When would you replace your house cleaning service?

In My Humble Opinion
1

My cleaner comes once a month. She is part of an agency. I’ve never had another one in my life so I don’t know if this is reasonable or how far to let it go. But she has a history of being late by as much as 2 hours. I did complain about it and it’s been better. But there is also the cancellations. She said she would clean today, Monday at 11:00 AM. Of course I get a text at 10:00 that she will clean on Friday at noon, because she has a toothache. It’s not the first time by any means.

I feel like I am an easy mark or something. That I let them become comfortable with a an unacceptable situation. Shouldn’t cleaners be on time and dependable? They went from $100 to $120 this year too.

Maybe with other agencies they can send someone else and avoid these cancellations?

2

It depends how much it inconveniences you. My cleaning lady often texts at the last minute to change her hours. Honestly, i feel like this bolsters my claim that she’s an independent contractor, and not an employee, and i don’t care very much when she is here. (Except not Friday morning! For reasons specific to me.) So long as she comes regularly, at a mutually convenient time, I’m happy. And we are hard to clean for (slobs) and she’s been great for us.

3

Before you replace your cleaning service, perhaps ask them to send a different cleaner?

4

When a business relationship involves someone coming into my home, I’m much more cautious about giving second or third chances. There is just too much harm they can do if the relationship starts to deteriorate. Entitled people are capable of a great deal of self-serving rationalization that you are the one at fault.

The whole point of paying for an agency service (which usually costs more) is that they are supposed to vet people so that this doesn’t happen. At the very least I’d tell them you want a different person.

Have you tried checking with neighbors for a recommendation? That’s usually a good way to find someone trustworthy, and someone who can easily accommodate you on your schedule, since they already work nearby. If you’re not in personal contact with neighbors, join Nextdoor and ask on there.

5

I don’t think I’ve ever expressed a particular time with my cleaner - it’s just ‘Friday’ and she can turn up when she wants. It’s never bothered me, unless I’ve got something specific on in which case I’ll let her know to work around it.

But changing from Monday to Friday would really pug me. She can’t help being ill, so I’d let it go that one time. Of course if she’s with an agency, I would expect the agency to send someone else.

6

The instant you’re not 100% pleased it’s time to start looking. Whether for house cleaners or brands of ketchup.

You may find a better quality product costs too much. Or you may decide the whole effort to change is just too much trouble. So you might end up right where you are. But you won’t know until you try.

You spent years teaching her, and her employer, that you can be ignored, treated badly, and made their lowest priority. And yet you keep paying. I know this smacks a bit of blaming the victim (= you), but that’s where you are now. They try to flake on most of their clients and some folks won’t stand for it and others just take it.

I suggest you’re not going to fix this worker or this agency. You might by saying something close to “I won’t pay unless you’re here on the appointed day within 15 minutes of the appointed start time.” I expect them to tell you to go pound sand, although in more mealy-mouthed non-committal terms.

I find the half-life of cleaners around here is about 18 months. By then they’re either doing slapdash work unlike when they started, or the inherent problems in the lives of the low-paid are starting to leak into my service. Time for me to find a new one. Lather rinse repeat.

7

Right. That’s why you use an agency. I don’t have a cleaning service right now, I don’t think anyone would do it until I hired a disaster recovery team to come in first.

8

Our cleaning lady is independent*.
I would be very reluctant to involve a third party. What are they doing to earn their fee? What are their fees?
Is your cleaner getting paid (enough)?

We must be something right, she does her work mostly to our satisfaction and has been around for ±20 years with a ~3y hiatus somewhere in the middle: She found some friends of hers to take over then, but I’m glad she’s back.

(*in my neck of the woods it is possible to set this up legally and with benefits. If you are doing this under the table you should be looking to arrange something for sick days etc.)

I agree that an agency should be seen as replaceable, but I don’t like the idea of treating someone who comes to my house regularly as replaceable.

9

The cleaning company I use now sends a team every other Wednesday, and if I want an ETA I can text my POC on Tuesday afternoon (otherwise it’s “any time after 8:30 AM”). Most of the time it doesn’t matter to me, but every now and then I’ll ask. I am never in contact with the team members themselves in terms of scheduling. The company has never cancelled or requested a different day, but I’ve requested changes from time to time.

