Custodians are the unsung heroes of our organizations, doing difficult work over long hours while typically receiving little-to-no recognition. The decline in janitorial budgets and shortage of available janitorial talent has made retaining your best employees more critical than ever, and with the rise of digitization in janitorial operations, we have a wealth of data that is leveraged to drive efficiency, realize cost savings and improve the quality of our cleaning programs.

In this blog post, we’ll talk about how to leverage insights to acknowledge your employees’ hard work and improve retention of your top performers.

Data to Evaluate Team Performance

As we look to drive better cleaning operations, data is critical to understanding the size, scope and quality of cleaning in your operations. While many organizations still work off analog paper logbooks for tracking cleaning efforts, cleaning validation software is becoming a popular way to track the who, what and where of cleaning for every location in our buildings and schools.

When evaluating your cleaning teams, there is important data you'll need to analyze to identify your best performers and to upskill lower performers. Whether tracking manually or through a cleaning validation solution, you should have the following data points at your fingertips for your team:

# of Rooms Cleaned Per Day: Whether it be conference rooms, manufacturing lines, or classrooms, the quantity of specific rooms or designated areas cleaned can serve as a general indicator of quality cleaning.

Square Feet Cleaned per Custodian: While the amount of specific areas cleaned has utility, it can be misleading if they vary in size. Total square feet cleaned by a specific custodian provides a more nuanced understanding of their efforts, especially when looked at in coordination with the type of cleaning performed across that square footage.

Distance of Cleaning Route(s): If your custodians have defined routes they take for their cleaning efforts, the length of them can also be a key indicator of their efforts.

Custodian Attendance: No-shows are a major issue in the custodial world, and tracking which employees show up to their shifts is a critical point to track. This can typically be done with your time & attendance software or through measuring the number of days where an employee has validated a cleaning in your cleaning validation software.

Data-Driven Recognition of your Custodians

Now that you’ve analyzed your data, it’s time for the fun part: rewarding your custodial team members. There are many different ways to do this, including:

Establish a Consistent Appreciation Program: A system that provides recurring awards can create short-term incentives for your team to perform well while feeling recognized. For example, custodians with perfect monthly attendance could be rewarded with a prize, or a “Custodian of the Month” program could be created.

Provide Rewards to Top Performers: Your best workers should receive the best rewards. This can be integrated into the aforementioned reward program or set on its own cadence, whether it be monthly, quarterly, or yearly. Metrics such as most square feet cleaned or best cleaning percentage can be good starting points.

Appreciation Event(s): Recognizing your staff at large is critical to overall custodial team success. Whether it’s a recognition day, award ceremony, or other event, having time dedicated solely to custodians and specifically top performing teams and their members can go a long way.

Retaining Your Best Employees and Improving Your Teams

By establishing key data points and making them a part of your custodial management strategy, you can better create a work culture rooted in transparency and validated cleaning. This provides you the ability to make data-driven decisions, some of which include:

Promotions: Data can tell you who your superstar custodians are. These standout custodians are promotion candidates—promotions that can move them up the facility management hierarchy and allow them to spread their expertise.

Recognizing Employees: Custodians don’t usually receive any form of recognition (typically the opposite…). Even the smallest of gestures that recognize their hard work can lead to improved morale, motivation, and overall job satisfaction.

Justified Budget Proposals: Custodial budgets are becoming tighter by the day and are one of the first areas looked at for budget cuts. With quantifiable metrics that show the value and impact of your team, you’ll be able to prove why your budget should remain.

In conclusion, tracking, analyzing, and using custodial data is one of the best ways to reward, and ultimately retain your custodians. Rewarding your often underappreciated employees highlights their critical contributions, boosts morale, and provides incentives to show up and work hard.

A data-first approach to custodial management not only improves job satisfaction and retention, but also supports stronger budget justifications by demonstrating the custodians' value. Investing in the data of your custodians ensures a motivated and dedicated workforce, which leads to benefits across your entire organization.