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Custodial Supervisor Simone Alvarez’s custodial team begins their day at 5 a.m. and continues cleaning buildings around campus until 1:30 p.m. The team is responsible for cleaning Lathrop and Noyes Houses, Mudd Chemistry, New England, Sanders Classroom and Sanders Physics Buildings, Olmsted Hall, the Skinner Hall of Music and the Vogelstein Center for Drama and Film. The team splits into smaller groups that will each travel among four buildings to accomplish daily cleaning tasks.
“I don’t need to tell [the team members] what to do because they already know,” Alvarez said. He travels from site to site through the day, listens to his staff and acts as a liaison between them and the Department of Buildings and Grounds. His is one of four teams, which break down similarly to clean small clusters of buildings. One of the sub-groups of
Alvarez’s team first arrives at the Vogelstein Center for Drama and Film, where they spend an hour and a half before moving on together to Sanders Classroom. Their third building, Skinner Hall of Music, is cleaned for one hour. The group spends the final three and a half hours of their day in Noyes House.
The team system of cleaning is markedly different from the custodial processes of previous years. Prior to this semester, one or two custodial staff members were assigned to a single building every day for zone cleaning.
“I feel like this change is working better,” said Alvarez. He noted that under the previous system, the staff could reach every room thoroughly, but during most of the day the spaces were occupied, making it difficult to maintain a steady pace of cleaning. With the team system, most academic and administrative buildings are finished before 9 a.m., when many classes begin. After cleaning these buildings, groups move onto their assigned dorms. “The dorms are getting more attention,” he said, explaining that more people work on each dorm and spend more time in them.
By nine o’clock on Sept. 28, the group had finished with Skinner Hall and moved on to Rocky—not to clean it, but to discuss operational issues with Custodial Manager Cynthia VanTassell at a regular focus group meeting. The team cleaning system has been in the process of being reviewed since its inception on Aug. 17. These monthly focus group meetings are an opportunity for the cleaners and janitors to share what is and is not working for them.
“I know within those jobs cards there is going to be some tweaking,” said VanTassell about the cards that indicate what tasks each employee is responsible for. She noted that some buildings are currently overstaffed while others may still be understaffed. “There may be some changes: some slight, some may be a little more dramatic.”
VanTassell has committed to meeting each team once every month to get feedback on the new system. This meeting is the team’s second with her. According to VanTassell, after the first series of these focus groups, break times were changed so that the staff could eat lunch at a later time.
VanTassell told the group. “I’ve gotten a lot of positive feedback; some [people] were quite negative when they first heard about it. I think each week we’ve improved.”
Though most recent changes at the College either are or are assumed to be a direct result of the difficult financial climate, the shift in the staffing plan for custodial services has been discussed for some time.
“We started talking about it or envisioning it among the custodial supervisor and manager groups probably a year and a half ago,” said Director of Facility Operations and Grounds Kiki Williams. According to Williams, the Vassar College custodial staff had been cleaning fewer square feet per person than the staff of peer colleges of similar size and facilities. The goal of the switch from zone to team cleaning was to work more efficiently and to achieve a higher square footage per Full Time Equivalent unit (FTE), a measure of employment.
The financial crisis, however, motivated the College to act more quickly to change the system. “I think the financial crisis and the recognition that vacancies were occurring naturally in custodial services urged us to move forward to permanently capture those vacancies through a new staffing plan,” said Vice President of Finance and Administration Elizabeth Eismeier.
Executive Director of Buildings and Grounds Thomas Allen said that there were often absences or vacancies due to retirement or disability. The change to team cleaning “institutionalizes” those vacancies. In the previous system, the College budgeted for 83 FTEs, though not all of these were filled. Under the new plan, the College has budgeted for 73 FTEs. No staff members were laid off in this reduction. In this way, restructuring the process freed up the budget of the College and still avoided cutting staff members.
“I think we’re very close to where we need to be,” said Eismeier. “But we had no layoffs to reach the new target—that was the key.” Though no staff members were laid off, the staffing change included modifications of the shift schedule and structure of shifts that have affected the lives of custodial workers. In the zone cleaning system, there were three shifts, beginning at 7 a.m., 4:30 p.m. and midnight. The new team cleaning system concentrates the largest portion of the staff in a new shift that begins at 5 a.m. and goes until 1:30 in the afternoon. The 4:30 p.m. shift remains, with fewer staff on it, and the latest shift was eliminated.
The administration informed the staff of the changes on June 15, two months before the new system was due to begin. The College’s contract with the Service Employees’ International Union requires that the College give notice a month in advance prior to implementing changes in staff planning.
“The challenges of supervising, coordinating, and really motivating these three shifts that were at different times of the day were great,” said Eismeier. “Our hope is that having most of the workforce working together as teams will lead to better supervision, better coordination among the different staff members and an ability to be flexible within this primary time block.”
This schedule was chosen, in part, so that the staff would be able to reach buildings before the buildings became full of people. The dorms have been left to the end of the shift so that the process might disturb students the least. However, this change, more than any other, has affected the lifestyles of the custodial staff members. Some were concerned about finding family care and access to public transportation, as local buses do not begin running until 6 a.m.
