CLEANING & HYGIENE
AN INSIGHT INTO RECOVERY
Ed Walker, Head of Sales at Lita Group FM, shares his insight into how businesses have been operating in recent times, and what this signals about moving beyond the pandemic.
It is well known that cleaning can sometimes be an underappreciated industry, however when the Covid-19 pandemic hit this service was even more fundamental to the functioning of all kinds of organisations.
Businesses had to implement deep cleaning practices at high speed. Schools, shops and offices all introduced new cleaning measures to prevent the spread of coronavirus and keep their services running.
Intense cleaning is here to stay If cleaning was a barometer for the nation’s confidence in Covid recovery, we’re definitely not back at 100% just yet. At Lita, we’re not seeing as quick a slowdown in demand for the high-intensity cleaning techniques that we brought in during the pandemic as we thought we might.
Many clients have wanted us to continue with the more frequent, in-depth cleaning. Additionally, the Covid safety requirements we’ve seen brought in and out mean that clients want to sustain that high level so that they can guarantee business continuity.
Flexible and hybrid working I don’t think there’ll ever be the same numbers of people in offices that there were before. That will be different from organisation to organisation: there are some out there who want everyone back in now, and there are
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some who have seen the opportunity to save money with a hybrid model. They’re reducing the size of their office footprint, implementing hot desk working, giving people schedules of when to come in.
We’ve had to change our cleaning routines to fit in with our clients’ new ways of working. Some have put in one- way systems, so we had to adjust our cleaning schedules to comply with that. Some have changed their timings or implemented staggered starts, so we’ve had to show a lot more flexibility timewise. That’s particularly impacted our operatives, who already had early starts.
Shifting businesses A lot of our clients are in the manufacturing and industrial backgrounds, so their numbers haven’t altered that much – and some of them even got busier during the pandemic. For example, one of our clients, that manufactures glass for the food industry, has moved to a 24/7 operation in the last year.
But we’ve seen more mixed results with our office-based clients. One, that previously had three offices in the North of England (one of which was over five floors) has now reduced to just one office over two floors. They’re never going to have the same footprint that they used to have.
www.litagroupfm.co.uk twitter.com/TomorrowsFM
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