Creating a Winning Cleaning Quality Assurance Program Series

Part 1: If You Want Quality Assurance, You Must Commit to Continuous Improvement

So you've decided your company needs a quality assurance program, some way to measure your progress and keep things moving forward. It may seem like common sense, but the first and most necessary step is one that many people forget: a self-assessment. And it can't be just any self-assessment. It needs to be critical and brutally honest. Begin by using a quality process model, such as the Deming model or the Six Sigma model (which was inspired by Deming's model).

For instance, Deming created a cycle: the 'plan-do-check-act' cycle. The Six Sigma model is similar: Define the process, measure key process indicators, analyze data for root cause, plan and implement improvements, and confirm control results.

As you can see, both models operate by organizing certain analytical processes into practical, easy-to-follow steps. Use them--they're the building blocks of every quality assurance program!

Once you've done an honest evaluation, ask yourself: Is your organizational culture conducive to a continuous improvement program? Are there corporate resources available to help implement a continuous improvement model?

And, of course, don't be shy when it comes to the internet. As just about everyone has begun to realize, the web is a powerful tool with many resources that can be leveraged to your company's benefit. Web-based data collection tools are especially useful when integrated with your quality assurance program.

While it’s very important to recognize the issues and problems with the quality of work performed by your cleaning staff and go about fixing them.  The real magic when it comes to cleaning quality assurance is to prevent problems before they ever get the chance to surface.

As a group, managers in the cleaning industry have always seemed to realize the necessity of performing some kind of inspection to check the work of their cleaning team.  However, due to many factors the inspection process has looked very different from one organization to the next.

All too often in the cleaning industry employees are met with negative feedback.  It’s easy to walk into a facility and see everything that has been missed or has not been cleaned according to the site specs.  It’s much harder for a supervisor or manager to walk into an area and notice what the employee is doing right.  This uneven balance of negative to positive feedback can really weigh on a cleaning staff and degrade morale, in turn, reducing the quality of cleaning to even worse levels.

However, by performing routine cleaning inspections you can build your quality database and see tangible positive change.  By scoring cleaning on an absolute scale we are able to see scores of area types or specific items increase or decrease over time.  This allows us to approach our cleaning staff with not only bad feedback but also more good feedback.  Some facility managers have even gone as far as to base raises or bonuses on the quality score increases their workers have shown over a period of time.

Performing cleaning inspections once in a while is great, and certainly better than nothing.  However, you are really missing out on a lot of the best data if you are only inspecting once every few months.

Think about it, inspections are most valuable for the data and reports they produce and that data is most valuable when there is enough of it to draw valid conclusions.  One of the major keys to cleaning inspections as a form of cleaning quality assurance is to make them part of your daily or weekly routine.  This will start to build your facility’s database and allow you to see reports that are meaningful and helpful to the quality process.  The other good news about this approach to cleaning quality inspections is that you won’t have to go through another learning curve every few months when you pick the handheld device back up to do an inspection.