Perception is very powerful! Your customers, staff and visitors have a degree of expectation of the level of service provided by cleaning. If those expectations are not met by your cleaning standards, then this will negatively affect the customer’s and staff perception of the organisation’s ‘brand’. Cleaning is a key essential service that directly or indirectly impacts all areas of the organisation. To ensure your cleaning operations are well-run and cost effective, cleaning operations must follow a two-step plan: achieve good cleaning and hygiene standards and then maintain them through routine auditing and continuous improvement. We have the technical and specialist industry experience to advise on how to implement and maintain good cleaning practices.

Cleaning is so tightly integrated into all organisations that poor cleaning standards have a direct and significant impact on its operations and its customers. The first impression a customer forms is often the quality of cleaning, whether that’s a good impression or not. Customers instinctively expect a clean and hygienic place to conduct business, to them this is a basic requirement that does not need justification. But this expectation varies depending upon the perceived value of business and the kind of interaction taken place. For example, a business selling high-value products or services are expected to have a higher of care in their appearance, or certain services like food and toilets are expected to have a certain high clean and hygienic appearance.

The real danger is that complacency is a comfortable state. Whether that is complacency in cleaning staff routines, tasks or attitudes, or their supervision, complacency always leads to falling standards, not instantly, but over time. Without an active and continuous improvement plan, it’s only when the complaints come in that it shows complacency has been firmly rooted in.

When you engage with us to conduct an audit, we use a number of key UK and international specifications and standards covering cleaning standards and auditing.

These are:

• ISO 19011:2018 Guidelines for Auditing Management Systems
• ISO 2859-1 Sampling procedures for inspection by attributes — Part 1: Sampling schemes indexed by acceptance quality limit (AQL) for lot-by-lot inspection
• BS EN 13549:2001 Cleaning services – Basic requirements and recommendations for quality measuring systems
• PAS 5748:2014 – Specification for the planning, application, measurement, and review institution of cleanliness services in hospitals