Dave, you mentioned on another thread that you don't have much luck with wc staff.........believe me office cleaners are worse (or can be).
We have a contract which is not straight forward office cleaning, it changes all the time as the site is expanding and the guy who runs it all is eccentric to say the least and as soon as any of his staff gets settled in an office he moves it all round!!!!!! The contract is for 28 hours per week over 4 evenings and we have 2 staff on it.
We charge high to the customer as luckily we were given a heads up on the shanagans on site! Staff we pay over the local going rate and pay half an hour extra per shift each for travelling as site is in the middle of nowhere!.
At the end of the day it is easy work, the hard bit is walking into yet another change and having to adapt your routine, but cleaning is cleaning not rocket science.
Now one we have at the moment beggars belief. His day job is as a Training Officer, so he ain't thick to be able to do that....ask him to pick up polish and a duster and a henry and it's like you have asked him to perfom major brain surgery or something
he has 2 weeks left to get over this or he's out. We have shown him ways of getting round the job achieving a good standard well within the time allowed. Leave him to his own devices and he does it his own way, gets it wrong and takes forever.....why? Latest winge.....there was still some people working in there last night and I didn't know what to do, so I went outside for a while.......... what was he going to do? wait all night? This happened when I was training him at first and I showed him how to handle it. I asked him why he hadn't done the same and he stared at the floor and said I don't know......
I can give you all manner of issues we have had, but at the end of the day we don't want to lose the contract as there are big plans for it and we also have window, carpet and hard floor cleaning with them, but at times I could happily just crawl under a stone and forget about it, especailly when you get a call late evening saying I can't get the hoover to work what shall I do........."use the spare one then and bring the duff one back on your way back"....but that means going back to the store room (2 min walk)......"hmmmm" and when the duff one gets to you for repair.........a pipe has been blocked with something that should never have gone up there in the first place.
Think carefully mate