Why Workloading? 

We all know of people who can walk into a facility and very quickly determine how many hours they feel the building will take to clean. In most cases, these people have years of experience and are able to compare similar areas or buildings with what they have seen in the past. Dividing by a magic number will then give you a correct number, some of the time. Unfortunately, it will also be wrong some of the time and, in both cases, you have a problem.

The main problem with the magic number method is that it becomes impossible to discuss how you arrived at the final figure with a potential customer and/or client, let alone with your own people. Perhaps most important, you are not sure whether you have guessed right or wrong, until you get the job. That’s not the time to find out you are wrong.

The only accurate method of determining how many hours are required to clean a particular building is to ‘WORKLOAD” the building. Workloading is a systematic approach to determining the total hours required to clean a facility. Workloading considers, through use of accurate time standards, exactly how many minutes each task called for in the specifications, will take to perform. Workloading is a process which yields fantastic results when translated into money and, ultimately, to service cost.

Workloading sets the professional cleaner apart from the sea of people who do not understand that every task takes time and that time converts into money. Since profits are so low in the cleaning industry today, it is disastrous not to capture all of the operating costs and this most definitely includes the time intended to use in the account.

In order to better understand the break out, think of the building as a pizza. This simply means that in order to eat a pizza, you first divide it into slices, then work on one slice at a time until the pizza is finished. The break-out of a building is no different. Any type of facility can be broken out in the exact same way.

Perhaps the most difficult task to undertake, and yet the most important, is the building break-out. In order to make it more easily understood we use the example of the pizza. If you think of the building as a pizza cut into slices, with each slice representing an area, the break-out becomes much easier to comprehend. Areas can be joined together which have the same specifications and floor type. The first step is to write down the obvious areas of the building. As an example, for an office building you may list the following areas as having their own requirements: washrooms, elevators, main lobby, entrances, corridors, elevator lobbies and offices. Then, these would be broken down by type of surface – such as carpet or tile.

Obviously this is purely an example and your specific building may break-out into many other areas. By separating each area, you are able to treat them separately and herein lies the base success of the program. Any building of any size or type can be workloaded using this method.

As an example, we will take one area, in this case the “office area – carpet” and will work with this area until it is finished. This is the most simplistic method of designing a specification or applying a given specification. Remember, areas of the same type may be added together, however, if they have different floor types, they should be separated. It is not that they cannot be added together, but the separation cuts down on the possibility of confusion and error. Work on the specification for one area at a time and when this area is completed then and only should you move on to the next area.

This picture shows a sample set of tasks you may choose to apply to the area. These are not intended to be a perfect set of tasks, but purely a sample set of tasks. Actually, they are quite basic and probably common to all office carpet areas. Additional tasks could easily be added. These include blind dusting, telephone wiping and partition glass cleaning to name a few. The list is extensive. After the selection of the tasks, the frequencies for each task need to be determined. When this process has been completed, simply move on to the next area and continue to process until the entire building has been completed.

Workloading is a repetitious process and will take time. However, it is a necessary process since the basis of cleaning hinges on an accurate workload, and this depends on an equally accurate break-out of the building.