The Janitors' Closet

Benefits of including periodic floor service

Some time ago, I presented a quote to a small medical facility whose floors had really deteriorated, because their current janitorial service charges extra (a LOT extra) for refinishing ("waxing") - and likes to refinish often, because they are not burnishing in between.  

Vinyl tile requires regular maintenance - to retain appearance, and to help provide a safe, injury free and sanitary workplace.  While glossy floors may look slippery, modern floor finishes meet or exceed Federal standards for traction, even when wet; they are generally more slip resistant than bare tile. Worn finish (or bare tile) is porous, and thus renders less effective any germicidal mopping (the critters have a place to hide.)

Frequent burnishing (ultra high-speed buffing) hardens the finish; harder finish lasts longer, so needs less frequent refinishing.  Burnishing is quick and inexpensive; refinishing is not.  As a bonus, the floor looks a lot better - ongoing.

Likewise, if carpet is cleaned on a regular basis, and a protectant applied, it looks fine ongoing, and each cleaning is easier to do (and thus less expensive) than having to do the occasional heavy "restoration" cleaning.

We offer our clients "full-service" — periodic burnishing, refinishing, carpet cleaning, ceramic scrubbing and window washing  — on a regular schedule, pro-rated into the monthly bill.  No extra charges, no surprises, and the place looks good ongoing.  Often doesn't cost more than a "let it deteriorate, then restore it" approach.

Robotic Window Washers

Should have looked further.  Just after I posted yesterday on innovations in window cleaning, and speculated on some sort of robots designed for high-rise buildings, I found in my in-box my daily feed from Building Service Contractors Association International (CBN has been a member since 1985)..  Included was an article on exactly that.

It seems that a couple of innovative firms (both Israeli, go figure) have systems up and running.  One places a robot on (essentially) an existing platform; the other has a light weight device, suspended by a rope, "climbing" down the building using suction cups.  The latter uses no water; it simply cleans the glass mechanically. Neat advantages are cameras and other sensors that look for cracks, gaps and so on.

Mentioned in passing is that high-rise window washers are hard to come by.  The work force is ageing, and few new folks enter the trade.  Thus there is a certain impetus to supplanting people, over and above cost and liability.  One sees the same dynamic in, among other fields, long haul trucking (driverless rigs look to replace the current inventory at least as soon as a given rig ages out); McDonalds is said to be testing an automated restaurant somewhere in Texas.  We're soon to see lots of folks out of work, with no work available given their current education or skill set.

Low moisture soil encapsulation carpet cleaning

Check out a recent article, from our friends at CleanLink, on a great carpet cleaning method.  We use soil encapsulation on virtually all of our client carpets, providing our client a variety of benefits.

"It’s a relatively basic concept: encapsulation cleaning utilizes the strength of crystalizing polymers with detergent components to attack and bind oily soil deposits buried within the carpet to dry elements that can subsequently be removed through a vacuuming process. The polymers penetrate much deeper than a standard vacuum bristle might, allowing cleaners to reach the deep-seated deposits and oils that give otherwise clean carpet that  worn-down appearance.  

"With encapsulation, a solution is worked into the carpet via a number of methods: it might be applied using a rotary machine, CRB counter-rotating brush, a brush applicator, or a compression sprayer. The method of application doesn’t really matter, though; what’s important is that the solution gets worked deep into the carpet.  

"After letting the solution sit, it will eventually dry and crystalize. Once that happens, a couple passes with the vacuum will remove the loosened compounds, leaving behind a clean and dry carpet."

We also see much less wear and distortion of the carpet than traditional rotary brush shampooing, and (due to less moisture) much less chance of either mildew or wicking than either extraction or shampooing.  And, due to less torque from the machine, it's easier on the operator. 

One of those rare win/win situations. 

Waterfall, and the importance of communication

A story from a few years back, that happened to come to mind:

From my operations manager's over night report:

"While Ernie was doing the floor at ..... a pipe burst in the ceiling and started pouring water down on top of him. He was able to get his wet-vac and keep the water from flooding the building until I arrived. I spoke to Bob, the emergency contact, who walked me through where to find the shut off valve for the water pipes. Had to climb up above the ceiling but I got everything shut off. Lucky for them we were there when this happened so there was no real damage except for the wet ceiling and water in the light fixtures."

And, from our client, this morning:

"Good morning Gentlemen, There was a call on my voice mail this morning from Tony. He called at 10:30pm last night. Please apologize to him for my not answering.  The problem was water was coming out by one of the light fixtures in the showroom. It turned out to be an old hot water heater we have upstairs. It hasn’t worked for years, but somehow the valve got turned on. Probably pressure or something. Tony called Bob and I think he walked him through it. We really appreciate him calling and taking care of it. You really train your teams well.  Please let him know we appreciate everything he did."

It's all in the details, and in contingency planning.  We stress communication; we're careful to get several after-hours emergency phone numbers from the client (three in this case; two of them did not answer); we encourage our folks to take the initiative to better serve our clients, and protect their facilities.  The latter is particularly significant; we provide janitorial service to clients all over the metro Phoenix area, so have keys to lots of client facilities, and feel a bit of responsibility for them.  And our floor techs generally carry wet-vacs. 

