Checking safety documentation before appointing a Hurstville cleaning provider

A safe work method statement is only useful if it describes the tasks being performed at your premises. Many providers hold a general document covering office cleaning, which is entirely reasonable for office cleaning and unhelpful if the proposal involves working at height, using a floor machine, handling a lift lobby or attending alone at night. Ask for the version that covers what you are actually buying.

Read the hazards and controls sections rather than the cover page. You are checking whether somebody has thought about the specific conditions: wet floors in a public area, cords across a corridor, access to a plant room, working alone in a building after hours. A document that lists the right hazards for your building has been considered. One that lists hazards you do not have has been copied.

Ask for a list of the products that would be used and the safety data sheets for them. This matters more than it sounds, because chemicals are stored somewhere in your building, sometimes in a cupboard shared with other uses, and because your own staff may need to know what is present. Some buildings and some tenancies restrict particular product types, and that should be established before the arrangement starts.

Ask where products will be stored and how. A locked cupboard with the sheets kept alongside is the straightforward answer. Products carried in and out each visit is also fine and should be stated. What you want to avoid is discovering an unlabelled container in a store room months later with nobody able to say what it is or who put it there months after whoever brought it onto the premises has moved on.

Ask what training attendees receive before their first shift and how it is recorded. Chemical handling, equipment operation, manual tasks and your own site rules all belong in that induction. A provider who describes a documented process has one. A provider who says their staff are experienced has described a hope, since experience elsewhere does not cover the particular hazards of a building nobody has walked them through.

Lone working deserves its own question in a building that empties at night. Ask what arrangements exist for a cleaner working alone: how they check in, what happens if they do not, and who would notice. Providers vary considerably here and many have thought about it carefully. A provider who has not is bringing a person into an empty building without a plan for the night it goes wrong.