CLEANING IN RETAIL
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leaning is one of the barometers of service in facilities. But in retail it is much more important than that. For a high street retailer – to whom protection of its brand image is paramount – the perception of quality and great service is measured not just by the hygiene standards of the toilets, but the entire retail experience. That is why within the retail sector cleaning is central to success – it is not just another box to be ticked within a range of soft services provided by major support services organisations. That’s the theory, and it’s the argument put forward by the specialist cleaning companies. But often clients looking for a competitive price and many of the larger service providers do not buy into that model. Indeed, some people on the client side and supply side will see cleaning as a service that is strictly controlled in terms of time allocated per square metre, or determined by the nature of an environment or space to be cleaned. There is often little connection between the nature of that service, how it is provided, and the people doing the cleaning or the impact upon the ultimate end user – the shopper. This is in part because of the prevalence of some procurement specialists and the basic desire to drive down costs, but it is also because there is a disconnection between what cleaning in retail is about and the result. And one of the main reasons for this is an obsession with technology. The cleaning sector has been seduced by the idea of solely using technological data to measure performance and so has drifted away from what cleaning is all about – physical cleaning of a customer’s property or asset by real people. Using technology to manage the services provided makes sense, but the desire to measure productivity and effectiveness has begun to obscure the actual service being provided.
People, not data Store managers, even the floor staff within the larger department store, and their consumers do not care about the service agreement and time allocated for each task – they simply want a clean, spotless environment in which to shop that shows off the retailer’s brand to the best effect. Therefore the real focus of management should be on the people delivering the cleaning – not the systems and processes assessing www.fm-world.co.uk
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their work. After all, it is a human being that delivers the service and although technology has a part to play, that is what managers should be concentrating on – not solely on data. But there is a strong risk that customers (that is, the retailers buying the services of an FM or cleaning specialist) and service providers are only measuring performance from their desks (often through no fault of their own) through technology. Not enough attention is being paid at a site level to get the full picture of service delivery. Suppliers need to be hands-on with their cleaning teams, and for that they need the necessary budget in order to have the freedom to do so. This is potentially a problem for those service providers seeking to offer a complete range of soft and hard services. In contracts of a certain size, the danger is that for the larger service provider, the client and their respective stores become just another contract to manage; there is no special relationship in place.
“The cleaning sector has been seduced by the idea of solely using technological data to measure performance”
Service targets Below, say, £10 million a contract can cease to grab the attention of senior management, leaving disempowered field staff to fend for themselves. The bigger FM players need the larger contracts to maintain revenue growth and replace lost work – their customers are happy to pay for what they perceive as a competent service at a cheaper price than a specialist competitor, backed by the guarantees offered by the larger brand name. But the sheer size of service provider and the nature of the contracts make achieving the agreed service targets very difficult without an element of compromise. All too often that compromise is about people and the result is an impact on quality. The bigger players may be overly reliant on technology and this has removed the personal touch. The relationship with individual team members, many of whom will often be waking up at 4am, is not close enough. These are the frontline staff; they are fundamentally the most important assets to any support services company. But many organisations are not managing the relationships with their people effectively. The cleaning sector needs to return to a people-focused industry and make sure that it has the right culture in place to foster better people management and encourage the right behaviours FM WORLD | 10 APRIL 2014 | 21
03/04/2014 14:23