Insights and Advice

Check-in procedures may seem mundane for many housekeeping managers, but those few minutes at the beginning of each shift, as well as the few minutes at the end, are crucial to productivity.

“If you have 100 cleaning workers making $6 per hour who waste just five minutes each day during check-in or check-out procedures, you will lose more than $15,000 a year,” says industry consultant John Walker. He has tracked the impact of check-in procedures on productivity and found there are a few key areas that almost any operation can improve upon to save time and money.

Location — If housekeeping staff must report to a select location to clock in and pick up supplies before heading to their buildings, they waste your time and money getting to their final destination because no work is being done. Instead, try to have workers report to the actual building, or one of the buildings, in which they will clean during that shift. Then, when they clock in, they already are on location.

Supplies — The place where cleaners check in also should be the place where their supplies are located. This allows them to sign in and pick up necessary items without having to wander to more locations before starting their work. To help expedite this process, Walker suggests all necessary supplies should be kept in a compact and organized container or cart. Employees should have a checklist available so they will know what items to look for and contact a supervisor if the appropriate supplies are missing, before the shift even begins. He also advocates placing any necessary keys, job description cards or work orders, personal protective equipment, even pens or pencils in a small box labeled with the worker’s name or shift on it. This keeps important items in one place and if a supervisor needs to add a job request or extra keys he or she will know exactly where to leave it for the employee.

Travel time — Once a worker has checked in and gathered the necessary items, he or she must travel to the starting point of their work. Sometimes, someone must walk across the length of a building to their starting point.

To minimize this “dead time” in the work cycle, Walker suggests timing how long it should reasonably take to get from check-in points to starting points in a building. Managers then should make this time known to workers so they understand they are expected to begin cleaning within an allotted time.

Measuring travel time not only shows the importance of starting work on time, but also allows managers to workload more clearly. If a shift is 4 hours long and 30 minutes is taken to check-in and get to starting points, and another 30 minutes is needed to return supplies and check out, then that leaves only 3 hours to complete cleaning tasks. Managers also can research the time it takes to travel from one building to another, if more than one is cleaned during a shift, and the time it takes to gather more supplies as that second location. In the case of multiple buildings per shift, managers also must determine the time it takes to return to the original spot to clock out and factor that into workloading.