Originally posted – Jun 25, 2014
[This is the first of a two-part series on ways to build a successful team of laundry attendants.]
Perhaps it’s easy for the uninitiated to underestimate the job that self-service laundry attendants perform. However, their duties couldn’t be more significant. After all, if a customer has a bad experience with one of your business’ employees, he or she has had a bad experience with your entire business.
Given that, we’ve reached out to a number of laundry owners and asked them to briefly outline their team management practices and to provide us with some of the tips and strategies they’ve incorporated into their own businesses, which help to keep their staffers efficient, effective and on task – and, in turn, their operations successful.
Here’s what they told us:
Larry Vladimir,
Bakers Centre Laundry
Philadelphia, Pa.
We hold staff meetings every six weeks, which I think are extremely productive and team-building. I buy dinner and let everyone clock in for these meetings. During the meetings, after I go over my agenda, I let the employees voice their own comments, opinions or questions. I’ve found regular staff meetings to be very effective in getting everyone to feel they are part of the team.
In addition, each one of our employees wears a shirt with our company logo. This serves many functions; however, I believe its main advantage is that, when employees put on those shirts, they feel they are part of our team, and it gives them a sense of pride.
We also have a detailed employee manual, as well as job descriptions – both of which I believe are critical.
As far as new employees, they go through extensive training with our other key employees – working and training at least four or five shifts before they are allowed to work on their own.
Part of my strategy for a well-motivated staff is to be generous. If you are profitable and successful, a main reason for that is your staff – so they should benefit from that success. Therefore, I give at least 50-cents-per-hour raises every six months. I also do little things to show my appreciation. For instance, I’ll buy my employees lunch at least once a week. I provide a refrigerator stocked with bottled water and a microwave with packets of popcorn.
We also provide generous bonuses at Christmas. And, during Thanksgiving and Easter, we give each employee a gift certificate to a large local supermarket chain. Generosity creates happier, more productive employees – and less costly turnover and, therefore, increased profits.
I want my attendants to feel that, if the store is successful, they will continue to benefit as well. This creates happy employees and great team spirit, which translates to smiling faces when dealing with the customers. In fact, I get compliments from our customers all the time about how much they love our employees. So, we must all be doing something right.
LaChena Clark
Sudsy Water Laundry
New Rochelle, N.Y.
We create daily task lists each week. For example, on Mondays at 11:30 a.m., we clean bathrooms; on Tuesdays from 2:00 p.m. to 3:00 p.m., we call customers to let them know their wash-dry-fold orders are ready to be picked up; and so on. These task lists keep the employees accountable for their customer service and also accountable for the environment of the store.
Eric Pooler
Gold Star Cleaners
Bangor, Maine
If you have more than one location, promotions should be a competition between stores, with the winning store getting a pizza party or something similar. Individual competition where there is an incentive for the employee based on sales also is effective. I market gift cards for services; I discount the cards by 20 percent, but you have to buy at least $200 (which would be $160 for the customer for $200 in services). For every $100 an employee sells, he or she gets $2. That may not sound like much, but it can really add up. The customer gets a deal, the employee gets a deal (2 percent), and you get a long-term customer and increased cash flow when you need it most.
You can do this for your wash-dry-fold service, tanning, drycleaning and your self-service customers, whether you are a card- or coin-operated store. The logistics of tracking a coin store would be more difficult, but it can be done.
A “secret shopper” program keeps our employees on their toes, and store inspections are a must. Rate your store, compare it to others, always be friendly, but have written reprimands for those that underperform. Three reprimands and you’re done.
Don’t expect miracles. Be flexible with your staff. If you see sudden changes in work performance, ask if everything is OK in their lives. Your employees should never be surprised when you show up. They should never feel belittled or that you are the bad guy. Have fun, keep the atmosphere light, and remember that happy employees are productive employees.
Your employees are real people with real problems. You are a real businessperson with real bills and real profit margins. You need a good balance of strict and kind and mutual respect.
I would recommend the book, “How to Win Friends and Influence People,” by Dale Carnegie. After all, you need to work on yourself first and become the best boss you can be. Real change comes with you first.
