What the cleaner does when a Ryde room is occupied at its scheduled time

In a consulting room, a meeting room or a private office, an interruption is at best inconvenient and at worst a genuine problem. The cleaner has no way of knowing what is happening inside, and a knock puts the occupants in the position of having to respond. Moving on quietly costs the cleaner a few minutes and costs the occupants nothing, which is the correct balance. Moving on quietly is the response that costs the least to everyone involved.

The exception is where a client has specifically asked for a different arrangement, such as a knock in a general office where staff are happy to be asked. That is recorded in the site instruction rather than left to individual judgement, because a cleaner applying a rule from one site to another produces exactly the awkward situation both parties wanted to avoid. Rules that travel between sites unexamined are how avoidable awkwardness is created.

The return pass has to be planned. A cleaner who intends to come back at some point will come back only if the shift permits, which on a busy night it does not. Building it into the route as a defined loop near the end means it happens as a matter of course, and it recovers most occupied rooms because meetings and appointments generally do finish. Most occupied rooms are recovered by that single planned loop.

Two attempts is the sensible limit. Circling a floor repeatedly to catch one room consumes time that other areas need and rarely changes the outcome. After the second attempt the room is recorded with both times, which is more useful than a third attempt because it starts building the record that will eventually resolve the underlying problem. The record is what eventually resolves the problem, whereas a third attempt is not.

One occupied room is nothing. The same room occupied at the same time every week is a collision between the cleaning attendance and a recurring booking, and it can be resolved in about a minute by whoever controls the booking system. What prevents that resolution is that nobody has told them, because each individual occurrence looked too small to mention. Individual occurrences look too small to mention, which is precisely why nothing changes.

So the supervisor brings the pattern rather than the incidents: this room, these dates, these times. Presented that way the client can move a booking, change the attendance order for that area, or agree the room is serviced on a different day. All three are reasonable and none of them can be decided without somebody putting the dates in front of the right person. Putting dates in front of the right person is the whole of the intervention.