Now we’re talking
What we have in the custodial industry is “a failure to communicate.” This is because unlike many other professions, housekeepers and custodians don’t have a professional language. It is a veritable Tower of Babel in housekeeping operations. Janitors in the United States currently speak Spanish (several dialects including Mexican, Cuban, Venezuelan, Puerto Rican, etc.), Polish, Russian, Korean, Vietnamese, Chinese and various dialects of English.
Instead of spending a fortune hiring translators and cutting down trees to print training materials in twenty different languages, we decided to copy what the airline industry did. In (OS1), the cleaning workers learn to speak and write the same language, worldwide. And so we don’t hurt anybody’s feelings, we teach everyone on the team a new language together. The new language is known as “(OS1)ian”.
(OS1) is a standardized cleaning management system. Everybody works with the same tools, materials, books and tasks. (OS1) organizations teach cleaning workers a specific, professional language. We originally tested (OS1)ian on the third shift at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Cleaning workers on that crew spoke Chinese, Russian, Romanian and English. After training, we were all speaking the same language. Later on, we taught (OS1)ian to a group of cleaning workers with disabilities. That provided an opportunity to teach (OS1)ian to workers with dyslexia, functional illiteracy and other cognitive and perception disorders. (OS1)ian worked great and it has been added to the (OS1) Boot Camp and (OS1) Basic Training curriculum.
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