What is an SLA in cleaning contracts?
A service level agreement sets the measurable standards a cleaning contract will be judged by — audit scores, response times, staffing levels — and what happens when they are not met.
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<img src="https://cleanoptix.co.uk/glossary/service-level-agreement/diagram.svg" alt="service level agreement — diagram from CleanOptix" width="880" height="620" loading="lazy">
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<a href="https://cleanoptix.co.uk/glossary/service-level-agreement">What is an SLA in cleaning contracts?</a> — diagram by
<a href="https://cleanoptix.co.uk">CleanOptix</a>
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</figure>The specification says what will be done; the SLA says how well, how quickly and with what consequence. A contract with a detailed specification and no SLA has described the work without defining success.
The measures need to be ones both sides can see the same way. An audit score from a form both parties have agreed is arguable; a client's general impression is not, and contracts that rest on the latter end in disagreement.
Response times for reactive work are usually where an SLA bites hardest, because they are the part of the service a client notices in the moment rather than at a monthly review.
In practice
A contract measured on audit scores alone.
The scores are good and the client is unhappy. What is going wrong is response: a reported spillage takes two days to reach anybody who can act, and the monthly score does not notice.
An SLA that measures only output misses the things people actually experience, which are usually about speed and communication.
The metric that would have shown it is the one nobody agreed, because it was harder to define than a percentage.
What goes wrong in practice
- Measures written that nobody collects data for, so the SLA is unenforceable in both directions.
- Audit scoring criteria not agreed, so every score becomes a negotiation.
- Reactive response times agreed without reference to how the labour is actually deployed.