Three Keys to Building a Strong Wash-Dry-Fold Team
With both the post-COVID-19 era and the laundry outsourcing revolution upon us, many store owners I speak with are seeing their wash-dry-fold businesses growing rapidly.
Given that, how do we – as employers, without automation – handle the workload of this new and growing demand for our wash-dry-fold services? How are you sourcing and finding quality employees to produce and deliver a high-quality product day in and day out? That’s going to be an increasingly difficult challenge.
When I’m looking at our wash-dry-fold production, I try to think about designing systems within which employees can perform to the peak of their ability. It’s all about getting the most out of every labor dollar you spent.
You need to know what your team can produce, on average, in an hour – because that’s the number on which you should always base your pricing structure. Understanding and tracking your production is the first part of the equation.
The second part revolves around trying to constantly improve your production. This involves motivating your employees. Be sure to always let your team play an integral role in the workload and production monitoring and improvement processes. That’s probably the most important thing you can do to increase employee motivation and create a level of ownership among your team.
At The Laundry Doctor, when considering productivity and efficiency, the first step is to let our employees evaluate the situation and come up with their own solutions. This will differentiate the employees as individuals, and it will enable them to help set the stage for creating greater value for the business.
Of course, be sure to recognize your employees’ contributions and reward them for it. Recognizing employees for the work they do every day – either financially with an incentive program or through daily reinforcement of their work and involvement – is crucial. Whatever you do, rewarding your staff members on a regular basis in some way will pay for itself exponentially.
Your reward program can be as simple as occasionally buying coffee for the team, bringing in lunch once a week, or carving out some social time for everyone to get together and relax a bit during the workday. Those are important team-building, company-bonding events that will strengthen the camaraderie within your laundry business.
In addition, it will make your employees more reliable and more eager to perform well as a group – so, when you have those stressful, high-production days – your team will be more willing to get the work done… and get it down with the highest quality in mind.
Lastly, one of the most important aspects of managing employees is finding out what certain individuals do well and then putting them in positions to do it. All large wash-dry-fold operations have multiple positions.
For example, in my operation, we have an employee whose only job is pressing. I also have staff members dedicated strictly to washing, drying, producing finished products and so on. Everyone has different skill sets, and everyone has something that they do best.
Play to your team’s strengths. Put a system in place that allows employees to do the work they do best, and be sure to get their input on how they prefer to tackle this workload.
To recap, three of the most critical tasks for any wash-dry-fold operator are:
- Understanding your team’s production capabilities.
- Motivating your staff as a way to encourage constant improvement.
- Discovering what your employees do well – and letting them do it.
We follow this three-step process at our facility daily to keep our full-service laundry operation running smoothly and efficiently, while producing the highest quality finished product possible.
