How do you speed up slow workers?
Oh, that's a good one, and we're going to talk about that today.
Hi, there.
I'm Angela Brown and this is Ask a House Cleaner.
This is a show where you get to ask a house cleaning question,
and I get to help you find an answer.
Now, today's show is brought to us by SavvyPerks.com
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All right, on to today's show, which is from a house cleaner who has a very slow employee.
Now, the employee, bless her heart, works really hard.
She does a really great job, but she's very slow, and the employer wants to know what
on earth am I supposed to do?
Do I let her go?
Do I work with her?
What do I do?
All right, so the answer is we all don't work at the same speed.
And we're all motivated by different things.
So if you're paying her by the hour, it's probably that she has no
rush, because she's going to work for three hours whether she works on one house or she
works on three houses, so she's going to just stretch it out and take her own sweet time.
Now, there are people who have absolutely no concept of time, and so as the employer
it is your job to reign that in, and say, "Hey, on this job, these are the specific
requirements."
Now, there's a whole entire program that you can look for called Speed Cleaning, and I
will link to it in the show notes so that you can buy that.
That's Debbie Sardone's company, and they do a whole entire training program on speed
cleaning so that you can up your game, and that means get more bang for your buck, or
more cleaning for your dollar, because in the house cleaning business, money is based
on how many houses you get to clean, and that's based on time.
Time is of the essence in the cleaning business.
There are a lot of industries that are regulated by time.
If you're a typist, for example, you get to type so many words per minute, and you are
paid based on how many words you type.
If you're a manufacturer and you work in an assembly line, how many products you can assemble
or how many deals you can pack are what you get paid on.
In the house cleaning business, what you may do with this particular employee, send her
back through training.
Teach her again how to clean, and how to clean properly and fast.
You may want to take her through the speed cleaning training.
Now, another thing that I might mention is people are wired differently.
Some people believe in coffee, and so every day when they wake up they got to have their
cup of coffee.
Maybe this person is lacking the coffee.
Now, if you don't believe in coffee, you may believe in exercise.
Maybe she's lacking the exercise, and so what you might do at the very first of the day
before the day begins, you might add an extra half hour on to her day and include a power
walk in there so she gets her blood flowing before she goes to clean a house.
Now typically, when you go to clean a house, you're moving around, and you're rushing around,
and you wake up, right?
You get going, and your blood is flowing through your body, and you're moving pretty fast,
but if you show up and you're really slow, and you stay slow, and you're not waking up,
something else must need to be done.
Now, I don't know if she's listening to music.
Some people are actually motivated by fast music, and they can work faster because they
have music.
Some people are distracted by music, and so they'll listen to classical music or whatever
and they get in the zone, and then it takes them forever to clean something.
You might look at what she's listening to, and if she's not listening to anything, you
might consider something like Focus@Will, and I will put the links in the show notes
to that as well.
That is my caffeine addiction.
What it is, is it is a series of scientifically proven music and drum beats, and you can choose
to listen to sounds like running water, or beats, or music,
or a variety of different things.
They're not songs.
They are patterns of music that are dynamically designed to make you work slow, fast, or fastest.
Of course, when I'm working, I put it on fastest.
I want to go fastest, but what happens is, I just listen to the drum beat, and it starts
beating really fast.
As it beats really fast, my heart starts matching that beat, and all of a sudden, it starts
getting you really excited and without the caffeine high, it's made me really, really
excited and it just keeps me going like a little wind-up toy.
I will turn that down on low, and I listen to that in the background when I'm doing tasks
that require my speed.
You might consider something like that.
It's called Focus@Will, and it's a monthly subscription that you pay for, and I promise
it is worth every penny.
You'll totally get your money back, because it is, like I said, scientifically proven,
and it's amazing what it does for your brain.
Okay, so another thing that I might consider for somebody that's slow is you may have to
create a time schedule.
A lot of people can look at their watch and say, "Oh, I'm supposed to be at this house
by 9:00 in the morning," but without that constant reminder of time, they don't know
where they're supposed to be.
You might bring it all the way back to in this particular bathroom, you have two minutes
on the toilet.
You have four minutes on the vanity with all of the bottles of makeup and stuff that's
on the counter.
You have five minutes on the bathtub and the shower.
You have two minutes for dusting.
You have three minutes for vacuuming the floor.
You have five minutes for mopping, whatever, and you may have to break it down by room
and by house so that this particular house cleaner can stay on task.
Then put them with a team member or a mentor that can keep them on task until they finally
get the hang of it.
Once they get the hang of it, you may be able to remove that to-do list.
I still have employees to this day that have a to-do list, and every day part of my responsibility
as the business owner is to make sure that they have a to-do list, and a time attached
to that so that they will stay on task, because you might find best and the most loyal employees
are the slowest, and we don't want to let somebody go just because they're slow.
They still have families to feed.
They have food they need to put on the table, and so because their skills don't match other
people's skills, that doesn't make them useless for your company, and so there may be tasks
that you have that are not time sensitive, that if you could switch them over to another
task, that would also be to their advantage.
If you need them on the task they're paid to do, then you have to come to an agreement
of their payment is associated with the job that they do, and you may have to take them
off being paid by the hour, because they're stretching that hour that normally you would
have them do three or four or five different tasks, now they're only doing one or two.
You might pay them based on their performance instead of paying them by the hour.
That might be a different incentive for you, but yes, it is really important to speed up
slow workers, because unfortunately, our business depends on it.
There's some really great people out there.
I hate that you have this problem.
Every house cleaner at some point as you expand and grow, you're going to run into this problem,
and I'm thinking back through my life of the employees that I've had that were really nice
people, and they were really good workers, and they were so slow.
It just drove me bonkers, so you might consider something like Focus@Will, and if it's like
two people in the same house, and the homeowners are gone, you may want to crank it up so that
everybody hears it and everybody's like working to the speed.
All righty, that's my two cents for today, and until we meet again,
leave the world a cleaner place than when you found it.
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