
Cash in hand jobs?
We have been hiring, and this is the most common questions that I get. "Do you pay cash?" Meaning that if we pay cash and not through PAYE. Of course paying people in cash is not illegal itself. But paying people in cash off the records and then this person not...

A job that is worth it
Is the job worth your time? Recently I was told by someone who applied for the job that the job we offered was "not worth their time". Although this person literally lived 10min away from the work and their day job was just 5minutes away. This person also said that...

Workflo connection
Attended Workflo connections at @workflosolutions. It was great to spend only 5minutes driving to get to an event! What a fantastic presentation from @MichelleQuinn Managing Director of Almond engineering. It was a story of her starting from the bottom and then now a...

New clients
😉Thinking about changing your cleaning provider? 🍑Is changing your cleaning company going to be pain-in-the-butt? Recently I am putting a lot of effort into getting new clients around Edinburgh and West Lothian! It really frustrates me when people are in the place...

Starting from seed
🌻This is the sunflower that my daughter planted at her nursery from seed. 🌱Now has a beautiful flower and it smells like toasted seeds. Today's story is about small change that we made by joining the Living Wage Foundation and paying the Real Living Wage so that...

I had a great catch up with our client at their office last week! It is always fantastic to catch up face to face as well, and meet them at their beautiful office. It is completely different to just emailing and messaging. It is somewhat weird because I am so familiar...

Dealing with grumpy people 2
Continuing from the story of people being rude and overthinking why people are being rude to you. My staff thought this person from the office was being rude and ignoring her. She might have thought that this person was "rude" to her because she was a foreigner, or...

Dealing with grumpy people
"She always ignores me", my staff whispered to me when a person from the office passed by us. I was visiting the office and we were folding the cloths together with my staff. And I was thinking about this. Some people have been indeed rude to my staff, and I have...
Avoiding tax?
Here we go again! Someone said that they wanted to leave their second job because they are paying "too much tax". I explained that the "double tax myth" is simply not true and had a discussion. It turns out that there was a mistake in payslip with their employer and...

Providing support for staff
I was well proud of our new guy today! I visited one of our client's premises this morning, and see how our new guy was getting on. He is one of our youngest member of staff and had no prior cleaning experience. When I entered, the doors were a lot cleaner and overall...

Employing young person
We have recently been working with local council and support group to help young people get into employment. We have recently hired 2 under 21's. When I interviewed the 16 year old person, he mentioned that he didn’t get any response from any of the employer at all....

Moment of reflection
Another fab morning at the Federation of Small Businesses (FSB) networking! Great presentation about goal setting and taking yourself to a next level by Nick Sellers. Recently I have been very busy with both business and in my personal life. I basically look after my...

HOLIDAY
The holiday season has arrived! Over the years I have been looking at other companies holiday policies and tried to make something that would suit us as a company. We have our standard 28days holiday, plus we give everyone extra day of holiday when they pass their...

Being transparent
I hear too often from people that worked for other cleaning company saying that they didn't get paid for the hours they have worked. And their manager was unresponsive. Why is this? This is because they either don't record the hours correctly, for example using manual...

WORKING IS GREAT!
I noticed there's a shift in thinking "work is evil". I was thinking about this a lot recently and thinking WHY do people hate work. Why did work became something that is an awful thing? Perhaps people had so much time over COVID that some of them didn’t need to work...

Branding
I was driving in Edinburgh yesterday and a girl aged probably around 7-8 years old pointed at my van and said "woooow!". This made my day and made me realise that I do love this van and the colours. I have designed the van myself(making my design degree useful here),...

Language
We have and have had in the past, people from all over the world working with us. We had people from Ghana, The Gambia, Portugal, Spain, Italy, Poland, Iran, India, Ukraine etc… Some people actually couldn’t speak much or any English. But we hired them. This one lady...

Who makes great cleaner?
I was carrying out and setting up new cleaning contracts for our good clients recently. You get to think a lot when you are cleaning. And I was thinking how to carry out the cleanings best and most efficient. And who is a good cleaner. When you work at offices while...

