Taking Care of The Maideasy Crew

Over the two and a half years of Maideasy operating, we’ve learnt a lot about our customers and especially our crew. In time, as Maideasy grew, as we served more and more customers and trained and provided jobs to our cleaning crew, we learnt a few key insights about the cleaning industry. My blog post this time is about how Maideasy takes care of the crew.In the first year of Maideasy, it was very difficult for us to hire Malaysians to work as a cleaning crew, mainly because of the negative connotation that most people tag on the profession of ‘cleaner’. 2016 saw a lot of PR that goes into promoting this job as a cleaning crew for the Malaysians and we worked hard in elevating the status of the cleaning crew. The first thing we did was re-name the job of cleaners into ‘crew’ as to make it professional and portray it as a dignified job.

For the crew’s work to be considered professional, we worked on the training syllabus to train our crew in providing high quality cleaning service. The training syllabus was worked on for about 1 year, and it includes not only in training the crew on how to clean homes, but also to recognise the materials used, as well as important tips on how to communicate with the customers. Finer details like what to call the customers like Sir, Madam or Encik, Puan are also taught to our crew. They were also taught to respect the customers to not call them kakak, abang or adik.

I would like to highlight the importance of the operations team in helping the crew. Most of our customers are not aware how important it is for the operations team to facilitate the jobs of the crew. What goes behind the scenes at the office is to smoothen out the crew’s jobs so that they can work with a peace of mind and also manage the expectations of the customers and crew.

Sometimes when the customer books a session with us, the condition of the house is not what the crew expect. The house could be in a state where it wasn’t cleaned for many months or it’s a unit that needs cleaning after renovating or moving out. With these types of conditions of the house and the customer books a Basic Housekeeping session, the crew can get distressed as they are not trained to clean these kinds of houses other than the Basic Housekeeping.

The crew can then call the Customer Support team at the office to act as an intermediary between them and the customer. The customer will be explained of the job scope that the crew is able to provide, and from then on agree to what kind of service the crew can render. It is this service that the operations team provide to make the lives of the crew easier that there are some crew who have been with us since we first started Maideasy until today. Some have found Maideasy to be their main source of income and have grown themselves to be more professional at their work.

For Maideasy, the crew’s welfare is an important element in providing the support to make our crew’s life better. Our first collaboration with SOLS247 was just one step in providing the additional care to our crew from Maideasy. In the following months, Maideasy will see more collaboration with other organisations to further widen the support for the cleaning crew as to take care of their welfare while taking jobs from Maideasy. At Maideasy, it’s not only that e take care of our customers’ satisfaction, but also taking care of the crew is important to us too.