Salt, wet floors and a skeleton rota: cleaning through Christmas

A cleaning contract is priced against a building in its ordinary state. From about November that building stops being ordinary: salt and grit arrive on every pair of shoes, matting saturates by mid-morning, hard floors are wet for most of the day, and it is dark before the shift starts. The specification has not changed. What it takes to meet it has.

The contractual side of that — who pays for salt, grit and extra matting — is in winter cleaning contracts. This is about what actually happens on site in the weeks around Christmas.

The person most likely to slip is the one who wet the floor

Wet floor signage protects the public. It does nothing for the cleaner, who is working on the surface they have just mopped, in a building that is darker than usual, often alone. The control that protects them is how the area is worked: which half first, which route out, and whether anybody is coming the other way.

Winter makes this worse in a specific way. Entrances stay wet continuously rather than drying between passes, so the hazard is permanent rather than episodic, and a sign that is always out stops being a signal. That belongs in the cleaning risk assessment as a seasonal condition rather than being rediscovered every year.

What salt does to a floor and to a schedule

Grit is abrasive and salt is corrosive, and between them they do more damage to a hard floor in one winter than a year of ordinary traffic. A floor maintained nightly with the wrong method will look worn by February, and the client will read that as poor cleaning rather than as a seasonal maintenance question — which is the floor care problem in miniature: appearance is a periodic outcome maintained by a daily method.

Matting is the cheapest intervention available and the one most contracts leave unowned. Enough of it, changed often enough, keeps most of the grit out of the building entirely. Who supplies it and who swaps it are questions worth settling in the specification rather than in December.

Periodic work in a month with no room for it

December is the month periodic tasks disappear. Buildings are busier, access windows shrink around parties and early closes, and the team is short. A monthly task sitting in a box at the bottom of a schedule was already likely to slip; in December it certainly will.

Put the periodic work on dates before the month starts, and move what cannot be done rather than letting it vanish — a moved task with a reason against it is management information, and a silently skipped one is an audit finding in January.

Cover is the whole game

Most cleaning happens when buildings are empty, which over Christmas means buildings that are empty for days. Two things follow.

• –Named cover for every site, with somebody authorised to arrange it and a route for telling the client
• –Keys, alarm codes and access arrangements confirmed for whoever is actually attending — not for whoever usually does
• –Induction for cover staff before their first shift, including the alarm, the store and what must not be mixed
• –A check-in arrangement that somebody is watching, rather than a number to ring
• –Agreed hours for the period, in writing, because a reduced service nobody confirmed is a complaint in January

Cover staff are also where chemical incidents happen. Somebody unfamiliar with the site, working alone at night in a small room, reaching for something stronger because a stain will not shift — that is the circumstance behind most of them. The instruction never to mix products belongs in the induction, not in a folder, and it is in the COSHH assessment for every product on site.

The related point from staff shortages and cover: a site covered by whoever the supervisor could reach is a site where nobody has checked what that person has been trained on.

The audit does not know it is December

Scores drift in winter for reasons that have nothing to do with effort — entrances that cannot stay dry, periodic work that slipped, cover staff learning a site. That drift is worth recording as a cause rather than absorbing as a performance problem, which is exactly what the cause column on the quality audit form is for. A low score because the specified frequency is too low for December footfall and a low score because the work was done badly look identical on a scoresheet and need completely different answers.