A new cleaner starts on a Monday. She is handed a set of keys, walked through three floors, and takes over a round on her own on the Tuesday. On the Thursday of the second week she does not come back.
For the site supervisor that is a nuisance in the roster. Arithmetically it is more expensive than it looks. The effort spent on selection, registration, equipping and familiarisation is lost, the round has to be covered from existing staff for weeks, quality falls in the meantime, and the whole process starts again. Early departures like this cause considerable repeat costs, and they occur frequently in both sectors. Which causes predominate in your own organisation can only be answered from your own exit reasons and deployment data.
What high turnover actually costs
Four items that are rarely considered together.
The direct cost of recruiting and hiring. The cost of familiarisation, and on both sides, since an experienced member of staff accompanying a new one is not delivering their own work in full during that time. The errors in the learning phase, which range from rework to damage to surfaces. And the loss of knowledge about the building, which cannot be quantified and has the strongest effect day to day.
The fourth item is the most important. Somebody who has looked after the same round for two years knows which room is occupied on Thursdays, which door does not close properly and when the caretaker is available. That knowledge is why an established team needs less time for the same area. It builds over months and disappears in a day.
Day 1: what has to happen
The first day shapes orientation and confidence in the organisation more than any later one. A missing point of responsibility or incomplete equipment conveys on that day that the start was not prepared for.
Four things belong in it. How long they take depends on the building; in an office building they are quickly done, in a hospital, a kitchen or a security-critical position they take considerably longer.
A person who is responsible and knows it. Not the site supervisor in passing, but a named member of staff with the task of accompanying the newcomer that day.
The routes: changing room, store, break room, toilet, exit. It sounds trivial and it is why people feel lost on their first day.
The equipment, in full. Workwear in the right size, protective equipment, keys or fobs, access rights. Anyone standing in front of a door on their first day with an access card that does not work has received a message.
And the names: who works here, who is the contact, whom do you call. In writing preferably, because nobody memorises eight names in a day.
What does not belong on day 1 is the full briefing on every regulation. It will not be taken in on that day, and it gives the other person the impression that this is mainly about covering the organisation.
One boundary belongs with this, and it is not a matter of taste. Everything required for the first task to be performed safely and lawfully has to be conveyed beforehand. Section 12 of the Occupational Safety and Health Act (Arbeitsschutzgesetz) requires instruction on recruitment, related to the workplace and the task. For hazardous substances it must take place before employment begins, for work equipment before first use, and operating instructions must be accessible in a comprehensible form and language. For guards there is the additional requirement that the operating instructions must be handed to them under Section 17 of the Guarding Ordinance (Bewachungsverordnung) before their first guarding duty, against written acknowledgement.
What gets staged, then, is the deepening, not the safety knowledge.
Week 1: accompaniment until sign-off
Working alone starts only once the person has a confident command of the task. That is the most expensive statement in this article and the one most frequently disregarded, because it takes staff time nobody has budgeted for.
A fixed week is not the right yardstick, because it is too long for one position and too short for another. Better is a sign-off for each task: explained, demonstrated, carried out unaided, signed off. For straightforward floor cleaning that may be reached after one shift. For operating a scrubber-drier, handling hazardous substances, working in hygienically sensitive areas or triggering an alarm route it takes longer, and until then those tasks should expressly not be performed alone.
Build the accompaniment into the plan and you get it back several times over. It is during accompaniment that the things get passed on incidentally that appear in no document. That this room stays locked. That the colleague on the ground floor does not like mopping during consultation hours. That the trolley does not fit in the small lift.
Part of that should then be checked and carried into the working instructions or the round schedule. Otherwise rules arise that exist only orally, that nobody has verified and that disappear again with the next change of staff.
For security services the same applies in sharper form. Somebody taking a night shift alone in a building they do not know is not capable of acting in an incident, regardless of their qualifications. Building-specific familiarisation before the first deployment is part of the professional minimum here, and a good basic qualification does not substitute for it.
Weeks 2 and 3: the phase where it can tip
The accompaniment ends, the routine is not yet there, and attention has moved on to other things. In this phase problems of time and understanding typically surface for the first time, and often nobody else gets to hear about them.
The reason is usually the same: the new member of staff needs considerably longer for the same round than the experienced one. That is normal, it is also unavoidable, and it is nonetheless rarely planned for. The consequence is that she either falls behind and experiences that as personal failure, or she omits services in order to hold the time. Both end badly.
What helps is an honest statement at the outset: in the first weeks it takes longer, that is planned for, tell us if you cannot get through. Fail to say that sentence and instead of a report you get an omitted service, and you find out months later at an inspection.
A short contact during this phase helps as well. Five minutes in the second week, with a single question: what is still unclear to you?
Week 4: the conversation that almost never happens
After four weeks a new member of staff knows enough to ask useful questions, and is not yet so settled that she takes problems as normal.
That is what makes this conversation particularly revealing. Twenty minutes regularly bring out things nobody notices any more: that a materials store is awkwardly placed, that an arrangement with one department does not work, that an area is missing from the round schedule.
Seven questions carry it. Which task is still unclear? Where is the time allowed insufficient? What information was missing? Which instruction does not match the actual process? Which piece of equipment is unsuitable? Which task still causes uncertainty? And what would make daily work easier straight away?
The conversation thus serves two purposes at once. It supports the new person, and it gives the site supervisor pointers to weaknesses in planning, materials and organisation that would otherwise only reach them through a complaint.
Language is a management task
In both sectors a large proportion of staff work with German as a second language. Treating that as the problem of those affected leads nowhere.
What works is straightforward and rarely done. Show important things rather than describe them. Demonstrate the dosing. Pictograms on the containers rather than continuous text. Short sentences without technical terms, and where a technical term is needed, explain it once and then use it consistently. And where somebody on the team speaks the same language, bring that person into the familiarisation deliberately. For safety-relevant content, though, that should not be the only basis. Responsibility for the accuracy and completeness of the instruction stays with the employer, and a helpful colleague is not a verified translation. That needs a written basis in comprehensible language and a check on whether the content has landed.
One point frequently overlooked here: safety-relevant information has to be understood, not handed over. Operating instructions for hazardous substances that nobody can read do not serve their purpose, even where they are on display.
Why this concerns the client
Onboarding is the contractor's business. The consequences of poor onboarding are borne partly by the client.
It bears them through quality, because uninstructed staff make mistakes. Through the fabric of the building, because wrong methods damage surfaces. Through safety, because somebody who does not know the reporting routes does not function in an incident. And through its own workload, because it has to deal with the consequences.
Three points therefore belong in the contract, notwithstanding that they concern the contractor.
Building-specific familiarisation before the first deployment, with documented evidence.
Notification of staff changes, in the security field before deployment, in cleaning at least promptly. You will generally not need full name lists for this. Clearance status, qualification, date of familiarisation, access rights and an unambiguous personnel code are enough for the monitoring purpose, and you should not require more than your access and security requirements actually support.
And the provision of the basics by the client itself. A cleaning concept, agreed operating instructions, a current building plan. Without these documents the contractor cannot familiarise anyone, because it lacks the information.
What you can check in your building
Ask the most recently hired member of staff what they were given on their first day, and ask them to show you a task rather than explain it.
Check whether there is a document that people are familiarised with, or whether familiarisation is oral and therefore depends on whoever happens to be delivering it.
And ask how many different individuals worked in your building over the past year. Where that figure sits well above the number of posts, the question of why is worth putting. Some of the reasons lie with the contractor, some in your own specification of services, and in a proportion of cases in the onboarding.