"Every time it rains, it rains pennies from heaven. Don’t you know each cloud contains pennies from heaven.” Obviously the lyricist that penned the lines to this popular song never worked in housekeeping. Otherwise, he would know that a gloomy economic forecast portends stormy times ahead for housekeepers. Pennies from heaven? More like budget cuts and labor reductions from hell.

Of all the facility services supporting both corporate-owned and leased properties, cleaning usually grabs the short straw when it comes to budget sacrifices.

But does housekeeping always have to be the hardest hit when an organization looks for ways to weather a financial storm? Could housekeeping executives do a better job of selling their mission to administrators?

It’s all about attitude
For example, is outsourcing the threat many facility support people seem to think it is? Not according to John Walker, owner of ManageMent consulting, Salt Lake City. The main reason administrators outsource is to remove liability, labor-related headaches and to gain expert services in specialized fields such as window cleaning or pest control. “Money is rarely a reason to outsource,” he says. “You need all of these elements before it is a major concern.”

And if housekeeping executives are concerned about their staff being replaced by a contract cleaner, they often are too busy worrying to properly protect their staff anyway, says Marty Shaffer, operations director of housekeeping for the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics.

“I know a lot of professionals who are very astute in knowing that their job could be gone tomorrow,” he says.

“So they quit worrying about it and started moving forward with plans to make their departments better while they’re still there.”

Budget cuts are more likely to occur than outsourcing, but cleaning managers

have to keep them in perspective as well.

“If a manager feels a bit anxious because the administration is going to cut costs, get over it, because it’s going to happen to everyone at some point,” says Tom Svendson, a California-based, environmental services consultant.

And housekeeping isn’t the only department that could receive cuts. That’s why astute executives need to make their operations seemingly indispensable to the non-cleaning expert wielding the budget knife.

Shaffer often competes with other departments such as x-ray, neo-natal or the emergency room. Yet, his well-thought-out justifications have helped him get at least some of the items he needs, even when competing with medical equipment and services that more naturally relate to the hospital’s mission.

“With the state of health care today, there is less money for everyone, so I have to be clear as to why a walk-behind scrubber that might only be a few thousand dollars is just as important as a $100,000 radiology machine,” he says.

“If I do it right, it’s possible that I’ll get one out of the three machines I requested. It’s not everything, but it’s still something more than I had before.”

Another misconception among in-house cleaners is that their operations are expected to respond to a variety of service requests that a contract cleaner would not handle. Thus, it’s these odd jobs or added frequencies that make it harder to do more with less when called upon by upper management.

A recent study from the International Facility Management Association reported that the difference in cost between in-house and contract cleaning was due to increased frequencies for in-house staff on many common tasks ($1.60 per cleanable square foot versus contractors’ $1.22 per cleanable square foot).

“Every worker in America gets requests from bosses and customers, and most people think you should jump when you get those requests, so janitors shouldn’t be surprised that they get the same thing,” says Walker. “But what makes these requests seem much more of a burden is that most in-house cleaning staffs are working without the necessary operations data to help them handle these needs.”

In hospitals, it is common to have more need on a weekend, but housekeeping sometimes has a skeleton crew on those days, says Svendson. The same is true of schools — if finals week has more students travelling through a student union, library or other common area, there should be more staff to keep up with traffic, instead of fewer who have to constantly put out fires.

“If there are plenty of last-minute requests looking for housekeeping, it tells me that the department hasn’t mapped out when it’s tenants need more help than others, and staffed appropriately,” says Svendson. “Even having a person on staff to handle last-minute needs should avoid different departments calling the main office to find someone. The goal is to have someone accessible to them already.”

The need for numbers
Current and comprehensive operations data not only can help cleaning managers handle daily requests, but it also is vital for yearly budget justifications. At times, credible numbers even can lead to increased funding rather than cuts.

While the Santa Fe Trail School District in Scranton, Kan., was in an overall budget crunch year, Corky Green, the assistant director of maintenance and operations, still was able to convince administrators to buy a new piece of equipment for one of his schools. He explained how long and how many supplies it otherwise would take to clean the school’s 27 restrooms. With a long-term view of savings, the district agreed.

The same is true for training and certification, which Green continued to push for, despite the lack of a custodial training budget. Even if he is the only person to attend training, he feels he can return to the district to advise cleaning crews regarding what he has learned.

“Money has a tendency to flow to people who take care of it and document what they’ve done with it to improve the organization,” explains Walker. “It doesn’t go to black holes and lost causes where there is no return on investment”

If there is a constant budget crunch in a housekeeping department, that’s a sign that the manager is not doing his or her job, or not communicating that job back to the administration, adds Walker.