BE A GOOD PERSON
🌸I saw a post from Lawrence at Electrify today he was speaking about hiring a good person. 🧼How we do interview in PCS is that we have an informal chat beforehand and then I will bring them onsite to do a "trial shift". ⏰Usually the trials are not long, around 30min....

Supporting local business
Spot our van! One of my staff works for a bigger company who is based in England to do some of her other shifts. She told me that she hasn’t been paid properly for the last 6 months, and this still has not been resolved. She said that her payments were always late....

Keeping it tidy
🙈I must confess that I am not a tidy person myself! 👻So I have come up with some tips for how to keep things organised and tidy as much as possible. 📚The key is not to organise per se, but more like to make the environment "easier to sort it out". 🔑The key is to have...

Work anniversary holiday
🌸My staff visited St Abb's Head couple of days ago and she sent me some pictures. 🌊Beautiful! 📷I enjoy getting pictures from my staff when they are away on holiday. 🙏🏻I really like it when they are able to go and have some time off. ☝️We give people "work anniversary...

When things aren’t working out
🧐Recently we had client saying that they were not happy how our staff cleaned their office. 👎Initially they said she was not doing a great job at their office. 👉We updated cleaning tasks, we did deep clean together hoping that this was going to make a difference. 🙀It...

We get things done mentality
💪🏻Why did we choose the line "We get things done". 👍Cleaning staff is usually the last person in the building. 🏢Whether this is in the commercial setting, or let's say if we were doing an end-of tenancy cleaning. 🗑We are the ones who turns the lights off, take the...

Keep moving forward
💪🏻It always motivates me to do more when I see my staff on site. 😔I had a chat with one of them yesterday, when we get some complaints from our client it feels as if we are doing a bad job, especially when we hardly got any complaints before! 😎This is where I come in...

Living Wage Clients
👍Does working with Living Wage accredited clients make a difference? ❤️The answer is YES. 🌞Usually they have same mindset as ours. Looking after their staff, looking after their environment and their workplace. Trying to make it better. ✉️When working with Living Wage...

Keeping our staff motivated
🙏🏻Keeping our staff motivated 😵💫I was thinking about how to keep our staff motivated and listed up couple things that would affect their motivation - Lack of appreciation - Lack of attention (neglect) - Work environment (dirty, etc) - Relationship with their...

Keeping it simple
🤔I was thinking today to myself, what are we doing right that other company who lost the contract is not doing? 👊🏻The answer is I think pretty simple, and that we do the basic things really well. ⏰We use a clock in & out app for our staff, so we know when people are...

Keep doing the right thing
🧼This week, we started a new contract! 🤷🏻♀️The client was just not getting a good service from their previous prover. 🙄You know we all have ups and downs but the problem is that this wasn’t getting solved for months and months. ⏰If the mistake or the complaint was...
Overworked?
🏨A lot of my staff also have a second job. Some of them work in a hotel. 😪They usually are really overworked and exhausted. 🧹Sometimes when I see them at their office cleaning premises, they come in visibly tired, flustered cheek, but motivated to work. This inspires...

Extreme ownership
🌞Happy Monday everyone! 🧹I asked the chat GPT to give me a summary of the cleaning industry in the UK. 🥷🏻Apparently the gig economy workers, the so-called "self-employed" cleaners are on the rise. This was not a surprise though as I have been encountering this. 🙄These...

Proud of your work
🧩Following up on our recent chat with clients, we have been implementing some changes in a lot of our locations. 🪑One of the client asked if we can place the chairs in a different way, and they sent us pictures. I have forwarded this pictures onto our staff and asked...

Ongoing trainings
⏰Recently we have been busy chatting to our clients and making sure they are 100% happy with our work. 🙏🏻As well as our staff, sometimes clients do not express their unsatisfaction until we actively get in touch with them. 👍We just wanted to say that we have never...

Zero-hours contract?
🍻When I used to work in a bar, typically in December you would see overworked colleagues, some of them working in 2 or more jobs, sometimes not sleeping and then coming back into work the next day. 🍸And usually in January, it all went quiet. Some of the staff had no...

