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Facility and Risk Management Tips presented by
How To Get Your Commercial Cleaning Contracts Right. Part Three
We continue and conclude our series on how to get your commercial cleaning contracts right.
An effective commercial cleaning contract benefits both facility managers and cleaning staff by establishing a standard for services as well as accountability to ensure expectations are met.
What Is the Most Important Clause To Add To Any Commercial Cleaning Contract?
A documented inspection process with a defined correction window. Most contracts describe what tasks will be done. Almost none define how the work gets checked.
A practical inspection process looks like this: supervisors conduct documented walk-throughs of high-priority areas, restrooms, entryways, break rooms, and high-touch surfaces on a scheduled basis, typically weekly. Each area gets scored against a defined checklist covering floors, fixtures, surfaces, consumables, odor, and overall presentation. Anything that falls below the agreed upon threshold gets flagged. The vendor has 24 hours to correct a routine issue and four hours for anything in a client-facing or high-traffic area.
That is not complicated. But it changes everything. Issues get caught and corrected before tenants or employees ever notice them. There is documentation if service consistently falls short. And the cleaning company has a clear target to hit every week rather than trying to match an interpretation of clean that was never defined.
A documented inspection process also gives real leverage if service slips, which is far more useful than a vague termination clause buried at the back of an agreement that nobody wants to invoke.
How Do You Keep A Contract Performing Consistently Over 12 To 18 Months?
Keep the conversation going as things change. A contract that nobody updates is a contract that stops working.
There is a real difference between a cleaning company that starts strong and one that is still performing a year and a half in. It almost always comes down to whether the relationship was built to adapt. New buildings get added. Staff turns over on both sides. Service needs shift. Budgets get reviewed. The contract needs to reflect those changes or it becomes a document that describes a relationship that no longer exists.
Contracts get adjusted all the time in practice: adding new buildings, adjusting time allocations for specific rooms, occasionally reducing frequency in certain areas to help a client stay within budget. That kind of flexibility only works when the communication is there from the start. The contracts that hold up over time are not necessarily the most detailed ones. They are the ones where the relationship was maintained alongside the document.
Where Should A Facility Manager Start To Improve Their Commercial Cleaning Contract Today?
Pull out the current contract and ask the following three questions.
Does the contract define what clean actually means with enough specificity that both sides would give the same answer? Does it describe how performance will be checked, by whom, and how often? And does it define what happens specifically when something falls short?
If those answers are not clearly written, the facility is not managing a cleaning program. It is only hoping one is happening.
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