Fairness in business - maintaining high standards

AG Cleaning Services works very hard to establish and maintain a reliable and sustainable cleaning business. We consider loyalty, integrity and ethics are fundamental pieces in ensuring that a trusting relationship is achieved, benefiting not only you our clients, but our cleaners as well.

Firstly, let’s look at what it takes to build up the team of our wonderful employees. I want to stress how difficult it is – especially now with Brexit, lockdowns, inflation and in general the big question marks around what it is going to be like in the next few months, let alone the next year.

First we have to pay either for advertising, or we reward our cleaners if they bring someone new to the company. Each new candidate goes through rigorous vetting. After that we send them for training with one of our cleaners: both of them (the cleaner and the trainee) are paid. The process lasts about two weeks as we want to make sure we send someone out who is not only ready but is the best they can be. Quite often however, the trainee resigns or else we don’t think they can meet the high standards we promise to our clients. This is all at no extra cost to you, but for us is a significant up-front outlay in both time and money, especially as there are no guaranteed or short-term returns.

I believe we do our selection and training process very well, and our cleaners are held in high regard. As such, it is only natural that clients may be tempted to ask cleaners to work directly for them – there have even been known incidents of this in the last few weeks. However, I can’t stress enough how damaging this is to the whole cleaning industry, to the cleaners themselves and also the clients in the long run. You might ask why this is so, as it seems like the cleaner may be better off being paid directly. Let me explain more.

Let’s start why it is bad for you the client:
• You are effectively liable for paying cleaner holidays
• You are effectively liable to cover insurance
• You have no one to make requests or complaints to
• You will not have cover should your cleaner go away
• You have no protection from theft, damages etc

Why it is bad for the cleaners:
• They are not protected by anyone
• They don’t have any income should a client cancel permanently or temporarily
• They don’t get pension payments,
• They are not insured against any accidents
• They are not paid for holidays

Finally, the whole industry is suffering as cleaners are the core of the business. We are fundamentally a cleaning service, not a recruitment agency – we charge a fee for providing cleaning, nothing else. We give the job to people when they need it the most and, hopefully, we provide the service you desire. It’s small businesses like us that are bringing the economy back to life. We face many risks and challenges in achieving this. We of course need to make money too – but the best way of protecting this is to protect both our clients and our cleaners.

I would like to take this opportunity to give a reminder about our Terms and Conditions: clients are obliged not to employ cleaners provided by us for at least six months after termination of the contract. We believe this is fair, and quite common business practice. It is not a pleasant task for us to have to send emails about ethics and legal obligations, but we sometimes have to take extra care in order to protect our business, which we have proudly built up over the last twenty years.

We hope you understand, and we look forward to continuing to provide a great cleaning service for you, now and into the future.

• Share

• twitter
• googleplus
• facebook