Yes.
With three conditions attached, one of which will cost you money and none of which appear in the industry white papers. I say this as somebody whose company still runs a great many night contracts and would keep every one of them if the client asked. The night model made sense when a London office was full from half eight to seven and empty the rest of the time. Most of the buildings we service no longer look anything like that, and a cleaning shift that starts after the last person leaves is now servicing a building that emptied out at four.
What does daytime cleaning actually change?
The shape of the labour, mostly. A day contract puts a resident team on the floor plate through the working day, running a rolling task cycle rather than a single compressed sweep. Somebody is on site at eleven when a coffee goes over the meeting room carpet, and at two when the kitchen sink fills up with cereal bowls, and at four when the third-floor washroom has taken 180 uses since the last check.
Under a night contract, all of that waits. The spill sets, the kitchen looks appalling for six hours in front of people who use the building, and the washroom runs out of hand towels at half two with nobody in the building who can refill it. What you buy at night is a building that looks perfect at eight in the morning and degrades unattended until nine at night. What you buy in daylight is a building that never gets past about 80 per cent of perfect, and never drops below it either.
The twilight shift is the worst of both worlds
Half the market’s answer to this is a four-till-eight twilight shift, and I think it should be abolished. It captures none of the responsiveness of day cleaning, because the working day is over by the time the team arrives on the floors that matter. It captures none of the efficiency of night cleaning, because the building is still half occupied and the team is working around people. And it is the hardest shift in the industry to recruit for, since it wrecks the evening without paying a night premium. Twilight exists because it lets a facilities manager say they have moved away from nights without any part of the working day changing.
Does it save money, and where does the saving come from?
Some of it is real. A lot of what gets claimed is not.
The London Living Wage went to £14.80 an hour for implementation by May, against a statutory National Living Wage of £12.71, and any decent London cleaning contractor is paying the former. Night work typically carries an uplift of 10 to 20 per cent on top of that, plus a higher recruitment cost per head, because night retention in this industry is dreadful and every leaver costs you three weeks of a supervisor’s time. Move the shift into daylight and the premium goes.
Now the part our sales team would rather I left out. A day team needs more hours than a night team to deliver the same specification. Interruptions are real – a cubicle is occupied, a meeting room is booked, a bank of desks has people at it, so the operative moves on and comes back. On the transitions we have run, the honest figure is somewhere between 10 and 20 per cent additional hours for an equivalent scope. That eats most of the shift premium saving. If a contractor tells you the labour line falls by a quarter, ask them to show you the hours.
The energy figure everybody quotes
You will see 20 per cent energy savings claimed in every daytime cleaning brochure printed since about 2009. The number is invented, or at least nobody has ever shown me the study behind it.
The genuine energy and services saving depends entirely on your lease and your building. In a single-let building where you control the plant, closing the building down at seven rather than eleven saves lighting on every floor and the air handling run-on behind it. In a multi-let tower it can be bigger, because out-of-hours HVAC is charged back by the managing agent by the hour per floor, and out-of-hours access often carries a security charge on top. A tenant we work with at Chiswick Business Park was paying for four hours of out-of-hours conditioning across two floors, five nights a week, purely so the cleaners could work in a comfortable building. That charge alone was worth more than the entire shift premium.
Ask the agent for the out-of-hours plant charge before you ask anyone for a cleaning quote. That single number decides most of these cases.
What stops working when you move the whole spec into daylight?
Plenty, and this is where most transitions go wrong, because the model gets sold as a straight swap.
Noise first. A standard commercial upright runs at somewhere around 72 to 75 dB(A), which is unusable next to a desk where someone is on a call. Low-noise machines sit around 58 to 62 dB(A) and are entirely workable, but they cost two or three times as much, and a contractor who wins a day contract on price will bring the old fleet and hope. That is the single most common cause of a day cleaning trial collapsing in month two. Put the machine specification in the tender document with decibel figures attached, and ask to hear one running in front of people at a desk before you sign anything.
Then washroom access. To service a washroom properly during occupancy you have to close it, which means enough washroom capacity to take one out of service for twenty minutes. In a 1980s building on a tight core with one gents per floor, you do not have that, and the day team ends up doing quick checks all day and nothing thorough. Deeper washroom work then has to go somewhere else.
Confidential floors go the other way, in our experience. Legal and HR floors are usually the ones flagged as unsuitable for daytime work, and they are the ones that benefit most. A partner floor cleaned at eleven at night, unsupervised, with nobody from the firm in the building, is a security arrangement most risk teams would refuse if they were designing it from scratch today. Daylight work puts the client’s own staff in the room on floors where documents sit on desks.
The jobs that stay at night
Nobody strips and reseals a vinyl floor at two in the afternoon. Nobody hot-water extracts a carpet that needs six hours of drying time, or works off a low-level access tower under a live ceiling, or descales a washroom with an acidic product while the washroom is in use.
So the honest model is split. Day team for the daily and weekly cycle, plus a periodic crew that attends out of hours on a fixed calendar – monthly, quarterly, annually, depending on the task. Any tender that promises to move 100 per cent of your cleaning into daylight is either misunderstanding the periodics or planning to quietly stop doing them. Ask specifically how the floor maintenance programme is delivered. If the answer is vague, the answer is that it isn’t.
Which London offices suit it, and which don’t?
Single-let buildings with their own front door and a three-day occupancy pattern are the clearest yes we see. The Monday and Friday gaps give a day team room to do the heavier work with almost nobody around, and the building never sits unattended.
Multi-let floors are more complicated, since you can move your own demise to daylight and the common parts will still be cleaned to the landlord’s schedule at whatever hour the managing agent has always used. You end up with two regimes in one building, which works, but stops the reception areas benefiting.
Where I would say no
Trading floors and 24-hour operations. There is no window, the occupancy never drops, and the desks are never clear. A dealing floor in the City gets cleaned in the two-hour gap it has, and that gap is at night.
Laboratories and clinical spaces have their own access protocols that usually rule it out. And any building where the client’s real objective is a lower invoice rather than a better-serviced building should stay where it is, because a badly resourced day contract is visible to every employee, every day.
How do you make the switch without a mutiny?
Talk to the incumbent team first. TUPE will carry them across if you change contractor, and their hours and premiums come with them, so the saving does not arrive on day one. Some of them work nights because it fits a second job or a childcare arrangement, and you will lose people who cannot make the new pattern. That is a real cost and it should be in the business case.
Then tell your own staff, with names. The single largest cultural gain from daytime cleaning is that the cleaner becomes a colleague with a name badge rather than an invisible presence who moves things overnight. Retention improves sharply once people are working in front of people who say good morning to them.
Move one floor, not the building
Six to eight weeks of overlap, one floor at a time. Pick the floor with the fewest phone-heavy roles, run it for a month, and let the rest of the building watch. Every objection you will hear in consultation – the noise, the interruption, the awkwardness of someone emptying a bin at your feet – either shows up on that floor in the first fortnight or turns out to have been imaginary. Measure it with complaints logged rather than with a survey, because surveys about cleaning attract people who were already annoyed about something else.
Hold the periodic schedule out of the trial entirely. If you change the daily model and the floor maintenance programme in the same eight weeks, you will never know which one caused what. We started a transition at a client on Buckingham Palace Road with the fifth floor only, because the fifth floor had the fewest phone-heavy roles. The eighth floor asked for it in week three.