When I let the previous company go, it was because I’d been noticing some increasing carelessness which was capped off by them cleaning the house on a day they weren’t supposed to. It was pre-pandemic and I was going to an office daily, something happened with my dog’s daycare so I was going to have to leave her in the house (and I couldn’t telework) that day, and I’d cancelled a day or two before – and had gotten an acknowledgement/confirmation of the request. They cleaned anyway. It’s bad enough if I’m around when there are strangers in the house making a lot of noise…the dog was clearly stressed and scared when I got home from work that day! Plus, being in the house with an unsecured dog put them at risk and could have introduced liability on my part. That was my last straw.

10

Similar. At some point the woman we initially hired started sending round her cousin and her nephew, and eventually the family transferred the job to someone new. And that woman has been with us for maybe 15 years. We paid her to not clean throughout the pandemic, in the hopes she’d still be in the business when we were ready to let her back into our house. And I’m delighted that she’s back. And i know she’s getting a decent hourly wage.

11

I’m retired and home a lot in the pandemic. So I need to know the time and date when my apt is going to undergo cleaning for 3-4 hours.

Also it makes a big difference if there’s two cleaners vs 1. But the cleaner is deciding that not me.

12

That sounds horrible! Our dog is best buddies with our cleaner, I suspect she’s been sneaking in some treats;)

13

I’m in a large urban area. A google search will give me a lot of agencies with good reviews. It’s harder to look for an independent. Plus I’d like a team of two to do it every month.

14

LOL!

The pandemic hit right around when I let the previous company go, and I figured I’d just go back to doing my own cleaning. That only lasted for three months (it’s a small house and I’m a neat person by nature, but I hate cleaning floors and bathrooms!). When the cleaners come, the dog is usually sleeping in her bed next to my desk: I shut her in the home office with me, and tell the team to skip this room. I’ve had the same “senior” team member almost every time for the past two years, but she just saw my dog for the first time a couple months ago. Heh.

15

I use a service for my house because I want them vetted / insured etc. In my professional life we have a lot of relationships with people who work in jobs that are often done by “independents”, and we stay away from them. Just too many issues. Now, that isn’t to say an independent laborer can’t be high quality / trustworthy etc, but I have the experience of significant numbers of interactions with such people (far more than a regular person), and got burned enough time by guys or gals running a business out of their truck / van with little else that I don’t do it anymore, and that same logic is why I want an agency for my house.

However, at least for me–I don’t care at all what time they clean, I know the day they clean and don’t care the time. My guess would be due to the nature of the job it’s the kind of service that probably isn’t ever super tightly scheduled.

16

You are completely within your rights to fire an individual or company for unsatisfactory work, by whatever standards you care to set.

However, I’m uncomfortable with some of the posts in this thread that seemingly fan the flames of indignation. The person cleaning your house is a person. She (or he, theoretically, but let’s be real here) has a body that can break down at inconvenient times, a family that needs her sometimes during work hours, her own scheduling challenges with people not showing up when they were supposed to, causing her to run late, and any number of other problems. She is not sitting in a salon massage chair at the appointed hour, eating bon bons and cackling at the thought of you waiting for her to show up.

Yes, an agency could keep additional people on call to substitute in for someone with a last-minute emergency to ensure that the customer would never be inconvenienced. But that would require either paying someone to do nothing, thus raising the prices, or putting someone on hold without pay and without the opportunity to use that time constructively. If you are unwilling to pay for the former and expect poor people to bear the burden of the latter, that might be worth examining.

I go back and forth on whether I feel hiring a house cleaner is worth the hassle. Sometimes after a bad experience or several, I decide it isn’t, and clean my own house for a few years before I get tired of that and try again with a new person/agency. But I try to keep in mind the power dynamic and the fact that I’m incredibly fortunate to have this problem, instead of being the person who might get fired from a shitty job I desperately need for being late to work because of a dental emergency.

17

I was probably the poster with the most inflammatory tone. And I perhaps overstated my case. Or at least I was guilty of assuming more than I said.

I have a cleaner (a pair actually) who come weekly for 2.5 hours. She picked the day when I hired her; they’re all the same to me and I was happy to let her pick whatever fit her time slots. If she needs to slide due to illness, or even no-show for a week due to vacation, holidays, whatever, that’s 100% fine. But tell me before the fact and offer me the opportunity to veto or to negotiate. Don’t just no-show, then show up unannounced another day and expect that degree of flakiness to work. Triply so if you work for an agency; the whole and entire point of an agency is they have enough people that you the customer aren’t dealing with the single point of failure of Jane, her car, and her health and her kid’s health. There is some degree of backstop built in there for when things go wrong in Jane’s life, as they inevitably will.

