Our own staff cleans every building

Evening janitors clean in the same order

An evening crew works the same route on every visit, and the order matters. Trash comes out first and every receptacle gets a fresh liner, because a full can left for later tends to get missed. Dusting goes high to low, ledges and partition tops first, so anything knocked loose lands on a floor that hasn't been cleaned yet. Then desks and counters get wiped down.

Restrooms come next. Fixtures get cleaned and disinfected. The disinfectant stays wet long enough to work before it's wiped off, and that's the step rushed crews skip. Microfiber cloths are color coded, so the one used in a restroom never touches a break room counter. Paper and soap get restocked so nobody runs out at ten in the morning. Then the high touch surfaces across the building get disinfected: door handles, light switches, elevator buttons, faucet handles, the shared coffee counter.

Floors go last. Carpet gets vacuumed, hard floors get dust mopped and damp mopped, and the crew works back toward the exit so nobody crosses a wet floor. Flip that order and you can tell in the morning: dust sitting on a clean floor, streaks where a mop ran over grit. Our standard contract includes restroom pressure washing, restorative extraction carpet cleaning, interior windows as needed, and floor scrubbing and waxing once or twice a year. Other companies often charge extra for those.

• Trash emptied and every receptacle relined
• Dusting and wipe down, high to low
• High touch surfaces disinfected every day
• Restrooms disinfected and restocked with supplies
• Floors vacuumed and mopped as the last step

Day porters clean while your people work

An evening crew leaves a building clean, but a busy building doesn't stay that way until the next night. By early afternoon the restrooms on a full floor have been used all morning and the break room has taken the lunch rush. Lobby glass picks up handprints all day. A day porter is on site during business hours to catch that before tenants and visitors notice it.

The porter works in rounds rather than one pass. Restrooms get checked and restocked more than once a day. Spills get cleaned up when they happen, before they dry into the carpet, and trash in the busy spots gets pulled before it overflows. After a meeting, the conference room gets reset for the next one. The front entrance gets touched up between rounds, since it's the first thing a visitor sees.

Not every building needs a porter. A single office suite usually does fine with evening service alone. A corporate headquarters with a cafeteria and a steady run of visitors usually needs one. So does a multi-tenant building. There, one shared restroom on each floor might serve several companies. We sort out porter hours during the building audit, based on how many people use the space and where they gather.

Janitors who stay learn your building

Janitorial work looks simple from the outside, but every building has details nobody writes down. One suite has a server room the crew stays out of. A side door has a latch that has to be checked twice before anyone leaves. A company that swaps in new people every few months has to relearn that, and meanwhile your tenants notice what gets missed.

All of our work is done by our own staff, and our people stay. Our cleaning technicians average more than ten years of facility maintenance experience, and many have been with CLS that long. That matters most on the evening shift, when nobody from your side is in the building to point out what got missed. People with that much time on the job know where to look without being told.

Many janitorial contracts get passed to a subcontractor, and sometimes passed again, so the company on the agreement isn't the company in your building at night. When a step gets skipped, it's hard to find out who was even there. At CLS the people in your building are CLS staff trained by us, and the person you call answers for their work.

One person answers for your building

Every building we clean gets a single point of contact at CLS. That person is responsible for the CLS Everyday Cleaner Standard in your building, so a property manager or facility manager has one name to call. When something needs to change, like a new tenant on a floor or a room that needs more attention, it goes through that person. The crew hears it from someone who knows the building. One Google reviewer, R Pyrch, wrote: "You will not find a more customer service focused cleaning service."

A new janitorial contract often starts badly. The new crew inherits what the last one left behind, like grime in the restroom grout and dust caked on top of partitions. Routine cleaning rarely catches up with that. Our Extreme Clean Program starts with an Intensive Initial Cleaning when a new building comes on, included at no additional cost. That way the everyday work starts from a building that's actually clean.

After the initial cleaning, we test surfaces with equipment to confirm they're clean, and we test again from time to time after that. The repeat testing matters most. A restroom counter or a shared door handle can look spotless and still not be clean, and the eye can't tell the difference. Testing can. When a result comes back off, your single point of contact is the person responsible for getting it right.

Road salt changes the work every winter

From the first snow until spring, everyone who walks into a building around Lisle brings road salt and slush in on their shoes. On hard floors it dries into a white film that dulls the finish and turns slippery when it gets wet again. In carpet it settles at the base of the fibers near every entrance. A winter route deals with it on every visit, because salt that sits for days is much harder to get out.

Entrances get the most work in winter. Hard floors near the doors are dust mopped first to pull up the grit. Then they're damp mopped with a neutralizing cleaner made to lift salt film. Vestibules get dried so meltwater doesn't sit by the doors. Skip the dust mop and the wet mop just pushes sand and salt across the floor and grinds it into the finish. That's how a lobby floor ends up dull by February.

The weather hits each kind of building around Lisle differently. The glass office buildings and corporate campuses along the East-West Tollway have big lobbies and long runs of interior glass. Low winter sun shows every smudge on it. Tilt-up concrete warehouses and food distribution buildings toward Bolingbrook and Aurora have dock doors that let in cold air and road grime all day. In the brick office parks and medical offices of Naperville and Downers Grove, every visitor comes through one or two entrances. Each kind of building gets its own winter route, planned around where the dirt comes in.