well with other team members also builds respect, competition, and comradery. Success in the cleaning business is often a function of good communication.
Even the best staff who are well well-trained need to feel important and even vital to their organizations. Having them teach new cleaners is a good way to show them respect. The best and most diligent of course will, over time, be compensated more. Although money is not a motivator.
Here again, good communication and positive performance appraisals when done properly are worth their weight in gold. Of course, when employees are not performing, they need to be managed in order to do better or let go to save you the customer from having to live with poor results and service.
5- Are the Company and its staff properly insured?
The cleaning company you are assessing needs liability insurance, not only for your premises but also for them. It is essential that employees have WCB (Workers Compensation Board). Many janitorial companies do not have employees but hire contract workers. In the latter, the contract workers must have WCB coverage of their own if not paid by the parent cleaning Company.
In addition to general liability (minimum $1,000,000) and workers’ compensation (minimum $1,000,000), it is imperative that the Company have automobile liability and an umbrella policy. You should verify coverage in order to give you peace of mind that your Commercial office cleaning company is adequately protected.
6- Will the same cleaner or cleaners continually maintain my facility?
You don’t want a steady stream of new people in and out of your facility, especially when access cards and access codes or keys are being passed around. Long-standing cleaners will come to understand your facility and your specific requirements and thus meet or exceed your expectations for cleaning.
Most janitorial businesses have floaters, or highly trained cleaners who can deliver service when your regular cleaner or cleaning team is out either on scheduled vacation or ill. But that should be the exception to the norm.
You should also ask if the cleaning Company offers the ability to do once-over jobs, such as deep shampooing or outside windows. Does the Company have staff to come in when there is an emergency such as a flood, or to add cleaning frequencies to areas such as entranceways during muddy spring weather, or for a quarterly preventative COVID-19/disinfection cleaning?
The best cleaning companies hire and keep good people, and pride themselves on filling customers’ every expectation or request.
7- What is your employee turnover percentage?
Part of continuity in a Company is its turnover percentage of staff. Apparently, the industry average is nearly 200% from statistics in the US. Turnover of staff is higher in the lower-paid service jobs but many housekeeping services have been able to create practices and systems that help keep good people and thus lower turnover. What is your prospective cleaning company service doing to keep their turnover numbers low?
8- What kind of QC checks do you use to assure reliability through accountability?
Janitorial inspections are the gold standard for quality control in the cleaning industry. Such inspections provide a link between a facility manager and a cleaning company. The best Office cleaning companies provide regular janitorial inspections.
Few go the extra mile and periodically request an assessment of performance from their employer. The very best are proactive in doing so, and thus look for ongoing feedback to expectations and to eliminate issues before they become a complaint.
9- What kind of green cleaning program do you have?
Green cleaning offers a focus on sustainability, environmental responsibility, and health and safety. Basic green clean practices can include things like proper chemical storage, disposal, and labeling. Really every commercial cleaning company should do this but it is surprising how many neglect these important practices.
Similarly, good green practices can include limiting the disposal of plastic trash liners by reusing them (if not soiled or contaminated with food/liquid). This simple practice alone saves money and limits the amount of plastic garbage your building generates.
Utilizing hand towels and toilet paper with a significant percentage of recycled or recyclable material, cleaning with microfiber rags rather than disposable paper towels and recycling are more eco-friendly. Taking it further, does your cleaning company utilize HEPA filter vacuum cleaners and other equipment that helps reduce indoor air pollution?
Likewise, the greenest equipment can also lower noise emissions, improve energy usage and reduce the excessive use of cleaning products. Similarly, the best commercial green cleaning companies utilize state-of-the-art carpet cleaning. These carpet cleaners are low moisture, meaning less water usage, and absent the harsh chemicals of many other conventional carpet cleaning methods.
10-How difficult is it to get out of your contract if we don’t like your service?
One of the biggest complaints of accounts is being locked into a cleaning contract with sub-standard performance. Look for a cleaning company where you can have a trial period before you have to make a commitment. Review their service contract and be comfortable with it.
If you don’t like statements in the service contract, stroke them out and initial them before signing the contract. Many cleaning companies will take a modified contract over no contract.
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Conclusion
As an account, you will have hundreds if not thousands of choices in a cleaning company. That will make your choices harder rather than easier. With answers to the questions above, you will be in a better situation to make both an educated and comfortable decision.
We understand that through your day-to-day activities, it may be tough to keep on top of everything you’d like to form a cleaning standpoint, but that is where Clean It All comes in. Our team of professionals is trained to tackle any task, no matter how big or small. Whether you need a helping hand after closing time every day, or a team to come in once per month, We’ve got you covered!
Proudly serving Calgary & the surrounding areas.
Give us a call today for your free, no-obligation property assessment! Or you can easily use our online quote service which will provide you with cleaning company services fast and hassle-free.
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