Every June, facilities leaders across the country begin to put into action their largest facilities work projects for your schools, campuses and corporate workplace. While planning begins much earlier, it’s in the daily execution during the Summer that will determine success of the larger facilities projects to ensure your school district, college campus or corporate workplace is ready to operate seamlessly after Labor Day.

From coordinating vendors to shifting work schedules to more specialized cleaning and facilities projects, the summer facilities schedule represents a significant departure from the always-on facilities and janitorial services that teams provide while necessitating the need for better planning and tracking to ensure all work stays on schedule and is done correctly. There are no second chances with Summer facilities and cleaning work.

This post will focus on strategies that leading facilities and custodial teams are using to drive Summer facilities work success through innovation, coordination and technology.

Note: This post will focus a good amount on the education side of Summer facilities and cleaning work. Corporate facilities often will launch larger projects over the Summer, however, the cyclical nature of the education schedule makes Summer facilities work crucial to start a new school year on the right foot.

5 Strategies to Successfully Complete Your Summer Facilities Work

Summer Facilities Work can be a logistical challenge and when dealing with large real estate footprints and building footprints, it requires integrated communication, real-time data and operational tools and processes to successfully complete.

Here are five ways to drive improved success for your strategy:‍

Integrated Communication Plan with Teams, Vendors and Executives

Communication is the most important aspect of planning a Summer Facilities and Janitorial strategy. As you create your summer facilities plan, it’s integral to understand the facets of your communication strategy including:

• Who you communicate to with what message: From your managers to your custodians, you need to communicate different messages to each audience and set the right expectations for them.
  
  • We’ve seen with many school districts the shift from daily cleaning rounds to more specialized summer cleaning work being a difficult transition and that SMS communications to alert on this transition can be very helpful.
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• Modes of communication: Typically, most districts will hold training sessions with teams to understand the work they need to do in-person, however, we’ve also seen SMS and email communications to be helpful in re-iterating the changes that happen with summer work strategies.
  
  
• Weekly Progress Reports: We get more into this below but it’s integral you have a reporting cadence with your executive team and/or superintendent on the progress of summer work. The report should tell the story of your strategy and highlight the hard work of your teams to ensure it gets done for the beginning of the school year or when employees get back after Labor day.

All in all, your team needs a communication platform and plan to ensure a seamless transition from daily facilities and cleaning work to summer work and then back to the daily facilities and cleaning work.

Work Completion & Validation that is Digitized

One of the largest challenges for most school districts is validating the work expected is completed by internal teams and vendors. Organizations doing this successfully use centralized tracking of all work by building/location to keep organized.

The most common example of tracking for summer work is hanging paper checklists of all work to be done outside a room. Custodians and facilities team members will sign or initial the work done on which day to confirm the specific activities were done in the room. While this can be effective, for larger school districts it becomes difficult to centralize the data to see progress and understand if the work is on track to be complete for the new school year.

The more innovative organizations are leveraging mobile devices for staff to digitally validate work completed using cleaning validation software with the ability to add imagery of completed work. This enables real-time data for managers to ensure work is being completed on schedule while also being able to review work off-site to ensure it’s done correctly.

‍Executive Real-Time Dashboards across Buildings and Locations

Where we’ve seen the most innovation in summer facilities and cleaning work programs is in the digitization of the daily work completed by location and building over the Summer. With cleaning validation software tools that enable easy work confirmation through a mobile app, facilities leaders now have real-time progress data across their school districts to understand if they are on-track with the work needed to be complete before school reopens in the fall.

While many still use paper processes, this essentially enables facilities and custodial staff and outside vendors to use mobile devices to record this information in the field enabling the ability to provide real-time insight into what has and needs to be done by location.

By having a live dashboard of progress, facilities leaders are able to better communicate with Superintendents and other stakeholders about the progress they are making and the value their teams provide to teachers, students and staff.

Scheduled Task Lists and Equipment Requests for Team Members

One of the most confusing parts of the transition to summer facilities and cleaning work for staff is understanding what they need to do on a daily basis and ensuring they have the equipment to do it on the day they need to complete the work.

There are some interesting use cases:

• Mobile Schedules Delivered Daily to Custodians Phone: While many organizations still live off paper processes, we’ve seen organizations use mobile applications to deliver the exact work and location of the work they need to do that day. This ensures work schedules don’t get lost as well as enables more dynamic scheduling based on if the summer program is ahead or behind schedule or vendors have to reschedule.
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• Broken Equipment Integrated with Work Order System: For large organizations, ensuring equipment is in working order for each team member is a full time job but in many cases these requests are not centralized with them being texted, called or emailed to managers for replacement. Not having this equipment means work does not get done on time.
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  • We’ve seen organizations begin to include their custodians in the CMMS work order process either through integration through mobile cleaning software apps or as users of the CMMS. This often cuts out the middleman for these requests and centralizes all requests so the facilities team can ensure all requests are satisfied.

The more transparent your process can be in providing the work that needs to be done and the equipment to do it with, the better your team can complete all the work that is required.

Training Schools and/or Teams and Employee Recognition Programs

With a shortage of facilities and janitorial talent affecting many school districts and workplaces, it’s as important as ever to recognize and reward staff based on data-driven performance. While there are many ways to do this such as promotions, annual awards programs, pay raises and daily thank you’s, leading organizations are baking in recognition into how they execute their Summer work strategies.

One such innovation is organizations designating their top performing teams as “Training Schools”. This moniker enables these teams to be recognized as the top schools for their districts, gives them an incentive for continued good performance and helps to uplevel training for summer work for other teams. Often this comes with a financial incentive for these teams to lead training sessions.

Other districts and employers also are using summer work completion percentages as ways to incentivize and gamify the summer work process for their employees. The teams that complete all the work they need to do in the fastest time at the proper quality earn rewards for their work. Organizations manage these award programs in different ways from annualized rewards for top teams and team members to more targeted programs around certain time periods (i.e. summer cleaning work).

Data-Driven Summer Work Leads To Better Occupant Experiences

Summer facilities and cleaning work is integral to starting the year right for occupants of your spaces from teachers to students to employees. While most occupants do not realize the gargantuan effort this work coordination entails, we all know the importance of this annual work.

Done correctly, summer facilities and cleaning work will enhance building life, mitigate back to school issues, improve the sense of community and positive feeling of your schools and make these environments be places occupants want to be in on a daily basis.

Being data-driven in how you communicate with your team, validate the work that’s been completed and recognize your teams is integral to ensuring summer work success that drives success over the annual year.