Educational institutions face growing challenges in maintaining cleanliness and hygiene in their school districts. Labor shortages and tightening budgets have made it harder to keep facilities in top condition, yet expectations remain high — especially after the heightened focus on sanitation following the pandemic. Clean learning environments contribute directly to student health, absenteeism, attendance, staff morale, retention, and academic performance.

The question is: How can schools maintain cleaning quality despite these constraints?

The Challenges: Labor and Budget Shortages

There are several challenges that are facing school districts and higher education institutions.

Labor Shortages

Many school districts struggle to recruit and retain custodial staff due to lower wages, physically demanding work, and competition from other industries. Fewer workers lead to increased workloads, burnout, and potentially lower cleaning standards.

With an average age of 48 for custodians in the US, your organization’s ability to build, coach and retain front-line teams will be critical to the on-going success and results of budget dollars.

Budget Constraints

With uncertainty in the recent federal budget freezes that impact budget expectations for education institutions, being able to drive efficiency and cost savings within operational budgets while ensuring quality work is paramount.

However, this is nothing new. Budget constraints have been a common challenge for operations teams that struggle to “keep the lights on” for their organizations, while having less room to invest in cleaning technologies, supplies, and staff compensation that can drive better performance and efficiencies in the future. 

There are also states that are losing student enrollment with population migration that are negatively impacting operational budgets while not drastically reducing operational responsibilities.

Higher Cleaning Standards Post-Pandemic

With cold and flu season currently driving up absences in our schools and institutions, there’s greater pressure to sanitize surfaces more frequently and thoroughly, putting additional strain on already overburdened cleaning teams and the processes that support them. Not to mention the team's ability to staff their teams with temporary workers as staff also deal with sick days during the year.

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3 Ways to Build Agile Custodial Operations and Teams Built For The Future

The question for most operational teams is how do they remain agile in these times?

With this reality of more work for less staff, many operational leaders are facing tough decisions that sacrifice future improvements for short term band-aids in their strategy. Having to do more with less while also foregoing changes and enhancements that can positively impact future strategy.

As organizations look to future-proof custodial operations, it’s integral to 

Develop and Consistently Measure a Common Data Set for Staffing and Performance

“You can’t improve what you can’t measure” is a common saying but one that is true for many custodial operations across the country. While organizations put massive efforts in place to measure energy efficiency and work order management, custodial operations typically rely on siloed team communication and time and attendance tracking to operate their process, which is often lacking for budget conversations.

When determining your data framework for custodial operations, modern operations have a common data set that includes:

Staffing & Performance Standards by Student or Square Foot

The first data framework for organizations to determine are 1) Staffing by size, 2) Budget per student for their organization. For many organizations, they have set standards for how much square footage a custodian can cover as well as the budget expense for cleaning equipment and supplies per the student population or for specific building types (i.e. High Schools vs. Elementary Schools).

• The key here is that the square footage and/or budget standards will have specific impacts on the quality expectations for daily cleaning operations based on standards such as APPA or ISSA, which need to be communicated to all stakeholders in the district or institution. Check out our APPA Guide for more details there.

Daily Performance Tracking

Performance tracking typically spans three specific knowledge areas:

• Did the Team Member Show Up?: This is tracked with time and attendance tracking and verifies that the custodian is at the location for that day.
• Did the Team Member Do Their Rounds?: This is tracked with pen and paper in most organizations but there is innovation for cleaning validation technologies that enable this tracking to be done in real-time with reportability with mobile devices.
• Did the Team Member Do Quality Work?: This is tracked often by managerial teams on a consistent cadence through the use of paper checklists or mobile quality assurance tools to ensure quality feedback is captured by location and the team member who cleaned.

For most organizations, technology is typically the biggest driver on if this data is being captured or not. Nearly every district has a time and attendance system that they use for custodial teams among others but most lack a way to consistently track performance across both daily activities and quality of cleaning.

There has been a rise in mobile technology innovation for cleaning tracking both for daily cleaning validation and quality assurance. To learn more about these innovations and the tracking capabilities, please review the following blog post.

Focus on People and Retention

For the cleaning industry, finding qualified and high performing team members is crucial to on-going success. And keeping them is even more important.

Providing a good workplace for your employees with a clear path of growth is integral to maintaining performance of cleaning operations and retaining top performing staff that saves on the costs associated with recruiting, hiring and training of new employees.

A comprehensive plan for employee retention can include:

• Establishing a growth path for custodians (i.e. custodian → head custodial → custodial manager → maintenance supervisor)
• Development of an on-going awards and recognition program (more details here)
• Manager training on recognition and skill development
• On-going training and development programs for staff

In these cases, it’s important to ensure expectations are set with staff on the level of performance expectation that should be achieved every day with a recognition feedback loop for those who meet and exceed these expectations.

Internally Advocating for Operations Role in Educational Goals and Outcomes

Operations, especially custodial operations often is seen as a cost center for the organization. A necessary spend that is needed but other strategic education initiatives. However, studies have shown, cleaning and maintaining educational environments significantly impacts student achievement, illness prevention (affecting absenteeism and attendance), and the sense of community, which influences school rankings and teacher retention.

That’s why it’s important to build the business case for the operations teams role in your organization’s mission with the data that supports investment as well as the potential negative impacts if budget is not secured. While there are many ways to approach this conversation with school boards and local government officials, we recommend you read the “Impact of Cleaning on Education” white paper that shares many studies on how better cleaning impacts educational outcomes to support annual budget conversations.

Looking Toward the Future Today

Maintaining cleaning quality in educational institutions during labor and budget shortages is no easy task. However, by prioritizing critical areas, leveraging technology, and engaging the community, schools can create a cleaner, safer learning environment even under challenging conditions. 

Balancing efficiency with strategic investments will be key to long-term success. And investing in the front line workers that contribute to your community every day is critical to having lasting impacts on your teachers, students and greater communities.