The more effective and comprehensive your cleaner training is, the more profits you’ll make in a cleaning business. A good cleaner training program ensures more professional cleaning staff, faster cleaning times, fewer accidents, cleaner buildings, improved employee retention, and exceptional customer experience.
- Employee Benefit News discovered that it costs 33% of an employee’s annual salary to replace workers who have left the company. Moreover, untrained employees who stay with the company cost the company so much more because they provide poor customer experiences, are prone to more errors, deliver poor quality of service, and more.
- A study found that 61% of employees would perform their jobs more effectively if adequately trained.
That being said, training for cleaning staff should be an ongoing process, and employees should be presented with clearly defined goals and empowered with the tools and resources that allow them to do their job well.[/vc_column_text][vc_column_text]
Why is training for cleaning staff important?
Training helps employees be the best they can be. For your cleaning company, well-trained employees will:
- Provide better customer service
- Be more efficient when cleaning, and
- Be a better representation of your company.
The untrained cleaning staff is a risk for themselves and to others. If they are not trained for better cleaning practices and standards, they can waste time, and cleaning products, contributing to higher direct costs.
Training for cleaning staff: Top 4 benefits
There are multiple benefits of providing training to your cleaning staff. Some of the key benefits include:
- Gain loyalty: When you invest in your cleaning staff’s training, you earn their loyalty. The Hiring Site Blog found that more than 90% of employees are more loyal to employers who invest in their skills by training them.
- Staff retention: Training your staff is a great retention strategy. It enables them to stay with you for a longer period.
- Earn profits: While training is an investment, it gives you high ROI as it enables your cleaning staff to improve cleaning times and lower accidents at client locations.
- Deliver quality service: Training empowers your cleaning staff to provide professional services of the highest quality. Training helps your cleaners understand what is expected from them and learn the best cleaning practices to deliver an exceptional customer experience.
Training for cleaning staff: 8 cleaner training tips
Your cleaners are more than your employees; they are your brand ambassadors. Therefore, when you train your cleaning staff, it’s important that you do it right. We’ve put together 8 handy training tips to get you started:
Empower them to build long-term client relationships
Your cleaning products and equipment are not enough to build long-lasting relationships with your clients. They need a superior customer experience. A cleaning service software solution can help you deliver a great customer experience through automation.Right from scheduling, invoicing, billing to client follow-ups, automation will enable your team to provide an exceptional customer experience – a cornerstone to building long-term client relationships. However, you must train your cleaning staff on optimal use of the software solution to make their work easier and better.
Concentrate on soft skills
Your cleaning staff is living, moving, and breathing representation and you and your cleaning business. Therefore, they need to have the right soft skills to build personal connections with their clients. Some cleaners are born with these skills, while some might have to develop them through training. Although it’s challenging to teach these skills, you can encourage personality traits like emotional intelligence and overall people skills. Some of the soft skills your cleaning staff should have include:
- Communication skills
- Work ethics
- Creative thinking
- Teamwork
- Networking
- Positivity
- Decision making
- Problem-solving
- Conflict resolution
- Flexibility
- Time management
- Motivation
Provide hands-on training through strategic team scheduling
It helps when you let a new cleaner pair up with a seasoned cleaner for on-job training. However, when you have more team members, it might get challenging to align the schedules of new and seasoned team members. In such a case, Zuper, with its dynamic scheduling feature, can help decide which seasoned team member is available to buddy up with a new cleaner and how their schedules can be aligned for training purposes.
Create a cleaning checklist
During the initial few days, the new cleaners usually attend service calls with experienced employees. But, when they are on their own, handling the service call all by themselves can be overwhelming. Therefore, they need a cleaning checklist to ensure that they don’t forget anything.Cleaning business checklists provide direction to your cleaners without you having to supervise them. These training checklists provide important guidance to your cleaners and make them feel empowered to do their job well.
Provide them with an employee handbook
Employees can refer to the employee handbook anytime they have questions, concerns, or just need a refresher. This handbook needs to be short, concise, and updated regularly. If you are using Zuper, you can have the employee handbook in the app itself so your employees can refer to it whenever needed while on the go. Your employee handbook should include:
- Company history
- Company value, mission, etc.
- Contact information
- Company hierarchy
- HR procedures like leave, time off, etc.
- Review of key training components
- Payroll information
- Health and safety
- Employee expectations, code of conduct, etc.
- Resignation and termination
- Potential damages management
- Dress code
Provide positive reinforcement and encourage feedback
During training, give your employees the freedom to voice their opinions and encourage feedback. This reinforces a positive environment, which is essential for the success of your cleaning business.
Have a plan for potential accidents and damages
Accidents do happen, especially if your employee is new at the cleaning job. However, your cleaner needs to know what has to be done if they have an accident at the client’s location – in case there is damage to property or any other items. The cleaner should know how to carefully and thoroughly clean the property.Ideally, your business should have insurance covering your clients’ property and your employees’ safety. The insurance information and contact details should be shared with the cleaning staff. So, when an accident does happen, they’ll know what to do and what information to pass on to the clients.
Make training a part of your routine
Most cleaning businesses make the mistake of not providing their cleaning staff with effective and ongoing job skills training. You must constantly look for opportunities to upskill your cleaners. So make training a part of your routine and enhance their skill level, enabling them to be proactive and produce improved and reliable results.
Tell-Show-Do-Review – An example of a simple yet effective technique for training cleaning staff.
Here’s a simple technique you can use to train your cleaning staff:
Tell (about each step)
You must educate your cleaning staff on the “why” of every cleaning step and activity during training. This is essential so that the cleaners do not resort to shortcuts while cleaning at the client’s location. Once the cleaning objective of each step is communicated, it becomes easier for them to do their jobs efficiently and effectively.
Show (how to perform each step)
After giving the basic cleaning instructions, show them how to do each step of each job. You can provide them with training videos demonstrating each cleaning task that your existing employees perform at the client location.
Do (each step)
The next step is to show them how it’s done in the real world so they can see, learn and get skilled. However, don’t expect them to do the cleaning task perfectly the very first time. Give them enough time to practice and perfect it.While showing them how it’s done, make sure that you explain each step in detail. Ask questions like – what steps do they feel are difficult to perform? Encourage them to ask questions; the more they ask questions, the faster and better they will learn.
Review (each step)
In this last phase, ensure that you check how much your cleaning staff has learned from the training. Ask them questions, conduct cleaner training courses and quizzes, and review their work performed as part of their learning. This is important because it helps your cleaners to be better compliant with the company’s cleaning standards.
Key takeaways
- Providing training for cleaning staff, both old and new, is essential to get the job done safely, correctly, and efficiently at client locations.
- Ongoing training creates new opportunities for your staff to learn, improve and add on to their skills.
- Cleaning staff training is an excellent employee retention strategy.
- A well-trained cleaner is a great asset that leads to client satisfaction, more customer referrals, and higher profits.
