HR Expert Gives Managers Employee Retention Tips

Employee retention is a major issue for facility cleaning managers. In fact, retention was cited as a top employment issue for the last three years, according to Facility Cleaning Decisions Management Studies. Considering that custodial executives are actively bemoaning retention woes, Facility Cleaning Decisions sought to explore the general challenges with staffing and techniques managers can implement to improve retention. The following conversation with Claudia St. John, Founder and CEO of The Workplace Advisors, provides this necessary insight. 

You've talked at a lot of industry events catered to commercial cleaning companies and in-house cleaning operations. Both ultimately belong to the cleaning profession, which, historically, is a bit of a thankless job. In your opinion, is that much of where the retention woes stem from? Do employees have a difficult time sticking with a job where they don’t get the respect they deserve? 

St. John—I think that there are a lot of thankless occupations out there, so I wouldn't say that thanklessness is necessarily the issue. I think there's a built-in retention issue within this industry because for a lot of people, this is their second or third job. It's really a means to an end, so they don't view it as a long-term career or profession. I think by its very nature, you're going to see more turnover than you would in other industries that don't have that type of work.  

I also know there are a lot of facilities where the janitorial staff are part of the family, and they are appreciated and thanked a lot. I think some of the innate challenges with this industry is oftentimes the cleaning staff don't have much of a strong relationship with the home office because they're out in facilities and aren't part of a cohesive team. And so, I think for that reason, it can be very isolated. You're sort of an independent person out there, so if something else comes along that creates a different opportunity, you'll get that turnover.  

It's a hard job, so businesses and owners that focus on creating community, connectivity, and appreciation to combat the thanklessness and difficulty of the industry are the ones at the leading edge of the turnover problem and are tackling it well. 

You spoke to the fact that many frontline staff are working as a means to an end. Does this reality, combined with the current hustle culture, make retention even more difficult? 

St. John—I think the fact that we have a gig economy right now is the same reason why we have these part-time second and third jobs. I've done a fair amount of research on the labor market, and what's happening is most people take gig work 
in order to patch together the income that they need or to fill out a full-time job when one wasn't available. 

There's a lot of talk about people making a lot of money in the gig economy, but the vast majority are making $45,000-$50,000 in this space. You have to be very sophisticated and have a niche skill set to be able to thrive at a high level in gig work. It usually is patching together different, more permanent work opportunities and creating a supplemental income. So, to that end, I think that both janitorial and gig workers—whether that's being a DoorDash driver or some other TaskRabbit type job—are people piecing together additional, more permanent work for more income.  

I think one of the challenges with gig work is that you're not getting any benefits taken out. You're having to pay your own taxes. You're having to pay your own workers' comp. There's a lot of expenses you have in addition to gig work income. It's hard to make it big in gig work, so I don't see it as a competitor to the janitorial space. I see them both satisfying a specific need, which is for full-time, permanent, reliable, and sufficient income. 

I’ve heard you say a lot about how employers can do more to make their employees feel seen. What do you mean by that? 

St. John—Remind everybody that it's a human need to be seen and heard. When we as supervisors, managers, and leaders go in with that as a priority, we can create connections, we can understand each other. I think the biggest issue in every organization, and I'm not picking on this industry specifically, is that supervisors and managers are not taught how to actively listen. They are not taught to lead with empathy. They are not taught to recognize that talent is an incredibly valuable aspect of the work environment—an attribute becoming more valuable as our labor population retracts and shrinks. Employees have become more valuable, and there's increased competition for talent, so I think the organizations that really do it well are those that are training their frontline supervisors and managers to have more empathy, to ask more questions, to understand what those employees' needs are. 

I'll give you one perfect example. There was a janitorial company that was really having a hard time keeping cleaning staff at one location, and they were telling themselves lots of things about why that was. Maybe the work was too hard; the building was too big; getting there was too much of pain in the neck. They kept throwing solutions at the “problem,” but they never asked the employees what the real problem was. 

The issue was that there was a light out in the back doorway where they were required to park their car and enter the building. It was very dark, very scary, and not in a great neighborhood, so that lack of light made the predominantly female work staff feel unsafe and quit as a result. 

The solution was a fixed lightbulb, but they didn't know that until they had repeated turnover and had applied a bunch of solutions that didn't address the problem at hand. That's where really asking, understanding, listening, seeing, and hearing what employee needs are can lead to solutions that are more effective and affordable than the ones we assume are going to solve the problem. 

How would you recommend employers and managers go about improving emotional intelligence and active listening? 

St. John—There are so many different ways of doing it right now. There are TikToks, TED Talks, and online courses and training. There are behavioral assessments that show where you are and how you can improve. We have a whole battery of these assessments that people can use to say, “Oh, wow, I didn't realize I'm not really very good at listening.”  

