HOTELS & HOSPITALITY
IMPROVING THEIR LOT
The hotel cleaner’s job can be tough, exhausting, disconcerting and thankless. Jeremy Bennett from Tork manufacturer Essity, looks at the various ways in which employers can make their life a little easier.
Every year, cleaning staff from hotels in Las Vegas dust off their skills and take part in the city’s Housekeeping Olympics. Friends, colleagues and families watch teams compete in the Mop Relay, which involves cleaners weaving their mops through a slalom course comprising more than a dozen ‘caution, wet floor’ signs.
The speed and accuracy of the contestants are assessed in a bed-making contest, while their throwing skills are put to the test in the Toilet Paper Toss. Their prowess with the vacuum cleaner is then challenged in a heat that involves hoovering up confetti from a patch of carpet in double-quick time.
Run by the US-based International Executive Housekeepers Association, the Housekeeping Olympics have been staged annually in Las Vegas for the last 30 years. The aim of the event is to celebrate the work of the city’s hotel cleaners and provide a boost for this often-forgotten workforce. It is a boost that the industry badly needs.
Hotel cleaners have a particularly tough job. They are expected to glide quietly from room to room, cleaning the general areas and servicing the guestrooms efficiently and thoroughly – but with minimal contact with the public.
They are usually allotted around 30 minutes to prepare a room for a new guest and just 15 minutes to service an
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occupied room. They are expected to clean 13 to 15 rooms per eight-hour shift – though this figure can rise to 30 in some hotels. Each room must be left spotless because any transgression in the form of a stray hair or dead fly is likely to be spotted, photographed and uploaded on to social media in today’s transparent world.
In a guestroom the cleaner could encounter anything from a vomit-spattered floor to a filthy bathroom - or even a naked occupant. Besides being unsettling and disconcerting, their job is also hazardous: studies show that injury rates among hotel cleaners is 50% higher than that of other hotel workers. This is because the job is a highly physical one that involves stretching, lifting and bending when carrying out tasks such as changing duvet covers, lifting mattresses, moving furniture and cleaning floors.
The work can also be exhausting, particularly when cleaning in a large resort or complex. Here the housekeeping staff will have to cover extensive areas as they walk from the pool to the spa, the restaurants, bars, fitness suite and general- use washrooms, cleaning up each space as they go and making sure that everything is in order.
So, what can be done to make life easier for the hotel cleaner? Obviously a reduced workload coupled with
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