Our success and understanding are lessons that came from repeated failures. As part of a recent marketing exercise, we identified that most office managers are likely to encounter a possible 19 pain points where they find service delivery doesn’t match with their expectations. We know them all. A few of the main examples range from:
This has seen increases every year that are way in excess of inflation levels and aren’t always easy for businesses to absorb or pass onto their clients.- Cleaners not working to a clear scheduleWhilst the desired outcome of the governments strategy can only be one that’s positively encouraged and supported – for many companies it’s proving harder to deliver.
- The cleaners always leaving early never doing their full shiftThere have been casualties in the Edinburgh area already this year with a number of cleaning companies having already closed their doors. Whether this was down to more enforced legislation increasing costs (pensions and wages) or other operating problems I’m not sure but one thing is for sure that many cleaners are facing the rough end of the stick.
- Too many things not being done properly meaning the Office Manager ends up catching up on many more tasks than they shouldTo compensate for the increased costs there is a re-balancing act that we see many companies apply. Such as:
- Security concerns where alarms have t been set of doors left unlocked Employ staff on a self employed basis
- New cleaners being shown in at regular intervals because the company just can’t hold on to staff Only employ staff on a zero hour contract basis
And whilst we may not have been involved in all of them we have seen the biggest and most regular offenders often. To be honest we still sometimes do but we now know how to fix them promptly so they don’t raise their head again.Deliberately cap hours to make sure nobody reaches levels of automatic pension enrollment, or qualify for sick pay and also means they’ll be paying zero employers NI
We now have strong processes and a much stronger team to make sure these are being applied every day. These are lessons made through mistakes or perhaps when we’d taken our eye off the ball. It’s not that we were ever complacent but perhaps believed that once something was fixed and dealt with that it would remain that way – which we now realise is only ever true at the time of fixing something but that can’t ever be guaranteed to still be working properly tomorrow or the next day or the week after that. Process and procedures have had to come to the fore to ensure every part of our business is working as well as it should.Take on younger staff in order to pay far lower minimum wage levels
We understand that cleaners are often the forgotten heroes that kee p everything going. Often unseen and unheard, due to the working hours they keep, they perform their duties diligently across the city topping up toilet rolls, emptying bins and ensuring
