Chris Brablc

If you type "Janitor shortage" into Google, you'll come away with many articles about school districts and building service contractors struggling to find and retain custodial and janitorial staff. This is a striking example of what some facilities leaders at schools and workplaces are struggling with every day to get work done to ensure a safe, healthy and productive environment for occupants. The unusual work-study program launched at Blaine High School last week, The Star Tribune first reported. Students must be at least 16 years old and are paid $15.30 an hour, according to a job application posted by the district.  Record numbers of Americans have been quitting their jobs in search of better working conditions and the greater cleaning industry is no exception. Residential cleaning companies told Insider they're having to turn down business and reschedule or even cancel regular customers because they can't find enough staff.

The first step of any performance program is to determine how you can centrally measure performance across your teams and employees. This data should be available in real-time and easily analyzed for these programs. For custodial teams, data typically used for performance programs includes: Confirmed Cleanings: Custodial work is daily and there are new Cleaning Analytics solutions that can help you track the everyday cleaning rounds of your team with a mobile device across every cleaning location. This can help understand which employees do the most work each day and determine the workload that can be expected by your janitorial staff for every building. Quality Assurance Ratings: Quantity is important but so is quality. Many organizations utilize Cleaning Quality Assurance tools to have managers provide scoring based on cleaning quality on a semi-regular basis. This can be married with the confirmed cleanings data to provide a holistic look at quantity and quality of work done by employees. Other Duties and Work: Custodial staff often gets pulled into plenty of other tasks and responsibilities. Any solution you use to capture performance data needs to make it easy to include this work including extra cleanings, fixing equipment, moving furniture or other tasks asked for by the occupant. If you are still using pen to paper for these measurements, you may want to look toward digital cleaning tools to make this data actionable. It will enable you to see the data better in real-time and to create a historical audit trail of all cleanings by all team members in order to evaluate performance.

While this janitorial shortage has impacted all industries, we are seeing the heightened impact it has had on education particularly in K-12 environments. From hiring students to do cleaning work to moving to outside contractors, school districts are being flexible in their quest to keep their schools healthy and clean. Facilities leaders at school districts are experiencing heightened expectations for the school environments they provide to teachers, students and staff due to COVID-19. With every school back in-person, they are dealing with these expectations while understanding the importance of facilities and cleaning on educational performance.

Employers are not only battling inflation and slowing growth, but worker productivity that is falling at the fastest rate in four decades. This has been the first year since 1983 to include three straight quarters of year-over-year drops in average productivity per worker, ADP chief economist Nela Richardson said during CNBC’s recent Workforce Executive Council Town Hall.

Gartner, a Connecticut-based technological research and consulting firm, found that 55 percent of organizations in North America were gearing up to offer “Summer Fridays” in 2019, a nine percent increase from the previous year. But now, of course, we’re in November, and Friday occupancy levels have barely picked up from the summer season. The fact that offices are known to be emptier on Friday contributes to something of a vicious cycle that has nothing to do with the end-of-the-week euphoria; when employees know that their offices will be vacant on a certain day, they’re more likely to avoid it. As Du Bey puts it,  “no one wants to come into an empty office."

Kastle’s 10-city occupancy average, based on its survey of entry card swipes, stalled at 43% in March—a level it hovered around for the next six months—and then registered a modest bump to around 47% in the weeks since Labor Day.

CoreNet Global shared some survey data on the impact inflation is having on CRE real estate portfolios and footprints. We are seeing trends of shorter lease terms and more caution with longer commitments which makes sense in a time of potential instability in the markets. Here are a few key stats: More than half, 54 percent, are consolidating locations and 42 percent are reducing the size of leases they are signing 34 percent say that annual escalations are 100 basis points higher than normal 44 percent say that compared to prior to the pandemic their overall corporate real estate footprint has decreased; 21 percent say that it has increased, and 34 percent say that it has stayed the same. Between now and 2025, 39 percent expect an increase in the size of their corporate real estate portfolio, 42 percent expect a decrease, and 19 percent say that it will stay the same.