What to Ask a Commercial Cleaning Company Before You Sign

Make them walk the building first

You will learn more about a cleaning company in twenty minutes of walking your building with them than from anything they send you afterwards. The useful part is not that they showed up to look. It is what they ask while they are looking.

Someone who intends to do this properly wants to know how many people use the building and how they use it, how many washrooms there are and how hard they work, what the floors are made of, where the bins go and who currently takes them out, what time the last person actually leaves, and what is failing right now that made you start looking in the first place. If nobody asks about headcount, be careful. Floor area tells you how long the vacuuming takes. Headcount tells you almost everything else.

At the end of the walk, ask them what they noticed. Someone who has really looked will name something you already know is a problem: the entrance matting, the grout in the second-floor washroom, the kitchen cabinet fronts nobody has touched in a year. Someone who has not will talk in general terms about quality and reliability.

If you are hiring for several addresses rather than one, all of this matters more, not less. A weak arrangement across a managed portfolio gets multiplied by the number of buildings, and you will be the one fielding every bit of it.

Insurance: ask for it in writing, then actually read it

Every facilities manager asks whether a cleaning company is insured. Very few people read the document that comes back. It is worth the four minutes.

Ask for the certificate of insurance to come from the company's insurance agent rather than as a file forwarded by the company itself. Then check the dull parts: that the name on the certificate is the same legal name that will appear on your contract, and that the policy dates cover the term you are about to agree to. If people will be working in your building unsupervised, ask about workers' compensation as well as liability, and ask what that answer means for you if somebody is hurt on your floor. If your organization requires it, ask to be listed as a certificate holder, and ask whether the policy carries a notice-of-cancellation endorsement — a certificate on its own only proves the policy existed on the day it was printed.

Then ask the question that actually matters and is not printed on the certificate. If something in this building gets damaged, who do I call, and what happens next. You are listening for a straight answer with a name in it rather than a reassurance.

We are fully insured, on every job and every property, and we will put proof of that in your hands before anything is signed. Ask us for it. Ask everyone else you are considering for it too, and treat hesitation as the answer.

• The name on the certificate matches the company name that will be on your contract
• The policy dates cover the whole term you are agreeing to, not just today
• Liability, and workers' compensation where people work unsupervised in your building
• The certificate came from an insurance agent, not as an attachment forwarded to you
• You are listed as a certificate holder if your organization needs notice of a lapse
• There is a named person to call if something in your building is damaged

Who actually shows up, and who shows up when they are sick

This is the question that separates cleaning companies from one another, and it almost never appears on anyone's list.

Ask whether the people cleaning your building are employees of the company you are signing with, or subcontractors. Both models exist in this trade and neither is a secret. The difference shows up in whether the standard holds from week to week, and in who is accountable at eleven at night in a building you are responsible for.

Then ask the follow-up. Will it be the same people every visit. A crew that has cleaned your offices thirty times knows which door sticks, which desk always has paperwork on it and must be left alone, and that the third-floor washroom needs more time than the other two. A crew meeting your building for the first time knows none of that, and you will spend the next month explaining it again to somebody new.

Ask what happens when a member of the crew is on vacation or off sick, because that is the night the whole arrangement gets tested. Ask who checks the work, and how often anyone senior walks the building rather than reading a report about it.

Be wary of a company that answers every staffing question with a claim it cannot evidence. If you are told the crew is screened, trained and certified to some standard, ask what that means in practice and what it looks like on paper. What we will tell you plainly is this: the crew is our own trained team rather than subcontractors — a small, known group of people rather than whoever a staffing agency had free that morning. That holds for a single office and for the common areas of a whole building alike.

Get the scope in writing, room by room, with frequencies

Most disappointment with a cleaning contract is not a standards problem. It is a scope problem nobody noticed until month three, by which point it feels like a betrayal rather than a misunderstanding.

Ask for the scope written out room by room, and insist that every line carries a frequency next to it: every visit, weekly, monthly, quarterly, on request. The lines that cause arguments are always the ones that were assumed. Interior glass. Inside the refrigerator. Under the desks. High dusting and light fixtures. Blinds. The bin room. Somebody in the room believes each of those is included. Nobody wrote it down.