What are some specific questions and techniques? Some of them are as simple as saying, “Tell me more about that.” Ask something open-ended three or four times. “So how did you feel?” “What were your conclusions?” “How might you see that differently?” If you apply those types of questions to situations where you're dealing with employees, that in itself is active listening and you may hear something different. 

Improving is the easy part. Being aware and intentional, realizing “I need to develop this in myself. I need to develop this on my team,”—that's the piece that may be missing. 

Are there any less obvious issues you think are pervasive in the cleaning industry? Things employers and management can do better?

St. John—I think if you have a lot of employees that are leaving for money and you assess that the money you're paying them is not substandard, it's a proxy because they're leaving because of their supervisor. 

People don’t want to create conflict, especially in this employee population. They will say, “Oh, I'm getting paid another 50 cents an hour.” Anybody who's leaving for 50 cents an hour more is dissatisfied. They would stay for substandard pay if they had the relationships, respect, and community around them.  

One of the important statistics—and this is for all industries, but I think it's even more prominent in janitorial—is that 75 percent of employees who quit their own jobs voluntarily do so because of their supervisor or manager. 

Of those 75 percent, half would have stayed because they liked the job. They liked the company or the work they were doing, but the problem was their boss. That is the biggest silent killer—not recognizing the impact that those supervisors and managers have on the work life of the people working for them. 

In cleaning, many supervisors and managers are trained on how to operate cleaning tools, use chemicals, and how to work through a facility most efficiently. More often than not, we don’t teach them how to manage others. 

Is there a way to open a dialogue so that employees can provide supervisors with constructive criticism so they’re aware of their blind spots? 

St. John—We recommend, when people are leaving, to do exit interviews. Human resources can then ask, “If we had changed something or if we’d been aware of something, would there have been something we could have done to keep you?” Asking those questions from a neutral party is one way of doing it.

Then there's also stay interviews, which asks people before they leave, “Are there things that would tempt you to leave and what could we do about them?” 

This all brings up satisfaction surveys, which I want to caution. If you do those surveys and don’t learn anything from them, or if you don’t take the employees’ feedback and do something with it, you can actually create more disengagement. I always caution employers to be very careful when they wander into employee satisfaction survey work. Instead, do a quick stay interview and ask, “What keeps you here? How can we improve?” It’s a quick check-in that does not promise anything.  

How is the economy impacting retention woes?

St. John—When the economy slows, people lay off employees. Then there are more workers, things get a little bit sluggish, and we can end up in a recession or depression. We’re not heading there because the unemployment rate is so low—it's at 4.2 or 4.3 percent, which is full employment. That means everybody who wants a job has a job. This economy is driving employers' decisions not to hire, but the unemployment rate is also driving their decision not to lay off. 

The important piece here is that as long as we have this tight unemployment rate, which is a huge factor in our economy, there will be increased competition for workers, and employers will continue to face the threat that somebody is going to come and steal their employees away. 

The antidote to that is everything we've already talked about. It's helping employees feel seen and heard. It's training your frontline supervisors. It's making sure that they not only have adequate pay, but that they also have opportunities to learn and grow. 

Why do you think retention is so challenging for supervisors in the cleaning space?

St. John— I think it’s an issue of not really listening. For example, a lot of businesses are still in this mindset of “This is the work schedule, and it’s set.” That might not accommodate their workforce. For example, many cleaning workers come from other countries, and they want to go home for lengths of time. If the business says, “Oh, well, we can't allow it,” they lose that cleaning staff as they need to go home to be with their family. Then when they come back, the employer says, “We're not going to rehire you because you already left.” But if you understood that that is a natural rhythm your employees are going to ask for and need, and you can accommodate that for your workforce, you will have a very unique culture where employees are going to stay and feel seen and heard, which is an important aspect.  

I think the thing that makes me cringe is that “This is the way we've always done it, this is the way it's going to be done” mindset, as well as trying to force that structure into a workforce that is evolving, changing, and needs more flexibility by its very nature. 

Jake Meister is the Managing Editor for Trade Press Media Group's Cleaning Group of brands. He works on three magazines: Sanitary Maintenance, Contracting Profits, and Facility Cleaning Decisions, as well as on Cleanlink.com, the home of all three publications. Jake has over five years of experience covering the commercial cleaning industry as an employee of Trade Press Media Group but also spent time as a freelance journalist for the company. 

Jake has attended many commercial cleaning events where he enjoys connecting and networking with representatives from all corners of the industry. This often lays the groundwork for profile articles featured across the group. He excels at identifying outstanding individuals and/or programs that showcase the great things the commercial cleaning industry represents. 

In addition to writing, Jake moderates many of CleanLink's educational webcasts, and he is the voice behind much of the social posts.

Follow Jake on LinkedIn here.