The no-show playbook: what to do when a cleaner doesn’t turn up
Nothing hurts your cleaning business more than a cleaner who doesn’t turn up to clean a customer’s premises, and a customer who knows before you do.
It’s 8:00 am and your customer is unlocking the door to their office building. Straight away they can see that:
- the carpets are dirty
- there’s a big scuff mark on the floor in front of the reception desk
- the bins are full and overflowing
Then comes the inevitable angry call, followed by you apologizing profusely and promising it will never happen again, when you know full well that we are dealing with people here, and that in all likelihood there will be other instances. Unless the robots take over!
You hop on the phone and call the cleaner, determined to pass on the hard time you’ve just had from your customer. Should you reach them, you demand some sort of explanation. Why didn’t they do their job?
This guide is a plain five-step playbook for managers with a small crew:
Why cleaners don’t show up
The reasons are usually ordinary:
- A transport problem: the car broke down, the bus was late, the trains weren’t running.
- The obvious: they were sick, or someone in their family was.
- A death in the family.
- “I was too tired… sorry.”
- They quit and didn’t tell you.
Life does get in the way, and we all have things that get in the way. But why didn’t they call you? Why didn’t they let you know that the clean they were supposed to do now has to be done by someone else, and that you have an unsatisfied customer on the way?
The start of a new week is often a bottleneck for no-shows. If a cleaner can’t face another week, the start of their scheduled week is the one to watch, particularly if you’ve already had some late shows and the odd miss.
Research on hourly workers (mostly retail and food service, not cleaning) finds ordinary causes too: short notice of schedules, on-call shifts and childcare problems. About two-thirds of the workers in one large survey got less than two weeks’ notice of their schedules, and short notice is linked to difficulty arranging childcare and to missed work. So giving people their schedule as early as you can is a cheap place to start.
Step one: prevent it
Plan for it: nobody gets 100% attendance
It’s a cliché to say that no one plans to fail, they fail to plan. It’s unrealistic to expect 100% attendance on your shifts, unless you’re a superstar. Except in exceptional circumstances, such as someone hurting themselves on the way to a shift or a death in the family, most people know an hour or so before a shift that they won’t be able to make it. (The flat battery is a tough one too.)
Good managers have a process that recognizes this is part of life. As Forrest Gump might say, stuff happens.
Don’t be the standby yourself
Many managers I’ve known just pull up their sleeves, pack up the back of their car and fill the gap themselves, making sure the customer knows no different. That can work. But if you’re working at scale, it’s hard to be the manager and the cleaner at the same time and look after the rest of your crew.
Build a SWAT team: Some Workers Are Tardy
What’s the answer? For some, it’s having their own SWAT team (Some Workers Are Tardy, which I just made up): a person, or people, who float for just this sort of occasion. It might be:
- Someone experienced and flexible enough to move at the drop of a hat, or a call.
- Someone who has left the industry but whom you trust, who only wants a few shifts a week and is happy to help.
- Someone you pay a premium to cover these events as they occur.
You may need several of them, in case one isn’t available or you have lots of jobs on. Make sure they are versatile enough to do a good job at sites they don’t know.
Having a SWAT team is budget dependent. Can you pay people more to be on standby? Hopefully. If not, you may be able to make it up to them in other ways: extra shifts, not working holidays, tickets to the Lakers (that might be costly).
Write the policy, and agree it
Clear processes and expectations are paramount. Your expectation that a cleaner lets you know as soon as they realize they can’t make a shift is fair and reasonable. Just wrap a policy around it, and introduce it on day one: see the first 30 days for a new cleaner.
A policy tells the cleaner what you expect if they can’t make a shift. That matters in any performance review too, because it negates any “I didn’t know I had to do that” answer. If the policy is clear and agreed to, there are fewer excuses later. The process matters because it defines the response chain once a no-show is on. Here is a suggested call flow:
- Call your line manager as soon as you know you can’t make it, not just before the shift starts.
- If your manager doesn’t respond, leave a message.
- If your manager doesn’t respond within a set number of minutes, call again.
- If there is still no response, call another manager or admin, if there is one.
- If no other manager is available, call a senior crew member and get their help.
That is only a suggested flow, but it puts the onus on the cleaner to share responsibility for filling the gap, so the customer isn’t inconvenienced.
I can hear some of you thinking, “I can’t get my cleaners to answer a phone, let alone do something like this.” That is a recruitment and training issue as much as anything else. Everyone says it’s hard to get good cleaners. It’s even harder when you lose a contract because of no-shows.
