Has COVID-19 changed the cleaning industry?

I have worked in the cleaning industry for almost 10 years, having to deal with teams, clients and contractors.

Has COVID-19 changed the cleaning industry?

I have worked in the cleaning industry for almost 10 years, having to deal with teams, clients and contractors. In that entire time, we have always seen the same people look for jobs, the same people enquire about using contractors who have always bought on the same principle price.

At Sparkle Cleaning we have never dropped our price to compete as we will only compete on quality, this is why 30% of the quotes we miss will eventually come back to us.

Before COVID-19 the common denominator for many people was this price point, they would always say ‘can you drop your prices as X will do the same job £2 cheaper’ however what we have seen in the last few months is that price isn’t such an issue, companies are willing to spend a bit more because there is a better understanding of the difference between a £10 per hour cleaning company and a £15 per hour cleaning company and through this understanding more companies are looking to outsource their cleaning meaning that what was a £24 Billion industry is only going to increase in the next few years.

As with everything though, when industry booms there are always people who jump on board and not everyone has the same standards, for example, when COVID-19 first came out I saw cleaning companies buying fogging equipment off sites like eBay, then going onto the forums to ask what PPE and chemicals they should be using, you can almost guarantee they have no training and therefore will be putting their clients at risk. 

A good cleaning company won’t have had to change too much when it comes to keeping teams safe. At Sparkle Cleaning we have always asked our teams to wear PPE, wash their hands and protect themselves as much as possible to keep them safe, therefore when the pandemic hit, we increased our chemicals to a medical-grade cleaner and retrained on the use of the PPE – To date, we have had no team off from COVID-19 and none of our sites has been affected.

This is where it is important to make sure you are going for a reputable company. It is part of our job to make sure that all the Health and Safety is in place and that we have trained our teams correctly, we need to be ticking our boxes to keep you as our clients safe as this is part of the service you are paying for.

The biggest change to have come out of the pandemic for the cleaning industry is the amount of innovation that has occurred. The cleaning industry has been fairly static for many years however in the last 12 months we have seen a wide range of products like robotic cleaning machines so that if a company has to go clean an infected area they can do keeping their teams safe outside the building, there have also been leaps forward in the simple PPE that is available for all teams.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Gareth Sanders
Gareth Sanders
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