Common Cleaning Inspection Questions
PART 4: Following-Up on Your Cleaning Inspections
Our series on the most common cleaning quality inspection questions continues with the topic of follow-up inspections. Completing an inspection is only the beginning of a cleaning professional’s job. In order to close the quality loop, cleaners need to take the appropriate steps to follow-up and correct any deficiencies that were found during the inspection. With that in mind, the absence of a follow-up system can sabotage your quality program.
If you inspect a building and there is no thought of what comes next, then it wastes your time the same way an overly critical or incomplete inspection would. Your team will not make improvements to cleanliness if there is no course of action resulting from an inspection. To make matters worse, your building occupants will continue to complain about deficiencies not being addressed, which leads to a decrease in perceived value by stakeholders.
Inspection apps such as Smart Inspect make it easy for you to track and correct the deficiencies that were found during an inspection. Smart Inspect gives you the ability to program inspection reports to be sent to your cleaners automatically, as soon as an inspection is completed. You can specify which reports you want to send, who should receive them, and can choose specific data sets to be sent to specific cleaners responsible for follow-ups.
As an example, the inspection app may auto-send a report that includes date/time stamps, deficiency locations (building, room, etc.), inspector identification, and photographs. Reports like these can help limit the guess work that is sometimes involved with quality improvement, providing you and your cleaners will carry a list of all the deficiencies that were found in a cleaning inspection. This type of report serves as the foundation for creating an efficient follow-up system, and it reassures your stakeholders that your team has implemented a proactive approach to the services you are providing.
A mature, full-circle inspection program includes a plan to address issues in a timely manner, so that a deficiency does not go unnoticed for too long. The inspector may also utilize the quality app’s work-order system to document serious defects and maintenance issues, and to schedule periodic tasks. Smart Inspect has a work-order system built into the app, allowing you to specify who should take care of a problem and how long each correction should take.
Remember – a quality program must include a corrective action process to be effective. Use your quality assurance technology to document the deficiencies, assign the corrective action and track to completion. Anything short of this process will leave you, and your customers, disappointed.