Increased Participation Among Cleaners as a Strategy to Improve Quality and Occupational Health

Abstract

Like many other industries, today the cleaning industry is affected more than ever by competition and pressure toward low prices, which leads to a nonadvantageous situation for cleaners. These days many Swedish municipalities choose to outsource cleaning service in order to save money, although the situation for the cleaners appears to be worsening. The aim of this paper is to evaluate an alternative organizational structure within a Swedish public cleaning division to investigate how good work environment for cleaners can be combined with economical savings for a municipality. Like many other cleaning organizations, both national and international, the present cleaning division has been struggling for a long time with high levels of sick leave and early retirements. After years of unsuccessful attempts to improve the situation by reducing the physical load, cleaning managers made a decision to broaden their strategy by changing the structure of their organization. In this study, both qualitative and quantitative methods have been applied to identify and understand the effects of the organizational change, both on an individual level and on an organizational level. The results show that the organizational change, which leads to increased participation and autonomy for the cleaners, in combination with a high degree of social support, had a positive effect on job satisfaction, work motivation, and pride among the cleaners. Sick leave within the division has decreased, and both the quality and efficiency of the cleaning service have increased. It can be concluded that there are other alternative organizational structures that could be applied within the public sector and prove advantageous, both for the individual cleaners and for the municipality. Further research of similar organizational structures within the private cleaning sector is recommended.

Identifying contemporary early retirement factors and strategies to encourage and enable longer working lives: A scoping review

“…Gregory and Menser () advised instead that managers should openly demonstrate that they value their employees. Other research teams emphasised preventing co‐worker conflict and bullying (Laine et al, ), enhancing collegial support and perceived workplace control (Liebermann et al, ; Öhrling, ) and fostering trusting relationships between supervisors and workers (Muurinen et al, ).…”

“…For instance, work can reduce social isolation; a key societal consideration since social isolation is a common problem in old age and many think old‐age social isolation is a result of retirement as there is a loss of workplace social relationships and the loss of a socially accepted and mandated purpose in life (Boudiny, ; Perez‐Cuevas et al, ). Moreover, if work begins to be broadly viewed as positive for one's health and if work is actually found through research to be positive for one's health, over the current common viewpoint that work is detrimental to health and well‐being (Gharibi et al, ; Gregory & Menser, ; Laine et al, ; Liebermann et al, ; Muurinen et al, ; Öhrling, ), then healthcare organisations and organisations of all other kinds may be more successful at retaining middle‐aged and older workers.…”

Forced Flexibility and Exploitation: Experiences of Migrant Workers in the Cleaning Industry

“…Many of the effects of globalization seem to be less positive for those actually doing the work, the cleaners (Ryan and Herod 2006;Seifert and Messing 2006). Cleaning is inherently a form of low-skilled and low-paid employment (Öhrling 2014;Tarkkonen 2010). As a result a high share of those who work as cleaners today are migrants, whose possibilities of accessing other jobs are limited due to their lack of language skills and contacts, their immigration status, and, in some cases, their lack of education (Abbasian and Hellgren 2012; Könönen 2012).…”