A friend of mine supplements income from his janitorial firm (and keeps on top of his game, industry-wise) by traveling around the country to give multi-day classes to in-house managers of janitorial programs. He happened to be in Phoenix to give his advanced class a couple of weeks ago, and invited me to give a quick presentation on cleaning for, and monitoring, indoor air quality - with sanitation, the two legs of our "cleaning for health" program.
His students had just completed a module on sanitation - restrooms and touch-points - and in methodology for testing its effectiveness. So, when I began by asking an open-ended question, "Why do we clean buildings?", I assumed I'd get mostly answers about protecting the health and safety of the building occupants. Instead, over three quarters responded with some variation on "appearance of the facility", one with "protecting the facility", and only a scattering on anything to do with health.
I then asked "what might be more important - appearance of the facility, or health of the occupants?" On reflection, they came around pretty quickly to "health". But only after I pushed them in that direction.
These were cleaning managers, almost done with an advanced course on cleaning, which stressed health.
If our own trained managers don't get it, how can we expect prospective clients to do so? There's much educating to be done.
Comments