Some maid services like boast about the length of their house cleaning checklist. Don't let this influence your choice of cleaning service. It is little more than a marketing ploy and not a very good one.
Cleaning Your House is Not a Checklist-able Activity
At Kalee's Cleaning, we appreciate things like checklists and other forms of well organized work. We do a lot of well organized work and we even use checklists for some things. However, as a marketing strategy for a house cleaning company, they border on false advertising.
Checklists are only useful if an activity needs to be done the exact same way every time it is done. For example, pilots use checklists to ensure everything is okay with aircraft before they take off. They check the exact same things, in the same way, every time they fly. This works because their aircraft doesn't change: it is very straight forward and unambiguous: this is what you check, on this aircraft, in this order, every single time.
Professional house cleaning service, on the other hand, is not straight forward and unambiguous. It is highly dynamic. Many factors contribute to what we call "Desirable Variability." Some of these factors are on the client side and some of them are on the company side. The only way we could conform your cleaning to a standard checklist would be to 1)Disregard your preferences, instructions, and budget or 2)Disregard the checklist.
We can appreciate that a checklist seems sensible and provides a level or "intellectual security" for your decision to go with a particular cleaning service. We can also appreciate the intent of the checklist, but in the practical realities of professional house cleaning, the checklist just doesn't hold up. Around here we like to say "Houses are similiar, clients are not." And that fact alone makes the checklist little more than a marketing ploy.
Why "Checklist" Marketing is False
Given the apparent sensibility of a house cleaning checklist, some readers may not be convinced by the above statemtents. After all there is something comforting about a nice, neat little checklist. Before you navigate away in search of a "checklist" company, consider the following:
- Anyone can write a checklist
The people who write the checklist are not the people who will be cleaning your house. We would be surprised if the people who show up to clean can even read the checklist.
- The length of a cleaning checklist is arbitrary
The length of a checklist can be easily extended to seem more complete. The consider the difference between:
- "Hand dust all shelves"
and
- "Dust bookshelves"
- "Dust knick-knack shelves"
- "Dust media cabinet shelves"
- "Dust fire place mantel"
As you can see, any list can be as long or as short as the list maker wants it to be.
Incidently, at Kalee's Cleaning our training manual says "Every horizontal surface gets wiped down." It is less ambiguous and less complicated than a deliberately extended checklist of minutiea.
- The maids do not work off of the checklist
You can bet that 9.9 times out of 10, the checklist is filled out before the maids ever enter your house.
A good, well trained maid knows how to do her job and what your home needs. In the course of her work, she makes a lot of decisions and trade-offs based on your preferences, the needs of your house, and the time she has available.
Even if they did read it, a checklist can make no decisions for your benefit. The people actually cleaning your house do this everytime they are there.
- A checklist does not make an excellent maid service.
While the checklist seems reliable, it really isn't. It doesn't magically create a strong culture of excellence. Nor does it simplify the really hard parts of running a maid service (like staff retention and client service). It is really little more than tactic designed to make you feel secure choosing the company that wrote it.
"What Does Kalee's Cleaning Do Without a Checklist?"
This is a fair, though not very accurate, question. We do have a list of what we clean in each room of your house. You can read a version of it here (opens new tab). This list is just one of our many documented standards. Our standards are the central part of our training program. Our maids know the standards and how to apply them in the context of your preferences, your specific house, and the other dynamics of actually delivering great service.
In addition to our generic standard, each client gets their own customized standard based on their specific requirements and requests. Every morning, the teams are verbally briefed on the special requirements of each house they are going to clean that day.
This approach allows us to be honest and non-gimicky in our advertising. It also allows us to deliver what we promise: an excellent house cleaning. Not only is our maid service excellent, it is also highly adaptable to your specific needs and priorities.
