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Episode #4 – What is employee turnover costing YOUR cleaning business? For a cleaning company it costs about $500 to recruit, hire and train a new employee. We’ll show you exactly how much money you could be throwing out the window if you don’t get your employee turnover under control. Plus, we offer tips on reducing that turnover.
In part 2, we’ll share the 3 things you need to do to get prospects to read your sales letter and take action.
Today’s Sponsor is Dick Ollek, author of Finding, Training and Keeping GREAT Service Employees 101
If you’re interested in marketing materials like self-mailer sales letters that have the 3 elements mentioned in the video, visit Cleaning Business Marketing Materials.
SHARE YOUR HIRING TIPS! Please share your thoughts and tips for reducing employee turnover by leaving a Reply below. And if you have additional tips for getting your sales letter read share those too!
(4 votes, average: 4.25 out of 5)
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This was a great episode. I will ensure the President,HR Manager, and Marketing Manager watch this.
Thank you.
Wayne
VP, Admin
Thanks Wayne! It’s amazing how eye opening it can be when you actually convert percentages to dollars, isn’t it?
I really enjoy all of your information. I am a numbers person. It is good to see intangible factors converted into numerical data. Keep the information coming. Thx.
J. L. Spratling
President/Founder
Corporate Facilities Mgmt, inc.
http://www.corporatecfm.com
Jean…I agree that turnover hurts the bottom line and trying to reduce it should be a goal for our company. In saying that, can you help me with some ideas on career development especially for part time staff. We are a new business going through our growing stage and trying to establish a presence within our community. I’d like to be able to offer some incentive to our staff besides just a part time paycheck but I do not want to make promises I can not fulfill.
Regards,
Guy Colerick
Hi Guy,
Great question! We also faced this challenge in both our cleaning companies because we had mostly part time people. Granted, there will always be a certain segment of your part time employees that have no interest in a career in the cleaning industry because they already have a full time career and are doing this for a specific reason (put the kids through college, buy a Harley, etc). But for the other people who have no other job or career direction, it’s a great opportunity to show them what the industry has to offer.
What we did was try to get our employees more involved in what our vision was for our company. I see too many cleaning companies hire “bodies”, put them to work, and the “bodies” know nothing about the company they work for! So the more you can share about your company’s history, where it’s going, what your goals are, and how they can play a role in that growth, the better the chance that they’ll start to see how they CAN have a career in the industry.
When we started our second cleaning company, our first part time employee was a former sales person for a chemical company, so a position as a part time janitor wasn’t high on his list of career opportunities. But Steve spent time sharing his vision for the company, and they both became excited about the possibilities, so he came on board part time and worked his way up to Supervisor and then Operations Manager.
Some of our other part time employees showed an interest in learning more about specialized cleaning like carpet cleaning, stripping/waxing, burnishing, etc. So they eventually moved into full time positions and were trained on these other services, which increased their pay and experience. Others who showed signs of leadership moved into training and/or supervisory positions.
You may also have career opportunities for office staff, bookkeepers and sales staff.
Hope that helps!
Some of the things we found that were important to providing an atmosphere of growth and belonging for our part time employees were as follows,
1. I think it is critical to provide them regular quarterly paid FUN training sessions. These can revolve around customer relations, carpet cleaning, supervisory development,employee relations, discipline procedures etc.
By fun I mean involve them in discussions and give prizes for great answers. Prizes can be movie passes, grocery gift certificats, restaurant certificates, and just plain ole envelopes with different dollar denominations in them that they draw for.
You can use your distributor, manufacturers, outside speakers etc. Assign one of them as topic to research and present to their peers, just always vary the delivery process.
We usually had them on a Saturday, starting about 10 AM, meeting till noon, sandwiches for a half hour lunch and out by about 1:30 PM.
2. Have an annual all employee and family picnic with special events for the children such as a clown or a magician etc. This is really rather inexpensive. After the first year they start asking if the next one is scheduled. We had a employee committee that planned the event after about the second or third year. The concept here is when you involve the family it becomes more than JUST A PART TIME JOB. It becomes someplace they may want to work full time.
3. Have a holiday open house for the whole family to attend. Have a Santa Claus and take pictures of the children on Santa’s lap and give them the picture. You provide light snacks etc. but again it becomes an anticipated event each year. We actually invited our employees to bring their favorite dish and it became quite a feast but you don’t have to do it. It was just something that evolved for us.
4. At one of these events have your employees write down the names of their children and birth dates and their spouses birth date and their anniversary day. Then assign someone to make sure cards get out to the people.
I found out that they weren’t getting any or hardly any of these benefits from their full time employer and guess where my full time employees came from–the part time ranks.
I don’t want this to sound like we did it only for part timers because it was for everyone but we considered our part time employees extremely valuable to our success.
Hope this helps.
Dick Ollek
Fantastic…..we have been struggling with this issue lately. So helpful and glad to know we are not the only ones.