Articles

How a Cleaning Standard Prepares for a Changing World

Categories: Cleaning for Health & Safety, ISSA Insights

Disruption often brings opportunities. The current global pandemic offers cleaning companies a crucial moment to reflect and examine their operations. As you begin to operate in the new normal, with its enhanced expectations of cleanliness, prioritize structures and processes that combine high quality service delivery, yet also strengthen your ability to adapt rapidly to new situations.

CIMS—ISSA’s Cleaning Industry Management Standard—is the foundation to achieving a more robust business model for cleaning contractors and in-house services providers. It ensures excellence by providing standardization and it is built around six pillars of management best practices. You will be able to quickly identify internal issues that leave you unable to satisfy customer demands, as well as find that competitive edge in optimizing your quality systems.

Shayne Warden, managing director at a United Kingdom-based cleaning services company CICS ® Ltd, which started its CIMS journey with the introductory in-house workshop—Fundamentals of CIMS – recognizes that: “CIMS will help us to bring structure to our growth plans, and it has already helped us to identify gaps we need to work on.”

Throughout crisis and beyond, the structure and efficiency created by CIMS, will highlight obsolete operational processes, and help you control costs. Motivated and well-trained employees are more adaptable to crisis and new workplace innovations, and also more productive. Improving basic skills and overall knowledge develops potential through a defined career path which ultimately aids staff retention. It also creates effective ambassadors ready to promote your quality of services.

The cleaning industry management standard’s emphasis on health and safety best practices also helps to protect cleaning professionals. In the enhanced frontline of public health, this commitment will engage staff by showing your respect for their safe progress, while helping to reduce absenteeism and minimize lost productivity. Furthermore, the additional CIMS-Green Building pillar promotes the objectives of sustainability and resource efficiency, which remain major drivers in the industry regardless of the pandemic.

Applying CIMS is crucial for U.K. organisations to differentiate their services and in delivering savings over the long-term, as cleaning consultant Lynn Webster testifies: “Certifying to CIMS is a way to apply universally accepted management principles to an entire organisation. With CIMS as a framework, companies can react to change based on strategy and procedures while ensuring quality of service delivery.”

CIMS is essential for the foundation of a high-performance, customer-focused cleaning organisation able to deliver the new cleanliness and successfully prepare for the impact of any future crisis.

For more information visit CIMS UK website: https://ukcims.issa.com/

First published in Cleaning Matters.

About the Author.

Dennis Goodwin is ISSA's Education & Certification Business Development Manager for the United Kingdom, Ireland, and Middle East.