We hold every visit to one written standard

Thirty-eight checkpoints, just for restrooms

This is not a general instruction to keep a building clean. It is a written checklist that spells out what clean actually means for every kind of surface a crew works on, carpet, windows, cove base, resilient flooring, tile and grout, walls, elevators, stairwells, and restrooms. As one example of how detailed it gets, restroom areas alone are checked against 38 separate checkpoints, covering dispensers, hardware, sinks, mirrors, waste containers, walls, doors, floors, air vents, light fixtures and floor drains. That level of detail is what separates a written standard from a general instruction to a crew to keep things tidy, and it is what a facility manager can actually hold us to on any given visit.

That level of detail exists because a restroom has a lot of small surfaces that are easy to call clean without actually checking each one. A sink can be wiped dry while the dispenser next to it is empty. A mirror can shine while the floor drain underneath it has not been flushed in weeks and starts to smell. The 38 checkpoints break the room down into its parts, dispensers refilled, hardware polished dry, drains flushed and sanitized at least once a week with water kept in the trap, so nothing gets skipped because the rest of the room looked fine at a glance. A checklist that specific does not leave room for a crew to decide on its own what counts as good enough.

The same approach applies outside the restroom. Carpet has to appear visibly and uniformly clean, free of spots and stains, vacuumed with a brush type dual motor vacuum, and spot cleaned with hot water extraction when needed. Resilient floors need five to seven coats of a slip resistant seal and a consistent high shine, with no dust streaks, standing water or cleaner residue left behind. Every surface type in the building has its own version of this standard, spelled out in the same level of detail as the restroom checklist, so nothing in the building is being cleaned to a vague or informal rule.

• 38 checkpoints for restroom areas alone, every visit
• Written standards for carpet, windows, cove base, resilient floors, tile and grout
• Floor drains flushed and sanitized at least once a week
• One point of contact responsible for the standard on your building

Twenty year old carpet, and restroom pressure washing included

Two parts of the Everyday Cleaner Standard show up directly in the results a building gets to keep for years. The first is our carpet maintenance program. We follow each carpet manufacturer's care recommendations closely enough that some buildings on our program have carpet that is 20 years old and still holding up, because it has been maintained the right way since the day it was installed rather than left to wear down and get replaced on a normal five or seven year cycle like carpet in a lot of other commercial buildings.

The second is restroom pressure washing, which is part of our regular maintenance program at no extra charge. A lot of cleaning companies treat restroom floors with a mop and call that sufficient, then charge extra when a building actually wants the floor pressure washed and brought back to a real clean. CLS includes it in the standard contract, because it is part of what the Everyday Cleaner Standard requires for restroom floors and cove bases to be genuinely free of dried soil, gum and cleaner residue buildup, not simply mopped over on a nightly basis and called done.

Both of these come back to the same idea behind the whole standard: doing the harder version of the job up front costs less over time than doing the easy version repeatedly. A carpet maintained on schedule from day one lasts decades instead of years. A restroom floor pressure washed regularly does not build up the kind of grime that eventually needs a full restoration to fix, which saves a building both the cost of that restoration and the disruption of scheduling it.

One standard, checked the same way every time

This standard applies the same whether a crew is cleaning a five thousand square foot medical suite or a two million square foot corporate campus. Carpet gets checked against the same spec in both. Restroom hardware gets polished dry to the same shine in both. The size of the building changes how many square feet the crew covers in a night. It does not change what clean means on any one surface, whether that surface sits in a small suite or a campus many times its size, checked room by room against the same written standard.

That consistency matters because it is what lets a property manager trust a report without walking every hallway themselves. If the standard were vague, a written report saying restrooms were cleaned would not tell anyone much. A checklist with 38 specific checkpoints, refilled dispensers, disinfected surfaces, drains flushed weekly, tells a property manager exactly what was verified, whether or not they were there to see it happen, and exactly which part of the checklist to point to if something does not look right.

A single point of contact at CLS is assigned to each building on the Everyday Cleaner Standard, responsible for how that standard is being applied on that specific property. That person answers for the checklist, not a rotating group of supervisors who each only know part of the building. If something on the standard is not being met, there is one specific person to call about it, and that person is accountable for fixing it, not passing the question along to someone else.

See the standard applied to your building

The Everyday Cleaner Standard is the third step in our Extreme Clean Program, following the Intensive Initial Cleaning and Surface Cleaning Testing. It is what keeps a building at the level those first two steps establish, visit after visit, for as long as CLS is on the contract, rather than letting a building slide back toward whatever condition it was in before the first deep clean.

If you want to see how detailed the standard actually is, a free building cleaning audit is the easiest way. We can walk through your building against the checklist, restrooms included, and show you specifically where things stand today, before making any changes to how the building is being cleaned, so you know exactly what you are starting from before anything changes.

Cleaning technicians who run this standard average over 10 years of facility maintenance experience, and many have been with CLS for more than a decade. That kind of experience is part of why the checklist actually gets followed instead of just existing on paper somewhere in a file. Call (630) 816-0300 for a free, no obligation audit and consultation.