City Clean is a large, internationally operating provider of facility cleaning and maintenance services. City Clean cleans offices, hospitals, public spaces and more. City Clean is a customer-centric company and its main aim is to become ‘the world’s most beloved cleaning and maintenance partner’. City Clean realises that its people are key when it comes to attaining this position and it therefore is making an effort to shift from a product-oriented focus in running its business, to a people-oriented one.
Additionally, the company knows that its workforce planning and management activities strongly affect the quality of the services that its employees are able to offer their customers. More than 80% of its services take place at off-office hours, during evenings, nights and weekends, thus affecting substantially the biological clocks and social agenda’s of its employees. Therefore, workload and staff planning and management has always been of key importance in this company.
City Clean has learned that by making employees’ schedules more flexible and by introducing self-scheduling, its business process needs are fulfilled much more efficiently, while at the same time its employees are much happier.
The self-scheduling facility, within a framework set by their manager, allows employees to make their own schedule, choosing and planning their own shifts in accordance with their physical and social possibilities and restrictions. Both effects, efficiency improvement and higher employee satisfaction rates, have directly positively influenced the company’s results (+4,7% in the first year) and helps them to further increase their market share.
"Why does this self-scheduling work so well?" Roman, one of the planners of City Clean answers... "Because you give the people more responsibility. You no longer manage based on distrust, but on trust. And you give the people more freedoms. Sometimes it is difficult to let go of your urge for control. But most of the times, when you give people more responsibilities', they will fulfil them. The result is a huge a amount of saved time. The schedule still needs to be made, but the execution almost goes by itself."
