“You’re here five nights. We’re here three days. So the invoice comes down by two fifths, doesn’t it?” That was a facilities manager in Farringdon, on the phone, in January, sounding entirely reasonable. He was about half right, which is the awkward part. Some of what we charge that building for tracks his headcount almost exactly, and should fall the moment his people stop coming in. The rest tracks the calendar and would cost the same if nobody ever walked through the door again. A flat percentage cut takes the same slice out of both. The second slice is the one that comes back at you eight months later, usually as a smell from a kitchen floor gully that nobody can locate.
What does three days in the office actually do to occupancy?
Less than the arithmetic promises. Hybrid working compressed the week rather than flattening it. Tuesday to Thursday carry almost everything, Monday limps along, and Friday in most of the buildings we cover has become a quiet day with a skeleton crew and a lot of empty chairs.
We look after a media business on Curtain Road in Shoreditch, 340 staff, desk sensors on every bank. Their average weekly occupancy last quarter came out at 58 per cent. Their Wednesday peak was 81 per cent. Friday averaged 19. So the busiest day in that “three-day” office runs at roughly four fifths of what a full-time office ran at in 2019, and the washrooms on that day have no idea what the weekly average was.
Why Wednesday sets your specification
A cleaning specification is a capacity plan wearing a different hat. The soap dispenser on the third floor either lasts through Wednesday afternoon or it does not. The bin under the coffee machine either holds Wednesday’s cups or it overflows onto the floor by half three. Neither of those things is negotiated down by the fact that the same floor was empty on Friday.
You can reduce how many times we attend. You cannot reduce what a peak day demands from us on the occasions we do attend – and if you try, what you get is a cheaper contract that visibly fails one day a week, which is the one day everyone is there to see it.
Which parts of the contract genuinely scale down, and which don’t?
Two groups, and one awkward outlier.
The occupancy-driven group falls almost in line with footfall. Consumables – hand towels, tissue, soap, sanitiser, sacks – track use directly. General waste volume tracks use. Washroom replenishment rounds track use. Carpet soiling is a footfall function too: soil comes in on shoes, and fewer shoes means slower loading of the traffic lanes, which pushes your extraction cycle out by months rather than weeks. Touchpoint work scales with the number of hands touching things. All of that should come down, and if your contractor resists it, ask them why.
The time-driven group does not move at all. Dust settles on an empty desk at the same rate it settles on an occupied one, and rather more visibly, because nobody has disturbed it. Internal glass gets marked by cleaning equipment, sunlight and building movement as much as by fingers. Hard floor maintenance is a wear-and-chemical cycle, and vinyl in a Croydon office block will still need its annual strip and seal whether the desks above it were full or not. Drainage, pest prevention, high-level dusting, external window cleaning, washroom deep cleans – all calendar work. Cutting them because the office feels emptier is the single most common false economy I see in tender documents.
Then the kitchen, which misbehaves upward. Office days have become social days. People who come in on a Wednesday come in to see each other, and they do that around the coffee machine and the fridge. Per head, we are clearing more cups, wiping more spills and pulling more forgotten lunches out of fridges than we were when everybody was in five days a week. A client of ours off Beadon Road in Hammersmith cut to three cleaning nights and spent the next quarter complaining about the fridge. The fridge was not the problem. Thursday night to Tuesday morning is 96 hours, and a chicken salad does not care about your occupancy dashboard.
Consumables and waste – the honest saving
This is where you should push hardest, and it is money out of our pocket, so take it as offered.
Plenty of contracts still bill consumables as a fixed monthly line agreed when the building ran at full occupancy. If yours does, you are paying for volumes you stopped using in 2020. Move to consumption-based billing with a monthly stock reconciliation. On a 300-desk floor that shift alone has been worth four figures a month to buildings we work in, and it costs us the margin we used to make on the difference.
While we are being honest: daily desk sanitising was mostly theatre, and we sold a great deal of it in 2021. Surface transmission was never the main event for respiratory illness. Keep the touchpoint work – door furniture, lift buttons, tap heads, handrails – and let the desk wipe go, particularly in a hot-desking layout where the cleaning matters more but the schedule that delivers it is the wrong one anyway. Wiping a hot desk at 8pm does nothing for the person who sat down at it at 2pm.
