by Camille Perlman
The pandemic, with its constant state of change, is testing the notion of what it means to be a team for facility housekeeping staff and supervisors. Two years ago, when the pandemic started hitting campuses, they saw other units going home to work remotely and felt like they were being left behind on campus. When it was decided that it was safe for a limited number of staff members to come to campus for work, it was helpful to have fewer students and staff on campus, but many felt it was like working in a ghost town. And the change that has cut the deepest has been the number of housekeeping staff who have retired or taken other jobs during this time because of unknowns along the way, like health risks and layoffs.
With the lack of staff, many housekeeping teams were (and still are) spread thin to cover the square footage they need to clean. There was (and still is) heightened pressure to perform their job seamlessly and effectively. And with more people back on campus now, they have staff, faculty, students, and parents judging the quality and the timeliness of their work. How do supervisors keep up morale and make staff feel appreciated in a work environment like this? How do supervisors help them see beyond the ripples the pandemic created for them and start working on team development?
Josh Gana, director of strategic initiatives at the University of Washington, notes that fellow directors say they are going back to fundamental management principles: listening, checking in face-to-face with teams, being more visible, and recognizing staff for good work. Together, these serve as a support mechanism for staff and can help them feel heard, supported, and appreciated. The pandemic has put strains on staff and supervisors within the areas of hiring, management, and planning, and these areas are challenging to navigate on a good day in the best of times. Now, teams and supervisors need support in these areas that will normalize and streamline their day-to-day and help them prepare for the future. There will be an end to the pandemic at some point, and custodial teams need to be ready.
The offer of a campus custodial job has been a hard sell. What used to be seen as a good job with benefits is now seen as an average opportunity for employment. Dee Sneed, director of campus services for facilities management at Auburn University, explains that with other employers offering higher wages plus benefits, people no longer feel they have to come to campus and clean up behind messy adults in order to have a good job. And when candidates do apply for custodial work, the pool tends to be shallow both in number and in expertise. Tanya Hughes, associate director of building services for housing and residence life at the University of Florida, notes that interview candidates have said, “I clean my home, how hard can it be?” Vincent Taylor, associate director of university housekeeping at North Carolina State University, agrees with them both, saying that it’s been hard to find even temporary workers and that the lack of staff has made it harder to cover staff absences due to COVID or regular time off.
As campuses begin another semester in the midst of the pandemic, hiring managers have put strategies in place to make the candidate pool better. At Auburn, they raised their hourly minimum to $14.50 and are hopeful this will attract more candidates. At Florida, Hughes says they will continue working closely with their human resources team and will equip staff who are managing the hiring process with knowledge they’ve gained from navigating hiring challenges the past few years. “Now is a good time to work with your human resources manager to review position descriptions, revisit organizational chart formats, and ensure your team has solid knowledge of the hiring pool and the process.” She also suggests presenting information about open positions more efficiently on social media platforms by “combining vacant positions that are similar into one posting,” which helps streamline the posting process in the virtual world. “Of course, word of mouth is and will always be a great component of sharing your vacancies.”
Due to the pandemic, custodial work is under greater scrutiny than in the past. Supervisors have had to step in and explain how thin their team’s capacity is and how the priorities on their daily lists have shifted due to COVID. High-touch surfaces in public areas remain the top priority, so schedules for cleaning more personal areas like offices or residence hall rooms are not back to what they were before the pandemic.
Building morale also includes creating a conscious habit of asking staff, “How are you?” and not just asking how the work is going.
This was the case at both Auburn and the University of Florida. Custodial supervisors asked staff and students to be the primary cleaners of their personal space, but their housekeeping staff were being asked by other staff why they weren’t coming into offices as often and taking out the trash or wiping down desks. And when housekeeping said they needed to put in a request to have their office cleaned outside of the scaled-down schedule, staff were confused. The solution here was for supervisors to step up and show support for their staff by communicating what the department’s priorities are and assuring customers that they are still committed to a highly skilled level of work and care even though they are running on a different schedule. Showing staff support in this way is always important, but it is especially so now. Reinforcing the message that custodial staff are skilled lets customers know they are being taken care of and lets staff know that supervisors support and care for them as well.
Although customers are important, Taylor highlights that it’s just as important to listen and communicate to staff. His strategy was to hold town hall meetings with his staff where communication flowed regularly and he listened to their concerns. Additionally, he asked senior administration and public safety leaders on campus to attend these meetings, which went a long way in making staff feel heard. And though these meetings started at the beginning of the pandemic as a way to put frontline staff at ease with health concerns and give them the latest information from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention about COVID, the senior leaders heard first-hand what the staff concerns were and used this knowledge to upgrade their PPE. This translated into staff getting nitrile gloves, which are thicker and stronger than latex, and face shields. “I can’t emphasize enough how important it was to communicate like this to custodial staff,” he says. Taylor also suggests talking to staff about change and prepping them for what it brings to their environment. “It may be that staff is doing stuff a certain way today, but a change may come quick, and staff need to be ready to work with the change.” Furthermore, he recommends sharing messages of change from the top down. This further cements confidence in the channel of communication between staff and supervisors.