Step two: notice it early
The worst way to find out is from your customer. Decide in advance how you will notice, and what sets your process in motion.
Evidence defeats confusion, and electronic attendance gives you evidence. Use mobile check-in so that a cleaner not doing something triggers a response. If a cleaner is scheduled to be at a site at 3:00 pm and hasn’t arrived by 3:10, that event should start your process. A good electronic system can tell the manager automatically, by email, text or notification, and the process removes the ambiguity.
SeeMySite shows on your dashboard and on the map who has arrived and who hasn’t, so you see a missing cleaner minutes after the start time, not when the customer calls.
If electronic attendance isn’t an option, make sure the phone call process from step one is in place. And be realistic about what a check-in can do: it doesn’t stop a no-show, it tells you sooner.
Step three: cover the shift in the first hour
When a cleaner doesn’t turn up, the best managers get ahead of it. Do they have a SWAT team? If so, they start making phone calls straight away to fill the gap. If not, and they aren’t doing the clean themselves, their focus is on making sure the customer knows no difference.
Poor managers don’t get ahead of the game.
If a good manager can’t fill the gap, they let the customer know. They put their hand up and say, “Our bad. This is the reason this didn’t happen, and this is what I’m going to do to fix it.” The poor manager who doesn’t communicate loses the contract, and loses employees.
Tell the client
Get in front of it. If it was an overnight clean, don’t call at 1:00 am to apologize. That can wait until after your first coffee and before the customer opens. An early-morning call might go something like this: “I did my best, I couldn’t get anyone, and I really apologize for the inconvenience. I can get someone there as soon as…”
When compensation comes up, that is down to your company policy, or whatever leeway you have. But keep the contract.
Step four: follow up with the cleaner
Good managers know who their superstar cleaners are, who can be relied upon, and who can’t. If there was a genuine reason for the no-show, keep your response on the down low: “At least you let me know, and we had the opportunity to get someone else there.”
If it’s a recurring problem, there may be employment requirements to consider, so check what applies where you work. Whatever happens, make sure you have a ready record of each occurrence: written, certainly, and electronic and time-stamped if possible.
Step five: learn from it
If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it, at least not effectively. So make sure each failure to deliver the service is recorded against both the cleaner and the site, for review purposes. Then look for patterns: the start of the week, a particular site, a particular person.
What a no-show really costs
The cost of a no-show is as much reputational as it is financial. Once a cleaning business gets a reputation for not showing up, it’s as bad as a poor clean, or worse. A poor clean is a training issue. A no-show is a reliability issue, and reliability and reputation go hand in hand.
You may or may not have to, or choose to, pay the cleaner for a no-show (pay rules differ by state and city, so check what applies). But you also double up on the cost with an additional cleaner or cleaners, and you make recompense to the customer. Every company has its own approach to fair reparation for a no-show. Just make sure yours is fair and equitable.
A pattern I have seen
You’ve had a customer for a few years and you have a pretty good relationship with them. They run a busy chain of restaurants around the city, and your crew has been taking care of them for all that time. Lately the crew has been getting a bit slack: bins missed, some floors not polished, and in some cases areas totally missed. The relationship starts to strain. You get a few calls over the past few months and you can feel the dissatisfaction.
One Sunday night, two of the three restaurants get a substandard clean. The third, a newer one, gets a no-show, and there is no call to you from the cleaner involved (they had a big Saturday). The owner comes in on Monday morning and the place is a tip. They ring your competitors and get a few quotes. Then you get the call: “Sorry, that was the straw that broke the camel’s back. I like you, but it’s just not working.” Contract gone.
The no-show wasn’t the only cause. It was the last straw on top of slipping standards that nobody had dealt with, which is why the follow-up and learning steps matter as much as the cover.
What actually reduces no-shows
- A known process, as a condition of employment. “This is the way we do things here. Anything else isn’t acceptable.”
- Evidence, not supposition. Make the process electronic, and measure what is happening on your sites. When a cleaner who is scheduled doesn’t show, that should start your response.
- A phone process if electronic attendance isn’t an option. The call flow in step one.
A no-show checklist
- BeforeA policy agreed in writing, a call flow, a SWAT team, and schedules out as early as you can.
- On the morningA cut-off time you decide in advance, calls started straight away, your SWAT team or crew covering, and the customer told before they notice if you can’t fill it.
- AfterwardsA conversation with the cleaner, the event recorded against the cleaner and the site, a look for patterns, and the contract kept.
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