A reader comments: "Our customer is claiming that we are not staffing the contract to their satisfaction. Under the agreement, our job is to clean the facility with whatever resources necessary. Do they have a right to question our staffing plan?"

Upon reviewing the history of this account it appears that your former POC (point of contact) left recently and was replaced by someone with a custodial background. Although they may not be versed in performance based versus prescriptive specifications, they do know about how many bodies (think staff) and hours are necessary to clean a facility of this size. It also appears that they started counting heads when complaints increased. This tied in with a lack of adequate equipment, tools and supplies has increased their concerns exponentially and resulted in increased oversight. Please note that in the current contract the former POC may not have tracked complaints and certainly did not conduct their own inspections. The new POC has reached out to tenants to get their opinions and it has not been very positive.

Upon evaluation of the daily DLH (direct labor hours) that was budgeted compared to what you are actually fielding each day, it is apparent that you are shorting the site by close to 50% with poor performance as the result. Based on my preliminary numbers your staff should be averaging close to 12,000 SF/Hour which means the only way they can cover their assigned space is to "skip clean" which results in a lot of missed areas. For example, dusting was a major complaint which appears to be valid since too many of the workers are simply pulling trash and spot vacuuming day after day. This is unacceptable and needs to change ASAP.

We will continue our thoughts in a future article.

Your comments and questions are important. I hope to hear from you soon. Until then, keep it clean...

Mickey Crowe has been involved in the industry for over 35 years. He is a trainer, speaker and consultant. You can reach Mickey at 678-314-2171 or CTCG50@comcast.net.


posted on 8/17/2015