Contract cleaning remains a buoyant market despite rising wages and material costs, uncertainty over Brexit and a ‘race to the bottom’ culture affecting the bottom line.
Throughout the 2008 recession the contract cleaning industry continued to perform relatively well and in the last 5 years during a difficult economic climate with budget cuts across both the private and public sectors cleaning still continued to perform better than the facility management and construction industries.
There’s no doubt that there have been challenges to face and there will continue to be so, the contract cleaning sector is a competitive market. Budgets are still being tightened across all sectors and the Living Wage program introduced by the Government has certainly had an impact.
USS like other commercial cleaning companies can’t hide from these challenges but what we can do and do do is continually evaluate our methods and procedures to establish more efficient ways to carry out our cleaning procedures without impacting in a negative manner on the service levels that we provide.
We also the increase in minimum wages as a positive thing. Reports indicate that the staff turnover in the industry is as high as 70% with the average length of service being 15 months, USS’s average length of service for staff is over 24 months and not only do we pay our staff above and beyond the national minimum wage we also encourage our clients to consider paying the London Living Wage.
It’s important to keep abreast of developments too within the industry and key trends to look out for are a growth in ‘powered’ cleaning machines, an increase in automation and a growth in daytime cleaning, new technology allows for cleaning machinery and equipment to be less noisy, less cumbersome and to offer a quicker finish meaning work that once had to be done at nights or weekends can now be carried out during core trading hours with little to no disruption to your business.
If you would like to know more about USS and our services or require a free, no obligation quotation call the office today on 020 8669 4377.
