Speed Cleaning (12 page)

Your home is the housecleaner’s place of business. Is it a good place
to work? The spirit or morale of your household is set by you. It’s more than a matter of trying to get along with your housecleaner; the human relations between you and your housecleaner are grounded in job satisfaction and job performance. Friendliness without these other foundations inevitably results in poor morale. If you create a positive work environment in your home, your housecleaner will feel good about the work and will be free to do his or her best. People who feel good produce good results.

The best way to create good morale is to look for people’s strengths. Peter Drucker, in
The Practice of Management,
says: “Nothing destroys the spirit of an organization faster than focusing on people’s weaknesses rather than on their strengths, building on disabilities rather than abilities.”
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Your housecleaner is a resource. However, the housecleaner has absolute control over whether she or he works at all, so your housecleaner as a resource has got to be motivated. Fear is not much of a motivator anymore. In a society able to provide subsistence to the unemployed, fear has lost much of its grip. Besides, firing people doesn’t get the work done.

Motivating doesn’t mean you have to be autocratic or hard-nosed. Positive motivation is usually far more successful than negative. But purely democratic, participative, supportive, or humanistic ideals
alone aren’t enough either. Money is important, but it’s largely a negative incentive; being unhappy with pay is a powerful disincentive, but satisfaction with pay motivates only when other factors are working. A high wage won’t keep people motivated if they hate every minute they spend at work, or if they are belittled, or if they feel exploited.

Here are six specific ways to motivate your housecleaner.

1. Start with yourself and set high standards:

2. Give housecleaners all the information necessary to be in control of their work and to be able to deliver a responsive performance. The housecleaner has to know what you want done, how you want it done, where things go, what not to touch, and so on. This is how job satisfaction starts. There’s almost no better way to destroy morale than not letting someone know how to satisfy expectations. One can try hard but never have it turn out to be right or enough.

3. Let your housecleaners know how important their work is to your home and/or family as a whole. Tell them how their contributions improve your home life, reduce stress, afford you valuable extra time, etc. Allow them to see your household as if they were responsible, through their performance, for some of the success of your household.

4. Allow the housecleaners to participate in the planning of the job. They are more likely to feel responsible for the results if they helped plan the job itself. Don’t detail them to death with what you want done, in what order, and how to do it. To be motivating and satisfying, work needs some element of challenge, skill, and judgment.

5. Establish and sustain rapport by leaving your housecleaners a note every time they visit; address them by name. Thank them for last week’s extra work; explain that because the sink’s a mess this week they can skip it; swear undying loyalty; tell them Aunt Bunny is coming and the spare room needs special attention; pass on a good joke; tell them there’s a treat in the cookie jar. Try to keep your notes upbeat. And you’ll get answers. This is a dialogue—and dialogue is critical to
managing and motivating. We have clients who look forward nearly as much to the weekly note as to the clean house.

Leave your note every single time—not just when you have extra requests or a reminder or a complaint. Consider how you’d feel if the only words you ever had from your employer or client were negative. A note with no special instructions—such as “nothing special today, just the usual great job”—is just as important as the ones that are chockfull of instructions. But when you do need to work out a problem, it will be much easier on you both if it’s part of a regular weekly note.

6. Probably the most effective motivators of all are the simple expressions of thanks and appreciation for work well done: “Fantastic job!” “I could not have done that better myself, and you know how particular I am about my kitchen.” “Thank you so much for working so hard on those horrible shower walls.” “Thank you for all your efforts. You make our home and life so much more comfortable and pleasant.”

Praise doesn’t have to be lavish, but people do need to know their efforts are noticed and appreciated. A good manager knows this and never fails to act on it. Invariably, a simple “thanks” will guarantee an even better job done the next time. Especially don’t forget to acknowledge the effort put into a special request or project.

Rewards and small considerations are great if they are sincere and appropriate. Cookies, holiday cards, or candy are all effective ways to express appreciation or thanks.

Management of a housecleaner (or a team) who works for a company is effectively the same as managing your own employee. Think of yourself as a midlevel manager. The difference is that you aren’t directly in charge of the cleaners; you can correct their work only up to a certain point before you need to talk to their boss. This type of relationship limits your control. But it doesn’t limit your using all your managing and motivating skills.

Of course, the best way to know whom to call is via a recommendation from a neighbor or relative or friend. If you were so lucky, you probably wouldn’t be reading this.

Start with names from a friend, from a flyer in the mail, from the Yellow Pages, from an ad on the side of a bus, or from a billboard. Then call them up and interview them on the phone. Ask them to tell
you what they clean and what they prefer to clean. For example, here in San Francisco there are cleaners who clean only empty homes or apartments, who clean only after fires or other insurance-related events, who clean only on a one-time basis, who clean only carpets, and so on.

Ask if they clean in your neighborhood.

Ask about their experience. How long have they been in business? Have they had any formal training?

They should be able to give you a reference. Give them a couple of days to check with one of their customers to get permission to give their name and telephone number to you. But don’t necessarily give up on a particular individual or company if they don’t have a reference. Some people are reluctant to give out their names and telephone numbers to strangers.

