Asfia Khan speaks to Elizabeth Baumholzer, author of time studies conducted in Germany’s cleaning sector, shows how a little training can go a long way to create a more productive and cost-effective workforce
Today’s fast-based business culture demands professional service in the shortest possible time, indicating the need for staff to work smarter not harder. The cleaning business is just the same where productivity and efficiency of the cleaning staff is what matters within the time frame that is allotted to them.
So what is the tool that enables staff to work smarter so as to increase their productivity and efficiency: it is nothing but training. The significance and value of training has long been recognized. Given today’s business climate and the dependence on technology, the need for training is more prominent than ever.
Training is an activity that changes people’s behavior and increases productivity which is often touted as the most important reason for training. But it is only one of the benefits. Training is essential not only to increase productivity but also to motivate and inspire workers by letting them know how important their jobs are and giving them all the information they need to perform those jobs.
Contract cleaning companies do not necessarily have the expertise to conduct in-depth needs analysis to determine what the real training issues are. Until specific training needs are isolated, no value-added changes in performance will occur.
It is this essential needs analysis that forms the focus of any training program. Recognizing the need for the right tools of the trade in the cleaning business, Elisabeth Baumholzer, managing director of Quality Office Clean, a contract cleaning company with its head office in Germany and branch in Dubai, has carried out a number of comprehensive time studies and also completed on-site projects investigating the viability of performance-related cleaning contracts.
Baumholzer started her first job in the service industry, i.e. catering and domestic management in Sweden where she was responsible for managing a catering company that used to serve 40,000 lunches per day. Her next job in Baghdad, Iraq, involved looking after 50 to 70 buildings and organizing a large team required to do the cooking, cleaning, etc, for 150 site engineers belonging to a German firm which was building a power plant there. Similar such roles were awaiting her in Mexico, Iran, India and Dubai.
Back in Germany, Baumholzer joined a contract cleaning company where she was responsible for quality monitoring and client relationships and immediately realized the value that planning and process optimization could bring to the cleaning industry. It was then that Baumholzer joined the REFA Association for Work Design/Work Structure, Industrial Organisation and Corporate Development in Germany, one of the world's largest non-profit training organizations, to set up the cleaning committee.
Time studies and process optimisation
In her capacity as managing director of the expert committee on contract cleaning for the REFA Association, Baumholzer was able to apply her planning and process optimization skills to fulfill market demands back then. "There was a need to improve the way in which cleaning was being done and also to make it cost-effective."
REFA has been offering training in the cleaning sector for twelve years now- a comprehensive programme of complete process management from the bottom of the hierarchy to the top level of companies. "REFA trains in how to implement better data management, control, etc, at all levels," said Baumholzer.
REFA brought some control to a sector that was badly organised and showed the middle management in contract cleaning companies how to organise their cleaning contracts better. In addition, Baumholzer carried out time studies for the first time in the German cleaning sector, on different types of rooms and area sizes in different types of buildings and utility, by “looking at the task people were performing and then educating them in process organisation.” Baumholzer has also carried out time studies in hospitals and in the window cleaning sector.
Her next major project was to set the precedence for performance-related cleaning contracts. This was important because many companies lay down specifications in a contract but all the job specifications and the standards are not always met, which results in clients paying for work that has not been done.
In a bid to see how cleaning could be carried out to a higher standard, with less expense and all the client’s criteria met, Baumholzer carried out a nine-month study of a contract whereby cleaners were educated to look at only what actually needs cleaning. The cleaners decide what needs doing and they take the responsibility, but with constant feedback about the standards they are achieving from the client and from their supervisors. The result of this particular study was that cleaning costs went down. The client was also active in developing the cleaning standards and they ended up paying less but receiving a better quality service.
Performance-related cleaning
“Performance-related cleaning brings better results, more loyal, better trained staff, and satisfied clients," says Baumholzer. In Germany, it is mostly cleaning companies that commission Baumholzer's services, and once contracts start functioning using the performance-related method, she just needs to check on progress periodically.
Baumholzer brings the same wealth of experience to Dubai. She was recently commissioned by The First Security Group, sub-contractors of Serco, the company in charge of operating and maintaining Dubai’s Metro system, to train 300 cleaners for the Dubai Metro project prior to the opening on September 9. All of the cleaners have been successfully trained by Baumholzer within a period of four weeks and deployed to clean the metro and the stations on the now functional Dubai Metro Red Line.
At the end of the Metro training course, the cleaners coming from a cross-cultural ethnic background thoroughly understood hygiene and safety and became familiar with the day-to-day cleaning procedures that were required to fulfill the vision of RTA, i.e. to provide a seven-star service to the commuters of Dubai Metro.
Right from basic grooming and the elementary use of English, the Metro training encompassed aspects such as the correct use of microfiber cloth and the proper handling of equipment like trolleys, etc, identification and the proper handling methods of spillages, understanding internal monitoring and defect reporting procedures, managing waste appropriately, customer service, etc.
Baumholzer implements the same training schedule for her staff as well. Quality Office Clean so far looks after the cleaning requirements of ten facilities which includes schools, offices, staff accommodation, labour camps etc, all managed on a time study principle. Her staff has also been deployed to clean a mosque where they overcame the challenge of cleaning windows at height with the help of telescopic cleaning poles. Baumholzer intends to refine this process of cleaning a little more by using “pure water” in the near future. They are also deployed in one-off cleaning jobs in private villas and flats where “word-of-mouth” publicity of a job-well-done earns the company more of such jobs.
However, Baumholzer faces the same language barrier problems like other cleaning companies when inducting new staff but has overcome these problems by encouraging her cleaning staff to learn one English word per day. Work wise, they undergo a half hour training right from day one and using a step-by-step learning approach they are ready to be deployed, starting from labour camps to offices and universities, etc, as they progress in their skills. Her staff is fully trained to use chemicals from the Germany-based Buzil chemicals, equipment from Hefter and Karcher and the use of microfiber cloth.
Baumholzer shuttles back and forth between her native Germany and the UAE. She was a speaker at the recently concluded CMS Berlin Show and the Facilities Management Conference in Germany. In the UAE, she has recently been commissioned to train the cleaning staff of a hotel in Sharjah. She believes that it is better to adopt the same system that exists in Germany, i.e. to make it mandatory for janitors to attend a cleaning course which makes them academically qualified for cleaning.
Right way of tendering for a cleaning job
One of the challenges she faces in the regional cleaning sector is that the tenders for cleaning are not specifically drafted so as to mention the area that needs to be cleaned in terms of square meters. “A tender which is ambiguous in terms of square meters and the type of rooms that need to be cleaned makes it difficult for a contract cleaning company to assess parameters like the number of manhours required for the cleaning, the number of people that need to be deployed and above all, the price to be quoted.”
She is trying to educate clients on how to draft a perfect cleaning tender to enable contract cleaning companies to calculate parameters such as hours/day, cost/hour, working days/month, hours/month, cost/month, cost/year to prepare a proper cost report and work time report and quote accordingly.
Another challenge which the contract cleaning and the FM industry needs to meet in the immediate future is to cut costs, which is only possible with a trained and qualified staff, so that “fewer trained people are deployed to do the job rather than numerous untrained people.
“Companies need to invest on training and the implementation of time and performance-related studies to increase productivity of their workforce,” adding that “it is just a matter of time when market forces will motivate companies to send fully trained individual on the job in an efficient and cost-effective manner.”
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