Following the world’s recovery from the depths of the COVID-19 pandemic, we wanted to bring you some news on how CCS’s cleaning service continued to provide support to its cleaning clients and cleaning staff.
Sadly, a few of our cleaning customers had to close their doors for some of the lockdown periods like many other businesses throughout the UK and worldwide. We helped them by agreeing to put their cleaning contracts on hold until such time as they could re-open and use our cleaning service again.
Many of our cleaning clients, though, were able to stay open and even increase their cleaning requirements, particularly where the cleaning was for sites such as schools, construction, medical centres, gyms and those supplying essential services. And as companies adapted, where they could be made “COVID Safe” for home workers to return in person we found that in these types of cleaning environments our service became more important than ever. Companies included regular sanitisation of areas that their workforce was in as part of their risk assessments and method statements for safe working.
During the COVID-19 outbreak we kept as many of our cleaning employees physically working as possible. While we had to furlough some of the cleaning team we didn’t make any of our cleaners jobless, and our cleaners returned to work as cleaning contracts began to re-open.
We were also contacted by our local NHS Hospital Trust where we had previously provided support cleaning staff and services. They asked us to provide full time trained cleaning staff and housekeepers throughout the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, and beyond. We quickly mobilised a competent cleaning team, many of whom went on to take up permanent cleaning positions within the housekeeping department. We were proud that the cleaners we had recruited were of a high enough calibre to join the ranks of the directly employed cleaning and housekeeping teams at the hospital.
When we were first consulted over supplying cleaning staff to the Hospital Trust, to help with making the hospital COVID Safe we made it clear that we would charge a low rate, because we believed strongly that it was not appropriate to make a large profit from the situation the whole country found itself in. We personally introduced every member of staff to the housekeeping managers and kept up regular meetings with the managers to ensure that we continued to supply them with the best possible cleaners and housekeepers we could during that difficult time.
Our approach was so successful that, although other local cleaning companies were also invited to supply cleaning and housekeeping staff on a similar basis, CCS was the longest running cleaning contractor during that time and were invited to continue supplying staff until September 2023.