Personal and household services send cooks, cleaners, caregivers, drivers and repair people into private homes. Trust, privacy and reliability decide the business, and much of the workforce is informal, mobile and hard to supervise.
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Share your requirementsA personal and household services business supplies or manages people who work in homes: cleaners, cooks, caregivers, babysitters, drivers, gardeners and handy helpers. The firm may run an app, a call centre or a local office. Staff go alone or in pairs to customers' homes, often on a recurring schedule, so the workforce is spread out and unsupervised. Customers let these people into private spaces, near children, elders, jewellery and cash. Trust is the product, and one bad incident harms the name. Workers often come from modest backgrounds, may lack formal records, and may depend on daily or weekly pay. Absence, late arrival, theft claims and clashes with customers are everyday problems. See also HR for facility management.
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.
GullyHR runs talent acquisition for permanent roles in personal and household services. For each role we agree the job description with you, find and screen candidates against it, and support the offer through to joining. Tell us the role and the number of people, and we start there.
We recruit permanent employees. We do not supply contract or temporary staff.
Every business interviews, but few have a written process that works the same way for every role and every interviewer. GullyHR designs yours, from the role brief to the offer, trains your managers to run it, and can run it for you on the roles you hand us.
We agree what the role must deliver, the must-have and nice-to-have skills, and how each will be scored.
Screening call, assessment, interview rounds and decision points, sized to the role and the number of people you hire.
Structured questions for each role family and a rating guide, so two interviewers judge the same answer the same way.
A short briefing for your managers on what to ask, what to avoid and how to give a clear yes or no.
Who approves, how the offer is made, and how candidates are kept informed from first call to joining.
A theft claim or rude behaviour spreads quickly, and the firm is judged on how it reacts.
The firm needs confidence in who it sends, but records are thin and the firm does not do formal verification.
If a worker is absent, the customer is left without help, and a replacement does not know the home.
Dress, duties and privacy expectations differ by home, and workers learn through errors.
Workers wait for the platform or office to settle dues and then switch to private work.
Staff may meet harassment or unreasonable demands in a home, with nobody to call.
Hygiene, care and manners are assumed, not taught.
After a few visits both agree privately and the firm loses the booking.
Start with the topics that matter most here: Employee Relations; Onboarding and Probation; Health, Safety and Wellbeing. Then work through the rest. Each topic is written for facility management, not in general.
Two routes — one for complaints, one for conduct — kept separate.
A first day that is the same for the fifth joiner as the first.
Induction, records, incident reporting and follow-through.
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.
Records, attendance, leave and the day-to-day HR that must simply work.
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.
Policies a manager can apply, and obligations with owners and dates.
Who leaves, when, why — and which of them mattered.
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 personal and household services business puts in place, in an order that makes each easier. Open any card for the detail.
Privacy, belongings, behaviour, phone use and customer respect, explained in plain words.
Privacy, belongings, behaviour, phone use and customer respect, explained in plain words. See HR policy packages.
Hygiene, care basics, safety, customer manners and how to raise problems.
Hygiene, care basics, safety, customer manners and how to raise problems. See employee onboarding.
A bench of trained backups and a handover note for each recurring home.
A bench of trained backups and a handover note for each recurring home.
Duties, preferences and house rules, shared with the worker before the first visit.
Duties, preferences and house rules, shared with the worker before the first visit.
Payment on a fixed date with a statement.
Payment on a fixed date with a statement. See payroll process management.
A person to call, a check-in routine and a way to leave a bad situation.
A person to call, a check-in routine and a way to leave a bad situation. See workplace health, safety and wellbeing.
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.
A short induction on care, hygiene and customer manners.
A plain conduct and privacy code.
Fixed pay days and clear statements.
A safety line for workers in customers' homes.
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
An employee brings you a complaint about their supervisor. What happens next should not depend on who is in the room. A grievance procedure a small company can actually run.
8 min readRead article
A first-week plan for bringing in an outside specialist: what access to give, how to protect client data, and the confidentiality steps to settle on day one.
7 min readRead article
A shift, weekly and monthly safety routine for rubber plants that names who checks platen guards, mill trip bars, autoclave doors, burst-test cages and slings, and who acts on near misses.
7 min readRead articleMore on the GullyHR blog.
Be clear on who you send, how you handle complaints and how workers are guided. Keep a fair, quick complaint process.
Keep trained backups, confirm visits a day ahead and speak with workers early about reasons for absence.
Offer value beyond introduction: cover, quality checks, support and fair prices. Have contract terms checked by a qualified professional.
Give a contact, a check-in routine and the right to leave an unsafe situation, with the firm backing them.
Listen to both sides, record facts, avoid public accusation and use a fair process. Take legal advice before action.
We would listen to coordinators and workers on missed visits, trust complaints and pay. A fitting first task is a conduct code with a short induction and a cover plan. Scope and fees follow in writing.
All 56 business types in facility management · Find another business type
See all HR topics for facility management, or another industry.
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