As staffing shortages continue and we adjust to new service expectations, mastering your cleaning schedules helps to improve efficiency and save you money. A solid schedule will also provide your janitorial team with some stability, so turnover may happen less, allowing you to get more work accomplished and save money on training costs.

Developing expert cleaning schedules helps keep your facility consistently clean, makes managing labour easier, and keeps your janitorial team on top of their tasks.

Assigning tasks

Think about scheduling your janitorial staff like quoting on a job. You want to budget time and manpower as efficiently as possible to maximize the effect and minimize the cost to your business. With staffing such an important issue, it’s vital that you’re as exact with your labour budget as you can be to stay profitable. Assigning each task an estimated cleaning time will help staff stay efficient and allow you to assign the right number of people to each task. When you estimate cleaning times, there many factors to consider:

• the task and what’s included
• the time you think it will take to complete the task
• the square footage or size of the space you are cleaning
• the number of tasks or items to be cleaned (for example, how many sinks there are to clean)

Assign each task a time and cost so you can create cleaning schedules that ensure the work gets done without don’t over-extending your labour.

Developing checklists

Staying on top of the schedules means doing daily, weekly, and monthly checks to be sure your system is still working and to evaluate the labour-to-tasks ratio. Things like seasonality, staffing, volume, and many more factors may mean that scheduling needs to be adjusted to maintain the highest efficiency. Creating schedules that work for your business is not a “set it and forget it” endeavour, it requires tweaking and editing to stay at its best.

Some areas, like the reception desk and waiting area, should be on your daily checklist to get them consistently cleaned and keep the jobs smaller by staying on top of them daily.

Developing checklists can also increase efficiency by limiting duplication as you divide larger tasks into smaller, weekly, and monthly jobs. For example, adding window cleaning or floor polishing to these lists means that they will be consistently completed in a timely manner. You may even find that it makes more sense to outsource some of the larger jobs so you can save your team some time.

Create cleaning schedules that work for your business to keep everyone on track, provide consistency for your janitorial team, and get the jobs done with maximum efficiency.