An office cleaning provider works before the tenants arrive and after they leave. The work is quiet, the shifts are odd, and one missed floor is noticed by the building manager before you know about it.
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Share your requirementsAn office cleaning provider looks after corporate towers, tech parks and small business floors. Staff arrive before the first employee or stay after the last, clean desks, washrooms, pantries, lobbies and meeting rooms, and leave. Each client expects a fixed number of people on named floors, with a supervisor who answers the tenant's calls. The owner earns by keeping every post staffed and every complaint short. Teams are small, spread across buildings, and often supervised by phone. Hiring is constant because the work is physical and pay is modest. See also HR for facility management and the wider facility management and housekeeping hub.
These are the places the people side of this kind of business tends to give way. The rest of this page works through them.
HR here has to work for each of these groups, not only the office. The set-up below is written with all of them in mind.
A cleaner calls in sick before the first tenants walk in. The supervisor is across town, and by the time cover arrives the pantry and washrooms have already drawn comments.
Complaints reach the client's facility team before they reach you, so you hear about a missed desk row second-hand and cannot easily say who was on the floor.
Early starts and late finishes make travel hard. People near the site stay, people far away drift off after a few weeks.
A reliever walks into a building for the first time, without the access card routine, the tenant's special requests or the pantry stock list.
One supervisor may cover three buildings. Most floors are inspected rarely and standards slip between visits.
Washroom stock, access cards and floor keys are issued by hand. When someone leaves, nobody is sure what was returned.
When a tenant cancels an evening or a building closes for a holiday, staff wonder about the day's pay and the supervisor has no clear answer.
Start with the topics that matter most here: Employee Administration; Onboarding and Probation; Retention and Attrition Management. Then work through the rest. Each topic is written for facility management, not in general.
Records, attendance, leave and the day-to-day HR that must simply work.
A first day that is the same for the fifth joiner as the first.
Who leaves, when, why — and which of them mattered.
How many people, in which roles, by when — and what they will cost.
Structure, reporting lines and who is allowed to decide what.
Requisition to joining, the same way every time.
Salary structure, payroll inputs and a month that closes on time.
Goals, reviews and ratings that hold up in a conversation.
Training planned from need rather than from the calendar.
Named backups for the roles that cannot be vacant.
Communication, recognition and the conditions people actually work in.
Two routes — one for complaints, one for conduct — kept separate.
Policies a manager can apply, and obligations with owners and dates.
Induction, records, incident reporting and follow-through.
Resignation to relieving letter, in a defined order.
Records that survive people, and approvals that do not queue.
A short monthly pack management actually reads.
An HR function that runs the same way every month.
The pieces a office cleaning providers business puts in place, in an order that makes each easier. Open any card for the detail.
Write who cleans which floor, at what time, with who covering.
What this coversHideWrite who cleans which floor, at what time, with who covering. The attendance and leave process turns this into one record.
Keep a few inducted people close to each tower group, so an early absence is covered by someone who has seen the floor.
What this coversHideKeep a few inducted people close to each tower group, so an early absence is covered by someone who has seen the floor.
Access routine, tenant requests, pantry stock, washroom checks and who to call.
What this coversHideAccess routine, tenant requests, pantry stock, washroom checks and who to call. Every reliever carries it on the first day.
Supervisors tick the same short list on each visit, and the area coordinator reads it weekly.
What this coversHideSupervisors tick the same short list on each visit, and the area coordinator reads it weekly.
Issue and return are logged against the person, and checked on the last working day.
What this coversHideIssue and return are logged against the person, and checked on the last working day.
Before changing anything, find out what is true today. These checks take an afternoon and tell you which of the topics above to start with.
Share your requirementsConfirm with a qualified professional. What applies to you depends on your business, your state and your arrangements, and it changes. This page describes practice. It does not state a legal position.
The services below fit this kind of business best. Each starts by recording where you stand, and every later report compares against that. We do not promise outcomes.
One floor-wise attendance record, so a missed early shift is seen the same morning and not at invoice time.
A short first-day routine with a building brief, so a new or cover cleaner is useful from the first shift.
A clear route for tenant complaints and staff concerns, with a simple record of what was said and decided.
A look at how your pay for early and late shifts compares locally, so far sites and odd hours are priced fairly.
Start with a free conversation, or see the paid HR Diagnostic.
Understand the business, its workforce, current processes and HR challenges.
Find the missing, weak, inconsistent or person-dependent processes.
Create the structure, processes, policies, SOPs, dashboards and systems needed.
Help HR and department managers actually adopt the new system.
Digitise repetitive and approval-based workflows where it is worth doing.
Track hiring, attendance, employee cost, performance, training and attrition.
Strengthen the people-management system continuously, not once.
From the GullyHR blog: one on HR in facility management, and one on each of the topics this page points to.
Housekeeping, technician and security staff at client sites leave for reasons head office rarely hears. How to ask, what to look for and how to act on it.
7 min readRead article
Payroll says one joining date, the personal file says another and the manager remembers a third. How to establish a single trustworthy employee record and keep it that way.
7 min readRead article
Hour by hour, then week by week, for a recruit's first month at a module, inverter, pack or junction box line: safety and handling first, a practice bench, a buddy, a sign-off and a day-30 review.
7 min readRead article
How to spot an unmanageable workload before it becomes an exit or an error, what to look at, how to talk about it and what to change, without guessing.
5 min readRead articleMore on the GullyHR blog.
Enough to cover weekly offs, sickness and the exits you actually see, close to your busiest building clusters. Work it out from your own list of uncovered floors over the last few months, then size the bench from that.
Log each complaint with date, floor and who was on duty. After a few entries a pattern usually shows, such as a late starter or an untaught reliever, and the fix becomes specific.
Many providers do, because early starts cost travel and sleep. Check what local firms pay for similar shifts and decide on a clear, written difference so there is no argument later.
The building's access routine, the floor list, pantry and washroom standards, safe use of cleaning agents, how pay works and who to call. A supervisor walking the floor with them on day one prevents most early problems.
Place people near home where possible, pay on a fixed date and check in on the second and fifth day. Most early leavers cite distance, pay timing or a rough start.
We would ask how many floors went unstaffed last month, how many buildings each supervisor covers and what a reliever is told on day one. A floor roster with a reliever bench and a one-page building brief is a natural first piece, with scope written down for you to accept or change.
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