What does Training and Consulting mean?

These terms are 2 sides of the same coin when we service cleaning teams who are either Building Services Contractors OR In-House Environmental Services Teams. Both of those groups perform cleaning services in and around structures. Some of those structures are homes, attended to by Maid Services. Other structures are commercial locations.

 

These commercial cleaning locations can include:

• Restaurants
• Hotels
• Apartment Buildings
• Business Offices
• Medical Offices
• Medical and Urgent Care Centers
• Child Care
• Local Schools
• Colleges & Universities
• Sporting Stadiums
• Light Manufacturing
• Heavy Industrial
• And many others

 

All of these locations have unique needs for their focus and their specific structures. When janitorial staff are called upon to “clean an area”, it requires a considerable applied knowledge of chemistry, safety and elbow grease to get the job done well and on time.

Back to “Training & Consulting”…

 

Commercial Cleaner Training

This is most commonly when DOC’S leads structured janitorial training programs to bring new front-line cleaners up to speed. They need a good working knowledge of the right ways and wrong ways to accomplish their commercial cleaning tasks. These include proper use of PPE and the cleaning materials. Along with this “material knowledge” is “situational knowledge training”. By that we mean, “Pay attention to the following actions, because…” THAT TRAINING ALONE can help a company determine the difference between success in the commercial cleaning industry and becoming uninsurable due to negligence.

 

Janitorial Services Consulting

This service is directed to the cleaning company owners, managers and shift supervisors. We’ll go into further detail in a future podcast. When Employees Do Dumb Things is not intended to be a series of “complaints”. These are cautionary tales directed Janitorial Company Owners and Cleaning Team Managers. The series is produced to help owners & managers understand the potential pitfalls of their roles. The advantage of time in any industry is developing the connections to solve problems and the resilience to recover from mistakes.

In this episode we’ll answer:

• 00:42 What happens when employees do dumb things?
• 01:09 Is experience better than training?
• 02:01 What could happen when commercial cleaning tools are not put away properly?

 

00:26 Ray

Joel, we’re back, and I will admit this series… I have a love-hate relationship with this series. Understanding that these are ancient stories, new stories, stories from your own customers. People who you work with that are just dealing with stupidness.

 

00:42 Joel

And not that employees are stupid. But on occasion, they do dumb things.

 

00:47 Ray

So when employees do dumb things, what do you have today?

 

00:52 Joel

This story goes back at least 25 years. Client, the prime on a contract, hired a subcontractor. The subcontractor provided custodial services. Great company. Did a great job. Great reputation. Hard working.

 

01:07 Ray

So, there are no red flags on the outset?

 

01:09 Joel

No red flags at all. But sometimes long hours, fatigue, stress in people’s lives, they don’t always stay focused like they should. Summer weekend, finish cleaning a building, they close it up, they leave Friday night. So, they probably got done probably somewhere between 9:00, 10:00 at night. Monday morning, the facilities manager was first in the building, about 8:00 AM, and walks into… (squish) Water all on the first floor. Looks up, water coming through the ceiling. Goes up to the second floor, water coming through the ceiling. It goes up to the third floor. (How many floors are there?) It goes up to the third floor. Water coming through the ceiling. It goes up to the fourth floor. Water. The individual somehow left a slop sink running. No, by running, they left the water. They left the water on. Okay.

 

02:00 Ray

But it’s a slop sink.

 

02:01 Joel

It’s a slop sink. Hey, it’s a drain. It should go down the drain. While they didn’t make sure that the mop stayed in the mop handle, and the mop slid down and blocked off the drain. It wasn’t like it was a trickle. It was raining inside.

 

The water was flowing probably at the four gallon per minute.

 

02:22 Ray

Are you serious?

 

02:22 Joel

It was full open.

 

02:26 Ray

This was not an easy miss.

 

02:28 Joel

Yeah, it was not a pretty situation at all. And I remember getting the phone call on my cell phone while I was still in bed sleeping, because I worked later in the day. I wasn’t up at seven o’clock in the morning back in those days. Particularly, the facility also had all hardwood floors throughout it. So, wood and water, they don’t go together. (No, they don’t.) And to make matters worse, because it was so long ago and the water did go from the first floor through the floor, through the ceiling into the basement. So literally, there was five floors worth of water between the basement all the way up to the fourth floor. So, I can’t remember how many tens of thousands of gallons of water they told us had flowed out of that as of Friday evening to Monday morning. But in the basement, they had a lot of paper storage of client files.

 

03:20 Ray

Sure, 20 plus years ago? Sure.

 

03:22 Joel

Yeah. So, it wasn’t… Things weren’t like, electronically held back then. There was microfish and things like that. But a lot of what they did It wasn’t that type of an industry that would store it on that type of-So you have paper archives?

 

03:35 Joel

Paper archives. We had a bringing a disaster restoration company, and each page had to be dried out, and all the water and the repair of all the hardwoods, and all of the plaster ceilings because it was plaster and lath because this building was over 100 years old. It had a lot of character. And it was just an utter nightmare. Needless to say, because of the entire situation, I mean, I know that that particular subcontractor ended up losing their insurance. (This) made them uninsurable. Obviously, the insurance company had to pay out for this loss, plus the company I worked for, whatever wasn’t covered by their insurance, had to be picked up by the company I worked for insurance. As well as a client that was a very high-level client that we had all those years ago, ended up being a very strained relationship with that individual. It was never able to be mended after that. It was just a very adversarial. We got a disaster restoration company out there within under an hour, pumping water, drying out things.

 

04:36 Ray

Well, and obviously, this is one of those situations where heads will roll. That’s going to happen, I understand, as we do the rear view mirror on it. Employee training, employee training, employee training.

 

04:47 Joel

Employee training is huge, even when it’s a subcontractor. Because that subcontractor has to mirror all of your policies and all of your procedures. In a previous episode, we talked about the security of a facility, and this falls under that. Make sure that your mop handles are adhered into the right places so that they’re not going to fall into a slop sink. You want them to drain into the slop sink because they’re typically wet. You don’t want it on the floor. So, they were trying to do the right thing. But what I can’t understand all these years later is why they didn’t have the faucet turned off. That is the biggest question that I still have today. Looking back, just doesn’t make sense. And all I can associate it with at this time is it just had to be a lapse of judgment at the time. Because of some stressor that may have been going on at the time that I may not have been aware of. So important to get people to double-check their work, even their own personal closet where they’re putting the equipment at the end of the night to ensure that things are put away properly; that lights are turned out; coffee pots are off; all those types of things. Because we are the last line of defense when we are in a building.

 

05:58 Joel

And this is one of those things could probably have been avoidable by paying a little bit more attention. Obviously, something was going on in their life because that was not them. They were some of the most responsible individuals.

 

06:11 Ray

This subcontractor had successfully cleaned this facility many times before.

 

06:16 Joel

Oh, five years previous.

 

06:17 Ray

Five years. Okay.

 

06:18 Joel

They had been a subcontractor for the company I worked for back then for many, many years.

 

06:22 Ray

Okay. Cleaning business will always have its challenges. We don’t have to create them, and there certainly are ways to avoid them. (Correct.) Thank you.

 

06:28 Joel

You’re welcome.