One thing I see so often is business owners attempting to manage their office cleaning in-house. By in-house, I mean hiring a part-time employee to clean, or delegate cleaning duties to current staff. We are often called in when this effort goes sideways. Let me share what I have experienced as both an office manager that delegated as well as outsourced. 

Should you outsource your commercial cleaning services or should you hire in-house janitorial employees?

One of the main misconceptions I find is that we all assume that cleaning is easy and everyone can do it. Most of us have been cleaning our whole lives, right? So the question becomes, should you outsource your commercial cleaning services, or should you hire in-house janitorial employees?

Believe it or not, the question has nothing to do with cleaning. It’s about whether or not your in-house janitorial staff is a match for what your business does now. Here are just some of the questions to consider. Can you handle managing hourly part-time employees? Can you maintain quality over time? Can you hire and deal with employee turnover? Does that match the business model that you have now, or is that going to completely take your focus off of what you’re doing and distract you from your main business? 

When I sat down and organized a cleaning system similar to a chore chart I implemented with my children, I was shocked at the staff’s response. Most felt stretched thin already and were downright angry to be asked to clean the bathrooms even 2 days a month. I persevered and pushed through but despite my best efforts, the quality of clean was not there. Turns out that if you are holding someone to a task that they despise, it shows. Employee morale dropped, the office was not cleaned to my standards and the constant follow-ups were harder on me than it was on them. 

The second option was to hire someone to clean part-time for our office. While the cost was more, I was only having to communicate my cleaning needs with one person. Holding that one person accountable. Those were the highlights, the downside was when they didn’t report to work I came in to find the trash overflowing and the paper products empty. I was in a constant cycle of hiring part-time employees and training them. This was not my wheelhouse or the best use of my time. I was responsible for ordering all of the supplies and disposables. 

Here is what I learned by trying to manage an office using an in-house cleaner. 

Cleaning Systems

You need cleaning systems in place. Checklists and tasks will help you determine whether or not the tasks are complete or incomplete. You’ll need to provide equipment--vacuum cleaners, cleaning solutions, mops, brooms etc. All of this equipment needs to be on-sight and maintained. If the vacuum cleaner breaks, you will need to replace or repair it. These can cost upwards of $700.  Supplies will need to be easily refilled and restocked so that the cleaning team has everything they need.

Recruit, Train, Repeat.

Be prepared for high turnover rates. The average employment of a cleaning employee in the cleaning industry is about 3-6 months. That means that you would have to have a system in place to rehire and retrain a person for that job that frequently. 

Scheduling time to meet with prospective janitorial staff on a regular basis and creating a training program that yields the results you’re looking for can be time-consuming and take your focus away from the main objective of your business.

Regular Management

You will need to create weekly schedules with part-time employees and make sure they’re on time for their shifts. Just as you monitor and review the work of your current employees, you’ll need a quality control system in place for your cleaning staff as well. This way you know that the work is being completed, and ideally, improving over time.

Unexpected Emergencies

Who would be available to handle unexpected emergencies such as equipment breaking down? If you have a small staff of two people, what happens when one of the team members calls out sick or takes a vacation? Or if the security alarm sounds and the team isn’t able to shut it off?  Who would be available to handle these circumstances? That often falls on the business manager or owner and equals late night calls.

It was a few months before I realized that this was also not a manageable solution for my office. 

That was when I turned to Trinty Commercial Cleaning. I appreciated meeting the business owner as he was the person who visited me to perform a walk-through. He asked me why I had reached out. I overshared my frustrations and desire to get back to focusing on what I did well, which was not managing the cleaning of my facility. He explained that while it will cost the business more there were several factors that make it worthwhile to hire an established, locally owned cleaning company.

So in the end, the potential savings that I was trying to achieve by having a cleaning service in-house were lost because of the time I spent trying to create, manage, and maintain the cleaning side of the business. That was time I wasn’t spending with prospective clients and growing our main business.

I found that hiring a premier cleaning service like Trinity Commercial Cleaning was worth the cost. I was able to return my focus to what I was hired for which only increased the profitability of our business, thus more than paying for the cleaning service.