Training is our best investment

The opening comment from ISS’s training and development manager Michelle Benton set the tone for the whole interview, when she said: "Training is our best investment because people are our only asset.

They make our business the success that it is today. As the largest cleaning and FM company in the world, we must set the pace for staff training. The Kimberly-Clark Professional & CSSA Golden Service Awards programme is designed to recognise the best in cleaning skills. In the last programme the ISS Group won three Awards – the Best Cleaned Premises by a Contract Cleaning Company in the Healthcare and the Leisure sectors, plus the BICSc Training Award.

The sector Award wins illustrate that ISS’s training is effective; without it the company would not be able to reach such high standards of cleaning.

£1 million and rising

The training budget at ISS runs at over £1 million and rising fast. This is proving to be a good investment. There are two training managers Mike Kilgour in the north and Benton in the south. They are responsible for continuous training of 43,000 UK employees. Kilgour and Benton have their own regional training teams who have completed the relevant training courses to enable them to share the information with others.

Where specialist knowledge or skills are needed the company uses external trainers if unable to self deliver. ISS gets involved in every possible programme for ‘people recognition’ and training. These include Investors In People, the Institute of Leadership and Management, the Government programme for NVQs ‘Train to Gain’ and a special women’s training programme ‘WAW Project’.

Benton said: "We are truly passionate about training. We hear so many other firms talk a lot about training but do little about it.

Training is a reality for everyone in our organisation and we are passionate about it. Our staff are well trained so they make good candidates for internal promotion. That is good for the individual as he/she sees a career path. We benefit because the longer we keep our staff means that we can provide more advanced training as we do not have to use the budget for new recruits.

Training toolbox

The ISS toolbox contains a wide range of tools. These include regular skills training and progress monitoring, refresher courses, specialist task training, new legislation courses and more recently on-line training. Training is used to teach, upgrade and monitor skills and progress. The organisation provides books and the ISS range of CDs and DVDs to support classroom and practical training.

Each month there is a newsletter and ISS health and safety posters - both can be downloaded and printed from the company’s intranet site by site trainers and managers. Training is carried out in company time so not only do employees get paid to become more knowledgeable, they improve their skills and have opportunities for promotion.

Little gems

To further encourage staff, ISS operates a GEMs programme - ‘Going the Extra Mile’ - to reward those that really do add that little bit extra to their daily tasks. There are many qualified BICSc assessors throughout ISS UK client sites and BICSc standards are the company’s standards with no compromise. Benton said: "A lot of firms have one BICSc assessor and think that’s OK. We have many across the country and are increasing them as needed. We won’t compromise or economise on training and that is a directive from the top.”

Every new member of staff has a full day’s induction course with site and task specific training. ISS regional offices have training rooms and at the Woking head office there are 25 training and meeting rooms. Global partner manufacturers such as JohnsonDiversey provide specialist equipment and product training. Operations maintain a training record for every employee, so when taking a promotion or changing job his/her skills basis can be checked first and new training provided. Company systems advise when refresher courses on issues like Health and Safety and Food Hygiene are needed.

A number of sites now use the Skills Passport system. So at ISS you can’t start work without training, you can’t change jobs in the organisation or carry out new tasks without having your training checked and each time that a new piece of legislation is introduced you get more training.

It’s a case of train, train and train again - what an excellent example for our profession.

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Winners Talk

"We have used GBM, the specialist shopping centre contractors, at Braehead since it opened in 1997.
When we reviewed our contracts we awarded four extra centres to GSA Award-winning GBM.
It now handles all the cleaning, security and customer services at five major sites."

David McGreggor of the Braehead Shopping Centre.