Managing Staff By Talking To Them
Author: David Andrew Smith

As a cleaning company we place a very high value on our staff,
they can make or break your business. They are our greatest
asset and also our greatest liability. Consequently maintaining
an excellent working environment and keeping staff well
motivated is one of our primary goals. The same applies to most
businesses although it is especially important in the cleaning
industry because of the potentially high turn over of staff
that is somewhat traditional in this field.

We go into many businesses in carrying out our cleaning and as
the current trend is for cleaning to take place during normal
working hours we see many of these in operation on a day to day
basis. Some of these are large organisations with well over 100+
people working on the site others are smaller concerns with
perhaps 5 or 6 people employed. Each manager has their own
method of managing their staff and some of the places are happy
environments where the individuals actually enjoy going to work,
others are places full of grumbles where the people cannot wait
to go home.

By and large the atmosphere in the workplace seems to be a
reflection of the managers. It never ceases to amaze me how
some managers talk to their staff or not, because quite a few
have decided that e-mailing them is better despite the fact
that they may be in the next office. It is written down
therefore it is done and no longer my problem seems to be the
attitude. From a personal point of view I could not tolerate
this.

One of the reasons we go to work with others is for the social
interaction and this is being gradually eroded in the modern
work place. When I did work in such an establishment it became
commonplace for people to send out memos. Memos had their
place, if a meeting was being arranged for example where time
and place and agenda needed to be specified. However I
concluded that well over 90% of the memos sent out to me were
not informational but requesting me to do something.

This I used to take as very bad manners and throw most of them
in the bin until the persons concerned were forced into
actually talking to me. Discussions we used to have around this
issue always centred on how more efficient it was to send out
requests on bits of paper. To me it seemed that it was
depersonalising the work place and increasing the amount of
paper that was being shuffled around. Now it is used as a
method of everybody covering their backs in case something goes
wrong. It may be me being 'difficult', and it may be necessary
to shuffle all this paper around but I just find it sad that
the workplace has deteriorated to this level in many instances.

How do we keep our cleaners happy? We treat them as human
beings who deserve the right to be spoken to correctly. Please
and thank you seem to be very under used words in the workplace
nowadays. We find that a please and a thank you goes a very long
way in maintaining staff morale as does actually talking to them
rather than leaving messages.

It is very noticeable that the good environments to work in,
where people are happy, the bosses actually communicate with
their staff on a human level and the word thank you is heard
quite a lot.

Just remember how you feel when some body says thank you to you
when you have done something for them and conversely how you
feel when there is no response!


About The Author: David Andrew Smith is the owner of
http://www.wesparkle.co.uk, a cleaning services company which
operates throughout the UK