Say the word audit in a building and watch what happens. Shoulders go up. Somebody starts explaining before anyone has asked a question.
That reaction tells you something about how the word has been used. Audit has come to mean somebody is coming to find out who messed up. Which is a shame, because a good inspection is not about catching anyone. It is about finding out whether the system is working.
I want to make the case for a different way of thinking about it, because it matters to anyone who pays for cleaning as much as it matters to anyone who does it.
Most buildings have no quality measurement at all
Here is the honest state of things in commercial cleaning. In most buildings, the way anyone finds out about a cleaning problem is that somebody gets annoyed enough to make a phone call.
That is not a measurement system. It is a complaint system, and complaint systems only tell you about the small number of places where a person was frustrated enough to say something. Everything else looks fine on paper because silence gets recorded as success.
If you are a property manager with a dozen buildings, or a strata council relying on volunteer eyes, or a general contractor handing over a site next week, the honest question is this. Do you actually know the work got done to standard, or do you know that nobody phoned?
A clean floor is not proof
This is the part that surprises people when I teach the Building Service Worker credential. Looking clean and being clean are two different measurements.
A washroom can look immaculate and still be a problem. Did the disinfectant sit on the surface long enough to do anything? Most products need several minutes of contact time, and a surface wiped dry after thirty seconds has been cleaned but not disinfected. Was the dilution right? Were high touch points done in the correct order, or did one cloth carry contamination from a toilet to a door handle? Was the person trained on that specific product?
None of that shows up in a photo of a lobby at six in the morning.
Appearance tells you about one shift. Process tells you what the next hundred shifts will look like. If you only inspect the outcome, you learn nothing about whether the outcome will repeat.
What a real inspection looks like
A useful inspection has a few characteristics.
- It is scored the same way every time. If two supervisors walk the same building and come out with different scores because they weigh things differently, the number is noise. We use a consistent rating scale so that a score in one building means the same thing as a score in another.
- It measures process, not just result. Product used, contact time, sequence, training status, whether the supplies were actually on the cart.
- It happens on a schedule, not after a complaint. An inspection triggered by a complaint tells you about the complaint. An inspection on a schedule tells you about the building.
- It produces a trend, not a snapshot. One score is close to meaningless. Twelve months of scores tells you whether a site is improving, drifting, or holding steady, and that is the information worth having.
- Somebody talks about it. A score that gets filed and never discussed has done nothing. The conversation is the whole point.
The score is not the product
This is the part I think most organizations get wrong, including us for a long time.
It is easy to treat an audit as a number to record. The number is only a starting point. The value is in what it makes you ask.
Why has this site improved steadily for six months while that one keeps sliding? Are the expectations written down anywhere the cleaner can actually read them? Is the schedule realistic for the hours we budgeted, or did we price the job optimistically and now the crew is being asked to do ninety minutes of work in sixty? Does this person need coaching, or do they need a different piece of equipment?
That last one comes up more than people expect. A lot of what looks like a performance problem is a resourcing problem wearing a costume.
Accountability is clarity, not punishment
There is a belief that holding people accountable means being hard on them. I do not think that is right.
Accountability means everybody knows what is expected. When the standard is written down and measured the same way every time, nobody is guessing what the boss wants this week. The cleaner knows what good looks like. The supervisor knows where to help. The owner knows where to invest.
That is fairer than the alternative, which is a standard that lives in a supervisor’s head and changes with their mood.
In our experience, crews come to prefer this once they trust it. What people resent is not being measured. What people resent is being measured by a rule nobody told them about.
What this means if you are hiring a cleaning company
You do not need to take anyone’s word for quality, including ours. Ask questions instead.
- How often is my building inspected, and by whom?
- What does the inspection actually measure? Can I see the form?
- Do I get the results, or only hear from you when there is a problem?
- Can you show me twelve months of scores for a building like mine?
- What happens when a site scores poorly? Walk me through the last time it happened.
That last question is the one that separates the companies with a real system from the ones with a nice line in their proposal. Anybody can say they do quality inspections. Far fewer can tell you what they did the last time one came back bad.
Where we are with this
We are currently building our own quality inspection system so that every site we look after gets scored the same way, with the results in a place where trends are visible rather than buried in paper. It is a work in progress and I will write more about it as it comes together.
I was reminded of why this matters by an article from David Green of Rediscover Clean, who makes the point that the real value of validation is the visibility it creates and the conversation it starts, rather than the number itself. That has matched our experience closely.
If you look after a building and you are not sure how you would answer the questions above about your current provider, that is worth a conversation. Not a sales one. Just a useful one.
Cleaning Angels has served the Okanagan for 21 years, founded on 32 years of janitorial business experience built first in Germany, then in Canada.