Which is cheaper cleaning the office in-house or employing professional cleaners?

At this time a lot of business are tightening their belt to get through the credit crunch. Budgets are being squeezed all the time. What type of savings can we make?

One business owner said they were having to cut back and do all the office cleaning in Aberdeen themselves sharing the work on a rota basis. Is this a practical option for your company?

One of the things you will need to consider is the need to go out and buy on a regular basis a variety of cleaning chemicals and other equipment dependant of the type of jobs being done. Someone will need to go out and buy these from the store. This is a time and cost expense in itself.Any professional cleaning service in Aberdeen will have a supply in stock at all times as the same products will be used on a number of different contracts.

If you are not going to hire an extra person to do the work then it is likely you will be utilising one of your existing admin staff members taking them away from their regular duties. This could have an extra cost effect on your business if their normal work is not being done effectively and on time.

If that person is not proficient on cleaning duties it will need to be done again an added expense and once again your office staff would not be using their skills and training in your business.

In addition the potential for damage to your office interiors increases as the person does not understand the use of some materials and the surfaces being cleaned. I recall going into one office complex and seeing that the cleaner (also employed as a book-keeper) had squirted some strong bleach on a floor and it had burnt the floor almost beyond economic repair. Are you aware of the dangers of mixing cleaning chemicals (even household strength cleaning products)? Did you know mixing some toilet cleaners together can give off poisonous Chlorine gas?

• Have you all the skills in house to develop all the health and safety guidance in-house? Or will you to pay to outsource it?
• Do you know enough about the role to do a professional Risk Assessment as required by law?
• Do you have copies of the COSHH data sheets for every single cleaning product your staff purchase in the event of an incident? Your local superstore will not supply them for the general household products they sell!| Can you be certain that you have the required COSSH safety data sheets for every single cleaning product your staff purchase? Your local supermarket or corner store will not be able to supply these legal documents and you will need them on site in case of an safety incident.}

If the choice was down to me as an office manager I would be asking myself the following questions

• ” Will I lose more money by taking staff away from the main business focus than I pay to use a professional cleaning company”

• “What is the cost of not doing the job properly and having to repeat the work, do expensive repairs or facing legal issues over health and safety? ”

Personally I would come to the conclusion in most places that it would be better to hire a professional cleaning company in Coatbridge rather than take the risk of letting untrained people make mistakes. I believe it works out cheaper that way in the longer term.

 

Choosing correct cleaning products makes cleaning easier.

When we first started out as a cleaning company we worked hard to ensure we only employed the right type of people and then put them through our own specially designed training course to make them really effective.. The work was good but the idea was still flawed. It was sometime later we realised that supplying the right cleaning chemicals was equally important.

As a group of senior managers we looked at some of the quality standards as we wanted to introduce a framework to monitor the quality and consistency of our work. Asking the question is it clean was not enough without knowing what was meant by the word clean. We then signed up to get both ISO 9001 and ISO 14001. During one of the working party sessions we had a visit from the newly appointed Glasgow cleaners office. It was part of his induction so we allowed him to sit and discover how brilliant we all were. However he flustered us by asking what tests we had conducted on the current cleaning chemicals. We had to admit we did not know. Sometimes it takes an outsider to ask a basic why question to help us to discover what we don’t know.

As senior managers we had all been around since the company beginning and not a single one of us had stopped to ask that question previously. And I am willing to believe that is the case in most cleaning companies across the country.

So we went back to basics and asked what criteria over and above the fact they clean do we want in commercial cleaning products to know they are the right choice. The session quickly was thrown out to all present and to other people in the company about what we wanted to see in the specifications for the perfect commercial cleaning products.

Amazingly we found our long trusted cleaning chemicals did not meet all our criteria. So we had to look at finding alternatives that did. Obviously cleaning performance can’t be judged by reading the advert or the label. so we took a number of them for testing over some time to judge long term performance as well as the quick clean and over a number of different types of cleaning problems, different floors, different levels of wear and tear etc.

We also did technical research on the constituents of the chemicals the COSHH data sheets, the environmental effects and potential hazards to our own staff and other people as well as surfaces. After all we did not want to have a very clean floor that was being damaged or eaten away by strong acid cleaning materials. We do have a duty of care to our customers, don’t we?

The one cleaning range that came out top was one we did not expect to win none of us had used it before and it did not come from a big name manufacturer. That clear winner was Soluclean by a mile. Very effective in cleaning power but top marks for safety at the same time. Being highly concentrated there was no expense of carrying a large number of containers across country and having to dispose of them afterwards. We also discovered that part of the range included a chemical that killed the bacteria and germs that tend to found in hospitals and have proven to be highly infectious and kill already weak patients.

We immediately decided that the best way to protect the standards and make sure we could ensure access to these chemicals was to become the national distributor for Scotland. We now sell these cleaning chemicals to other companies in our area.