Most businesses hire a cleaner the wrong way round. They decide they need one, ask around, and take on the first person a friend recommends – only to discover later that the job they had in mind and the work she expected to do were never quite the same thing. The better sequence is the opposite. Before a shop, office, salon or guest house looks for anyone at all, it should be able to describe, on a single page, exactly what needs cleaning, when, how often, and who supplies the materials. Recruitment starts with the site, not the search.

This matters more than it used to, because the work around it is professionalising. DailyNews reported that facilities management is growing in Botswana as organisations focus on operational efficiency, sustainability and the upkeep of their buildings. Speaking at the World Facilities Management Day event in Gaborone on 15 May 2025, Ms Kesegofetse Mganga, operations manager at Dikago Facilities Solutions, said the sector was “steadily growing as more organisations prioritise green practices” and that good facilities work “did not only create jobs, but also extended the life of buildings”. A small firm will never run a full facilities department, but the same thinking scales down to a one-page brief. Here are the seven questions that build one.

1. What kind of premises is it?

A salon with basins and chemical residue, a guest house with linen and daily turnover, an open-plan office and a retail floor are four different cleaning problems, not one. Write down the floor area, the surfaces you have – tile, carpet, glass, stainless steel – the number of toilets, and the traffic the space takes in a day. The Gaborone commercial cleaner The Specialists says plainly that it will tailor its services to each site rather than sell a single package, which is only possible once the site has been described. Your description is the thing everyone else quotes against.

2. What exactly needs doing, and to what standard?

Separate the daily from the periodic. Daily might be floors, bins, wiped surfaces and ablutions; weekly might be windows and skirting; monthly might be a carpet or upholstery clean. Name the standard, too, because “clean” means different things to a doctor’s rooms and a warehouse. A guest house that needs a room turned in twenty minutes between check-out and check-in is buying speed and consistency, not a general tidy. Writing the duties down turns an assumption into an instruction, and it is the part most first-time employers skip.

3. When, and how often?

Decide whether the work happens before opening, after closing, or during trading hours, and how many days a week you actually need. A busy salon may want a daily two-hour clean and one deep clean a week; a quiet office may need three mornings. The honest answer here also sets the budget, because you are buying hours, not a person, and hours are what you will pay for.

4. Live-out or live-in?

For almost every business the answer is live-out: set days at an agreed day rate. It is worth knowing that these are genuinely different arrangements rather than the same job with a bed attached. An introduction platform such as Kleana, which operates in Botswana alongside South Africa, Zimbabwe and Zambia, keeps them separate for exactly this reason – live-out is priced by the day, live-in is a monthly engagement with written terms. Choose before you search, because the two attract different candidates and different costs.

5. Who provides the materials and equipment?

Cleaning is not one purchase but four: chemicals, consumables such as bin liners and hand towels, equipment such as mops and a vacuum, and protective wear. Decide before you hire whether you will stock these or expect the cleaner to arrive with them, because it changes the rate and it changes who is responsible when a surface is damaged by the wrong product. For a commercial site, the business almost always supplies and controls the materials.

6. How does she get in – and out?

Access is a security question, not a footnote. Work out who holds a key, who disarms the alarm, who opens and locks up, and what happens on a public holiday. If the clean happens out of hours, the arrangement should say so in writing and name the person accountable for the premises during that window. Vagueness here is where trust quietly erodes.

7. What are the terms, in writing?

Since the Employment and Labour Relations Act took effect, a Botswana business that engages a cleaner is expected to have the days, hours, duties, pay and notice written down and agreed. A platform that asks both sides to sign a short charter – work is work, terms are settled up front, either side can end or report the arrangement – is doing in plain words what the law now assumes. Listings there show skills, area, rate and verification tier but no name, photograph or number until an introduction is made, which keeps the choice on the record rather than the recommendation.

Scope first, then search

Answer these seven questions and you have a business-ready brief: one page that tells any candidate, agency or platform precisely what the job is. The pay-off is a better fit and far fewer disputes, because the person who starts on Monday already knows the premises, the standard, the hours and the terms. The move that matters is small and comes before the search, not after it. Write the brief first. A firm that can describe the job in a paragraph will hire well; one that cannot will keep hiring, and re-hiring, on hope.

Source: Kleana Africa – kleana.africa