One thing professional cleaners learn when visiting workplaces across the UK is that most struggle when it comes to creating cleaning checklists. Managers and business owners set out with the very best intentions, though end up with inaccurate, incomplete or entirely inappropriate cleaning checklists that just don’t work.
The beauty of an effective cleaning checklist is the way in which it makes keeping tabs on every key cleaning duty exponentially easier. On the reverse side of the coin, get it wrong and you’ll find yourself fighting a losing battle, day in and day out.
So with this in mind, what follows is a brief outline of the five most important tips for creating an office cleaning checklist that works:
1 – Take Your Time
First of all, if you think you’re going to flutter about the workplace for 20 minutes and come up with a great result, you’re sadly mistaken. If you really want to get it right with a cleaning checklist, you have to take your time and consider every area across the premises from top to bottom. Spend a full day or even longer making a list of the jobs that need to be taken care of, then moving onto the job of prioritising them over one another.
2 – Ask for Input
Under no circumstances should you ever go about the job alone, either. The reason being that it’s almost guaranteed that there will be things you’ll overlook along the way, which a second person may well pick up on. What’s more, along with taking at least one other person along for the ride, be sure to seek the input of everyone else in the workplace. As they have far more familiarity than you with the areas they work in day in and day out, they may have valuable insights to share.
3 – Nit-Pick
It’s important to be extremely critical along the way and never to take things for granted. Just because it seems obvious that any given job will be done as a matter of common sense doesn’t mean it actually will. Remember that if it doesn’t make it onto the checklist, it is not a job that you can expect to get done after it is implemented. Don’t rely on common sense – be extremely specific.
4 – Delegate Duties
While going about the checklist, think carefully along the way about who exactly the jobs that need to be carried out should be delegated to. It could be a case of assigning them to a specific department, desk or individual – the key being to ensure that they are delegated fairly. If you want to ensure that the jobs on the checklist are all carried out with the same level of efficiency and effectiveness, fair delegation is crucial.
5 – Ask the Experts
Last but not least, you could always ask the experts to come in and cast a watchful eye over your workplace, in order to provide a neutral third-party perspective on how things should be done. And of course, you might just find that hiring the pros to take care of all cleaning jobs on your behalf is actually easier and more affordable that taking care of things in-house!