Hi, this blog is called ‘Be seen and not heard,’ I normally completely disagree with this phase in normal life, because I believe we should all be heard. However, in this context of housekeeping I disagree with that.
I believe we are in someone’s sacred place, it’s their home and nine times out of ten our clients are actually working from home and we are in their space, they are busy, focused on their work.
The best way to work is to support our customers – is to be incredibly conscious of the sounds that we make as we clean. This took me a while to get in my early days and I noticed that when clients would give me feedback one of the things that they said to me: “it’s so lovely when you come here, it’s as though you are not here! You get the job done and you do the job so quietly, we feel that you are not intruding in our space and we get on with our normal lives”.
That really struck me, and it’s now something that I train all my staff in. Because, we are often working so much with visuals when we are cleaning, we are looking at zooming in zooming out, we are looking at top to bottom, we are using cloths it’s all about the visual. So, when that happens, we often forget the noises we make.
I had two lovely girls working at one of my prestigious clients homes the other day and I couldn’t believe the noise they were making. I am going to give you some examples of some things to look out for as a housekeeper, when you are cleaning, so you could be really, really respectful of your client’s space. So, the first thing to be really conscious of is to do with your footsteps. I have often been told that I am a heavy walker, so this is something that I have to work on as it’s very easy to be…. (India stamps her feet). So, what if you are upstairs and your clients on the phone downstairs they can hear the clomping and it’s so now so, it’s so important to be careful of one’s footsteps.
I like to wear slippers or a soft pair of shoes when I go into my client’s home that helps as well. So, footsteps number one, number two is voices especially if you are working in pairs – it’s really easy if you’re cleaning together having a good chat just be conscious if you do that where you are in the house in relation to your customer and just keep the tone down. So that when you are cleaning you are not disturbing your clients with your voices. It’s nice to keep your voice tone low, quiet, maybe even shut the door when you are cleaning so that it doesn’t interrupt your customer.
So that’s number two, number three this is a really important one, laughing! Now, I am all for being positive and having a great time when ones is working. However, if a customer hears you laughing do you know what? Often, they will think these housekeepers are in my home and they are laughing and they often might automatically think they are laughing at me, they are laughing at something about my home. Because, customers are being very vulnerable when they allow housekeeper into their home and are often very sensitive. So, to laugh out loud in a customer’s home could be construed in the wrong way. I actually know one of my clients actually sacked a housekeeper because they kept laughing and they felt they were laughing at them. So, this is a really important one to bare in mind.
The final one is equipment, and particularly if you are using a Henry hoover – very popular they are very robust and work really well. But, I have noticed that when we are doing the hoovering we clunk when we pull the hose out and its clunk and makes horrible loud noises. Also, when you are taking the ends off and using it to do the edges just be aware of the sound one is making, so you can do this as quietly as possible. Those are the things that I would like to share about and I hope this has been useful!