On paper the round works out. 1,400 square metres, a productivity rate of 250 square metres per hour, makes 5.6 hours, and six are costed. In reality the person working this round needs seven hours and still leaves things out on a regular basis.
The calculation is not wrong. It is incomplete, and at a point missing from almost every costing: the time not spent on the floor area.
The calculation in its simplest form
From the room schedule, each room yields its area, its room group and its interval. From the room group follows a productivity rate, that is, the area that can be worked in an hour. Area divided by productivity rate gives the time per cleaning visit; multiplied by the frequency it gives the time required per week.
That calculation is the way into any costing, and it is incomplete. Part of the work cannot be expressed in square metres per hour at all: waste bins, sanitary fittings, door handles and contact surfaces, lifts, workstations, documentation tasks. These services depend on unit counts rather than areas, and they need times of their own.
What a productivity rate actually says
Before arguing about the level of a rate, settle what it covers. Does "250 square metres per hour" mean floor cleaning only, or every service in the room? Are waste bins, surfaces and sanitary fittings included? Is it net working time or paid time including travel? Which interval, which quality level, which degree of soiling, which method?
Without those details two productivity rates are not comparable, and half the discussion between client and tenderer turns on exactly this without anyone saying so.
Where productivity rates come from
A productivity rate is an empirical value for a particular activity under particular conditions. There is no generally binding rule for determining one. Various sources quote ranges, and those ranges are wide.
In the 2014 study we deal with more fully elsewhere, values between 180 and 260 square metres per hour were recorded for classrooms in municipal in-house cleaning; the North Rhine-Westphalia municipal audit institute recommended 200 to 260 at the time. For offices, in-house cleaning values were mostly between 180 and 230, and between 220 and 300 for private contractors.
These figures are old, and they rest on a scope of services you have to read along with them. As an order of magnitude for a first plausibility check they serve; as a basis for costing a particular building they do not.
The spread remains striking. Between lower and upper limit lies more than fifty per cent in each case. Anyone reviewing a costing and asking only whether the rate applied falls within the range has checked nothing. The question is whether it fits this building.
What shifts the rate
Five factors weigh particularly heavily. They do not explain the whole spread, since interval, quality level, waste volume, the number of items of furniture, access restrictions, user presence and hygiene requirements all have an effect too. No costing manages without the following five, though.
The degree of furnishing. An open-plan office with forty workstations and a seminar room of the same size differ considerably in effort, and in both directions: a room with many movable chairs costs time as well. It is not the area that costs time but what stands on it, and the number of individual operations.
The room size. Twenty single offices of 15 square metres each take considerably longer than 300 square metres in one space. Every room means walking in, opening the door, repositioning the trolley, getting your bearings. That time is constant per room and higher per square metre the smaller the room is.
The floor covering. Textile floors are vacuumed, hard floors mopped, and the methods differ considerably in area performance. Added to that is the question of whether machines can be used, which in turn depends on the room layout and the furnishing.
The degree of soiling. It depends on use, visitor traffic, weather and on the entrance matting zone. A zone that is too short or poorly maintained noticeably increases the amount of soil carried into the adjoining areas.
The method used. Pre-prepared mopping systems, the two-bucket method, machine cleaning, microfibre or cotton differ markedly in area performance. By how much depends on the room layout and can only be quantified with a time study in the building.
A defensible productivity rate can therefore only be determined for the specific building, as a rule through a site inspection. Copy from a table and you are costing a different building.
The time beside the area
Here lies the real craft of the thing, and here the differences between costing and practice arise.
Travel times within the round. Changing floors, waiting for the lift, moving between areas far apart. In a compact building they barely register. In a round covering three storeys and two parts of a building they add up to a considerable share of the shift.
The route to the store. How often does water have to be changed, materials fetched, waste disposed of, and how far is it? A central store in the basement serving a round on the third floor costs several minutes per trip, and the trips are not optional.
Moving materials. A cleaning trolley that does not fit in the lift changes the entire logic of the workflow.
Set-up and clear-down times. Changing, loading the trolley, mixing products, and at the end cleaning the trolley, sending covers to the laundry, tidying the store. Depending on the building that is twenty to forty minutes per shift, entered as zero in many costings.
