What 24 years of house cleaning has taught us

House cleaning checklists do not work

If you have any experience with our competitors, you know it seems to be a silly game, each company trying to breakdown to the minutia the different items in your home, then add up each item and claim their 50-point, or 100-point or even 150-point checklist promises you a better cleaning. It doesn’t. In fact, the more checklist items you give a cleaner the less the checklist can be used as a practical guide while cleaning. Worse, checklists turn the house cleaner into a robot, mindlessly cleaning items that do not need it because they are on the checklist, and ignoring items that need cleaned because they are not. Most cleaners that are required to use a checklist, especially if it is “comprehensive” will just give up on it, and resort to cleaning the room the best they can without it. Once the cleaning is finished the overwhelmed cleaner just checks all the boxes on the checklist, without even reading it, undermining the purpose.

We do utilize checklists as a training tool for new employees, and as an inspection guide for our quality control inspectors so we acknowledge checklists can be useful sometimes, but we know the existence of a checklist doesn’t deliver better cleanings and often has the opposite effect on cleaner competency and cleaning outcomes.

Impact Cleaning produces the best results

We clean your entire home. Whatever needs it. We don’t follow a checklist because every single thing in your home would have to be on the checklist which isn’t possible. Instead, we train our maids how to thoroughly and efficently clean a home, but then we leave it up to them which items to focus on to turn a good house cleaning into a great house cleaning. Our cleaners spend their cleaning time on the tasks that need it the most. The ones that make the biggest impact for our clients. This radically shifts a cleaners mindset away from passive checklist cleaning to real house cleaning like you would do on your own home.

Impact Cleaning relies on OUR maid seeing what items need cleaned to make the biggest impact and we train this exstensively, But the time spent Impact cleaning is approximately only 25% of the time the cleaner is cleaning. The other 75% of the time needs to be spent following our set systems and procedures to properly prioritize and clean the different spaces in your home.

A single maid working alone or a team of 2 do a better job, in less total time, than a larger group

When one person is solely responsible, things tend not to be missed and the responsible party is clear if they are. When a team barrells through your home no one cleaner is actually sure what has been done and what hasn’t. Each cleaner just knows what small part they did. To mitigate this, a team lead spends their time directing, coordinating and reviewing the work which is an unnecessary cost to you.

We send one maid per cleaning unless size, complexity, or time constraints require more, in which case we send as many house cleaners as needed to meet your needs.

House cleaner burn-out and turnover is the silent killer of maid services

Finding amazing people with the temperment and work eithic to clean houses well is a tall order. The industry faces a 200% turnover rate and an image problem. If you do manage to find the perfect, caring new hire, training them to be the best is expensive and it can take months, even years, to create a ninja level house cleaner. So to lose a successful, experienced cleaner due to burn out can be very difficult for a company to overcome. Quality suffers. Clients get concerned. If the company is not careful, it will out of necessity shift the extra work onto the best cleaners that remain pushing more of them to burn out, further exasperating the problem. A maid service that can’t keep its employees happy long-term, will never be able to keep their clients happy even in the short term. Its that simple.

To mitigate employee burn out and turnover Maid On The Spot takes a proactive role in our employee’s lives with the intention of spring boarding them to accomplish their dreAms and goals. When people are acheiving their dreams they are happy and happy, motivated people produce optimum outcomes. By helping shift our maids perspective to one of self-reliance and a willingness to stretch their comfort level to acheive their dreams, we help them grow and embody a higher plane of existence. The end goal is for them to see themselves as the author of their own life and no longer a victim of circumstances. They can manifest amazing cleanings just like they can manifest the life of their dreams. It all works together and its a beautiful thing to watch happen. Of course, it helps that we hire amazing people and give them industry leading performance-based and longevity-based compensation, each maid designs their own schedule, is treated like royalty, and receives between 10-20 paid days off per year.

Guiding Principles

Unlike checklist cleaning companies, our system requires smart, competent maids that know our guiding principles, or the fundamental concepts that combine to form the substance of proper house cleaning. Some examples of guiding principles we live by are:

• Top, Down: Dust and dirt fall down so always start at the top.
• Back to Front: pull the dirt from the back to the front for efficency.
• Dry then Wet: Remove the dry dust and debris before applying product.

Guiding principles shape the thinking of our maids.

Cleaning Systems

These are multi-step processes that show the optimum way to clean things. Emphasis is put on redundancy, where we employ similar processes for multiple spaces and surfaces, repeating and repeating the right way, in a variety of applications, until it is second nature.

• Edge first, two passes on surface, dry: This cleaning process works for many things like glass cleaning, floors, and furniture.
• Clean the item, clean the surface under the item, and place back: This basic cleaning process covers how we handle items in your home.
• Combine like objects, exposing surfaces and staging: This stuff seems basic, but it is important for making a clean home look its bests.

Cleaning Systems show our maids how to do it.

Impact Cleaning

We wish we could deep clean every home. although deep cleans take more work and are harder physically to do, they are easier to do mentally because everything gets cleaned thoroughly. The maid doesn’t have to make judgement calls what to clean and not clean in the time allotted. So its straight forward. Unfortunately, we have time caps on most of our cleanings set by your home size and budget. We usually can’t deep clean everything in that time. So what do we do to give you a great value and the best results? We impact clean focusing on what you would notice most. Things like:

• Build-up: If a maid notices something is built-up, they should clean it.
• Spots, prints and scuffs: Removing these brightens surfaces.
• High use: We focus on the things and rooms you use most.

Impact Cleaning is our secret to great house cleaning!

Inspections, client feedback, performance-based

If a cleaner makes it out of training it is because they have successfully cleaned and been inspected dozens of times under the guidance of our office manager, field trainer, and quality control inspectors. The cleaner has demonstrated success, repeatedly. They get-it. We like them, they like us, clients like them and they like serving our clients. This is the honeymoon stage. None the less, as they transition to working on their own, their success has to be acknowledged and reinforced from multiple angles regularly. Also, falling short has to be corrected and eliminated ASAP or else it becomes a bad habit. We utilize a combination of scheduled field inspections and surprise inspections the frequency is determined by the cleaner’s inspection results and client feedback. Lastly, we utilize a performance-based compensation plan that aligns the goals of the company, the goals of our clients, and the goals of our cleaners into one clearly articulatable goal that satisfies all 3: Make the clients happy by performing amazing house cleanings, consistently, every time.

• Internal quality control inspections: Every maid is inspected regularly by us for both the cleaning process and outcome.We want to catch a problem before our client(s) ever experience it.
• Client feedback: We solicit and value all client feedback and share it with our maids for training purposes.
• Performance and longevity-based compensation: We pay more for great results, and financially incentive length of employment, making sure our top maids are paid the most in the industry, they deserve it!

Even with the best training program and monitoring system occassionally, a house cleaning will not meet expectations and thats when a rock solid, no-questions asked satisfaction guarantee steps in to save the day!