From my operations manager's over night report:

"While Ernie was doing the floor at ..... a pipe burst in the ceiling and started pouring water down on top of him. He was able to get his wet-vac and keep the water from flooding the building until I arrived. I spoke to Bob, the emergency contact, who walked me through where to find the shut off valve for the water pipes. Had to climb up above the ceiling but I got everything shut off. Lucky for them we were there when this happened so there was no real damage except for the wet ceiling and water in the light fixtures."

And, from our client, this morning:

"Good morning Gentlemen, There was a call on my voice mail this morning from Tony. He called at 10:30pm last night. Please apologize to him for my not answering.  The problem was water was coming out by one of the light fixtures in the showroom. It turned out to be an old hot water heater we have upstairs. It hasn’t worked for years, but somehow the valve got turned on. Probably pressure or something. Tony called Bob and I think he walked him through it. We really appreciate him calling and taking care of it. You really train your teams well.  Please let him know we appreciate everything he did."

It's all in the details, and in contingency planning.  We stress communication; we're careful to get several after-hours emergency phone numbers from the client (three in this case; two of them did not answer); we encourage our folks to take the initiative to better serve our clients, and protect their facilities.  The latter is particularly significant; we provide janitorial service to clients all over the metro Phoenix area, so have keys to lots of client facilities, and feel a bit of responsibility for them.  And our floor techs generally carry wet-vacs. 

We use maps at CBN to better understand and improve performance

The old days of pins 'n strings on a cork board have been over for some time now, but the practice of planning our work continues.  Years ago I was the sales manager at CBN, and when I brought a new account's paperwork into Bob's office, he would get excited, jump up from his desk and go over to a large map we had on the wall. Bob would then select a colored pin with a number, the color representing the frequency that we would clean the account, the number representing the account's ID number. These pins would be grouped with a string, that represented 'the route'.  There was a visceral feeling of pride that we all felt in our wall map ritual.  Google's mapping technology definitely changed that. 

Today we use digital mapping to efficiently route customer service visits, inspections, floor crew assignments, and to spot trends.  Digital mapping technology has improved our operational efficiency and helps us to better serve our clients. But for the nostalgia we wouldn't go back to pins 'n strings. 

I bring this up because I read this article in Fast Company about maps and how they help us understand the world and events, in this case Russia's invasion of Ukraine. 

The idea of crowd sourcing maps with information content can also be paired with cloud based webcams and drones to help us see and understand what's happening in the world in real time. 

There are some very interesting links in the article that suggest that they might be better than the good old Penguin Atlas, although the sites linked in the article do have a lot of ads, while a used but good Penguin Atlas could be picked up at the annual Visiting Nurse Service Auxiliary book sale for cheap. 

https://www.fastcompany.com/90733391/theres-a-lot-you-dont-see-in-maps-of-the-war-in-ukraine-heres-how-to-look-at-them-differently

Here are two links from the article, it may take a bit of effort to get to the good stuff. 
https://liveuamap.com  

https://www.bellingcat.com/news/2022/02/27/follow-the-russia-ukraine-monitor-map

by Bill Black 

What's happened to America's public restrooms?

Due to my last post, regarding my janitorial background, I seem to be thinking about public restrooms.

An often overlooked aspect of a city's livability, and thus civility, is the availability of public toilets.  If one is not at one's home or office, and not patronizing a particular business, one is often out of luck.  And it's a bit of an imposition, and an economic hardship, to require a shop or restaurant to open its restrooms to general street traffic.  Here's an interesting article out of Marketplace, that includes the following:

"In the middle of the twentieth century, public toilets were relatively common in the United States. For the most part, people had to pay for the stalls, which opened with coins, while urinals were free. But with rising feminist sentiments in the 1970s, people started to recognize this arrangement as sexist, since it meant that women had to pay, while men did not. Over the following decade, the grassroots organization Committee to End Pay Toilets in America succeeded in getting bans on pay toilets in many states, and the late March Fong Eu, California secretary of state from 1975 to 1994, smashed a porcelain toilet with a sledgehammer on the steps of the State Capitol.

"The banning of pay toilets had an unintended outcome. Instead of free public toilets for all, public toilets pretty much disappeared from American cities, since cities found it expensive and difficult to keep them safe and clean. (In Europe, where there was no such movement, pay public toilets persist, as they have since as far back as Roman times.)"

Flood clean-up

While much of the country suffers high temperatures and drought, here in Phoenix we're having our usual summer monsoon season.  And, as usual, neither our trees nor our roofs are ready for it.

I spent yesterday evening chain sawing fallen tree limbs in my backyard and my neighbors; meanwhile, I had my service techs do preliminary flood clean-up work in a cardiovascular facility to which we provide janitorial service.  Multiple points in the roof gave way, bringing down ceiling tole and insulation throughout the office.

While there is no asbestos to contend with (too recent construction), the fiberglass insulation is rather nasty stuff, so we used masks, goggles and gloves, with bunny suits available if needed, all on our vans as a result of ongoing Coronavirus electrostatic disinfection, which we've offered to clients and the rest of the commercial community since quite early in the pandemic.

