Handling an early morning complaint about last night on Darlinghurst sites

These are two different tasks and confusing them causes most of the friction. Rectification is straightforward: get the area right, as soon as the site allows. It does not need to wait for anyone to work out what happened. Explanation takes longer because it involves the shift record, the cleaner and often a look at the sequence, and it should not hold up putting the area right.

So the immediate answer to a client is about rectification and timing, not cause. Telling somebody at half past eight that their meeting room will be attended to, and separately telling them by that afternoon what appears to have gone wrong, is a much better sequence than a single response that arrives late because somebody was assembling an explanation first. Splitting the two responses is a small change that removes most of the friction.

The shift record is the starting point. Was the area recorded as completed, deferred or inaccessible. Was there an exception logged that morning that nobody had yet read. Did the shift finish at the usual time or run short. Then the cleaner is asked, and asked in a way that produces information rather than a defensive answer, because a cleaner who expects blame will say they did it.

Frequently the answer is in the record already. The room was in use. The shift was covering an absence. An area had been added the week before and the time had come from somewhere. Occasionally the answer is that the task was done and the complaint concerns something that happened afterwards, which is worth establishing calmly rather than asserting immediately. The point is to establish what happened rather than to allocate blame quickly.

The answer given to the client should be specific enough to be checkable. What was found when it was looked at, what the record showed, what has been done and what will be checked. General reassurance produces a client who stops believing anything they are told, and the next complaint arrives with more heat and less detail because they have concluded the detail makes no difference.

Where the finding is uncomfortable, it is still given. A shift that ran short because it was covering an absence is a real answer and a client can work with it. Pretending otherwise means the same cause will produce the same complaint next month and the explanation will have to be invented again. Honest answers are also considerably easier to remember. A client who trusts the answers will tell you about small things before they become large ones.