10 Expert Tips to Hire and Train Cleaning Staff That Will Shine

When running your own cleaning business, creating a client list and meeting their needs is only the beginning. You need to build a well-oiled team, so every individual can work independently and provide your clients with quality service.

But you can’t take any random person off the street, give them some gloves and a sponge, and expect them to do an amazing job. 

Firstly, you need to follow the right steps to recruit the best candidates for your cleaning staff. And secondly, you need to give them the right tools and training resources to hit the ground running and grow into their role.

Let’s break down exactly what you need to hire the very best talent for your cleaning business. Also, learn how to give them the best training experience to execute their jobs to perfection. This can apply to any cleaning service, including house cleaning, disinfection, or laundry cleaning.

Traits You Should Look for When Hiring Cleaning Staff

The first step of hiring cleaning staff is highlighting the core strengths of the ideal employee you’re trying to recruit. You will only get the right candidates on board if you know exactly what you expect from the job. 

Here are some of the most crucial traits to consider when hiring cleaning staff:

• They have previous cleaning experience: Ideally, you want to hire staff who already have previous experience in other cleaning companies. Everyone needs to start somewhere, but hiring newbies requires training. You might be more inclined to recruit employees who already have the skills and knowledge to perform your required jobs.
• Problem solvers: Even when your team is in one location together, you need to assure that each employee has the ability to work independently. This means they should be able to solve problems, both big and small, without needing to seek help from others.
• Approachable for clients: Your cleaning staff should always be friendly to your clients and make them feel accommodated and safe.
• Trustworthy: When a client starts bringing cleaning staff into their homes or facilities, they are bringing in strangers. Allowing others to clean or maintain their premises comes with a high level of trust. They have faith that your staff won’t steal or damage any items on site. Criminal background checks could be necessary, depending on the clientele.
• Dedicated: Ideally, you’ll be able to count on all of your staff. This means they always arrive to jobs on time and don’t regularly decline their shifts last minute.

How to Hire Cleaning Staff

Finding the ideal candidates for your cleaning business is no easy process. The best hiring strategies require following many key steps and lots of time and resources. 

Let’s break those steps for you to give yourself the best chance of hiring the right cleaning staff.

Step 1 – Create & Share Your Cleaning Job Ad

Identify the strengths of your current, successful team members and use them to create a job specification ad. For many potential applicants, it’s the first time they’ll see your company, so you want to give the best first impression. 

You need to explain what your company wants to achieve and why they should apply. Typical job ad details include:

• Job title
• Job description
• Salary range
• Potential employee benefits

Make sure to provide contact details so applicants can reach out to you, whether that be an e-mail address or phone number. 

When posting job ads, you should exhaust your options. Not only should you upload the job ad to your website, but consider posting on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. 

Upload job ads to job posting boards such as Indeed and Monster, as well as professional networking sites like LinkedIn.

Step 2 – Review All Applications

After your application timeframe has expired, review every single application, and then sort them in order of how interested you are in pursuing each applicant.

Step 3 – Schedule & Conduct the Interview

A quick phone interview can give you an initial idea of whether an applicant is a good fit or not. 

After that, schedule an in-person behavioral interview to get a more in-depth overview of the applicant, covering their background, strengths, past experiences, and previous jobs with focused questions.

Step 4 – Conduct Background Checks

After shortlisting your best candidates, conduct some kind of background check to learn if they have any kind of criminal record, with their consent.

Step 5 – Ask for References

Ask the candidate’s previous employers for opinions on how they are as an employee. The applicant will most likely provide references with positive reviews of their performance, but it’s nevertheless worth checking up on. 

Step 6 – Offer the Ideal Candidate the Job

Once you know who you want to hire, provide them with a formal job offer. While many will accept the offer unconditionally, others will attempt to negotiate terms. 

Don’t go over budget to accommodate a candidate’s needs. There’s also the option to hire someone under a probationary period.

Why You Need Training For Cleaning Staff

If your cleaners are untrained, then they are open to risks to themselves, to others, and to the surface materials around them. Not to mention that they will ultimately waste time and product.

Apart from the safety aspect, training for cleaning staff is critical to establish better cleaning practices and standards, and can even contribute to fewer direct costs through reduced wastage. 

Moreover, Employee Benefit News discovered that it costs 33% of an employee’s annual salary to replace workers if they leave the company. However, employees who stay, without proper or effective training, cost the company so much more through poor customer experiences, more errors, poor quality, and more. 

