How To Train Your Workplace Cleaners? A Step-By-Step Training Guide

In today’s fast-paced business world, building great client relationships is very important for commercial cleaning businesses to grow and attain success in their business. But, the ones who interact frequently with clients on their behalf of them is their janitorial staff. The corporate cleaning staff works day in and day out at multiple client locations to get the job done.

Corporate cleaning employees are the ones who represent the face of your cleaning company by interacting with your clients every day. Hence, recruiting, training and retaining good employees is a must for any cleaning business to get success. You, as a commercial cleaning business owner, should always put your focus on training your commercial cleaners first, so that they can understand & perform their cleaning duties properly.

Why Train Commercial Cleaning Staff

No matter the company type or size, training new employees has a lot of benefits. A good training program helps new employees to become the best version of themselves and deliver the highest quality work. As a commercial cleaning agency owner, you always want your staff to get comfortable and skilled in their cleaning job, and that’s the place where employee training comes in.

The well-train commercial cleaning staff is also more capable to deliver better customer service and being more efficient in their work while working for any cleaning company.

For example, Clean Group, the best commercial cleaners in Australia, has a highly skilled and well-trained cleaning staff who deliver the highest quality of commercial cleaning services to their corporate clients, as per their needs.

Clean Group has been able to maintain the aura of commercial cleaners in Australia, all thanks to its customer-friendly and dedicated cleaning staff who has superb knowledge in cleaning & maintaining large storefronts, retail stores, warehouses, apartments, etc. The regular in-house training and knowledge provided to new employees of Clean Group have helped them in delivering healthy, eco-friendly and reliable cleaning services to all its clients.

Benefits of Training for Commercial Cleaners

There are multiple benefits of providing training to the commercial cleaning staff for any janitorial company. Some of them include:

• Trained commercial cleaners are more loyal. As per the Hiring Site research, 90% of the employees are more loyal to commercial cleaning companies that provide regular training to their employees.
• Training cleaning staff also enables commercial cleaning companies to retain their staff for a longer period.
• Commercial cleaning companies can also make more profits by providing regular training to their cleaning staff.
• Receiving effective and comprehensive training also leads to improved cleaning times and fewer accidents at client location for cleaning staff.
• Regular training also helps cleaning staff to deliver the highest quality of professional cleaning services.

Training Commercial Cleaners is Challenging Sometimes…!

Providing regular training and knowledge about the latest cleaning techniques and equipment is a shared responsibility for a cleaning company. The administrative staff, including managers, owners and supervisors of a commercial cleaning should take the responsibility of providing regular training to its new and existing employees.

The motive behind such training should always be to familiarize the cleaning staff about their work and get knowledge about the cleaning activities they need to perform at a client location.

A well-organized training program and specific job training manuals are extremely vital during cleaning staff training to avoid any goof ups. It helps trainers or supervisors to stay on track and cover all the important aspects of the commercial cleaning training program.

Step-By-Step Guide for How to Train a Commercial Cleaner

To train your commercial cleaning staff properly, you can follow a four-step (Communicate Display-Implement-Review) training strategy as it will help you to achieve your desired goals.

So, here is a detailed, step-by-step procedure that you can follow to train your commercial cleaning staff:

Step 1: Communicate

The first step of your commercial cleaning training program needs to be introducing your janitorial systems verbally to your trainee janitorial staff.

You can also provide them with an overview of the overall training program by handing them over a written training program document. This document can be a good start for your cleaning staff to know about each training phase from start to end, including activities or tasks they need to perform to clear it.

Explaining them the need for “why” they are doing a particular activity during training is equally important. If they don’t understand the need for doing it, then your cleaning staff will choose shortcuts to perform some crucial cleaning tasks at the client location, which might harm your overall reputation.

Hence, clear communication with cleaning staff is extremely vital at the first phase of the training program You can also save a lot of your time by putting up a ‘‘why’ upfront yourself related to the training program. Once the training objective is communicated, provide printed training manuals to your employee to perform their job tasks as efficiently and effectively.

Tips to Consider While Training Commercial Cleaning Staff at This Stage:

• Trainers, owners, managers, and supervisors must first have a proper and clear understanding of the training process themselves at the start of the training program.
• Create interest among your staff about cleaning industry using your prior knowledge and experience.
• Group training sessions can be conducted initially to make it interesting for new joiners.
• Use training materials that are a good fit for your cleaning company, staff and contracts to save your time.
• No matter whether your training program begins from scratch or lean on pre-existing materials available online, it should not only cover what to clean and how to clean but also why you do things the way you do.
• Create cleaning checklists when training new employees so they don’t forget anything while working at a client location in real-time.

