Building a cleaning rota, and covering the 6am sick call

What a rota has to satisfy at the same time #

• The access window

  The site can only be cleaned between certain hours, and somebody has to be able to get in: keys, a fob, an alarm code, a signing in book at reception.

• The specification

  Daily, three times a week, weekly, plus periodic work that has to land somewhere.

• Contracted hours

  Part time people with agreed hours who will notice immediately if they get fewer.

• Geography

  Two or three sites in one shift only works if they are close enough, and the travel between them is paid time.

• Rest rules

  A 20 minute break when a working day runs past 6 hours, 11 hours between working days, and 24 uninterrupted hours off each week or 48 each fortnight.

• Site specific clearance and training

  Schools, care settings and secure sites do not accept whoever is free.

• Who the client will actually accept

  Contract managers have preferences and they are real, whether or not they are written down.

• Lone working

  HSE lists cleaners among lone workers and says employers must manage the risks before people work alone. Who is alone, where, and at what hour is a rota decision.

Eight conditions across every site and every person is why the rota is built by the one person who holds all of it in their head, and why that person cannot take a holiday.

Why the 6am call costs more than the shift #

A sick call is not a gap, it is a cascade. The obvious cost is the replacement hour. The real costs are underneath it.

• Travel time

  You pay travel time for somebody coming from further away, and that travel counts towards minimum wage hours because it is movement between assignments rather than a commute.

• Overtime, or a broken rest pattern

  You may push a person into overtime or into a pattern that breaks the 11 hour rest rule.

• A hole somewhere else

  You may take somebody off another site, which moves the problem rather than solving it.

• The site, or a stranger on it

  If nothing can be found, you either leave the site or send somebody who has never been there, which is the most common starting point for the call about a missed clean.

Because the National Living Wage is £12.71 an hour for workers aged 21 and over from 1 April 2026 and most contract cost is hours, the margin on a site does not have much room in it for repeated cover premiums.

The information problem underneath #

Solving cover in ten minutes requires knowing, immediately:

On most rounds that information lives in four places, which are a spreadsheet, a WhatsApp group, a folder of induction records and the supervisor's memory.

When the contract changes hands #

TUPE is likely to apply when a cleaning contract moves to a new contractor or comes back in house. GOV.UK gives the cleaning example directly.

For the rota that means inheriting people with existing terms, existing hours and existing continuity, at a site you have just priced. Whatever your rota holds has to be able to absorb a group of people who did not come through your onboarding, which is the practical reason onboarding records matter more than they look.

Which parts run on rules #

Counting it #

Count two numbers for a month: how many cover events you had, and how long each one took from the call to the problem being solved. Most operators are surprised by the second. The free tools turn that into hours, and the free audit looks at the whole office week rather than one job.