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3 Tips For Commercial Cleaning in the Winter Time

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With winter just a few days away – even though it may not fully feel like it – in the midst of the holiday season, lets all take some time to start preparing your office or facility for the upcoming winter months before temperatures begin to fall even further. Let’s take a look at the top 5 tips for keeping you and your employees safe this upcoming winter season here in the PA and NJ area.


Disinfect


The #1 and most important tip which you should be doing year round is disinfecting and regularly cleaning your workspace. This is as especially important in the winter months as this is the season primed for the flu and colds. It is extra important to keep your employees safe and healthy during these months. It may behoove of you to reach out to your current janitorial service to schedule an extra deep cleaning. If you do not have a service already, BCS Facilities Group provides an array of cleaning services, day or night to help protect and keep you and your employees safe.


Entryways and Walkways


With the winter months comes snow, rain sleet or all the above! This can lead to a slip and fall hazard for employees or visitors entering and exiting your facility. Ways to avoid this is to make sure you set forth safety protocols for clearing walkways or paths by using anti-slip products such as salt or even runners to absorb water by the doorways leading to the outside.


Floor Deep Clean


To piggy back off of the previous tip, flooring remains to get a lot of use as is the case year-round. With the outside elements especially the use of salt, snow and people tracking all of that in with heavy duty shoes, this can cause some damage to your floors. This is where walkway mats or carpet runners can come in handy as well.


It is very important to make sure your facility is well maintained this upcoming winter season as we all start to slowly transition back into office life. Make sure your employees are well educated about the importance of health and safety during these harsh and cold winter months ahead. BCS Facilities Group has provided janitorial services for over 30 years with our “Boots on the Ground” experts here to serve YOU with the highest quality and reliable service. Stay safe and stay healthy!

Top 3 Tips on Creating an RFP For Your Janitorial Service Needs

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Let’s start off with the number question you may be asking. What exactly is a Janitorial RFP? To put it simply, it is a document that solicits proposal, and often made by an agency or company interested in the procurement of a service, product or any asset that they deem to be valuable to qualified contractors. This is often times completed through a bidding process between these suppliers.


Below, we will go over some tips, from our experiences, to help you find a new cleaning company that is the best fit and value for your facility.


Tip #1: Don’t Oversaturate Your Search


What do I mean by this? Often times you want to give many companies the opportunity to bid for your business, but you leave yourself at risk since not every company is going to be the best fit for your facility. One example of this is you may be a large corporate office building that requires nightly cleaning along with a day porter during the day, and you may find yourself with companies bidding that specialize in medical facilities and retail stores. This may not be the best “marriage” between the two. Or, you are a very large facility and smaller janitorial companies may not have the capacity or resources to tackle a job like that.


Do some research beforehand to potentially eliminate some of this unnecessary hassle and do NOT send RFPs to a company that you know will not be able to handle the task at hand. This is a waste of their time and money and your time by reading it.


Tip #2: Keeping It Simple


RFPs are not everybody’s favorite to read since they can become a mess or a cluster of random pieces of information seemingly thrown together without any organization. While you want to give vendors/contractors as much information as you possibly can, as with anything there is a “too much”. Before just sending a mass request with a document from past RFPs make sure you are updating this and reading it over as most companies do change, adapt and grow from year to year. There may be added work from years past or different scopes of work needed. Make sure you are checking for outdated information. What information is needed for a vendor to create a good proposal. Some examples include:
Times of day the facility needs to be cleaned
How many people are in the facility
Square footage
Number of restrooms/kitchens etc.


Tip #3: Be Specific About Pain Points


Try to sit back and ask yourself a couple key questions. Are you unhappy with your current or previous janitorial company’s services? Is this switch in vendors solely cost related? Has the scope of work changed wherein the current servicer cannot get the job done? If there is one piece of advice, I can give you on this it’s be transparent. If you are honest with your issues, this will give vendors the opportunity to speak to these issues you are having and offer some solutions rather than just following the generic protocol. This will also give you a good look at their commitment to customer service as well as quality control.


If you follow these tips when creating your next RFP for janitorial services, this will create a significant connection with a distinguished and reputable janitorial vendor.



Helpful Tips When Transitioning From One Janitorial Service to the Next

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Changing cleaning services can be a pain and hopefully it is not done all too often. With our 30+ years of being in business there is an array of reasons to change your services. The most common reason being poor and/or lack of performance. With this comes eager Facilities Managers, Office Managers etc. asking “When can your company get started?” The answer is going to be 3-4 weeks.


During this time, there will be some very important processes being performed by your new cleaning servicer.


Team Building


One common fallacy that a lot of companies share is that our industry is filled with cleaning members ready to start as soon as possible. That is simply not the case. In most cases, once a new customer has been secured will janitorial servicers start the recruiting process. This could take multiple weeks with the recruiting search, interview process and background checks of all applicants. After that has been completed there will be activities for the onboarding process along with the appropriate training.


Development of the Operations Plan


Once all of the above has been completed, we then work together as a team to develop an operational plan. During this time, it is best practices to learning the workflow of your facility (I.e., areas of concern, etc.). With this upper management works together with our front-line cleaners to develop the most beneficial work plan.


Now, typically when you provide a 30-day notice of termination of services for the previous servicer, they would honor this as it is in their contract until the new servicer is in place. This is not always the case unfortunately. There will always be the vendors who will walk off the job once they are given notice. With this, below are a couple pointers for you to help make the transition as smooth as possible on your end if such occurrences happen.


Transitional/Temporary Services


One of the first steps to take is to reach out to your new servicer to see if they are able and willing to provide a transitional service before the official start date. This will usually be a scaled down version of what full services will be performed.


Remind Current Vendor of Contractual Obligations


With all of these steps being taken, it is important to reach out to your current vendor to simply let them know that it is their obligation to work through their end of the agreement. This could put a strain on possibly ever working together in the future if not.


Having a plan is important if you plan on changing cleaning services at some point in the near future. Know that there will be a transition period in between and having a proactive plan can most certainly save you the headache, and time along with allowing your next servicer to start off in a positive way.