Clean Like a Pro: Lessons from the Hospitality Industry

It is hard to blog this week without acknowledging all of the heavy and serious news affecting the United States in light of the horrific attack in Arizona and an unusual car bombing here in the Washington area.   My thoughts and prayers are with all those affected and those trying to make sense of it all.

It feels decadent to have the privilege to discuss something superficial like cleaning but I suppose also therapeutic to retreat into an activity where you can claim nearly full control over the results.

Last week, we discussed cleaning in the context of the home.  This week, we are going to look at cleaning in the commercial context.  There are several industries where cleaning is not just a nice touch but a required aspect of doing business.  Cleaning in these contexts is about dollars and in some cases life and death.  Imagine for a moment having surgery in a filthy operating room or having your hair washed in a dirty salon.   Gives you the creeps, right?  As it should!

The industry with perhaps the greatest cleaning challenges, however, is the hospitality industry.  They have the same challenges the average person faces cleaning their own home, magnified hundreds (or perhaps thousands) of times.  Providing someone an immaculately cleaned and well-maintained “home away from home” is not easy and requires the coordinated efforts of many people and an excellent management team.

How does the hospitality industry pull this off?  For insight I looked to the textbook, Professional Management of Housekeeping Operations, 4^th Edition by Thomas J.A. Jones.  This book was a surprisingly interesting read and left me with a huge appreciation for all that goes on behind the scenes in the hotel industry.  While you might simplistically think (as I did) that all you need is a bunch of maids running around with large cleaning carts, there is a lot more complexity to it than that in the bigger picture.  There are many lessons that we can adopt from hospitality management techniques for the cleaning of our own homes and small businesses.

1.  Write down a cleaning plan. Cleaning of a large, complex space doesn’t happen on the fly.  There is a huge amount of pre-planning and thought that goes into making this happen.  Due to the complexity of the operations, writing the plans down is critical.  Some of the written documents used in a complex cleaning operation include:

a.  Division of Work Document. A generalized list of what needs cleaning, how often and who will clean it, typically organized as follows:

• Rooms (including elevators)
• Public Areas
• Recreation Areas
• Meeting Rooms
• Kitchen Areas
• Maintenance Shops
• Exterior
• Landscaping
• Lighting
• Laundry
• Other

b.  A Cleaning Diagram. In addition to a written description, a diagram showing the location of spaces to be cleaned on a typical shift/day is often used.  It is common to assign each space points based on complexity of cleaning and then create a pictorial cleaning plan allocating a certain number of points per worker or per shift.  (For example: “Clean rooms 101-115 plus the elevator.”) This type of planning could result in a daily schedule, for example, where one day only a few hard to clean rooms are assigned or a mixture of hard to clean and easy to clean areas are assigned on alternating days.

d.  “Opening the House” Daily Plans.

“The day-to-day delegation of tasks as to which rooms require service and who will actually service them is performed through a routine commonly known as opening the house.”

—Professional Management of Housekeeping Operations, 4^th Edition by Thomas J.A. Jones. 

A specific daily plan is needed taking into account day-to-day business occurrences, occupancy and changes required to the cleaning and maintenance plan.  If you are aiming for the highest quality, clean environment, the “opening the house” plan would be the steps needed on that particular morning before your doors open for business or before you invite guests into your home.  In the ideal world, if you were able to do this every morning, you would have no qualms about having a health inspector, critic or other regulator dropping in to your business uninvited or, in the case of your home, random guests dropping in.  What a luxury that would be!

c.  Progress Checklists.  A checklist or log to track the areas that have been cleaned and those that still require cleaning as well as notes on maintenance items, etc.

2.  Define cleaning supply storage spaces.    Cleaning requires supplies and equipment of various kinds and all of these things require storage.  It is common in the hospitality environment that managers of different areas (housekeeping, maintenance, etc.) have to learn to share closets and other storage areas throughout the hotel space.  Some of the types of storage used in high end hotels include:  linen storage, TV repair space or storage for furniture spares.  In your own home or business, you might seek to define a cleaning storage space.  Most homes these days are not built with a designated cleaning closet.

3.  Clean for health.

“Cleaning for appearance is important, but . . . our primary concern as executive housekeepers is to clean for health.”

—Professional Management of Housekeeping Operations, 4^th Edition by Thomas J.A. Jones. 

In a hotel environment, there are serious concerns about cross contamination of bacteria and viruses from one room to another.  While you may not need to worry about this as much in your own home or business, there are a few tips you can apply here.  Most hotels designate red cleaning cloths (or another similarly conspicuous color) to scrub the outside of toilets and other germy spaces so that these cloths are not used for any other purpose.  Disposable mop heads (that can be rewashed and sterilized for future use) are changed from one room to the next.  Also systems that function like a carpet cleaner with one tank for soap and a suction tank for dirty water are used to clean restrooms to prevent any cleaning water and germs being transferred from the restrooms to other spaces.

4.  Don’t forget the importance of a motivated cleaning staff.

“[P]rofessional housekeeping requires a staff with a sense of pride. “

—Professional Management of Housekeeping Operations, 4^th Edition by Thomas J.A. Jones. 

As you can imagine, any hotel, business or home that is going to adopt all of the time consuming steps above has to have a reason to do all of this work.  As I thought about the sentence above, I realized that it gets to the root of what it takes to have a clean home or business.  It is not so much about who has the most energy to clean, who spends the most time cleaning or who knows the most about cleaning.  Rather, a really clean space is only going to result when the people doing the cleaning associate the overall cleanliness of the space as part of their own identities.  They have to feel that cleaning enriches their sense of self-esteem and that the resulting clean space is not just a testament to their cleanliness but rather all of the wonderful qualities they possess.

Unfortunately, there is not a lot of detail in the book about how you motivate an employee to adopt this mindset but a few hints are given.  One of the most important motivational tools is to ensure the employee sees that their job is about far more than just cleaning and that every employee is contributing to the greater goal of the overall success of the enterprise.  Employers who adopt the approach that every job is important are more likely to win the hearts of their staff than those who feel that cleaning attendants are simply replaceable cogs in the machine.

Another motivational technique is to give cleaning attendants responsibility and appropriate recognition for the areas they clean.  There is a hierarchy of cleaning attendants, including room attendants, floor managers, laundry managers, etc.  Titles recognizable by the entire staff are one way to ensure your cleaners will pay attention to something and also so that they get appropriate credit when things go well.

Hopefully these tips have enlightened your thinking on cleaning at the professional level and may have inspired some creative ways to manage cleaning your own spaces.  On Thursday, I will be back to profile the hotel chain that completely blew me away with their cleaning operations during our cross-country vacation last summer.