Who is actually paying for the reduction?
Worth working out before you start negotiating, because in about half the buildings we service the tenant has no authority to cut anything.
If you occupy a floor in a multi-let building, the cleaning of your demise is yours and the cleaning of the common parts is the landlord’s, recovered through the service charge. You can move your own floor to three nights tomorrow. The lift lobbies, the ground-floor reception, the shared washrooms on your level and the goods route all sit outside your gift, and the managing agent will not reduce them because one tenant is in on Wednesdays. Nor should they, since the other tenants may be running a different pattern entirely.
We see this play out in the tower blocks around Canary Wharf constantly. A tenant cuts their demised cleaning by 40 per cent, their service charge does not move, and the saving on the total occupancy cost turns out to be around 8 per cent. The conversation they needed was with the managing agent, about whether the common parts specification still reflects how the building is used. Slower argument, better money.
The sublet floor nobody cleans
The other trap is the floor you have taken out of use. Furniture still in place, lights off, door locked, pulled off the cleaning route to save money. Six months later it needs a builders-standard clean before you can show it to a subtenant, and that quote will exceed everything you saved. Keep a monthly attendance on mothballed space.
What happens to a building that sits empty four days a week?
It develops problems that occupancy used to hide.
Water is the serious one. HSG274 Part 2 puts weekly flushing of little-used outlets in the routine monitoring table, and ACOP L8 expects it written into your scheme of control. In a five-day office, taps got used and the flushing regime was largely academic for anything except the disused shower room. In a three-day office with half the desks dark, whole runs of pipework go quiet – the far washroom on the sixth floor, the cleaner’s sink in a store nobody opens. Somebody has to run those outlets. In practice it is often our team, because we are the only people in the building with a route sheet and a reason to walk it. Cut us to two nights and lose the flushing, and you have created a gap in a written scheme that a Health and Safety Executive inspector will find in about four minutes.
Traps dry out as well. Floor gullies in kitchens, unused shower drains, the odd hopper behind a riser door – water evaporates from the U-bend across a four-day gap, and in a warm August you get sewer gas coming back up through the floor. We had it at a client on Cheapside two summers ago. Three weeks of investigation, a drainage contractor, an air quality consultant, and the answer was a dry gully in a kitchen the tenant had stopped using.
The bin that nobody emptied on Thursday
Food waste over a long weekend is the other one. Under a Monday-to-Friday clean, nothing organic sat in a building for more than about 60 hours. Under a Tuesday-Wednesday-Thursday clean, a Thursday afternoon takeaway container in a desk bin sits until the following Tuesday, and by then you have flies. If you cut nights, cut them at the front of the week. Clean Thursday night no matter what.
Should you cut nights or cut scope?
Nights. Almost always nights.
Scope cuts feel painless because nobody notices the missing task for a year, and then everybody notices at once – the carpet lanes set, and the washroom limescale turns into a resurfacing job rather than a descaling one. Frequency cuts show up straight away, and that is a mercy. Three thorough nights aligned to Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, with the full periodic programme intact, will hold a building better than five thin ones with the periodics stripped out.
The contestable bit: most London offices at three days should be cleaning in daylight, and the reason they don’t is embarrassment. Facilities managers tell me staff find it awkward to have someone vacuuming near them. What they mean is that they find it awkward. Daylight cleaning removes the unsocial hours premium, cuts the building’s out-of-hours lighting and HVAC load, and puts a supervisor on site while there is someone to talk to. It also means the washrooms get serviced during the Wednesday peak rather than nine hours after it, which is the entire point. A three-day office has the natural gaps to make it work – Monday and Friday are effectively free.
What to ask before you sign the variation
Ask for the reduction broken down by task and by hours, never as a percentage. Anyone who agrees to 40 per cent inside a phone call was either overcharging you before or is planning to cut labour hours quietly and hope. Ask who is flushing the outlets, and get the name of the schedule it lives on.
The gully in the ground-floor kitchen at Curtain Road gets a jug of water tipped down it every Thursday night. Takes eleven seconds. It is item nineteen on the sheet.