How she shines: I am pleased to nominate Skylar Sheler, Custodial Supervisor at the University of Virginia, for CleanLink's 2026 Women of Clean recognition program. In every dimension of her role—leadership, innovation, dedication, and impact—Skylar consistently raises the standard for our team and our industry.
Leadership: Skylar has built a culture of growth on her team by cross-training every custodian she supervises, ensuring that no single person is a bottleneck and that each employee has a path to develop new skills. She has also taken a deliberate, hands-on role in developing senior custodians, mentoring them toward greater responsibility and preparing them for advancement. This investment in people doesn't just strengthen her team day-to-day; it builds a bench of future leaders for our organization.
Innovation. Rather than accepting the status quo, Skylar led her team's shift from traditional zone cleaning to a hybrid, task-oriented model. This transition required rethinking workflows, retraining staff, and managing the inevitable resistance that comes with organizational change—and she did it in a way that improved efficiency without sacrificing quality or morale.
Dedication: Skylar supervises a wonderfully diverse team, and she recognized early on that effective communication was the key to safety, quality, and morale. Rather than relying solely on translation or workarounds, she took the initiative to develop her own conversational Spanish so she could communicate directly with her Spanish-speaking staff. This has paid dividends across procedures, relationship-building, and most critically, safety. She has made it a priority to ensure that every safety concern can be expressed and understood clearly, regardless of language, because she understands that a safety message lost in translation is a safety message that fails.
Impact: Skylar's team reflects her values: customer-focused, detail-oriented, and deeply respectful of the buildings they maintain. She approaches her work with an eye toward the long-term preservation and longevity of university facilities, not just day-to-day appearance, a mindset that distinguishes truly excellent custodial leadership from merely adequate maintenance.
Skylar exemplifies what it means to lead a modern custodial operation: she trains up the people around her, drives innovation in how work gets done, breaks down communication barriers that too often go unaddressed in our industry, and holds herself and her team to a high standard of care for the spaces they serve. She is exactly the kind of leader CleanLink's Women of Clean program was created to celebrate, and I'm proud to put her name forward.
Years in the industry: 3 years
Job responsibilities: Skylar's duties include developing and implementing custodial work schedules for assigned areas; maintaining written records of work scheduled and completed; supervising members of the custodial team and providing them with frequent and constructive feedback; ensuring all required custodial projects are completed in a timely, professional manner, tracking purchases and updating inventories; conducting and submitting routine safety inspections; and working independently and being proactive with managing the workload by anticipating operational or small-scale projects.
In addition to all these job responsibilities, she may be assigned other duties. In general, Custodial Services Supervisors are responsible for providing clean and healthy environments for the University Academic and Health System facilities by supervising up to approximately 10 to 15 employees in performing safe and critical custodial management tasks. The Supervisor maintains department expectations of providing high-quality and consistent service by supervising, scheduling, and training the workforce. The Supervisor maintains positive and professional relationships with facility occupants, staff, colleagues, students, visitors, and department leadership.