Also check with the Better Business Bureau. Poor cleaning services accumulate a negative file with the BBB rather quickly. Bear in mind that individual cleaners are less likely to have complaints filed against them with the BBB.

If you’re looking for ongoing household cleaning, the service should make an appointment to see your home in order to give you an estimate. You may prefer that they just come and clean your home once so you can see if their work is any good. However, most companies really do need to know how much work there is before they can schedule you, and countless potential misunderstandings can be
avoided by having them see your home prior to cleaning it the first time. Read on.

It’s more important how much work gets done per hour than what the hourly rate is. But many people still shop by comparing hourly rates. It’s no bargain to pay $4.00 per hour for eight hours of work when someone else can finish the job in far less time at a higher rate—especially if the lower-paid worker is not very experienced, is a mediocre cleaner, or is unreliable.

If you have a housecleaner you like, it can be to your advantage to pay by the hour. Housecleaners will get faster and faster at cleaning your home as they do it over and over again. So after a few months, cleaning your home may only take them three hours instead of the five hours it originally took. For the same price, you can now have the housecleaner do some ironing, wash a few windows, polish some brass or silver, or do some other chore that wasn’t originally included in the housecleaning.

Many housecleaners or cleaning companies charge by the job instead of the hour, especially for ongoing cleaning. It might take them a little longer one time and a little shorter the next, but it averages out.

A fixed job price has many advantages: you know how much work
will get done, you don’t have to worry whether they work fast or slow, or take breaks on your time. All you have to consider is whether the price is fair and the house is clean.

It also gives housecleaners a chance to earn more money per hour by concentrating on being efficient. This is a real morale-booster because they can earn the same amount of money in fewer hours. Working more efficiently and smarter doesn’t mean that the quality of work suffers. In fact, quite the opposite is commonly true because the work that is done is given full attention.

A fixed price assumes a job description: exactly what work is going to be done for the price. Generally, the job description is for “light housecleaning,” which should include all the things you would normally clean once a week or every other week if you were doing the work yourself.

Cleaning tasks not included in the job description are yearly or “spring cleaning” chores, such as washing windows, stripping wax off floors, polishing silver, cleaning ovens, washing walls and ceilings, and cleaning carpets. Expect to pay extra for many of these chores.

A job description has to assume that the house is ready to be cleaned so the housecleaner can go right to work. People often joke that they have to clean up before the cleaners arrive. But what we’re really talking about is picking up the house so the cleaners can get to the surfaces they are supposed to clean. Picking up is daily cleaning, and a good example is the kitchen. We can’t clean the sink if it’s full of dirty
dishes. That doesn’t mean that they can’t be washed; it just means that if you want to include a
daily
cleaning job like the dishes, you’ll need to discuss it and expect to pay for it.

Housecleaners usually will want to clean when you’re at work. They need a reliable, fail-safe way to get into your home—usually a key.

There are a few alternatives to providing a key. A doorman, babysitter, neighbor, or landlord are all fine as long as they never leave the house. Our exhaustive experiments have shown that, without fail, the moment your neighbor runs to the store for a quart of milk The Clean Team will arrive. It is surprisingly difficult to arrange fail-safe access via a third party.

Some clients attempt to solve their security fears by scheduling the housecleaners to clean when the clients have a day off. This is a great way to ruin an otherwise perfectly good day. It is very frustrating to have plans for your day off and then find yourself waiting for a housecleaner who has been delayed. Even if the housecleaner does arrive on time, you may quickly discover that you don’t appreciate having someone underfoot.

Absolutely don’t leave the key under the door mat! Not only do burglars know about this favorite hiding place, but if there ever were a burglary at your home, how would you know who did it? At least if the housecleaner or cleaning company has a key and something is missing,
you have a good chance to collect from a reputable housecleaner or company.

Some cleaning companies provide the client with a lockbox and a key to open it. The client puts a key to the house into the lockbox, which is usually hung on the outside doorknob. The housecleaner also has a key to the lockbox and uses it to retrieve the house key, which is replaced upon leaving. We’re not sure how much this improves security. If the housecleaners were dishonest, they could still go copy the keys and replace the originals in the lockbox without the client’s knowledge.

Needless to say, it’s scary to hand over a key, but there seem to be few other options that are any safer and yet still accomplish the purpose. Some people with deadbolts offer only the doorknob key; we have yet to find a client who does not then forget to leave the deadbolt unlocked. In addition, the house is left less secure that day with just the one lock in place, whether we get in to clean or not.

When The Clean Team asks clients to mail us a key, we advise them to take one precaution: not to put their return address either inside or outside the envelope. We tell them to identify the key by name or initials only. We watch for it and call them when it arrives. Once we get the key, we number it and file it in a safe with no reference to name or address. Even if a team should lose a whole ring of keys, they would still be useless to whoever found them.

Teach the housecleaners how to arm and disarm the house’s security system. There are two problems if you leave it disarmed on the day the cleaning service comes. First, of course, your home isn’t as secure as it would be if the alarm were on all day. And second, you have to remember to disarm it. What you really have to do is to remember
not
to do something that you usually do—which is surprisingly difficult. Most alarm systems have special codes that are designed to be used by people who need occasional access to your home. Consider using that feature instead of deactivating your whole alarm system.