What Does Your Cleaning Contract Actually Buy You?
If you’re only comparing hourly rates, you might be comparing the wrong thing.
When businesses review commercial cleaning contracts, one number tends to dominate the conversation:
The hourly rate.
One company charges $55 an hour. Another charges $60. Another comes in at $75.
It seems like an easy comparison.
But there’s a problem.
An hourly rate tells you what an hour costs.
It doesn’t necessarily tell you how much cleaning gets done.
At Mode Technology, we think there’s a better way to look at commercial cleaning, particularly now that automation can work alongside cleaning teams.
Instead of asking:
“What is your hourly rate?”
Try asking:
“What will my building actually receive for that money?”
Five cleaning hours aren't always five equal hours
Consider two commercial cleaning contracts.
Both provide five hours of attended cleaning each week.
Under a traditional model, those five hours might need to cover:
vacuuming
mopping
bathrooms
kitchens
bins
desks and surfaces
glass
consumable refilling
meeting rooms
reception areas
stairs and corridors.
That's a lot to fit into five hours.
And when time gets tight, cleaners naturally have to prioritise.
Now imagine those same five human hours supported by an autonomous cleaning robot operating on the site's large floor areas throughout the week.
The labour hours haven't necessarily changed.
The cleaning capacity has.
That's an important distinction.
Stop buying hours. Start buying outcomes.
If you're responsible for a commercial building, you probably don't actually care whether somebody spends precisely 43 minutes vacuuming the office.
You care that the office is clean.
You want bathrooms that are presentable.
You want kitchens maintained.
You want bins emptied.
You want floors that look good when customers arrive.
And you don't want employees telling you there's no soap or toilet paper.
Those are outcomes, not hours.
Yet much of the commercial cleaning industry is still structured around selling labour time.
At Mode Technology, we're increasingly designing cleaning solutions around the outcome a customer needs and then determining the best combination of people, automation and equipment to deliver it.
Where should people spend their time?
There are many cleaning tasks where people are essential.
A robot isn't going to notice fingerprints on the boardroom door.
It isn't going to wipe down the kitchen.
It won't clean your toilets, empty the office bins or notice that you've nearly run out of hand towels.
Those are exactly the areas where we want our cleaning teams spending their time.
But does a person need to spend an hour walking backwards and forwards vacuuming a large open-plan floor every night?
Sometimes they do.
Sometimes technology can do much of that work instead.
By automating suitable repetitive floor-care tasks, we can redirect human cleaning time toward areas requiring judgement, detail and care.
That's not replacing the cleaner. It's making their time more valuable.
Your building doesn't stop getting dirty when the cleaner leaves
This is another limitation of comparing cleaning contracts purely by labour hours.
Imagine your cleaning team attends Tuesday and Thursday.
What happens on Wednesday?
Or Friday?
Or over the weekend?
Under a traditional contract, potentially nothing.
Robotic floor cleaning changes that.
Depending on the facility and the cleaning requirement, an autonomous robot can be scheduled to operate between attended cleaning visits.
So a business purchasing a relatively small number of attended cleaning hours could potentially receive significantly more hours of actual cleaning activity across its facility.
This is why comparing two quotes based only on the cleaner's hourly rate can become misleading.
One might be selling you labour.
The other might be providing a complete cleaning system.
What about all the things around cleaning?
Then there are the jobs nobody thinks much about until something goes wrong.
Who checks the toilet paper?
Who orders the hand towels?
Who makes sure there is soap?
Who notices you're down to the last box of bin liners?
Who stores the stock?
Who deals with the suppliers?
None of those jobs individually seems particularly significant.
Collectively, they're another piece of facility management somebody in your organisation has to deal with.
Mode Technology can incorporate hygiene and consumable supply management into our commercial cleaning service.
Our cleaning team is already there.
They're using and refilling those products.
It makes sense for us to help manage them too.
The cheapest quote isn't always the lowest-cost solution
There's also a difference between price and cost.
A cleaning contract can look inexpensive on paper but become expensive if internal employees constantly need to deal with missed cleaning, complaints, stock shortages or supplier issues.
Likewise, adding technology to a cleaning service might appear more expensive than simply comparing labour rates.
But if that technology substantially increases cleaning coverage without requiring the equivalent increase in labour hours, the economics start looking very different.
The right question becomes:
How much would it cost to achieve this same level of cleaning using people alone?
That's the comparison worth making.
Seven questions to ask before renewing your cleaning contract
The next time your commercial cleaning contract comes up for review, don't start with the hourly rate.
Ask:
Which areas are being cleaned, and how frequently?
What isn't being cleaned as often as we'd like?
Where is the cleaning team spending most of its time?
Could repetitive floor care be automated?
Could automation increase cleaning frequency between attended visits?
Who is managing washroom and hygiene consumables?
How will we know the agreed cleaning standard is actually being delivered?
Those answers tell you far more about the value of a cleaning contract than an hourly rate ever will.
A different way to think about commercial cleaning
Mode Technology isn't interested in putting robots into buildings simply for the sake of having robots.
We're interested in finding better ways to get work done.
Sometimes that means people.
Sometimes it means automation.
Usually, the best solution involves both.
Add management of the everyday hygiene products a workplace needs, and commercial cleaning becomes much more than buying a few hours of someone's time each week.
It becomes a managed service designed around the building and the people using it.
People where people add value.
Automation where automation makes sense.
One team responsible for the outcome.
Is your cleaning contract delivering enough?
If your commercial cleaning contract is coming up for renewal, don't just send us your current hourly rate and ask us to beat it.
Show us your building.
Tell us what's working, what's not, and what you'd like cleaned more often.
We'll look at where your cleaning budget is currently being spent and whether a combination of commercial cleaning, robotics and hygiene consumable management could deliver more.
Mode Technology
Safe by design. Efficient by nature. Scalable by choice.