CLEANING SHOW
🧼I was at the cleaning show down in London! 💙It was especially great to catch up with the Pacvac team. They were all really enthusiastic about their amazing vacuums! 🌸Fiona Morris was the lady on the photo with me, who is doing a lot of training with pacvac. She was...

TRUST & loo rolls
Happy Monday everyone! 💬I met up with a friend this weekend, she was telling me about her workplace drama… 💣Apparently her workplace being a bit chaotic since the director left the business. 🌞Then I realised the problem was the "lack of communication", and "lack of...

STATE OF INDUSTRY
I encounter this A LOT, especially in the recent years. 🤷🏻♀️It goes like this "I cannot work more than X amount of hours because I will lose my universal credit." This means that this person will NEVER be able to do any covers due to their universal credit getting...

SO PROUD
💪🏻I was so proud of our team yesterday. 🧍🏻♀️I took my staff who agreed to cover the shift of another staff to their location so that they have the opportunity to meet her before doing the cover from tomorrow. Me or our managers always make sure to do this so that...

TIMEKEEPING
✨We used to schedule everyone's shift on EXCEL spreadsheet…! This is when we had like 3 staff, things were simpler back then. ⏰But once we hit more than 5 staff it was just time consuming. So we had to look for solutions! 📱We wanted something that could operate from...

Invisible hand of cleaning industry
Recently I met with an old colleague of mine who work as an IT technician at one of the big fintech companies in Scotland. While talking to him I realised how similar the IT departments are to cleaning teams in most of the modern companies. Both provide a service,...

IMPORTANCE OF GREETINGS
IMPORTANCE OF GREETINGS おはようございます! Good morning! ⛹🏻♀️When I joined the basketball club in high school Japan, the first thing we were taught was to greet the seniors loudly. (they told us to make sure whole school hears you😂) 🙇🏻♀️We had to bow to our teachers or...

BEING A ROLE MODEL FOR YOUNG PEOPLE
BEING A ROLE MODEL FOR YOUNG PEOPLE 💪🏻I always feel a great responsibility when a young person starts working with us, and especially if it is their first job. ❤️I always want to provide them with a good experience working with us. You always remember that first job...

Why is our MISSION important?
Our mission as a company is to create a safe, fair and motivating working space for our team. Why is this our mission? Isn't all the jobs fair and safe?? You ask? While working in the industry, I have encountered and witnessed a lot of DODGY practices. The industry is...

Cleaning cupboard means LOVE
How important is it to have a cleaning cupboard full of materials? We always strive to have a cupboard fully stocked. How do we make our staff's lives easier & happier? It's by making clear and simple instructions & showing that we care. ❤️Full cleaning cupboard means...

PROBLEM SOLVER
Our last but not least core value is being a "problem solver". This is super important as well, because our managers cannot always be with everyone at the same time. If it is small things such as "piece of paper got stuck inside the vacuum" then my staff should be...

BEING ACCOUNTABLE
This was me at 17. I used to play basketball in school. I was captain in junior high school and a vice captain in high school. I was not technically skilled in any way, I started to play when I was 13. So I made sure that I exceeded in other places. I made sure that I...

TEAM PLAYER
Our second core value is BEING A TEAM PLAYER. You absolutely need to be a team player in PCS! It doesn’t necessarily mean that you need to get on with everyone and become best pals. It is about showing care to one other. Being a team player means that you collaborate...

POSITIVE ATTITUDE
What I define as a great staff is when they tick all the boxes of our core values. We set this out as the core value for PCS. It is absolutely parallel because people are the company. Our staff embodies this! HAVING A POSITIVE ATTITUDE💪🏻✨ We had so many people with...

Cleaning is fun!
Living in Japan for 18 years, I went to Primary School, Secondary School and High School in Japan. None of my school had a cleaner, we had to clean ourselves. This was a fun time for me and for all of us in the school, we had fun doing cleaning. We have fun doing...

Just want to be happy 🙂
Once I asked one of our cleaning staff "What's your goal in life?" thinking that he would say that he would like to be a manager, more responsibility…etc. His answer was "I just want to be happy, you know, no stress, just happy." I was actually shocked because until...