The three questions #
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Is the trigger describable in one sentence?
“A cleaner does not sign in by 07:15” is a trigger. “Things feel off at the Broadway site” is not.
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Is the output the same shape every time?
An invoice, a shortlist, a reminder, a report with the same sections. If the shape changes with the circumstances, a person is deciding something.
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Would two competent people produce the same answer today?
This is the one that catches the impostors. If your two best supervisors would answer differently, the job contains judgement whether or not anybody has admitted it.
Three yeses and the job runs on rules. One no and a person belongs somewhere in it, though usually not in all of it.
The sort, job by job #
Runs on rules
- Reissuing a stable rota week to week. Nothing is being decided
- Producing the shortlist of who could cover a shift. Assembling the facts is lookup. Choosing between two names is not
- Checking a proposed pattern against rest and hours rules. The rules are published and fixed
- Chasing a site sheet that has not come back. The trigger is its absence, which is checkable
- Collecting audit scores and attendance into a monthly report. Assembly, from several sources that disagree on site names
- Raising invoices from an agreed schedule. The schedule is the rule
- Pricing the labour hours in a quote. Hours times rate plus on costs is arithmetic
- Issuing the onboarding pack and chasing what is missing. A fixed list with a fixed deadline
- Generating a PPM schedule from fixed intervals. The intervals are set by the equipment and the law
Needs a person
- Designing a rota for a new contract. It is about people, travel and what a site will accept
- Deciding a site sheet has been filled in retrospectively. Judgement about a person
- Deciding what the report should say about a bad month. Persuasion, and it belongs to whoever owns the relationship
- Deciding what to credit after a complaint. Commercial judgement about a relationship
- Deciding how many hours the building actually needs. That is the survey, and it is the whole skill
- Deciding whether somebody is right for a school site. Judgement, and some of it is legally yours
- Deciding what to do about a failed inspection. Risk judgement, often urgent
- Answering the phone at 06:40 about a missed clean. Recording it is rules. Handling the person is not
Where the test misleads #
Three traps are worth naming, because each of them produces a wrong answer in a predictable direction.
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Scattered inputs make rule based jobs look like judgement
Producing the list of who could cover a 6am shift is pure lookup, and it feels like expertise only because the facts live in four places. The job is not hard. The information is badly stored. That is the single most common pattern in this sector and it is covered in rotas and shift cover.
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Tedium makes judgement look like rules
Complaint calls are repetitive, which tempts people to treat them as a process. They are not. What is rule shaped is logging the call and routing it. The conversation itself is the business.
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Legal duties are never rule shaped in the way that matters
Controlling exposure to cleaning chemicals under COSHH, assessing risk and managing lone working are employer duties. HSE names cleaners directly in its lone working guidance.
Why this sector is so exposed to the difference #
Almost nothing in cleaning is observed directly. The work happens before buildings open and after they close, spread across sites, largely by part time staff. So the office does not manage the work, it manages the record of the work, and the record is produced at the point furthest from the office.
The scale is real.
1.51m
People in the cleaning, hygiene and waste industry, about 5 per cent of the UK workforce
British Cleaning Council research, 18 February 2026
78,915
Businesses in that industry in 2025
British Cleaning Council research, 18 February 2026
222,000
Business administration and support services businesses registered for VAT or PAYE in March 2025, 8.1 per cent of all 2.73 million UK businesses
ONS, UK business: activity, size and location, 2025
This is a large sector of small operators, and in most of them one person holds the whole picture.
That is arithmetic, done from a record, and it is exactly the kind of work the three questions are designed to find.
What to do with the sort #
Run your own week through the three questions before spending anything. The which tasks run on rules tool does the sort interactively, and invoicing per contract is the usual place to start, because it is the job in this sector that passes all three questions most cleanly and still takes days.