Mark Murray
Adrian Image Center
Adrian, Mich.
We use “check sheets” for daily tasks, which everybody uses – but we have 10 steps for all tasks. This is a step-by-step to-do list on one page that essentially covers each step of the cleaning/maintenance process. This enables the team to learn faster with less help from superiors.
We also hold weekly team meetings with “pass to’s” and “pass up/downs” to keep communication moving both ways, along with a chalkboard for daily entries and a log book for other information, which everyone checks every day on punch in.
However, the No. 1 lesson I’ve learned after 50 years in the business is: “You get what you inspect, not what you expect.” It’s my job as the owner to inspect everything done over a period of time, to be sure that the team is actually doing what is supposed to be done, not what I want to be done. I’m always surprised at the difference.
Damon Levy
Cyclone Laundry & Internet Cafe
Baton Rouge, La.
We had a big problem with employees not showing up to work on-time for one reason or another. So, I purchased a yearly subscription to ShiftPlanning.com, which is an online staff scheduling software program that allows my manager to input the shifts for each employee by week. The software enables the employees to view the schedule, trade shifts, and communicate with management and other staff members – all from their computers or smartphones.
What I like best about the program is that it sends email and text alerts to an employee 24 hours and then one hour prior to his or her shift starting. So, for us, this eliminated all of the excuses as to why an employee missed a shift or was late. I can’t imagine running my business without it now.
Nancy and Patrick Higgins
Top Shelf Laundromat
Clarence Center, N.Y.
Our main focus is cleanliness, customer service and the greeting of every customer, which includes opening doors, helping to carry laundry and anything else to give the Top Shelf experience – and all while also providing a great experience with our wash-dry-fold service.
We focus on the cleanliness by showing and explaining our expectations – and by displaying our commitment to cleanliness by cleaning and maintaining our facility from the core and inside the machines.
Regarding customer service, our employee manual lists this as a primary job function. We teach our employees about customer service and our expectations using the Ritz Carlton and Russell’s steakhouse as our examples. We also utilize our camera systems to view, teach and train our employees.
For the wash-dry-fold service, we teach and train our process from Day One – from writing up and order to packaging. It is all in writing so that they understand we take it seriously. We make sure all wash-dry-fold orders are done the same way, regardless of the attendant on duty. And the staff has risen to our level of expectations.
It all comes down to the fact that we try and be the best employer they have ever had. We show appreciation, thank them for a great job, and explain and train our desires and vision. We want them to work together and take pride in the success of our store. They rise to that, and I feel we have the best staff in the industry.
Peter Stewart
Dirty Duds Laundry
Minot, N.D.
I’ve developed a five-step process for managing our employees and building our team:
1. Clear job descriptions.
2. Very clear job expectations during the hiring process.
3. Daily communication.
4. Ask for – and listen to – employee input.
5. Inspect what you expect.
Daryl Johnson
Giant Wash Laundry
St. Ansgar, Iowa
The key to team-building is simply to hire good people. If you have good people on your team, it’s much easier to manage them. We spent a lot of time talking with our new team members and trying to get them to buy into the DNA of our organization. When it’s obvious that our new team members have bought into that DNA of who we are, then we start giving them more and more freedom to make decisions that are consistent with that DNA.
We back our employees’ decisions 100 percent, even when dealing with customer complaints. If they handle an issue incorrectly, we still back them and then address it in private, offering them a better solution and empowering them to handle it more successfully the next time.
We feel that – if we have the best employees and they have bought into what we are trying to accomplish – we can free them to do their job and trust that they are working for the good of the company as a whole.
Duane King
LMARIES Laundromat
Bowling Green, Ohio
At LMARIES, we keep it simple for all of our attendants. We are partially attended, and every attendant is assigned – on a daily basis – what needs to be done and how to do it. We’ve created a detailed nightly cleaning list, as well as a monthly cleaning chart that outlines what to do and when to do it. When attendants finish their tasks, they date and initial those tasks on the corresponding sheets.
Although the attendants never work together, they stay in contact with each other through an open notepad document on the computer in our store’s office. Anything that needs attention is noted on the screen. Our system isn’t fancy, but it has worked for us for many years.
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