How do you hold cleaners accountable to their work? After all, they get paid the same no matter what. And they have a habit of finding ways to charge extra… But if reviews drop, so does revenue. To the tune of tens of thousands of dollars in annual bookings – that’s the difference between a 4.8+ STAR rated property and something in the low 4s. I know this for sure, I’ve seen it first hand, in fact, here’s a video on it and another Blog I wrote on the issue. So, how do we align our incentives so that cleaners are successful at the same time as us, rather than regardless of how successful we are?
We tried a lot of things, here’s what worked:
We got good at finding good cleaners. Earlier this year we had a ton of “tools” to help our cleaners do a good job. We were using Breezway (got rid of that lately) and we had a never ending checklist that every cleaner had to go through. They had to take pictures of every room, all that. And none of that mattered. There were cleaners that consistently got great cleanliness ratings from guests, and those that consistently didn’t. It was that simple – good cleaners don’t need a checklist. They just do a good job every time. They care about their work. They get to the hard spots. They fold the toilet paper. The window sills are clean. In fact, I went on a nationwide tour of our properties over the course of a month – flying spirit airlines of course – and visited the “good” and “bad” cleaner’s homes right before check-in to see if I could find the big differences, and it turned out to be a million small things. It was the details. The “good ones” got every nook and cranny. The cabinets were organized. The window sills were dust-free. The splatter zone around toilets had no yellow speckles. The bad ones barely went beneath the surface and put things away in the closest cabinet or drawer they could find. So the big question to me then was: How do I identify whether you’re a detail oriented cleaner before the guests tell me so in their reviews??? The answer was what I like to call the “Closest and Cleanest” Method.
I would simply look around on Airbnb (using Airdna) for similar sized and amenitized properties that were nearby and had an average cleanliness score of 4.8+ over at least 30 reviews. I would find out the address of said Airbnbs ( I have methods…) – and I would approach the house when I thought a turnover clean was happening (again, methods). Yes, I’d show up when good cleaners were cleaning someone else’s Airbnb and bluntly ask them if they wanted another home to clean, right down the road, a lot like this one you’re cleaning right now. And it worked. So far, every time. I mean, who doesn’t want more business?
Simplify their responsibilities
We got rid of the checklists and picture taking requirements. Good cleaners don’t need them. And, they loved us for it. But of course we need some kind of evidence that the house is in fact cleaned, so we moved to walkthrough videos. Instead of going through a comprehensive checklist and stopping to take a gizilion pictures, we just have them take a video of the clean home when they’re done cleaning. I came up with a method for doing this too, called the “Right wall walk” method, which captures the entire home. Literally just follow the wall to the right when you enter the home until you find yourself back at the front door. If there’s a second story, then there’s two videos with the second one starting at the bottom of the stairs. Simple, effective, and does a great job at not only catching things that cleaners inevitably sometimes miss, but also catches damages caused by guests as well. And airbnb loves video evidence. They love it.
Pay good for good work
We pay whatever they ask, and we bonus them. We used to negotiate with cleaners. Now that we only hire the best ones, we simply ask them what they want to charge and then we pay that. Simple. There is no amount they can charge that is more than the additional earnings you get for having a consistently clean house. Again, watch/read the aforementioned blog and video. So we just pay them what they think they are worth, and I’m sure they feel valued as a result. Not only that, every time one of our cleaners gets a 4.8 average cleanliness score for a month, we give them a $50 bonus for every 5 star review from that same month. And we publish these bonuses and scores for all of our cleaning teams to see – so every month every cleaner gets a newsletter that tells them 1) did they get a bonus 2) who got a bonus and 3) how your cleanliness ratings match up to others in your field. It creates a little competition. And when cleaners start to get low scores for whatever reason (They hire new cleaners and don’t train them well being the most common cause for declining scores) – we give them warning and then get rid of them if the scores don’t improve. We simply can’t have guests walking into dirty homes, and we don’t tolerate it anymore.
Need I say more?
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As I’m writing this, a dozen nuanced “things” we do come to mind that I know have a positive effect in some small way. But these last 4 parts represent what are by far the biggest and best, and if you just do those well then a lot of other effective things fall into place by default. So I’ll leave it at that for now with regards to internal team management and managing cleaners. There is one other things that we did though that I think has been super effective at biasing guests towards giving us a good review – despite what they may have negatively experienced at the property, and that’s what I call “Early check-in gifting”
More on that in Part 5
