Martha Woodward Explains How to Set up a Quality Control System ZenMaid Magazine

Last Updated on August 28, 2023 by The ZenMaid Team

Before Quality Control

Core values are an essential part of creating a culture that encompasses your home cleaning business. These values can be separated into 3 basic categories:

Attendance
Quality
Attitude

However, it can be difficult to grow your Maid Service when quality control is non-existent.

Think about your current processes and what could stand to be revamped in the way that your home cleaning business is currently being run.

You might need to do some work on yours if any of the following is occurring:

You don’t take attendance and just wait to see who shows up
You are not checking in with cleaning clients on satisfaction
There is no training program for your cleaners
Cleaners disrespect you
Employees walk all over you

It can be hard to develop a new dynamic once one is already set, but it is possible.

Don’t let fear control your actions or stop you from growing your Maid Service to its full potential.

Identify problems in your Maid Service’s policies and procedures

Do you have a training program?

Do you have reproducible results?

What is your cultural standard?

Is your cleaner turnover rate high?

In order to understand what systems and processes that you need to fix, you must first consider what is working and what is not working properly.

Quality control helps with this.

Write down and set procedures in place that can revolutionize your Maid Service by continuing to review your systems periodically, tweaking them for improvement.

After Quality Control

You need to be honing in on the cleaner and cleaning office staff portion of quality control. If an employee is not matching your culture then it’s best to let them go.

A cleaning company can be easily dragged down by a negative employee. They can infect your entire staff because of the environment they are creating within your company culture.

If you happen to have one of these negative nellies in your Maid Service, let them go when they disappoint rather than giving them endless chances.

When you are able to make an example of what kind of behavior is not acceptable, it shows other cleaners and staff that you will fire them if they don’t do their job.

Create a consistent process so that your employees know what to expect. You can’t expect anything if you don’t set up a foundation for success from the beginning with your cleaners and staff. Decide what you will tolerate and that becomes your policy.

For example, offer an attendance policy with 3 unplanned absences with opportunities to earn more through good client scores or great attendance. This way, you can reward your quality employees and easily weed out people that don’t fit your standard.

When you set a standard it becomes easier for your staff to understand what is expected of them and it becomes easier for you to receive what you expect.

Frequency of quality checks

It might seem overboard at first but it is actually a common and great practice to check quality with cleaning clients after every service. Lots of successful people do this.

It’s better to know what you need to know as fast as you can, this is how you affect change and growth in your cleaning company. By doing this, cleaning clients understand that you care and are happy that you are wanting to hear from them.

Listen to their feedback on your services whether it be good or bad.

Score your cleaners

Create a template to allow cleaning clients to score the cleaning of their homes. You can provide score sheets and create in excel a grid so that cleaners see their scores.

It’s up to you whether you want to make the scores visible to the entire staff or just to the individual cleaner.

Consider this though, showing scores for all employees can create a competitive team-like feel that can encourage them to want to improve their scores.

People love to compete and to visually see how they are doing due to the way we are ingrained to care from the time we start interacting with others.

If it doesn’t fit with your culture though, just show individual scores. The idea is to provide coaching and recognition, not negativity.

Scores and data can drive performance, so your cleaners only have a score but can’t see the data of what that means then it misses some of its value. Be sure to explain what scores mean and how your cleaner can improve theirs.

Reward quality cleaning services rendered

Provide a reward system for your cleaners and staff. This should be something that really matters so ask them to be sure.

Submit a list of a few options and let employees pick their reward, then build a system around the reward itself. This creates the consistency you need to see scores move up and for your cleaners to move forward in your Maid Service.

If scores don’t go up then you will likely lose the lower scoring employees.

They won’t like this system and this is an easy way to faster let go of those who won’t make it anyway.

The consistency, transparency, and respect will help to create a positive culture for your Maid Service, your employees and even a ripple effect in their personal lives.

Your work matters, your cleaners matter, and they have pride in what they do. You’re influencing others by what you do, start building that culture now.

Cleaners and staff will know when and what they need to do for bonuses as well as the boundaries not to get into trouble.

Don’t harp on the bad things though, just praise the good and dismiss the bad.

About the Presenter

Martha Woodward is the co-founder of Quality Driven Software, which helps to grow your Maid Service by checking in on cleaning client satisfaction.

This incredible software allows home cleaning company owners to keep their current clients happy all the while checking in with cleaner progress.

Martha lives in Kansas and has been an absentee owner of her Maid Service for years.

She now has been able to create a company in which her management staff is completely remote as well.

Martha says that she only sees them for staff meetings periodically or for more fun activities.

Anyone who is living their best life – and who has ample knowledge of the cleaning industry – is certainly someone we want Maid Service owners like you to learn from.

This talk first aired at the 2019 Maid Service Success Summit.

The Maid Summit is an annual online event that brings together the most successful leaders in the cleaning industry, like Debbie Sardone, Angela Brown, Courtney Wisely, Amy Caris, Chris Schwab and more. Get free access to masterclasses and workshops that will help you to grow, scale and automate your cleaning business so you can get more leads and create more profit. Make sure you’re on our email list to find out how to get free tickets to the next event.