Step 2: Display

Once you deliver basic cleaning instructions during phase one of commercial cleaning training to your janitorial staff, provide them with visuals by ‘showing’ them how each job is done at the next stage. You can provide training videos, demonstrating each cleaning task that your existing employees perform at client location as part of their service, to your trainees.

Also, letting them know ‘why’ they should perform each task in a particular sequence and what happens when the sequence is not followed is important in videos. To make sure that your training program is super effective, don’t just rely on written training manuals or product literature, as they are tough to read and boring for many employees.

The better option is to demonstrate cleaning tools or equipment videos that they will be using at along with various cleaning techniques. Keep eye contact, ask questions and motivate your trainees to ask questions from the training videos that they watch at this stage. Don’t just give a lecture, engage with your cleaning staff, and make them involved.

Also, your training should be focused on the current needs and experience level of your cleaning staff.

Tips to Consider While Training Commercial Cleaners at This Stage:

• Limit your training sessions to a maximum of one hour, so cleaning staff don’t get trainees bored, restless, and feel “information overload.”
• Use interesting short videos or tell stories throughout this training phase about both the correct and incorrect ways to do things, so trainers learn about things quickly.
• Keep the training video length short (max 30 seconds), so the information given in the video is easily digestible for cleaning staff without fear of attention loss.

Step 3: Implement/Action

Now that you’re done with written training material and video demonstration exercise in your training program, it’s the time to showcase those cleaning tasks in real-world to your cleaning staff or trainees, so they can learn, observe and get skilled with it.

Don’t expect them to do any particular cleaning task accurately, right after you showcase the same during training. It’s like showcasing a small kid how to less up his shoes, but without execution or practice, the child will never probably learn it.

The same thing goes with cleaning staff during the training program. It is important you showcase every cleaning task to your trainee cleaning staff by doing it on your own in a detailed manner at the very first and then ask them questions like – are they finding it easy? what are the steps they feel difficult to perform in this particular cleaning task? etc. – the more questions an employee asks, the faster they will learn.

Also, provide positive reinforcement to your cleaning staff when they do it correctly.

Important Training Tips for Commercial Cleaners at This Stage

• Use real-life situations (e.g. client service locations like office, apartments, etc.) to train your employees better during commercial cleaning training. However, avoid letting your clients know that your staff is in a training phase.
• Implement techniques like simulation and role-playing to train, practice and reinforce cleaning expertise among trainee commercial cleaners.
• , Unlike regular training sessions which involve the instructor in front and the employees seated at tables, make circular seating arrangements for more interactive, engaging training sessions.
• During extensive in-house training, invite consultants, conduct seminars, workshops, etc. for your trainee cleaning staff, so that they can learn faster about different cleaning procedures, cleaning products, surface types and industry standards for cleaning, like how to deal with blood-borne pathogens, etc.

Step 4: Review/Feedback

At the last phase of the commercial cleaning training program, it is important to check the training knowledge gained by your employees. You can ask them to bring notes prepared by them initially during the training program, Also, review the work or activities performed by your employees during the training as a part of their learning.

It helps you to reinforce training knowledge among your employees and make them better compliant with your company’s cleaning standards. Further up, also check that your management staff, trainers and supervisors are doing a good job related to training your janitorial employees. Of course, the best place to get feedback about the quality of your commercial cleaning training program is your trainees themselves.

Training Tips for Commercial Cleaners at This Phase:

• Use innovative feedback tools like quizzes to determine the knowledge obtained by your employees during the commercial cleaning training program.
• Keep questions short and fair in your feedback quizzes for employees.
• Provide clear and precise instructions for each client location to your trainee employees when they are posted for work there.
• Proactively support newly trained employees and answer all cleaning-related queries at the client site.
• Follow-up regularly and get feedback from cleaning staff to improve your training program, once they start working on real projects.

Summing Up ..!

Providing proper training to commercial cleaning staff is vital to get the job done safely, correctly, and efficiently at client locations. Regular in-house training creates new opportunities for employees to learn, improve, and build upon their existing capabilities.

It also provides a better opportunity for cleaning companies to retain their employees. Making training hands-on, informative and fun is important to keep your employees interested and engaged during commercial cleaning training sessions for corporate cleaners.

At last, a well-trained commercial cleaner is a great asset to have for any cleaning company as it will lead to more customer referrals, client satisfaction, and higher profits.

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