Cleaning schedules, and the faults cleaners see first

Cleaning staff walk every room in the building every day. They see the leak on day one, the door that no longer latches, the light that has been out for a week. In most buildings they have no way to report any of it, which wastes the best fault detection system on site.

Give them a way to report that takes twenty seconds

A code in the back of house of every floor, a photograph and a sentence. No account, no login, no category. Anything more and it will not happen, because reporting a fault is not their job and they are on a schedule.

Two things make it stick: nobody is ever criticised for a report that turned out to be nothing, and reports get acknowledged. A cleaner who reports three faults and hears nothing back will not report a fourth.

Separate cleaning work from maintenance work

Mixing them makes both lists unusable. A blocked toilet and a failed pump are different work, done by different people, measured differently. Keep the work types apart and let both feed the same reporting point.

Schedule by frequency and traffic, not by room count

A busy entrance needs several visits a day and a quiet meeting room needs one a week. Schedules built on floor area alone produce a plan that is wrong at both ends and gets rewritten informally by whoever is on shift.

Periodic work is where the quality is

Daily cleaning is visible and mostly happens. Periodic work is where standards actually live and where slippage is invisible.

• •Floor stripping, sealing and deep cleaning by surface type
• •Carpet extraction
• •High-level dusting, vents and light fittings
• •Windows, internal and external
• •Waste area deep cleans

Put these on the same schedule as maintenance, with the same late-work visibility. They are the first thing to slip and the last thing anybody counts.

Inspect against a checklist, with photographs

Cleaning quality arguments are opinion against opinion unless somebody scores rooms consistently. A short checklist, a handful of rooms a week, scored the same way with photographs, ends most contractor disputes before they start.