I was actually more reacting to the OP himself. Where it sounded to me like he’d been passively accepting ever less good workmanship and now, when he’s well past fed up, he’s just starting to consider he might have a problem that needs solving.

IME / IMO these problems of differing expectations are much better handled firmly from the git-go. Fuming that “They’re doing a crappy job” but giving no feedback until it’s been going on so long you’re upset enough you’re ready to fire them is an unproductive problem-solving strategy. It’s a common strategy of conflict avoidant people, but it doesn’t really work very well for effecting the change you want to see.

Perhaps I read more into the OP than was there. Perhaps not. He’s not addressed this part yet.

18

FWIW with my agency cleaners I rarely ever see them do their work, as I’m usually not at home, but it’s more often than not a new person each time I do see them–I don’t really have a personal relationship with the individual cleaner. I have a consumer relationship with the agency.

I have never needed my cleaners at a hyper specific time, so I will admit to not being that familiar with that aspect of it, but I see cleaning as at least somewhat similar to other service people I have called out–like my HVAC service technician or plumber, they usually will give me a scheduled “window”, but anyone who has dealt with such people before knows that those schedules are shaky. This is a little intrinsic to the reality of labor that varies from job to job and so can be difficult to predict. It would not really make me think the agency was bad if they couldn’t adhere to a very narrow range of schedule time, now if they committed to “between 8am and 2pm” and regularly showed up after 5, I would think that’s unreasonable. Certainly, if they don’t show up at all on the day in question, that is also not reasonable.

I feel like it would be reasonable for them to charge a higher fee for someone who could only accommodate cleaners in their home at say, exactly 10:30am each Tuesday with a requirement they be finished by 11:45am and no later.

19

We have an agency, but they send the same two women, and have for years. They clean my mom’s house as well. If they can’t come, the agency will try to schedule a sub if I want.

The advantage of an agency is that they handle the legal stuff, they have standard procedures for what should get done, and–appropriate to this thread–if I did need to fire someone, they would handle it. This came up with my son’s piano teacher, who we also hired through an agency. She was just persistently unreliable. She was supposed to come from 6:30-7:15, but she would regularly be very late, like 7:00 or later, with no warning. And show up with a fast-food cup. In fact, she often showed up with “I’m sorry I am late, I had to stop for dinner after work”. My son is 10, and he gets tired early. A lesson from 7:15-8:00 was really too late, he didn’t learn nearly as well. I spoke to her several times about this, but it kept happening. She kept insisting it wouldn’t happen again, when I offered to find a different day and time: this was her only window.

She also cancelled a lot: at least 1 in 4, maybe 1 in 3 lessons. And she’s offer to reschedule, but it was never soon–like “I need to cancel tomorrow’s lesson, but I could do a make up lesson 2 Saturdays from now”. I feel like piano lessons need to be consistent. His current teacher will sometimes ask about moving them one day earlier or later, which is easy and I don’t mind doing. But missing whole weeks was infuriating.

Anyway, even with all that, it took me a long time to fire her. I felt very bad for her, because I strongly suspected she had some kind of Executive Functioning issue: like, no matter how often it happened, she never thought to pack a dinner or snack, so that she wouldn’t have to get dinner before coming to my house.

I did call her first and tell her that I thought we needed to try with someone else, and I didn’t give the agency a bad review, but I was really glad to let them handle all the logistics.

20

And I hire a person in part because I want the same person each week – I know that she’s never stolen my stuff, I don’t know that about the new person the agency just hired. I also hire directly because independents earn more, and it’s a pretty shitty job so I’d like as much of the money to go to the cleaner as possible.

I put up with a certain degree of flakiness, but (1) the time doesn’t matter very much to me and (2) she does always text and let us know what’s up. Except once, when she sent a very apologetic text the next day – she’d had her citizenship interview that day, and I think she’d been flustered. I would have skipped cleaning some random house to get to MY citizenship interview, too.

But I do agree with this:

When she wanted to move one week to Friday morning, I said “no, that doesn’t work for me”, and she ended up coming at 2PM, which worked very well for me. At least she texted, so we could negotiate. But I’d have confronted her (or I should have, anyway – we all tend to avoid conflicts) if she’d just shown up.