Looks like the job went well; the contractor has baseboards to replace, at a minimum.

Most of my thoughts lately have concerned our long-time focus, providing commercial janitorial service with a view to making our client facilities just a bit safer and healthier to work in.  Also, of late, since we're performing a good many COVID remediation jobs, I look at the evolving science of disinfection and other aspects of the current Coronavirus pandemic.

It can all get just a bit depressing.

So, when a colleague sent me a note on a subject about as far from my usual concerns as possible, I just had to pass it along.

In England, it is not uncommon to see "wavy" brick walls. Interestingly, the design uses fewer bricks than a straight wall.

A straight wall that is just one brick thick is not sturdy enough to stand alone & can be easily toppled, so they generally have a thickness of at least two or more layers of bricks, & are also reinforced at regular intervals with vertical posts serving as buttresses. But a wavy "one-brick" wall stands just fine on its own due to the arch support provided by its shape, which combines both wall & buttress. Such a structure is called a "crinkle crankle wall" "the Old English version of "zig zag."

As my friend put it, I had no idea.

The CBN Way: "If it's not bright, it's not right."

A note from a team member of 40-plus years standing:

Robert, we have been talking lately about CBN’s culture, and how the company's culture sustains the values and virtues that shape our work, and how our work shapes who we are.

As an illustration of what this means to me, let me tell you a story that a mutual friend of ours, Arthur Brodsky, told me about ten years ago.

When Arthur told me this story, he said it occurred about ten years before he told it to me, so that would be about 20 years ago. Arthur said that he, and a friend of his, James, had been working together on a community volunteer service project, and in the process, they were asked to clean a bathroom, and the bathroom was rather grody. Arthur said the bathroom smelled awful, and it looked worse than you could possibly imagine. None of the other volunteers wanted to do that job, however James and Arthur agreed to clean it up, and so they rolled up their sleeves and dove into it.

When Arthur and James were done cleaning the bathroom, Arthur looked at the porcelain sink that James had just cleaned and he said, "Wow, James, that sink is really, really, clean". Arthur said the sink had looked so bad when they first saw it, that you couldn’t see any of the porcelain, and now the sink looked immaculate. The walls, the floor, the fixtures, everything in the restroom were immaculate. After Arthur expressed his admiration for the effort James had put into cleaning the sink, he hinted that perhaps it was not really necessary to clean it that well, and James replied, "If it's not bright, it's not right".

Arthur was puzzled by that comment, and he asked James what he meant by that. James then told Arthur that about ten years earlier he worked for a cleaning company where his brother was the operations manager. James said the cleaning company's name was CBN, and that CBN taught him to do things "the CBN way". Arthur had heard of the name CBN before because he knew Bob Croft, CBN’s owner, from the Salt River Brass Band.

Arthur asked James to say more about "the CBN way". James said it's not enough to clean a sink and leave any spots, stains, smudges, or any residue whatsoever, and further, the fixtures had to shine, and the porcelain had to be whatever color it was when the sink was new. James went on to say that when he worked at CBN, the company operated a service school to train janitors how to clean a building properly.

One of the key principles CBN taught James was that a job is not done until it's done right, and it's not done right until it's done completely, that's the CBN way.

Arthur said he appreciated the integrity that James showed that day. In the early years of CBN, we ran a janitor's training school once a week, classes met for six to eight hours every Saturday. We taught

• the proper use, maintenance, and repair of cleaning equipment and tools;
• the proper use and storage of chemicals;
• the best cleaning methods for various hard floors and carpeting;
• dusting and dust control;
• trash collection and recycling;
• windows cleaning;
• workplace cleaning strategies and workflow for individual, and team cleaning;
• estimating and business math;
• inventory control;
• vehicle organization routing and planning;
• company forms, record keeping and communication;
• work safety;
• building security;
• quality control;
• customer service.

The curriculum was rather comprehensive.

The training program was a significant investment of CBN's time and resources to develop janitors and staff, it was not just about techniques and knowledge, it was also about fostering good character, and that was management's commitment to the CBN way.

How necessary is the day porter?

Had a call from some folks wanting a day porter.  It seemed to be about the same situation as one I wrote about a few years ago.

A client wanted us to quote and provide a day porter for their facility, perhaps an hour per day, mid-day, in addition to our regular nightly cleaning.  They're a large call center, with lots of folks using a couple of large restrooms, in something of a high pressure environment.  So the restrooms get hammered, and my client thought they needed an extra mid-day cleaning

I dropped by, early afternoon, to check the restrooms with the client and to probe a bit on exactly what his concerns really were.  Turns out that overflowing trash cans and empty towel and toilet tissue dispensers were more of an issue than that the facilities' needing to be cleaned.

While I'm not adverse to building some into a contract, I can't see allowing a client to waste his money, even on me.  So I suggested larger restroom trash cans, and more (and larger) paper dispensers.  Buying cans and dispensers cost less than a couple of weeks of day porter service would have.  And we're always available to run someone out on short notice, in an emergency.

Less hassle for me, and much less expense for my client.