Amazing organizations are comprised of amazing people;
the problem is that amazing people don’t come labeled as such. You have to find
them and in order to do so; you have to look for them. Looking back across
almost four decades in the cleaning industry from working in 25 different
companies, I know the cleaning business is really the people business.
But I didn’t always know that, I had to learn it.
I remember at first recruiting, interviewing and hiring
was a bit of a mystery to me and as you can imagine it didn’t go very well at
all. Employees were a necessary evil and one of the big headaches in the
cleaning business. Starting from that point of view employees then became warm
bodies, a part of the cleaning equation and not as reliable as my other tools,
such as upright vacuum cleaners.
I recall having very pleasant daydreams of clean
buildings without employees (which completely replaced childhood daydreams of
being a pirate, but required the same amount of magic).
Slowly I learned the value of my own employees
but it was not until I was working for a large cleaning company where cleaning
staff were less expendable than upright vacuum cleaners that I began to develop
a realistic working theory and then a strategy.
We hired large groups of
workers all at once when a new contract was secured. I recall seeing one worker
on his first day and I could have bet money he wouldn’t return for his second
day of work. A ‘loser’, a complete zero in my mind and on the first night we were
never very picky, we simply needed warm bodies.
He proved me wrong. Not only did he return on the second
night for work but never missed a day and five years later he was appointed
supervisor of one of those buildings. I was wrong about that man but what I
could not see that first night was that he cared about what he was doing.
Identifying people who care means you have to pay attention.
