Your janitorial standards are what set you apart from the competition. Here are 6 essential tips for maintaining those standards.
One of the ways your company stands out in a competitive market is through your janitorial standards. Whether you’re a commercial cleaning company, an in-house provider, or a building services contractor, your standards are vital to your reputation.
The standards you set define your business ethic. They’re central to the way customers perceive your business. Are you thorough, friendly, trustworthy, on time, communicative, helpful? These are all, in part, a reflection of your business standards.
However, your janitorial standards rely so much on effective communication. High-quality work depends upon communication among employees. Customer service is elevated with communication between you and your clients. How well you and your team communicate is the basis of almost everything you do.
At the same time, communication can suffer when we get overwhelmed or busy. We start to make assumptions and get frustrated when our expectations aren’t met. Soon enough, we go from providing excellent work to good enough work. And if we let the communication falter enough, we may find that good enough work quickly becomes not enough work.
Most clients are willing to forgive some mistakes and oversights. However, when the work quality continues to degrade, it won’t be long before those clients start looking for a new provider. That’s not meant to frighten you. The goal here is to highlight the importance of communication in all aspects of your business, especially when it comes to maintaining the high-quality standards and work your clients expect.
Improve communications and keep up with your employees. Schedule a free call with Janitorial Manager to learn how mobile-friendly janitorial software can help your team improve.
Discover 6 communication ideas that can help your janitorial standards remain high
1. Define your standards. The very first thing to do in maintaining and communicating your janitorial standards is to define those standards. Even if you and your team “know” what they are, write them down and make sure you can put your standards into words. These could be anything from arriving on time for every job to ensuring all your equipment is clean and in good working order at all times. Maybe it’s achieving a 100% client satisfaction rate. Whatever your standards are, define them clearly and put them down in writing.
2. Share those standards. To maintain your janitorial standards, your team has to know what they are. And since we’re on the topic of communication, it’s helpful to share your standards in multiple ways. Go over them in meetings, include them as part of your training and employee onboarding material, and take advantage of the translation capabilities of your janitorial software to ensure everyone on your team can read them in their preferred language.
Now that you’ve defined and distributed a set of standards you want to maintain, the next part is focusing on effective communication. You want to ensure that you, your team, and your customers can communicate effectively. Here are some simple and powerful ways to do that.
3. Include your standards on checklists. An easy way for your team to keep your janitorial standards in mind is to include them on your checklists. This way, anyone can review them at any time. No one has to hope for the best or assume what someone else says is the way things should be. When they are right there, visible to everyone on your team, it’s much more likely your employees will meet the janitorial standards you set.
4. Use real-time task tracking. Whether you want to keep up with what your team is doing or they need to communicate with each other, real-time task tracking is an excellent way to accomplish that. There’s no need to guess or try to find the right person. Simply review your checklist.
5. Take advantage of QR codes. You can divide facilities into sections or even individual rooms and include a QR code with each area. Tools like Scan4Clean, from Janitorial Manager, give you the option of not only checking off tasks, but also uploading images, leaving comments, and learning when an area was last cleaned. Furthermore, your customers can scan these codes and learn all of this, as well. That means better, faster communication with everyone involved.
6. Site-specific messaging. It’s easy for messages to get lost when you have one big stream of text from numerous locations. But when you can look at the messages from individual locations, things clear up quickly. When you can send, receive, and review messages based on location, your communication is quicker and more effective. Incidentally, Janitorial Manager includes the JM Connect app, which makes it easy to accomplish this.
Even when you’re separated by time or distance, your janitorial standards can still beat as the heart of your business. Focus on communication to ensure your team knows what you expect, and make it easy for them to uphold the standards you set. Your customers will appreciate it.
Take advantage of the value Janitorial Manager can bring to your cleaning operation to streamline your processes like never before. Learn more today with a discovery call and find out how features like QR codes can make your communications more effective and easier to manage!