Locking and securing. Where rooms have to be individually unlocked and locked, where alarm systems have to be operated, where access is logged.
How large this share is differs considerably from building to building, and estimating does not help. A time study across a few representative shifts, recording direct and indirect times separately, is done in two days and serviceable for years afterwards. Anyone not entering the ancillary times at all has a round schedule that cannot be met from the outset, and the person expected to meet it compensates in the only way left to them.
Then there are breaks. For working time of more than six and up to nine hours, at least 30 minutes are required; above nine hours, 45 minutes, and they have to be fixed in advance. A round schedule that does not reflect that is not a plan.
Periodic services in the schedule
A round schedule covering only the routine cleaning is incomplete. The monthly, quarterly and annual services need time as well, and that time does not arise evenly.
The clean approach is to plan them as separate items with their own windows, their own area reference and their own hours. That costs more staff time and is monitorable in return. The alternative, letting a flat share run along each week, looks more elegant on paper and can barely be verified in practice. Where it is chosen, that service is the first to disappear once things get tight.
What happens regularly: the periodic services are included in the price and not in the round schedule. They are then delivered in whatever time the routine cleaning leaves over, and it leaves nothing over.
Cover and absence
A round schedule without a cover arrangement is sensitive to the first case of sickness. That can be observed in almost every building where the planning was tight.
How often an absence is to be expected cannot be estimated; it can only be derived from your own absence data for recent years, including planned absences and their seasonal distribution. Plan without those figures and you are planning the staffing you wish you had.
A reserve arrangement need not mean unused time sitting in every round. Workable options are a briefed float pool, designated replacement staff, cover across teams, or additional on-call capacity.
What has to be settled in the contract in any event: which services may be dropped first in the event of an absence, which are delivered under all circumstances, within what period they are made up, and from when replacement staff are to be deployed. That prioritisation is not for the contractor to make alone, and otherwise the client does not know what it can rely on.
Why round schedules go out of date
A round schedule describes a building at a point in time. Buildings change: areas are repurposed, partitions inserted, occupancy shifted, extensions brought into use.
After three years the schedule describes a building that no longer exists in that form. The staff have adapted without anyone having changed the schedule, and nobody knows precisely any more what is actually owed.
Updating is the contractor's task, but it presupposes information only the client holds. A duty to notify structural alterations and changes of use therefore belongs in the contract, and it should run in both directions.
One level has to be thought through here that does not appear in the costing. Changes to productivity rates, working methods, working time arrangements, or the deployment of technical systems capable of monitoring performance may trigger participation rights of the staff or works council. How far those reach in the individual case depends on the applicable law and is to be clarified legally. Put plainly: a tightening that is arithmetically achievable is not thereby schedulable.
What a client should see
Assigning individual staff to rounds remains the contractor's organisational business, so far as the contract, access rules and security requirements do not require otherwise. Who takes which round and when, the client generally does not need to know.
The basis of the costing is another matter, and here a sense of proportion is needed. Areas, room groups, intervals and the scope of services owed are supplied by the client in any case; there is no argument about that. Whether tenderers must in addition disclose their productivity rates and hourly assumptions with the tender is a matter of design, and the answer has limits: information marked as confidential and trade secrets are protected in the procedure, and what is required has to be proportionate and announced in advance.
What is workable is a standardised costing sheet containing the figures actually needed for the evaluation, rather than the release of complete internal round schedules.
And where a tender costs 8,000 square metres of office space at 320 square metres per hour, that is not a finding but a question. For densely furnished single offices the figure would be hard to sustain; for large open areas cleaned by machine it is entirely possible. The answer depends on the scope of services and the room type, and it belongs in the clarification of tenders under Section 60 VgV, not in a complaint six months later.
Three questions for your own costing
Are travel times entered for the actual structure of the building, or not at all?
Where does the cleaning store sit in relation to the rounds, and how often does it have to be reached?
And if you divide the hours costed by the number of staff: do continuous, plannable working hours emerge, or a series of short shifts at the fringes of the day?
The third question belongs in round planning in professional terms, even if it does not look like it at first. Heavily fragmented rounds make recruitment harder, increase travel effort and produce the turnover that then renders the schedule unusable.