Plotting A Course For Cleaning

Housekeeping executives must become recognized experts and valuable resources to their respective administrations, especially when planning for a new facility or when restructuring services within an existing building. Key to these responsibilities is expertly workloading facility cleaning, which requires proper preparation and a complete knowledge of today’s most successful methods.

Often, this initiative is not taken until too late. But housekeeping executives always have the option of rethinking operations no matter what their status. They just need to follow a few steps to get their departments back on the right track.

The master plan
The first thing to do is become totally familiar with all facilities that require cleaning. Things that are important at this stage are determining how many fixtures are in the restrooms, how many restrooms are in the buildings, what type of floor coverings are in the buildings, how much of each type of covering exists and where each portion is located.

How do you find out all this information and have it available at your fingertips any time you need to access it? The answer is floor plans, but not just any floor plans. The housekeeping executive needs “cleaning plans.”

The information contained on cleaning plans constitutes the necessary basis for any facility workloading. Knowledge is power and this information will provide the housekeeping executive with a vast, intimate knowledge of buildings he or she manages.

A cleaning plan shows the floor plan of a building, identifying floor covering types and square footage of each room and corridor, fixtures in the restrooms and furniture locations throughout the building.

The process of gathering this information starts with floor plans for the building. Every facility should have a set of plans from construction to find plumbing, wiring, sewer lines, etc. The most common way to construct these cleaning-specific plans is with a CADD program that can manipulate the drawings and descriptions on a computer. Unfortunately, not every facility has a CADD program or a drafting technician to develop these drawings. If a facility does, the housekeeping managers must utilize them. If not, there are several other ways to achieve this goal.

The first alternative is to get a copy of the floor plan for the building or buildings and physically walk each floor, measuring the dimensions of each room, and noting the type of floor covering, number of restroom fixtures, furniture types and locations to manually record on the plan. This process may sound like a lot of work and it is, but if housekeeping executives don’t have other resources, it is a necessary procedure.

Another alternative is to buy a simplified software package that has some basic floor plan capabilities and to draw housekeeping’s own plans. These software packages are not extremely expensive, are fairly easy to learn and will print out on ordinary printers. The drawback is that if the floor of a facility is more than 5,000 square feet, the drawing will need to be shrunk down to fit on one page, which is harder to read, or will require several pages to show one floor.

A better alternative is to contact local universities, community colleges, technological schools or high schools to see if they offer CADD courses. Many of these programs welcome real-world projects for their students to work on and they might produce cleaning plans at little or no cost. Often, high school programs will welcome such projects in exchange for donations to help acquire new hardware or software.

There also could be an employee in the facilities department interested in taking a CADD course; the company pays the tuition, and the person uses the company’s building or buildings as class projects. This method also would give the housekeeping department future access to make changes to existing cleaning plans and plot extra copies as needed.

Calculating quality
The next step is to determine the cleaning quality level of expectation and cleaning frequencies to achieve that level. As an example, if the facility is a high profile public building such as a bank, then the desired cleaning level in the public areas should be high and require high frequencies. To keep the carpet appearance at a high level, completely vacuuming public areas, daily, would be necessary. While nonpublic areas may require lower frequencies to maintain appearance levels and weekly vacuuming would be acceptable. Keep in mind: the higher the frequency, the more labor, the more labor; the higher the cost.

Housekeeping executives also must remember that a building’s furnishings have a life cycle that is similar to that of a car. If a car is not properly maintained, the useful life is reduced and more frequent replacement will be required. Similarly, if the cleaning frequency is not adequate to maintain furnishings, then premature replacement may cost more than the required maintenance — something most administrations would appreciate avoiding.

Finding time
Once managers determine quality levels and frequencies, they need to establish standard cleaning times for the various cleaning tasks. Some facilities already may have established cleaning time standards for their particular operations.

To create standard cleaning times for an organization, housekeeping executives can use a stopwatch to measure how long it takes to accurately perform each task associated with cleaning a facility.

Another way to establish standards is to use those of other facilities or industry professionals. One such standard is "The Official ISSA 358 Cleaning Times" from the International Sanitary Supply Association. This book offers field-tested cleaning times listed by how many minutes it takes to perform each basic task for an individual item or surface, taking into account different common tools a worker might use. The Association of Higher Education Facility Officers (APPA) also offers cleaning standards for common tasks performed in schools and universities.

Whether using the times from the ISSA, APPA or another facility, housekeeping managers must make sure to compare selected times with actual cleaning times required by their own staff to validate whether those standards are reasonable for their organization’s facilities. This may require comparing stopwatch-recorded times with set standards to find a compromise between the two numbers.

Assigning the work
The final step uses information from cleaning plans and times to determine the total number of hours needed to clean parts of, or all of, a given building. Executives can compute this by hand or utilize a simple computer spreadsheet program. There also are multiple industry-specific computer programs available that only require the number of fixtures or square footage of flooring to compute necessary cleaning hours and how many full-time equivalents (FTEs) needed.

Several chemical suppliers also have programs available for discounted prices to customers meeting certain purchasing requirements. These programs have built-in cleaning times from various sources to select from or allow users to insert custom times to computer workloading requirements.

The important aspect of a workloading program is that without the information determined from the cleaning plan and the quality level frequency requirements, the program cannot compute anything.

While it might seem obvious that housekeeping executives and their facility managers should know the makeup of their facilities, many departments don’t have this common knowledge. It offers an information base necessary to workload the building, adjust to budget cuts, determine factuality, compute costs associated with design choices in construction and finishes, and establish the housekeeping executive as an invaluable resource to the organization.

Steven Spencer, cleaning and interior maintenance senior specialist for State Farm Insurance