Facility and Risk Management Tips presented by www.solidrockfacilitymanagers.com
Facility and Risk Management Tips presented by
How To Get Your Commercial Cleaning Contracts Right. Part Two
We continue 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.
Here is what it looks like in practice.
A typical weak contract says something like:
Restrooms cleaned daily, common areas vacuumed three times per week, floors mopped weekly.
That sounds reasonable until you realize it answers none of the questions that actually matter. Cleaned by whom, at what time, to what standard? What counts as done? Which floors? Who restocks the paper towels and soap?
A well-written scope clause for the same restroom might read:
Restrooms serviced once per shift during operating hours and once after close, each service including toilet and urinal disinfection, sink and mirror cleaning, floor mopping with germicidal solution, waste removal, and restocking of paper products and hand soap, with supervisor inspection after each close-of-day service and any area scoring below standard corrected before the next business day opens.
Same task. Completely different accountability. That difference is worth the extra time it takes to write the contract properly, because vague scope almost always adds 10 to 20 percent to the annual cleaning budget through change orders alone.
Should A Cleaning Contract Be Written Differently For Different Types Of Facilities?
Yes. And most contracts are written as if every building is the same. They are not.
A manufacturing site has engineering-guided industrial equipment cleaning requirements that are completely different from anything in an office or retail building. The cleaning needs of a production floor are nothing like the cleaning needs of a corporate lobby. A corporate office is about appearance, discretion, and surface-level detail. A manufacturing or industrial facility can involve safety-critical requirements where the wrong cleaning approach creates real operational risk.
Scope has to match the reality of the facility. A contract that does not reflect what actually happens in the building is already failing before anyone shows up to clean. When both sides agree on what success looks like in the specific context of that facility, consistency follows. That sounds obvious but it is genuinely rare.
What Does A Bad Commercial Cleaning Contract Look Like?
It is vague, years out of date, or impossible to find. Usually at least two of those three.
Facilities spending huge sums of money in a month on cleaning services with nothing in writing that defines what that money covers is not unusual. No frequency, no standard, no verification mechanism. Just a price and a phone number. When something goes wrong, and it always does eventually, there is no document to go back to. The conversation becomes a dispute with no ground to stand on, and the facility manager is left managing the fallout while also trying to run a building.
A lot of the time the contract was signed years ago and as people came and went, nobody can locate it anymore. The whole service relationship ends up running on assumptions that both sides have gradually filled in differently.
You cannot hold a vendor accountable for expectations that were never written down. And a cleaning company cannot deliver consistently against a standard that does not exist. Both sides lose.
To be continued……
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