I am Joseph Edwards, the founder of Gleem.��As Gleem continues to grow, my passion around leadership continues to develop. In this blog post, I am going to talk about Gleem⫪s employees.From day one, Gleem set out to be different. At the outset this meant providing a service that was as flexible as possible for home owners. We used self-employed cleaners, and were passionate about being high-tech and on-demand.This approach worked at the outset, however we started to notice a key limiting factor in the business: churn. We were using a workforce that presented multiple problems when it came to ensuring they were able to show up, on time and do a good job...it hurt, and Gleem struggled to hold onto customers, meaning we struggled to grow.As the business continued, we began making tweaks and changes to the business model. We began to hire PAYE employed cleaners to service our customers⫪ homes. We found that our employees started to show up on time more often, and we could organise a cleaners day around multiple sites. Things felt like they were moving in the right direction. But, we weren⫪t spending enough time with our cleaners: training them and ensuring they were committed to their roles. Although we were showing up on time, we noticed that cleaners would leave abruptly, ignoring their notice periods, and putting Gleem is a mad scramble to reassign cleans (without enough cleaners to do so). This led to additional problems: our current cleaners were overworked, increasing the risk that they⫪d up-and leave and we also now had the risk of a whole raft of customers cancelling their services if we couldn⫪t fulfil.I took some time to reflect: I began Gleem selfishly because I wanted to enjoy my job. The more we grew and experienced office life, the more I knew it was important for my office team to enjoy theirs too. Gleem needs to be representative of me, and therefore Gleem needs to enable people to enjoy their jobs.This has become the office teams passion, is becoming all of our cleaners passion and is Gleem⫪s reason for existing: to empower as many people as possible to enjoy their jobs.Gleem is by no means perfect. We are young, inexperienced and often focus too much upon being a business, neglecting the actual cleaning we perform. The one thing that we are, is passionate.In everything that we do, we think about our employees and if it will empower them: because if it will, it will foster a hard-working community of people all joined together on a mission to help each other and to help people like us. Everyone wants to enjoy their job, and it is our collective responsibility to ensure that this happens.I⫪ve spoken with cleaners, customers, our office team, strangers and myself. This is a work in progress, but for now, it embodies Gleem⫪s aims. This is Gleem⫪s vision:Gleem add sparkle. Our caring community makes people feel valued. We maintain the upmost respect for all of our staff for the important role they play in the lives of others and provide them with the opportunity to develop themselves to the level they aspire to reach. This environment empowers over 100,000 staff who deliver an unrivalled quality of service and creates a reputation synonymous with the standard of service we provide and the enjoyment our staff get from doing their best.