“We have had people say ‘I can’t believe you’re going to cut five more people when we can’t handle what we’re doing now,’” says Stanley Krupski, sanitation manager for Quaker Oats Co.’s largest cereal plant in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. “Our answer is you haven’t proven what you can do and if we cut more workers it won’t make a difference anyway. Maybe if you have even less people you’ll be forced to focus.”

When efficiency is questioned, benchmarks are your best defense, says Larry Mishall, supervisor of janitorial maintenance for Pharmacia’s Kalamazoo, Mich., research campus, which is down to a skeleton cleaning and maintenance crew of 34 full-time and 14 temporary staff. “But having the numbers is the easy part, it’s making sure you’re comparing apples to apples that’s harder.”

Mishall is in the process of measuring specific metrics in his operations so he can answer administrative questions should contractors come courting.

“If a contractor says he can do this at 72 cents per-square-foot, compared to our 90 cents, I can point out what they’re doing differently and whether it will offer the same quality as what we do,” he says. If in-house numbers are not comparable, administrators may make assumptions in the contractor's favor, Mishall warns.

Among the things to consider is whether project work such as carpet deep cleaning or hard floor stripping is considered in your average cleaning costs. Most times, those are separated out in contracted bids, says Mishall. Cost per full-time employee is another number administrators like to compare with other service providers, he adds, along with task frequencies and justifications.

What also has helped Mishall combat the threat of being outsourced is documentation. Since there are many sensitive experiments taking place in the various campus buildings, Mishall’s staff knows how to act quickly to alert the right people if equipment alarms sound or anything else happens that could jeopardize research.

“That’s not what you pay a contract cleaner to do, but we take ownership in our organization and it’s mandatory for us,” he says. The Pharmacia cleaning staff also knows how to evaluate maintenance problems to determine if they can fix them in-house or need to out-task to a specialist.

“I’ve been in a lot of housekeeping departments where they didn’t know the going rate for cleaning workers around the country. You need to know the high and the low, which most associations or trade publications report,” he says. “Then there’s national productivity rates and how they’re measured in similar facilities or markets — another topic too many in-house managers know little about.”

Managers also should learn how contractors measure buildings to assess typical cleaning needs and costs, Walker adds. Even if outsourcing isn’t a threat, often contract cleaners are better at tracking average costs for bidding processes.

“I think a lot of money in the budget every year is up for grabs but housekeeping managers just don’t offer this information to support why they deserve it,” says Walker.

For instance, a housekeeping manager Walker worked with at a large Illinois research and development campus was allowed to prioritize items he needed to address in order to whip an in-house operation back into shape. Extra funds were made available to support the streamlining. After he increased productivity and reduced costs the first year, the manager assumed that would be the end to additional funds. Instead, he was surprised to learn that administrators were so impressed with his documented developments, that when money was left over, his staff got all of it.

The next time Walker spoke with the manager, he reported receiving one-third additional staffing for his department, something the man never expected. The reasoning: detailed accounts of what he was doing with staff, how it affected the organization and what he could do if he had more people. With the right paper trail, Walker says any operation can reach that level of respect.

Facing the inevitable
Since budget cuts are inevitable in any operation, the key is avoiding a disproportionate number of them. If your budget is cut in spite of your best efforts to sell your department, there are ways of making reductions more palatable.

Too often, managers spend needless time bargaining for slightly cheaper supplies that do not achieve significant savings. Instead, managers must turn to labor. But don’t start cutting entry-level cleaning positions says University of Iowa’s Shaffer. Instead, he suggests using natural attrition.

“It’s better, in my opinion, than laying people off and lowering morale,” he says. “Plus, in this industry, cleaning people turn over rapidly, so managers often are used to working with a reduced staff.”

In fact, most industry veterans say it is reasonable to expect cleaning operations to decrease about 5 percent a year due to labor-saving innovation.

Shaffer also advises managers to trim supervisory staff before front-line workers.

Instead, he suggests giving those workers a few additional responsibilities that a supervisor might have done as a way of boosting moral.

“Some people could easily monitor the supplies or train others,” says Svendson. “I encourage managers to put the kind of decisions they need to make every day into the hands of multiple employees so they feel like they are moving up the ladder and you have time to develop the information administrators are looking for.”

And when cuts are handed down, detailed data comes in handy to explain the exact ramifications of reductions. You can very quickly and clearly point to a list of services to justify current staffing levels, says Svendson.

And if you have to cut services, take that list to each department and have managers choose which tasks they want to trim from their cleaning. That way, tenants are just as aware of what they will and will not get. Who knows, you might gain a new champion if an in-house customer feels he or she can’t do without some services.




POSTED ON: 8/1/2001