An effective ongoing training regime is vital for any business wishing to ensure its staff are successful and retain them.
Not least is this true in the world of commercial cleaning, although you’d be surprised at the number of people outside of the cleaning industry who fail to grasp this. “You train people to do what?” is an all too common refrain I’m afraid.
People assume because they clean at home that those skills are transferable – but that isn’t the case. I’ve been known to mow the lawn every once in a while, but it doesn’t make me a landscape gardener. The same parallels can be drawn here.
There are many reasons why training is important: increased productivity, improved morale and better staff retention. Additionally, investing in the best cleaning systems and machinery is undeniably worthless unless your cleaning staff are fully capable of making the most of that investment.
Having said this, training is only one part of the approach to ensuring that our customers make the investment work best for them.
We consult with the customer to be certain we understand their wants and needs; we survey their site in order to ensure we offer up the system that is best suited to meeting said wants and needs; we demonstrate the system and its capabilities and then work towards a final agreement. Once all of this has been completed training takes place to ensure all staff who will be using the system have a detailed understanding of how to make the most of the equipment.
It is vitally important, that those people who will be using the system on a daily basis are not just included in this process for training once all of the decisions have been made but are included from the very beginning and throughout.
More often than not they will have extremely valid input into what will work best for them given their intimate knowledge of doing the job in question. Additionally, securing their buy-in is crucial to guaranteeing that we achieve what we set out to achieve – making certain that our customer’s investment is absolutely right for them and delivering everything we agreed.
People can be resistant to change and in my humble opinion, never is this truer than in cleaning but it’s our experience that an inclusive approach is much more likely to succeed than an exclusive one.
They say ‘a bad workman blames his tools’ but actually failures in the equipment procurement process can result in staff being lumbered with the wrong tools for the job they’re trying to do so why wouldn’t they blame them?
