Do You Need Your Own Cleaning Service if Your Building Already Has Janitorial?

You’ve moved into an office and hear, “Janitorial is included.” Great!

Then a few weeks later, the kitchen is never quite clean, conference rooms need more attention, trash is overflowing between visits and nobody seems to know who is responsible for what in your suite.

This is common because building janitorial and tenant office cleaning are not always the same thing.

First, Find Out What You Already Have

Before hiring another cleaning company, ask your property manager or landlord two things:

• What areas does the building janitorial service clean?
• How often are those areas serviced?

You may find that the building cleaner handles common areas only. Or they service your suite but only provide a basic scope that was designed for the building, not for how your company actually uses the space.

Get the scope in writing if you can.

Once you know what the building already handles, the next step is deciding what belongs in your own recurring cleaning scope — especially if your office also includes lab, shop or production space.

Read: How to Scope Cleaning for an Office With Lab or Production Space

Then, Compare It to How Your Office Actually Operates

For a smaller office, the pressure points are usually pretty predictable:

• Kitchen or breakroom
• Restrooms
• Shared work areas
• Conference rooms
• Trash and recycling
• Floors
• Interior glass

A 25-person company that eats lunch onsite, works late and regularly hosts visitors may need more cleaning than another 25-person company in the same building where most of the staff work remotely.

The question is not: “Don’t we already have janitorial?”

It is: “Is the cleaning we already have enough for the workplace we actually operate?”

Your Three Options

For many smaller companies just getting up and running, supplementing is the best first move.

Next, Bring the Existing Scope to a Cleaning Walkthrough

There is no reason to pay a second company to repeat work the building is already performing well. But you probably have a gap to close or you wouldn’t have read this far!

Bring the existing janitorial scope to the prospective cleaning provider in a walk-though and ask them to identify the gap. For example:

• Building cleaner handles floors and trash nightly; your provider handles the kitchen, restrooms and conference rooms twice weekly
• Building cleaner handles common areas only; your provider maintains the entire office suite

A good cleaning provider should also be able to recommend the right scope and service frequency based on things like:

• Number of restrooms
• Kitchen use
• Office layout
• Headcount and occupancy
• Existing building service

Those same factors will influence price. That is why a short walkthrough is usually more useful than collecting generic quotes based only on square footage.

Our Recommendation

If your building already provides janitorial but the office still does not feel consistently clean:

1. Ask the property manager for the current scope and frequency.
2. Identify the areas your team is still managing or complaining about.
3. Bring both to a cleaning walkthrough with a potential new vendor.
4. Ask the provider to recommend whether you should supplement or replace the existing service.

You do not need to know how to design a cleaning program before you call. That is part of what the cleaning company should help you figure out.

DREAM CLEAN provides recurring commercial cleaning for growing South Bay workplaces and can build around an existing building service when that is the most practical solution.

See how DREAM CLEAN supported a growing El Segundo technical company.