Whether you’re a residential cleaning business with 5 to 50 employees or a Fortune 500 company, tracking the performance of your employees is vital to making better decisions about investing in your workforce. Hiring, training, and retaining top cleaning talent is vital to the success of your residential cleaning business. Calculating your residential cleaning business employee turnover rate, and managing this metric is something you will be able to achieve after watching the video, and downloading the worksheet in MaidCentral Academy.
Most residential cleaning businesses don’t quantify the true cost of turnover in their business, but if you were to put a number to it, I think you would find that the cost is much higher than the cost of running ads, interviewing employees, drug and background screenings, or even the hours you spend training your employees. Those all add up, and can be several thousand dollars for a single hire. But there are other hidden, but more expensive costs to unnecessary turnover. If you were to truly add up the cost of turnover, it would also include the cost of lost opportunity for growth and unnecessary customer churn. We talked about calculating the Lifetime Value of a customer in a prior post. When you understand that a customer can be worth well over $10,000, even losing a few extra customers a month due to unnecessary employee turnover can create a real drag on growth and profitability.
How many clients are secretly leaving your company because they are fed up with the revolving door of people in their home? Quality suffers, but more importantly consistency suffers. It could be argued that consistency quality what your customers are really craving. And the only way to create consistency is to have longevity in your employees, coupled with training and systems. All the great systems in the world can’t make up for a perceived revolving door of employees.
Your customers are relying on you to hire, train, and keep cleaning talent. They don’t want to deal with hiring people, they just want their home cleaned once or twice a month the same way every time. And that’s why you need great employees. Of course it’s not that simple, but identifying the challenges you face is an important step in creating meaningful solutions.
Before we get too far into the weeds, let’s talk about employee turnover rate. I’m sure you know what it is and by the end of this training you will be able to calculate it. But do you actually understand why your talented employees quit or worse yet become disgruntled before quitting? A disgruntled employee that stays is almost worse, but that is the topic for another post.
MaidCentral has powerful employee engagement tools in addition to objective reporting. At any given time you can look at objective measures of every team member you employ. You can measure attendance and give each cleaning technician an objective score. You can measure quality scores from client feedback and how often they receive feedback. You can see how efficiently they use their time, and how productive they are.
To truly reduce your cleaning technician turnover you need to have objective measures that you can use to identify how your team members are performing. Because not all team members are equal in their value to your company. Some important thing you should measure and create scores for your team members are time and attendance, client satisfaction scores, customer churn, how efficiently your team members spend their time, and how productive they are in cleaning time as compared to your allowed cleaning times. When you know all of these data points and more you can put a more meaningful value on how you pay and reward your top cleaning talent. And the pay is only part of it. If your top techs know they are appreciated and recognized for measurable results they will keep delivering.
All of these are core features of how MaidCentral creates employee engagement, and helps you reduce turnover.
In addition to these metrics, giving your cleaning technicians tools that help them make requests off, see their scheduled days and scheduled days off, make requests to change their availability, see their payroll data, see their customer feedback scorecards, and of course have a portal with all the information they need to deliver a great cleaning to your customers.
Tracking and managing your employee turnover rate is critical to employing strategies to control that critical cleaning business KPI. What gets measured gets managed. This is one of the built in reports and KPIs that MaidCentral cleaning business software has at the heart of its KPI modeling and business intelligence.
If you don’t have MaidCentral yet and need to get a handle on your current turnover, please watch the video in this post and download the spreadsheet from MaidCentral Academy.
