SPECIALIST CLEANING
“Unfortunately, people assume because they
clean at home that those skills are transferrable – but that clearly isn’t the case. I’ve been known to mow the lawn, but it doesn’t make me a landscape gardener.”
periodic and would have consequently been carried out by members of the regular cleaning team.
When I first began delivering cleaning related training in the late nineties it was fairly commonplace for groups of cleaning staff working in schools for example, to attend training on such subject matter as stripping and re- applying emulsion polish, deep cleaning kitchens and high level cleaning. The outcome being that come the summer holiday shut down, the school or service provider was equipped with a team of staff with the requisite skills to complete the annual deep clean of the premises without going to the expense of engaging third party contractors.
So why is it that some of those skills previously at home on the periodic list have moved in our minds to the specialist skill list? I believe there’s more than one answer to this question.
In the first instance some skills have moved out of necessity. For example, during my early years in cleaning it was typical to see step
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ladders or at least kick stools in most cleaning cupboards. However due to the significant number of serious injuries and deaths caused by falls from height (across all industries, not just cleaning) reported by the HSE annually, it has become necessary for service providers to radically change their policies in regards to people cleaning whilst standing on anything other than the floor. In my experience, most service providers nowadays instruct their regular cleaning teams to clean only as high as they can comfortably reach while standing on the floor and would choose to use teams of specifically and intensively trained personnel for high level work or contract the work out to a third party.
Another reason for the shift, in my opinion, is that the number of individuals working in the industry with a sound working technical knowledge has shrunk in parallel. It would appear that not as many organisations as before consider it to be as important as once was the case and consequently the number of individuals with the ability to complete more complex procedures has diminished.
A former colleague, who began his career in cleaning in the seventies as a relief caretaker working for a county council in the North of England, waxes lyrical to this day about how he had to complete many months of training and assessment in order to achieve his City and Guilds Cleaning Science qualification and is known to quote from the works of J.K.P. Edwards, considered by many to be the founding authority on commercial cleaning.
Although I’ve heard these stories many times over, I believe he has a point. I agree staff need to be trained to understand the basics of their job role as an immediate priority. However it should be feasible to continue their development with training in more involved and complex skills as time progresses. And there, I think, is the crux of the matter – Training.
Regardless of where these skills sit, whether they are truly specialist or not, it has to be acknowledged that the key to them being undertaken with success consistently is having staff who have been thoroughly and comprehensively trained.
For me the two issues which training helps prevent are (i) the operatives putting themselves and others at risk of injury or illness and (ii) the operatives causing damage to the surfaces they are supposed to be cleaning and maintaining.
For example, if a cleaning team was looking at the removal and reapplication of emulsion polish to a floor covering, it would need to be trained to differentiate between different floor types. The team could identify whether the floor would accept polish, whether proprietary polish strippers would be suitable, or would cause damage, and what machine accessories would be best to use.
If they were looking at the correct process for clearing body fluid spillages, the team being trained would need to understand the chain of infection and how they could inadvertently put themselves at risk of serious illness if not following protocol, how to safely put on and remove PPE and how to correctly dispose of the resulting waste from this process.
The list of examples is endless. While you may think that having staff properly trained to carry out specialist skills is nothing more than common sense, you would be surprised at the number of horror stories I hear about staff with no prior knowledge of a specialist process ‘having a go’ anyway and consequently putting themselves at significant risk or causing untold damage.
www.jigsawcleaningsystems.co.uk Tomorrow’s Cleaning June 2016 | 47
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