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Hard floor care has never been simple, but today, it’s more demanding than ever. Cleaning professionals are being asked to deliver consistent results across multiple surface types, in more environments, with fewer team members, tighter schedules, equipment limitations, and higher expectations for appearance and hygiene.

The entire industry is in a bit of flux, explained Bill Griffin, president of Cleaning Consultant Services Inc. in Seattle. Changes are occurring in labor, surfaces, chemicals, customer expectations, budgets, robotics, and artificial intelligence.

“If you’re not staying on top of that and continuing to educate yourself as a manager or owner and training your employees to deal with the most recent surfaces, then you’re going to be having some troubles,” Griffin said. “It just gets expensive. You can damage a floor really quickly by using the wrong processes.”

Griffin advised starting hard floor care by reviewing the manufacturer’s instructions for installation, maintenance, care, and warranty. If any problems occur, the manufacturers will either stand behind the claim or decline it, he explained.

Labor problems

Labor is the No. 1 problem, said Taf Baig, owner of Magic Wand Co. in Perth Amboy, New Jersey. Often, owners do not adequately train team members, and employees can become liabilities. Employee burnout is also real and must be addressed before it affects productivity. Additionally, scheduling too many employees for pre-cleaning or setup consumes time and money.

Equipment breakdowns, failure to fix equipment, and bringing too much equipment to a job also reduce productivity. For example, some cleaners will use whatever equipment is available when a machine breaks down.

“Low-production machines will just kill time, and that costs you money,” Baig said. Infrequent maintenance usually displaces problems, he added, leading to more serious equipment malfunctions.

Additionally, chemistry is often ignored.

“Chemistry really cuts your cost down quite a bit,” Baig said. “If you have the correct chemistry, the cleaning time will be reflected in that because the chemistry is going to do the work. The problem is that people don’t really understand [chemistry] that much. They’re almost afraid of it.”

Additionally, owners must provide team members with written expectations and instructions that can be enforced. “It gives them the ability not to forget a lot of the things that are important,” Baig said.

Time and money

Bob Merkt, owner of Kettle Moraine Professional Cleaners Inc. in West Bend, Wisconsin, speaks often in his training about production killers because it’s all about time and money. “Sometimes it’s not hours; it’s minutes that you save,” he explained.

Merkt breaks hard floor cleaning into three categories: pre-cleaning, cleaning, and post-cleaning. Cleaning professionals often overlook pre- and post-cleaning procedures that gobble up person-hours and are unproductive. To avoid wasting time, during pre-cleaning, a team member must go to inspect the job and test the floor for cleanability and results.

“Test cleaning the floor is going to eliminate a million problems,” Merkt said. “… You have a good idea what it’s going to take to meet the customer’s expectation, and the customer will have a realistic look at the end result.”

Another production killer at the beginning of the job is failing to obtain all pertinent information, such as entry issues. To manage the indoor environment, Merkt advised asking questions, including: How are we getting in? What is our alarm code? Where are the lights? Where’s the breaker box? Where’s the water source? Will there be any security issues? Will the air conditioning be shut off?

“Much of our work is done at night and on weekends,” he explained. “If we’re applying a coating or a finish or a sealer of some sort and the indoor environment is not such that is conducive to rapid drying, you may be sitting on a floor that’s taking forever for that finish to dry.”

Merkt also recommends having a clear understanding of what you expect from your customer and what the customer expects from you. For example, is the customer or the cleaner moving the contents, and what does that entail?

“I’ve walked into jobs where the customer said, ‘We got it all ready,’” Merkt explained. In reality, Merkt’s team moved everything, while the customer had moved only a few chairs and garbage cans.

“You have to set that expectation,” he said. “What are you moving so that you can plan accordingly if you’re the one expected to move it, and you can get enough manpower in there and enough time.”

Managing teams

Regarding labor, Merkt has also seen companies spend thousands of dollars a year on developing a prep-and-landing team. Instead, Merkt advised that if you are going out to do a big job, such as at a school or healthcare facility, where you need eight employees, not all of them need to meet at the shop.

“All of those people do not have to load the van and get everything ready for this assignment,” he explained. “When you bring them to your facility, you have to pay them from the time they get there. If you have a prep team, it only takes one or two people, three in some cases, to load the equipment, get there, and have everything all set up. Then you assign the workers to show up at the appropriate time after you have all that prep work done. They walk in, they jump on a machine, and they’re going instantly.”

By having people show up to the job when you properly plan for their arrival, you can let them go when they need to as well.

“If you have six people standing around, and they can’t go because Johnny is not done with his task and he’s driving the van, or we only have one van, then you’ve got people standing around doing nothing,” Merkt said. “When they’re done, they can go.”

Additionally, when a team member finishes using a piece of equipment, they can clean and prepare it for the next job.

“A production killer is taking it back to the shop and leaving it sitting there until the next time you need it,” Merkt explained. “It’s all gunked up, and you’ve got to clean it before you go.”

Smarter planning

Organizing, managing, and assigning crew members to their tasks is essential.

“Don’t leave it up to the crews,” Merkt said. “Everybody has their area of expertise, and this guy may be better at that, or this guy may be better at this. You want to assign the task to the person best suited for it. And of course, establish the flow of work. You, as the manager, should understand we’re starting over here, we’re going to end over here, and do we need to do certain areas first?”

Merkt emphasized that pre- and post-cleaning procedures are essential to increasing productivity.

“At the end of the day, when you look at how many man-hours it took you to do the job, and then you divide that by what you make, you go, ‘Wow, I hardly made any money,’” Merkt said. “‘Well, if I could eliminate six, seven, ten man-hours on the job, I might have broken even.’”

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