Fresh & Clean

Fresh & Clean

Fresh & Clean are a division of ALSCO. They manage hygiene and washroom rental programs throughout Australia, and deliver a wide range of functional, hygienic and stylish products and services with an eco-friendly focus. As they like to say, you can leave your washroom hygiene in their hands! Here’s how the Mitti (by SafetyCulture) platform helps them clean up smart.

So fresh, so clean, so smart

Fresh & Clean is traditionally a very labor-intensive business. 11,500 Australian businesses, 24,700 sites, servicing 130,000 assets every month. That’s a lot of travelling between clients and plenty of paperwork! In the past, Fresh & Clean were heavily reliant on analogue processes. Staff would fill in forms, hand them to a supervisor who then put them in a drawer never to be seen again. This is where we come in.

Jason Baulch is an experienced operations management professional, currently working as the National Project Manager at Fresh & Clean. Put simply, his job is to modernize the business. He looks for opportunities to streamline processes and encourages the business to invest in new technology where possible.

Jason needed a solution to capture a lot of their manual processes. The business needed more transparency. Jason found and implemented Mitti (by SafetyCulture) to ensure they had a compliant/non-compliant checklist. Not only could Jason tailor his own templates and checks to be adaptive to what the businesses needed, he could also dig into the analytics to get smart about what was working and what wasn’t.

Empowering frontline workers

Fresh & Clean now empower their workers with the right technology. With Mitti (by SafetyCulture), everyone across their business has visibility from the start to the end of a process. Not just senior management, but also their frontline workers – their Service Technicians who are out on the road all day. Previously, staff may not have trusted handing in a piece of paper, because they never knew where it was going to go, and more importantly if it would ever get fixed or resolved. Now with Mitti (by SafetyCulture), they fill out an inspection, assign an action, or report an issue, and can follow the digital “paper trail” of its progress, and when it’s completed.

Connecting from afar

Fresh & Clean Service Technicians are out on the road from 6am servicing up to 30 customers per day and 100-150 units, which involves a lot of traveling between clients. This leaves only a handful of employees left in the office each day. Managers and Supervisors may only see Service Technicians once or twice a week at most.

Before Mitti (by SafetyCulture), to communicate with their teams, they had a memo system. Messages were put up on a noticeboard or into a folder, and they were instructed to read these when they came back to the office. They also used emails and text messages, but they found it resulted in varying response rates.

After trialing Heads Up, Mitti (by SafetyCulture)’s one-stop messaging broadcast center, Fresh & Clean unlocked a whole new world of opportunities for communication.

The Fresh & Clean Team have implemented Lean methodology in their routines, including a daily scrum meeting they call “L1”, where they share important messages about the day ahead.  They were holding L1 meetings each morning but only reaching 3 out of 40 employees. They now send their L1 communications via a recorded video message on Heads Up, communicating directly with all of their staff. They cover off all the main points around safety requirements and what is happening in the broader business. The comments section allows two-way feedback and engagement from staff, giving everyone an easy way to share their point of view, opinions, and ideas back to the management team.

Memos haven’t gone away, but supervisors now record and share a Heads Up video adding emphasis to the memo, which they have found is a really good way of communicating to get the message to the team. If a supervisor is off sick, it’s an easy way for them to notify everyone, and know they have received the message.

Fresh & Clean have loved the creative license Heads Up has given the team. No more boring text-only messages. One of their supervisors goes the extra mile, including music, animations, a voiceover, and turns his Heads Up messages into a full-blown production. Senior leaders often do guest appearances, and although they share best practices, every branch is encouraged to keep their own personality to their Heads Up messages.

Winning ALSCO’s National Safety Improvement Award

In 2021, Fresh & Clean Sydney won the award for best safety improvement thanks to their new traffic management plan and the Heads Up video that went along with it.

In 2020, ALSCO’s new CEO made safety a top priority. He wanted all teams to improve their safety standards, so receiving this award felt extra special for the Fresh & Clean Sydney Team.

Jason feels incredibly lucky that he has a boss that trusts the decisions he makes around technology – where it can take them and what it can do. Fresh & Clean is not a workplace where everyone is just happy doing what they’ve always done, they’re always looking to innovate and Mitti (by SafetyCulture) has been a huge help with the improvement movements they’re making.