And if you didn’t consider that your employees want to be properly trained then you’re sorely wrong on that account. A study found that 61% of employees would perform their job more effectively if they were properly trained.

Moreover, that same study found that employees are far more committed to the company when they have training opportunities as well.

So, if you’re looking to save on costs, have fewer turnover, have satisfied customers, and have a competent team, you must know how to training staff from the moment they set foot in your door.

We gathered the best and most effective tips on how to train cleaning staff so you can be sure your team is delivering exceptional customer service and repeat business. (Not to mention all the other benefits of training for cleaning staff!)

10 Tips on How to Train Cleaning Staff

The world is digital these days. There’s no escaping that. And if you’re still running your company with pen and paper or even endless Excel spreadsheets, you’re open to countless human errors and unnecessary costs due to those mistakes.

So, what does this mean if you’re looking for tips on how to train your cleaning staff?

• Cleaners want digital training because they want access to information that is readily available
• No one wants to spend time sitting in one room for an all-day training session, digital training is time-effective
• It’s a more flexible way to learn as it’s done on your own time and can pick up where someone left off

This is exactly why so many cleaning companies are turning to digital onboarding and training processes. Take Connecteam, for example .This all-in-one employee training software helps managers and owners of cleaning companies ensure that employee development and training are efficient and quick.

Digital training is used to reach every single cleaner that’s always on the go. You’re able to keep track of their progress and complete training on subjects including:

• Health and safety training
• Proper use of hazardous materials
• Equipment usage
• Maintenance of equipment and resources
• Knowing how to perform cleaning in restroom care, carpet care, general office cleaning, etc.

What’s more is that with Connecteam, you can set deadlines to training programs, see who hasn’t completed their courses in time and send your cleaners reminders to ensure that no important knowledge falls through the cracks.

Additionally, you can create a full knowledge center for safety resources available at the click of a button. This allows your cleaning crew to immediately get answers to questions so they don’t have to chase after you with countless text messages or phone calls.

Dish out online quizzes to ensure that your cleaning staff really understands the material covered.

Onboarding is killer in this app. Many small and big businesses deal with space problems within their offices but Connecteam offers flexibility so you can accomplish the onboarding process from a distance. I love the onboarding feature. 

Parfait Vandi, President and Qualify Manager of UGS Private Security Inc.

Connecteam makes it quick and efficient to onboard new cleaners and gets them up to speed in a timely manner. With training, courses, quizzes, and knowledge bases, your cleaners have a structured onboarding experience that is both simple and effective.

Soft skills are positive and strong personality attributes that allow your workers to get the job done. Successfully done.

Now, it is more challenging to train soft skills to your cleaning crew but you can encourage emotional intelligence and “people skills” in your team.

Don’t solely focus on performance metrics when training for cleaning staff. Instead, motivate and encourage your cleaning staff to build personal connections with clients. No, your team doesn’t need to know the customer’s entire life story. However, ensure your team can be sensitive and attentive to your customer’s needs and expectations to help ensure repeat business.

Soft skills include many of these traits: 

• Communication skills
• Creative thinking
• Work ethic
• Adaptability
• Teamwork
• Decision making
• Positivity and motivation
• Problem-solving
• Time management
• Conflict resolution and flexibility

By hiring employees with soft skills, positive personalities, and a can-do attitude, (and training those who lack such skills) you can take your onboarding and business to the next level. 

If you really want to know how to train your cleaning staff, then start with belief. Your cleaners need to believe in your business. If they don’t, then they’re not the right fit for the company.

You need a team that is confident in what they do and the brand they represent.

However, make sure you aren’t overselling or overpromising your company, like bonuses every month or 150% growth. You must be honest and realistic. 

To best motivate your tea and pursue effective training for cleaning staff, you need to set short and long term goals together. The goals you create together can serve as the foundation for every task your cleaners complete on a daily basis. 

This will truly help your team as it reassures them that they’re working towards a bigger picture; they know what they do matters in the long run. 

Make sure to create realistic goals so that no one is working aimlessly towards something that can’t ever be reached. For example, push 14 upsells a month is manageable if the cleaner has 30 clients, but if they only had eight clients, meeting 14 would be impossible. 

For both effective training and gathering information from their jobs, cleaning staff need to fill in forms or tick off checklists of what to complete instead of keeping it all in their heads. 

With Connecteam, you can write out the topics, videos, reading material, and whatever else should be covered so that cleaners are able to tick off all of their training tasks as they go.

