fbpx

Professional floor care takes a lot of work. Consider a floor care training program for consistency that leads to success.

We don’t usually think about it, but people spend the better part of their days walking on floors. They might be linoleum floors in a kitchen or cement floors in a warehouse or wood floors in a store or small office. They are conduits, avenues for people to get from one place to the next to do their jobs. But if there are spots or stains or poor traction, people will start to think about the floors, and they won’t be pleasant thoughts. The best way to keep them moving—and keep your cleaning business looking sharp —is to develop a floor care training program to make sure you hit the mark with every floor you clean.

But where to start? After all, not every floor requires the same care. Some need buffing and burnishing while others require complete stripping and refinishing. There’s also floor type to consider, not to mention spot stains, faded areas, places with improper finishing from previous jobs—the list goes on.

Never fear, though. A floor care training program doesn’t need to be as complicated as it sounds. Start by laying a framework, and you’ll find the additional steps fall into place from there.

Laying the framework

Before you begin detailing a floor care training program, create a list or an outline. What do you need to include? What applies to all floor types? We recommend you start with a preventative checklist. Just like a trip to the dentist goes more smoothly if you clean your teeth year round, so also do daily and weekly cleaning practices become easier if you take the time to do the little things so they don’t turn into big things.

Next, include a section on common floor types. Remember, some of your staff may be new to the industry and unfamiliar with how to clean different surfaces. A proper floor care training program educates your employees on all the floor types they might encounter, from different kinds of vinyl to tile and even brick.

Floor Care Training Program

The regular tasks

With preventive and informative measures out of the way, it’s time to dig into the floor care training program itself. You’ll probably want to start with a section on the most common tasks that your team will encounter, things like wet mopping, dry mopping, scrubbing, and polishing. Be sure you include a section for each floor type you discussed in the framework since each one of them will be different.

Outline these tasks in great detail, no matter how intuitive they may seem. Sure, your cleaning team likely knows the difference between a wet mop and a dry mop, but do they know the most efficient technique to use for each? Many cleaners are trained on what to clean, not how to clean. Include details on how to clean or dispose of cleaning tools at the end of the day—you can’t clean floors with dirty tools!

Floor Care Training Program

The sporadic tasks and troubleshooting

It’s essential that your floor care training program talks about how to correctly perform the less common tasks, like buffering and burnishing, stripping, waxing, and refinishing. Some of your clients might ask for buffering or burnishing on a weekly basis, but most of these are monthly jobs, if not less often. Equip your cleaning teams with know-how on these tasks to give them the confidence and skill they need to complete jobs they don’t have a chance to repeat very often.

Finally, no floor care training program is complete without a troubleshooting section. As you know, things don’t always go the way you plan, even when you follow the instructions. Incorporate a section on what to do when things go wrong. Include information on problems that might be caused by the floors themselves as well as problems that malfunctioning machinery or equipment might be cause.

Make it available

There’s no point to the hard work of developing a floor care training program if you’re not going to make it accessible! Create a manual that you can share with your employees. If you don’t have the resources to make that many copies, use technology to your advantage. E-mail it to your staff so they can reference it at their leisure. We recommend that once you put the program together, you present it to your entire team as a group, perhaps as a PowerPoint presentation. But ultimately, they can’t be expected to remember everything from a single exposure. Repetition, just like with floor cleaning procedures, is key.

Share
Tweet
Share
Pin