3 Steps to Manage Your Facility Labor and Maintenance Program

Low Hanging Fruit? Prune Your Labor Management Process

Experts say that up to 90% of facility maintenance is labor. While equipment, supplies and chemicals are important, your labor costs could be low-hanging fruit that, if managed better, could have a huge impact on your budget and productivity!

In order to understand facility labor requirements and get the most out of your staff, three things are essential:

1. An accurate workload assessment
2. An effective employee training program
3. An objective performance measurement

Combining these three ideas into your labor management process can yield efficiencies and savings for your program. Here's where CompuClean® Custodial Management Software from Spartan Chemical Company can help.

Quantify Tasks with Workloading

Workloading is a process that standardizes cleaning processes and quantifies your daily facility cleaning requirements. By identifying the time and labor required for various cleaning tasks, you can identify savings opportunities by showing the impact of changes you might make to your program. Although manually quantifying task times can be arduous, CompuClean will streamline, automate, and calculate labor requirements for your entire facility.

Motivate and Improve Performance with Standardized Training

Cleaning is not just done for aesthetics. Proper cleaning and disinfection reduces sickness among building occupants and improves employee productivity. For best performance, a quality assurance program and structured employee training plan is essential. Where a well-trained carpenter can build a bookshelf in a day, an amateur may take a week. The same holds true for custodial employees. The more knowledgeable they are about how and why to clean, the more productive, efficient and motivated they will be. Training should be concise, structured and measurable. You can use manuals and tests, trainers and consultants, or even Spartan's CleanCheck online training system, which combines web-based and video learning with written manuals and task reference cards.

Measure Employee Performance

Finally, in order to truly understand where and how to make improvements to your program, you’ll need to measure employee performance. Inspecting your facility after cleaning allows you to reward employees based on their inspection performance and identify areas that may be understaffed. Quality assurance tools range from simple manual checklists to advanced online systems with mobile capabilities. In order to truly utilize the information being collected during inspections you must have the ability to compile results and identify trends. This is where electronic or web-based systems rise above the pack. Spartan's CompuClean custodial management software can provide web or mobile based inspection capabilities on your Android® device or on iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch while simple and powerful reporting allows you to view current or historical results with the click of a button.

Managing custodial labor is the single most important part of any cleaning operation. By combining three powerful tools, Workloading, Training and Quality assurance, facility managers can realize true gains in cleaning productivity, morale and savings!

To find out more about Spartan's CompuClean application or for assistance in setting up a custodial management program for your facility or building, contact your Nassco sales representative at 800-729-6726 or ask a Nassco expert!