“We were working with individuals to find out what time of day would be best for them,” Allen said. Adjustments included switching to the afternoon shift or coming into work at 6:30 a.m. rather than at 5 a.m., at which point bus transportation is reliable.
According to Eismeier, “I think we’re going to continue to adapt the schedule and assignments and do the best we can to make the team concept work at Vassar.” Though accommodations were made for 10 employees, the early start time has taken a toll on some cleaners and janitors.
As Janitor Joseph Sparrow and Cleaners Jenea Settles and Melvena Walker moved swiftly from room to room in New England Building, they agreed that this has been a difficult adjustment. “I can’t even get used to it. It affects my body,” said Settles. “I don’t know what I’m going to do come winter time.”
“I don’t like it because it’s draining me,” said Walker. “I’m scared to get up out of my house,” she said of leaving home while it is still dark in the mornings.
“I don’t like the five o’clock stuff,” said Sparrow. “We could still get it done at seven.”
The early start, however, has not been so difficult for everyone. “I like it,” said Janitor Juan Lajara. “I’m a morning person.”
The change to the shift schedule also includes a new schedule for the cleaning process. Each small group of four to five staff members spends between an hour and an hour and a half in each of their academic buildings and then spends about three and a half hours in their assigned dorm. This process is meant to increase efficiency, though some have raised concerns that it has become too rushed. “I don’t think it works on a functional level, and my understanding is that it is difficult for the custodians,” said Curtis Peterson ’10, a current Lathrop House resident. “It’s a difficult schedule to ask someone to work.”
According to Peterson, an example of the practical issues was a bathroom that went without soap for a week. He believed that students should be concerned for the staff that cleans up after them. “I think it’s something the student body needs to be concerned with,” Peterson said. “There are no consequences we will face for being outspoken on this.”
“If you know anything about Blodgett Hall, you will know there is not any possible way one team could do Blodgett and two or three other buildings in a morning,” said Administrative Assistant Wendy Post of her office in the Religion Department. “It’s ridiculous.”
“It’s very early; we’re only about one month into it. And we aren’t there yet—we need to continue to improve,” Eismeier noted. “We try to do one or two floors a day, but sometimes we run out of time,” said Janitor Louis Olivetto of the task of mopping hallways as he went through his duties in Skinner Hall of Music. “We try to stay on top of things, but sometimes you want to do more.”
As his team moved through Skinner, Olivetto agreed that some buildings needed more time than they have currently been allotted, and some could do with less. Specifically, he suggested that his group spend an extra half-hour on Skinner every day and cut a half hour from their cleaning in Noyes House, where he believed that they had more than enough time and people to do the work. The process of moving from building to building has been regularly revised. “This was the most controversial change. I think when you had an isolated person just taking care of one building for eight hours, there was a lot more things that they did,” said Williams. “They became a fixture in that building, and they got to know the people, so they would do those extra tasks.”
Walker, Settles and Sparrow, all members of Alvarez’s team, felt that their work had become rushed. Settles explained that sometimes absences made it more difficult to finish a building thoroughly. In fact, Sparrow normally works with a different group, but was filling in for an absent teammate of Settles and Walker. “Sometimes it might be only two people covering these buildings,” she said.
Many complaints about the rush through buildings focus on garbage. Post was concerned that her office’s garbage was not being picked up at appropriate intervals.
“We’ve always picked up from classrooms, public spaces and restrooms every single day, and only from offices once a week,” said Williams. “But there were some people giving some extra work because they were that key person in that building and maybe had a lot more time on their hands.” The policy of picking up office waste once per week assumes that very little food waste is accumulating. However, offices, such as the Office of the Religion Department, are sometimes a gathering place for students replete with snacks. Both Allen and Williams suggested that food waste in offices should be moved to the hallway, where it would be removed on a daily basis.
Once inside a building, staff members look at their job card for that particular building. Each job card indicates both what the staff member is responsible for on a daily basis as well as what tasks he or she is responsible for on that day only.
“What happens when you’re doing a particular task over the course of the day, you actually develop the [most expedient] way of doing it,” said Eismeier.
“The team cleaning concept is almost like an assembly line,” said Williams “An example would be they go in and unlock the door, they pull the trash, they clean the whiteboards and blackboards, they spot clean all of the furniture tops.”
“But, we certainly wouldn’t want one person having to do the worst task on the team over and over and over. Eventually we will get to the point where we can rotate tasks,” said Eismeier. Although moving from place to place on campus has increased the efficiency of the cleaning staff, the many staff see fewer members of the campus community. “Some of them get so attached to you because to them, I’m their parents,” Walker said that she preferred working with students, “even though they’re messy.”
“If you’re in one building you get comfortable [there],” said Sparrow of the familiarity between the staff and a building’s occupants. Allen noted that the same group of people will still be cleaning a building every day, though the new system is partially designed so that the cleaning staff works at times when the buildings are emptier.
“It’s a brand new initiative,” said Williams. She encouraged feedback from “all three pieces of the triangle,” including the supervisory group overseeing the cleaning process, the frontline staff and the customers in the buildings.
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