Comparing quality assurance methods offered by Norwest cleaning providers

A cleaner reviewing their own work at the end of a shift is a useful discipline and not an assurance process, because the person assessing is the person who did the work. Assurance requires somebody else looking, whether that is a supervisor, an area manager or a periodic audit by another part of the business. Ask who performs the check and what their relationship is to the cleaner.

Ask how often it happens and whether the frequency is higher during mobilisation. Most arrangements need closer attention in the first months while the site is learned, and a provider proposing an identical frequency in month one and month twenty has chosen a number for the proposal rather than for the work. That pattern is easy to spot and worth asking about and it usually indicates how much thought went into the rest of the proposal.

A check without a standard is an opinion. Ask what the checker works from: the scope document, a site-specific list, a generic form, or their own judgement. A site-specific list derived from your actual scope is the most useful, because it produces findings you can act on rather than a score that summarises everything into a single number nobody can interpret and lets you see whether the check reflects your building or a template.

Be careful with scoring systems. A percentage rating is easy to read and tells you very little, since a high score can coexist with a persistent failure in the one area that matters to you. Ask whether the output identifies specific items and their location rather than producing a figure. Specific findings are actionable; an aggregate score usually is not and a score without underlying detail cannot be acted on by anybody.

Many providers run genuine internal checks and never share the results, which means the mechanism improves their service without giving you any evidence of it. Ask whether you would receive the output and in what form. A short report listing what was checked, what was found and what was actioned is enough, and it costs the provider almost nothing to send and it gives you evidence to bring to a review conversation.

Then ask what happens to a finding. A check that identifies an issue and produces no change is an observation, not assurance. The useful question is what the provider does when the same item appears twice: a conversation with the cleaner, a change to the schedule, or additional time allocated. That response is the part of the system that actually improves anything and it is the part most often missing from an otherwise convincing description.