Certainly, in recent history, the challenges facing the hospitality industry right now, not only in the UK but the world over, have never been tougher.
Costs have risen exponentially, margins have tightened beyond belief, and many businesses are under constant pressure to identify quick wins and efficiencies.
While it may seem financially tempting to bring every possible job in house when profit lines are under so much pressure, doing just that can sometimes be to a business’s detriment.
When it comes to outsourcing to an external partner to handle cleaning, there are many major benefits to be gained. The strongest benefit in the current climate is the ability to flex the agreement to reflect the changing needs of the business.
The seasonality of the hospitality industry has always made business uncertain, and, at times, a challenging environment. But with an outsourced partner you’re not stuck to a fixed cost.
We recognise that the week is not flat, for instance that Monday for your business may be very different in trade terms to a Saturday. But rather than having a fixed overhead, outsourcing gives the opportunity to expand or contract the cleaning team.
With night cleaning whether you’ve had 100 guests or 1,000 guests, there’s still the same spaces that need to be cleaned. But if, for example, you’ve made a decision to not open seven days a week, we can move immediately with that, and adjust the rota to reflect the changed service requirements.
Meanwhile, with the daytime teams, we can change from week to week based on business levels and plans. We understand that clients may decide to put areas under renovation or wish to take complete areas out of service for a period of time, and we can respond to that strategy and adjust the rota accordingly.
It’s the same approach for us when a business is unexpectedly booming, or if people are sick, we’re always able to cover that because we’ve got a large collection of people who are trained in these jobs, and there are always individuals who are keen to take on additional hours.
So, if you need an extra person at short notice, you know you have someone coming who has all the statutory training that’s required and knows how to do the job. They’re a safe pair of hands.
We’re proud of a diverse workforce and have spent a lot of time and investment in having our training moved to an online platform in multiple languages, so that, together with our clients, we have peace of mind that everybody has been trained in a consistent manner, on the same areas. It’s transformed our training procedures from when our training was delivered only by people, being very much reliant on the quality of the trainer.
“I view the relationship with Act-Clean as very much a partnership. They are an extension of my own team and provide a level of service which is consistent with that of my own.” Gareth Banner, Managing Director of The Ned
But key to maintaining standards is that once trained, and everybody knows what the job is, there are then managers on site, regularly, checking the standards, walking around, referring to the cleaning schedules, talking to the clients, getting their feedback, and, importantly, observing the work.
In addition, there are many other obvious advantages to outsourcing to a hospitality cleaning partner such as improved cleaning standards, access to specialised expertise, increased efficiency, and a reduced HR burden.
Other advantages include not having to manage the cleaning team, or deal with the issues that come directly from managing people like sickness, absence, training, accidents, and health and safety. We take care of all of this. As well as the risk assessments, method statements and much more.
From the client’s point of view, all employees can focus on their principal responsibilities, leading to better productivity and better retention. Feeling proud and valued, is essential to retention, which continues to be under pressure in so many roles in hospitality.
Trust is critical in a partnership. And when things go wrong, which they inevitably do, we’re very honest about what has occurred and deal only in the facts.
We own it if something’s gone wrong, and we endeavour to make it better, quickly. If people have behaved badly, we deal with that immediately. If we’ve inadvertently damaged something, we make sure that we put our hands up and are truthful. We work closely with the client to make it is righted.
Such partnerships grow and develop over time. For example, we’ve been working with a hotel client cleaning their back of house areas for a number of years, and built such a strong, authentic partnership, that when they decided to revisit the front of house contract, we were awarded that too.
Through good communication and building relationships we’ve integrated well, we’ve grown the contract and managed to, at the same time, give efficiencies in terms of cost and people, because now there’s one team doing the whole job and able to focus on whatever is the priority at the time – again completely responsive to the needs of the business.
We take comfort in the knowledge that our clients are world-class operators, and we have been working with many of them for a very long time.
We’ve been working with a hotel client cleaning their back of house areas for a number of years, and built such a strong, authentic partnership, that when they decided to revisit the front of house contract, we were awarded that too.
As Gareth Banner, managing director of our client The Ned, told us recently, leading hospitality businesses are complicated environments.
Top operators, like Gareth and his teams, can only focus on the demanding or clever initiatives their businesses face if they are certain that the basics of the business are being delivered in an impeccable manner.
“We work with many suppliers, vendors, contractors in our organisation, as do most people in the hospitality environment,” he says. “I think there’s a difference, though, between a contractor and a partner. And I view the relationship with Act-Clean as very much a partnership. They are an extension of my own team and provide a level of service which is consistent with that of my own team. To be able to do that unsupervised, through a fully managed and outsourced solution, is very easy to aspire to, and it’s very hard to get right.”
Our hospitality partners speak volumes for our business – we know they have exceptional standards, and would not be working with us if we weren’t doing a first-rate job.
Gillian Thomson was speaking to Amanda Afiya.
If you would like to learn more about how Act-Clean can help your business, get in touch here.