The ideal cleaner's training checklist

 

Mr. Brant Insero, ISSA Senior Director of Education, Training, Certification & Standards, discusses what constitutes the ideal cleaner’s training checklist.

 

Filed under
Housekeeping
 
March 24, 2023
 
Share this story
 
 
Subscribe to our newsletter
 

To receive the latest breaking news and stories in Dubai, the UAE and the GCC straight to your inbox.

 
The ideal cleaner's training checklist
 

Good employees are at the core of any successful cleaning business - whether it is an FM service provider or an end facility. To help your employees do their best work, though, you need to invest time and effort in training them.

They might be brand-new cleaners, or your longstanding crew needs to brush up on processes and procedures. Whatever the reason, your cleaners need training. In fact, training the cleaning staff is pivotal to an organization's success. We spoke to  Mr. Brant Insero, ISSA Senior Director of Education, Training, Certification & Standards, to dig a little deeper and see what constitutes the ideal cleaner’s training checklist. 

Why are training checklists important for cleaners?
Oftentimes, the frontline cleaners i.e. the ones who actually do all the cleaning for organizations can oftentimes get lost throughout the day. It's not because of them. It is because of the demands of the business. A lot of times we see cleaning professionals are asked to perform tasks other than what is in their daily scope of work. But it's critical that they go back to their daily checklist or their job cards to truly understand where they are supposed to be at that time of the day, what they are doing and what they are doing it with. 

How important is risk assessment for training cleaners?
As you think about the times of the pandemic and how we came out of it, we stopped cleaning just for appearance. That’s not to say cleaning for appearance is bad. It’s not and many times, we do clean for appearance but now times have changed and things have shifted. We are now cleaning for health more than ever so we identify risks such as infectious diseases and safety risks which could ultimately impact human health. So when we think about risk assessments, we should always add it into our checklist and determine what the level of risk is and what we need to do. These risks can also change on a daily basis.

What does an ideal checklist look like?
The checklists have changed over time but there is some consistency in a few things. For instance, the start of the day tends to be the same. The cleaner is going to walk into the cleaning closet, will put on the PPE and gather all the tools necessary to start the day. 

When we think about individuals who have missed these starting points of the checklist, that's when we should start to worry about risk and safety concerns. But one of the things that we noticed with checklists in a written format is that they are never updated consistently. The scope of work may change and the checklist format does not. It's one of the challenges we face. We have document control on these checklists and I would say one of the nicest things we see happening over time is that things are becoming more automated. The reason why I like that is when change occurs, there is a sense of urgency and we can start to have immediate control over the situation and the daily tasks that need to be accomplished. 

I think oftentimes we forget that we need to go back and perform a quality check on the work performed. A lot of times cleaning professionals are tight on time. Organizations use the ISSA cleaning times and tasks to go ahead and figure out their workload but they forget to dedicate a time in the day for quality assurance and ensure that the job is being done correctly. So I would always add that in the conclusion of each task - a little bit of time for quality check. 

Training to use automated solutions and checklists

We are seeing organizations move towards QR codes, RFID tags, etc. so the cleaning professionals need to understand a little more about technology. Most often, they use cell phones for this task - to understand what the apps are, what does it mean if they miss a tag. We also want to encourage cleaning professionals to leverage technologies for their benefit. 

Note: this is an excerpt from our podcast, the clean talk. To listen to the full episode, Click link here : https://www.cleanmiddleeast.ae/podcasts/the-ideal-cleaners-checklist