Being prepared in advance ensures that your team is well-informed and shows that you, as a manager, are taking their training seriously. 

With the app’s forms and checklists feature, you can build an in-app training process that covers the following topics:

• A formal letter welcoming the employee to the company
• A checklist to guide the training like with a “New Employee Checklist”
• Personal information form
• Background and security check compliance forms
• Employee uniform order and agreement form
• Nondisclosure agreement
• Declaration of pre-booked holidays
• Read & sign of appropriate forms

A thorough cleaning job is a top priority and ensures positive customer service. However, ensure that your cleaners are comfortable and confident in going above and beyond for the customer.

Allow your employees to offers extras, or upsells, to the customer like a deep carpet clean or a 5% discount, as this helps guarantee repeat business. 

Your cleaning job training should cover tactics to offer exceptional customer service, including: 

• Taking notes on client preferences and sharing them with the team
• Having answers to common customer questions (an FAQ section in your training app comes in handy here)
• Quickly responding to phone calls, emails, social media messages, etc.
• Allow time gaps between jobs to minimize arriving late or needing to leave early for a cleaning job 
• Wear the proper uniform
• Have all necessary tools and equipment (along with backup)

Sometimes accidents happen, so make sure your team is trained to handle it like a pro. Whether it’s breaking or damaging a piece of property, your organization needs detailed instructions on how to handle the situation. 

Ideally, business insurance ensures your clients’ property and employees’ safety is covered. And you should make sure that your team has the insurance information and contact information on hand. 

Ensure your cleaning staff understands how the insurance covers them and the customer and how they can best communicate this to the customer.

Throughout training and onboarding, video is a great way to reach the employee and really tell a story.

Record examples of how to go about the correct and incorrect way to do something so it engages the team and helps make the information stick. The skits can then be recorded and used as training videos for future cleaners.

However, try to keep the videos short, so you can hold the employees’ attention.

Amy Champigny, the senior product manager at Deltek, stated that “when developing relationships for the first time, it’s important to rely on video to lead the interaction. This allows both the manager and new hire to read the tone of voice, facial expression, and feel a sense of connection.” Now, technology shouldn’t replace the human touch but it does build a relationship between managers and employees.

Use software like Zoom or Loom to answer commonly asked questions, hold training, have meetings, and you can even screen-record how to use cleaning materials or how to fill out a certain form. 

All of your cleaners should be 100% up to speed on the latest health and safety protocols, including fire protocols as well. Regularly update them on new updates to health and safety to ensure they’re safe, and your customers are as well. 

For companies in the United States, OSHA has laid out the health and safety topics a cleaning company should adhere to:

• Recommended Practices for Safety and Health Programs are used in a wide variety of small and medium-sized business settings and present a step-by-step approach to implementing a safety and health program.
• Job Hazard Analysis
• Safety Pays Program assesses the impact of occupational injuries and illnesses on an employer’s profitability. 
• Safety and Health Management Program Guidelines; Issuance of Voluntary Guidelines highlights safety and health program management guidelines to prevent occupational injuries and illnesses.
• Elements of an Effective Safety and Health Program.
• Business Case for Safety and Health provides information on how an effective safety and health program can improve an organization’s productivity and profitability.

Health and safety are constantly evolving – that’s something the recent COVID-19 pandemic has taught us – so ensure that you are regularly checking if OSHA or other institutions have released new guidelines for your industry.

Creating an employee handbook can help your cleaners when it comes to training for cleaning staff as they can refer to it at any moment if they have questions, concerns, or just need a refresher. 

Try to keep it short and to the point, and it should be updated regularly.

If you’re using Connecteam’s employee app then you can upload the employee handbook directly to the app so your employees can refer to it in real-time whenever they need it. 

Download our free employee handbook template to get started.

Include the following: 

• Company history
• Company mission, values, etc.
• Company hierarchy & contact information
• HR procedures like calling in sick, requesting time off, etc.
• Payroll information
• Review of key training components
• Health and safety 
• Potential damages management 
• Employee expectations, code of conduct, etc.
• Dress code
• Resignation and termination

Regularly update the employee handbook and add material as needed.

Training For Cleaning Staff – One Final Tip

Make sure you ask your new hires and even “veteran” staff for feedback and suggestions about training, onboarding, and development. This will allow you to create the best cleaning job training. 

Our guide outlines how to train cleaning staff, but if you have additional questions, then be sure to reach out to us at [email protected] or on any of our social channels.  

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