Another important management strategy is for supervisors to work alongside staff in the field or walk around and check in with them. Hughes says to supervisors, “Step out of your comfort zone, get to know names and faces, know who works where on campus, and roll up your sleeves and get in the trenches with staff.” This is what makes the work teamwork. “Let’s remember we should never ask our team to perform tasks we ourselves are not willing to do. Working with our team provides a level of understanding; we are not just dictating the work which needs to be completed, but we are equally invested in our team’s success with a hands-on training approach.”
Morale builders continue to be an important piece to management. As Hughes says, “Placing a lot of emphasis on reminding the group of how appreciative we are for all their hard work, dedication, and commitment as often as we can goes a long way and increases morale. This level of recognition encourages the team to persevere through all types of adversity.” Taylor agrees, noting that they feature staff in the department’s weekly email and hand out special coins for a job well done. Building morale also includes creating a conscious habit of asking staff, “How are you?” and not just asking how the work is going.
The approach to planning is certainly different now due to the pandemic. For instance, Gana says that his campus is on version 20 of their operational plan for this year. However, there are still ways for management to ride the waves of change and make sound plans.
Supervisors need to be willing to pivot. Hughes presents the example of leading staff through a “what if . . .” exercise when an entire unit is sent home because of COVID and everyone is thinking, “What do we have to learn? We are living in a pandemic and have already learned what to expect.” And then it happened for real. She says it opened their eyes, and they have added more standard procedures to their pandemic cleaning document and adopted more of a team approach because of it. Teamwork is crucial to the job. The mentality of “This is my zone and I only clean in my zone” needs to be dropped, and the message about coming together as a team and believing that care for all zones is important needs to be broadcast. She also keeps training at the top of her mind when planning for how the work will get done. “We can’t do the obvious, which is increase salaries as often as we would like for meritorious services; however, we can focus on what we can do: continuing to encourage, create, and reinforce time for staff to attend training sessions.”
Reinforcing the message that custodial staff are skilled lets customers know they are being taken care of and lets staff know that supervisors support and care for them as well.
Sneed explains that although juggling who is cleaning what area on their campus is challenging (the amount of cleanable square footage there is divided between in-house and contract staff), she reviews their contract monthly and preaches partnership. And 2022 is already looking better. “A little over half of the square footage of the in-house staff will be added to the custodial contract beginning February 2022,” she says. “With this, we will be able to right-size our in-house staff and provide more coverage in certain areas. This alone should take some stress off the in-house staff, hopefully boosting their morale. Additionally, the clients in the in-house buildings should see improved services, especially in floor care.”
Taylor says that along with continuing to prep staff for change, they are doing a lot of cross training and are considering moving to flex scheduling in order to ease the pain the staff feels when someone is out for the day or an extended amount of time. He also has regular discussions with senior housing officers about the capacity of the custodial team and balancing that with keeping customers happy. “You can’t make short cuts in cleaning residence halls. They need to be aware that if someone is out on the housekeeping team then I am pulling someone away from another maintenance team in a different area on campus to fill in.” From a budget standpoint, this also helps him make the case that they need all the custodial staff that they have.
Even though their days are already extremely busy, supervisors need to be thinking about the future of their teams. Hughes says it is important to remain current with trends and technology in the field and to create a budget for cutting-edge technology for staff. She also says it is important to take care of staff and acknowledge that there are different generations in the field, which also needs to be reflected in staff training. “I believe it is important for our team to understand the work we do is not new or enhanced work; to me, it continues to be crucial work when performed correctly. I want to continue working with our staff that want to advance further by creating training tracks specifically geared toward their career goal trajectory.” Sneed agrees, noting that bringing an aging workforce into training with modern technology is key and will remain so until more of the younger generation with a greater comfort level with technology starts coming in.
Supervisors need to continue to demonstrate the skill, knowledge, and worth of the custodial staff to other campus departments so that they can know more about their facilities and understand the inner workings of the custodial team. “It’s like the younger generation says. It’s not enough to talk about it; we need to be about it.” And she concludes by saying, “We must work with our staff to focus on inviting them to continue investing in the work we do daily. When we as managers are rolling up our sleeves it signifies that the work we do matters, that we care, and brings great rewards.”
Camille Perlman is the managing editor of Talking Stick for ACUHO-I.