Pin down the vague words while you still have leverage. As needed means nothing unless a person is named to decide when it is needed. Spot clean can mean anything from a genuine wipe to a glance on the way past. Detail clean should have a list underneath it or it is decoration.

Then settle the unglamorous logistics, which are the ones that generate the emails. Who supplies the soap, paper and liners, and who notices when the store is running low. Whose equipment is used and where it lives. Who takes the bins out at the end of a visit, and whether recycling is part of that. Whether anything at all is expected of your own staff before the crew arrives, because if the answer is yes it should be said out loud rather than discovered.

This matters most in the rooms where somebody outside your business forms an opinion. In a practice, a studio or any professional office where clients sit and wait, the scope should be heaviest exactly where they sit.

• Every line has a frequency beside it: every visit, weekly, monthly, quarterly or on request
• Interior glass, high dusting, light fixtures and blinds are named rather than assumed
• Appliance interiors — refrigerator, microwave, oven where there is one — are explicitly in or out
• Consumables: who supplies them, who restocks them, who flags when they are running low
• Bins: who empties them, who takes them out, and whether recycling is included
• Vague terms — as needed, spot clean, detail clean — are defined or removed
• Anything expected of your staff before a visit is written down rather than implied

How a problem gets fixed

Everything goes wrong once. A washroom gets missed, a floor gets done badly, a crew arrives on the wrong night. Whether the contract survives it has very little to do with the mistake and almost everything to do with what happens next.

Ask who you contact. You want a person rather than a general inbox, and you want to know roughly how far up the company that person sits. In a family-run company the answer is usually short. In a larger one, ask how many hands your message passes through before it reaches somebody with the authority to send a crew back.

Ask what the process is, in plain terms. Does it need to be in writing. Is it put right on the next visit, or does somebody come back before then. Does the same issue arriving twice trigger anything different, or does it simply keep being logged by a person who is not the person who could fix it.

Ask for a review after the first month. It is the single most useful thing you can build into a cleaning arrangement and hardly anyone does it. Four weeks in, both sides know things neither of you knew at signing: that the kitchen needs more time than anyone allowed for, that Thursday is a worse night than Tuesday, that the meeting room glass matters more to you than the meeting room floor. A short walkthrough at that point fixes all of it while it is still easy to fix.

Then be a good client in return, because it genuinely changes the outcome. The cleaning has gone downhill cannot be acted on by anybody. The second-floor washroom mirror was missed on Tuesday and again on Thursday can be, and usually is, that same week.

Access, keys and the security questions nobody enjoys

If a crew will be in your building when you are not, the access arrangement is part of the contract whether anyone wrote it down or not. Better written down.

Ask how many keys, fobs or codes will exist, who holds them, and where they live between visits. Ask what happens when somebody at the cleaning company moves on, and whether that key is accounted for. Ask what happens if a code stops working at seven in the evening: is there a person who answers a phone, or does your building simply go uncleaned and you find out on Wednesday morning.

Agree in writing that keys, fobs and codes come back when the arrangement ends. It is a dull clause, and it is the one people wish they had written when a contract ends badly.

In a building with other tenants, tell the property manager, the alarm company and any security patrol who has authorised access before the first visit rather than after the first false alarm. Nobody enjoys that phone call and everybody remembers it.

The contract itself, and how it ends

Read the term, the renewal and the exit before you read anything else, because those three decide how much the rest of it can hurt you.

How long is it. Does it renew on its own, and by what date do you have to say no. What notice does each side give. Is there a period to put things right before either of you can walk away. And the one that catches people out: is the company you are signing with the company that will do the work, or a broker who will place it with somebody you have never met.

Ask what happens to a visit that cannot happen. Central Massachusetts closes buildings a few times most winters. Is a missed visit made up later, moved to another night, or simply dropped. Any of those answers is workable. Agreeing it in September rather than at six in the morning with eight inches on the ground is the part that matters.

Ask how the arrangement changes when your building changes, because it will. You will add headcount, take a floor, gain a tenant, or turn a storeroom into a break room. There should be a way to revise the scope and the schedule in writing that does not mean starting the whole conversation again.

None of this requires a long document. It requires a short one that says what gets done, how often, by whom, how you reach somebody, and how it ends. If a company is reluctant to put that on paper, you have learned something useful before signing anything.