Improving our image
I suspect I’m not the only person expressing concern right now about the growing recruitment challenge in cleaning.
Lee Andrews, CEO of DOC Cleaning, addresses the recruitment challenge. beneath people, and it’s this perception we need to address.
Yes, it’s always been harder with cleaning than in most industries, for reasons we all know well. But to this challenge has now been added the complication of Brexit. I’m already hearing stories about EU staff returning home, either because of uncertainty, or because the weakness of sterling is making their pay packet worth less back home than it was previously.
And that’s just the start. The reality, under evolving government proposals for points or salary-based immigration control, is that with or without a deal, in 2021 the inflow of EU staff looking for lower paid work in the UK may well come to an end. Unless different rules apply to immigration from non- EU countries, we will then be left with indigenous supply as our only source of labour for cleaning contracts.
That frightens me, as British attitudes to working in our industry have changed in the last few years and I don’t hear many solutions being offered as to how we address this. The whole thing is like a ticking time bomb. So, what do we do?
Well, I see there being two linked solutions. The first is an internal and external public relations challenge, the second is about training. The link is that they both come down to the same fundamental issue: the use of the term ‘low- skilled’. Here I’m just focusing on PR and how that relates to frontline staff, the toughest recruitment challenge.
Perceptions are difficult things to deal with. The fact is there are a lot of ‘low-skilled’ jobs in the UK carried out at anti-social times – thousands in cleaning, but just as many in call centres, retail, hospitality and so on. The difference with cleaning is it’s perceived as a dirty job that’s therefore
The PR task is around getting both client organisations and ourselves, the contractors, to value the work cleaners do – in fact to make a conspicuous point of valuing it. No-one questions the critical importance of cleaning in healthcare, food production, data rooms, sterile ‘clean’ rooms and so on. But as an industry, do we do enough to highlight the value of our work in creating a hygienic environment and reducing the spread of infection across the more commonly cleaned areas – hot desking offices, public venues, or the UK’s 32,000 schools?
The fact is, it’s easy not to notice good cleaning or understand how it is achieved, but where the role is more valued it is easier to justify the cost of providing it, as a result of which pay rates can rise in tandem. A steep hill to climb, I know.
Of course, it’s one thing to emphasise the value of cleaning through our own staff recruitment and induction procedures, but it’s another to convince clients of our cleaners’ importance and maybe this is where our industry bodies could help.
How? Well I heard a wonderful example recently of how a major city institution insists that the outsourced cleaning staff wear the same uniforms as their own FM team, that they have access to the same welfare facilities – canteen, gym, etc. and attend the same FM briefings. The word to describe this is ‘inclusiveness’, and through a subtle process of case studies and media projection, it’s this type of attitude that we should be exploring more with the FM client community.
www.doccleaning.co.uk
34 | A JOB WORTH DOING
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