The words on the contract, explained.

Demobilisation is the orderly exit from a contract at the end of its term or on termination, covering the return of equipment and keys, the transfer or redeployment of staff, and the handover of records.

A KPI is a specific metric a client uses to judge contract performance, such as audit score, complaint volume, staff turnover on site, or hours delivered against hours contracted.

Mobilisation is the period between winning a contract and the first day of delivery, during which sites, service plans, shift patterns, equipment, staff transfers and compliance documents are all put in place.

Most contracts that lose money lose it here rather than in delivery. A shift pattern set up wrong at mobilisation is paid for every week for the length of the contract.

Periodics are the non-daily tasks in a cleaning contract, such as carpet extraction, hard floor treatment, high-level dusting and window cleaning, delivered on a cycle measured in weeks or months rather than shifts.

They are priced into the contract value but delivered irregularly, which is why they are the first thing to slip and the last thing anyone notices has slipped.

A service plan is the record of what a contract obliges you to deliver at a site: which areas, which tasks, at what frequency, for how many hours.

It is the reference every other number is measured against. Without one held as data, "delivered as contracted" is an opinion, because nothing states what was contracted in the first place.

Client proof

An SLA, or service level agreement, is the part of a contract that sets measurable standards for the service, typically a response time, a resolution time and a minimum audit score.

An SLA is only worth what the measurement behind it is worth. Response time recorded from the moment somebody remembers to log a call is not the same measurement as response time from the moment the task was raised.

Cost per hour worked is the fully loaded hourly cost of delivering a contract, including wage, employer national insurance, pension, holiday accrual, absence cover, equipment, consumables and management time.

The gap between the wage rate and this number is where most bids go wrong. A bid built on the wage alone is a bid built on roughly two thirds of the real cost.

Costing and bids

An ITT, or invitation to tender, is the document a buyer issues setting out the requirement, the specification and the pricing schedule, and inviting suppliers to submit a priced bid against it.

A PQQ, or pre-qualification questionnaire, is the first stage of a tender, used by a buyer to filter suppliers on financial standing, insurance, accreditations, policies and reference contracts before inviting a priced bid.

It is answered on evidence you either hold or do not. Sustainability and data questions now appear in PQQs routinely, and are the questions most contractors answer with intent rather than with a record.

Scope creep is the gradual expansion of what a contractor delivers beyond what the contract prices, usually through small informal requests that are never varied or charged.

It is rarely one decision. It is fifty small ones, each individually too minor to argue about, which is exactly why it needs to be visible as a total rather than as incidents.

Stop margin leakage

Under-delivery is the gap between the hours a contract was priced on and the hours actually worked, whether through unfilled shifts, short shifts or uncovered absence.

It looks like margin in the short term because the wage was not paid. It is the leading cause of a contract being lost at renewal, because the client eventually notices the standard, and it is what an audit score scoped to delivered hours exposes.

Stop margin leakage

A variation is a formally agreed change to the scope, frequency or value of a contract, recorded and priced so that additional work is billable rather than absorbed.

A checkpoint scan is a timestamped record made by an operative at a fixed point on site, typically by scanning an NFC tag or QR code, evidencing that a specific location was attended at a specific time.

Most common on security patrols and periodic cleaning routes, where the client is buying coverage of an area rather than a single task.

A deskless workforce is a workforce that does its job away from a desk or computer, reached through a mobile device or not at all.

In FM it usually also means low device storage, patchy signal, shared handsets and high turnover, which is why an app designed for office staff on head office wifi tends not to survive contact with a basement plant room.

Mobile app

Lone working is work carried out without close or direct supervision by anyone else, common in early morning cleaning and overnight security, and requiring its own risk assessment and check-in arrangements.

A quality audit is a scored inspection of delivered service against a defined standard, carried out on site by a supervisor, manager or the client, and recorded with evidence.

A score on its own is an assertion. A score with three months of trend behind it, scoped to the hours actually delivered in that area, is a diagnosis.

Quality and audits

A reactive task is unplanned work raised in response to an event, such as a spillage, a complaint or a sensor threshold being crossed, as distinct from the planned work on the service plan.

Rostering is the assignment of named operatives to shifts at sites across a period, taking account of contracted hours, availability, competency requirements and working time limits.

The test of a roster is not whether it is published but whether it is fillable. A roster with holes in it on Friday is next week’s under-delivery.

Scheduling and roster

A shift pattern is the repeating structure of shifts at a site, defining days, start and finish times and the operatives required, from which the live roster is generated.

Time and attendance is the record of when operatives actually started and finished work, captured at the point of work rather than assumed from the roster.

The gap between rostered and actual is the whole subject. A system that pays from the roster cannot tell you that a contract was under-delivered, because as far as it knows it was not.

A competency matrix is a record of which qualifications, certifications and practical sign-offs each role and site requires, and which operatives currently hold them.

Clients ask for it at renewal and auditors ask for it without warning. Assembled by hand it takes days and is out of date on the day it is produced.

Learning and competency

COSHH, the Control of Substances Hazardous to Health Regulations 2002, requires employers to assess and control exposure to hazardous substances, which in cleaning means the chemicals in daily use.

A COSHH assessment is per substance and per task. The common failure is holding a folder of safety data sheets and calling it an assessment; the data sheet is the manufacturer’s input, not your control.

Duty of care, under section 34 of the Environmental Protection Act 1990, requires anyone who produces, carries or disposes of waste to ensure it is handled safely and only transferred to an authorised person.

A near miss is an unplanned event that did not cause injury or damage but had the potential to, such as a fall arrested by a handrail or a chemical spill in an unoccupied area.

Near miss reporting volume is one of the few leading safety indicators available. A site reporting none is usually not a safe site; it is a site where nobody reports.

RAMS stands for risk assessment and method statement: a paired document that identifies the hazards of a task and sets out the safe sequence of work, the controls and the equipment required.

The compliance question is not whether a RAMS exists but whether the specific operative signed the specific version before starting the specific task. An unsigned RAMS is the same as no RAMS after an incident.

Health and safety

RIDDOR, the Reporting of Injuries, Diseases and Dangerous Occurrences Regulations 2013, requires certain workplace incidents to be reported to the Health and Safety Executive, including specified injuries, over-seven-day absences and dangerous occurrences.

The reporting clock runs from the incident, not from when head office found out about it. On a dispersed frontline workforce, that is a records problem before it is a safety problem.

Scope 3 emissions are the indirect emissions in an organisation’s value chain that it does not own or control, including those produced by its suppliers and contractors.

A contractor’s own emissions are part of a client’s Scope 3. It is the mechanism by which a landlord’s reporting obligation becomes a contractor’s data request.

SECR, Streamlined Energy and Carbon Reporting, requires large UK companies to disclose energy use and greenhouse gas emissions in their directors’ report each financial year.

It reaches contractors indirectly. A landlord reporting under SECR needs figures that originate in the operation, which is why the data request lands on whoever delivers the service.

The connected estate

A toolbox talk is a short briefing delivered on site on a single safety topic, recorded with the date, the topic and the operatives who attended.

TUPE, the Transfer of Undertakings (Protection of Employment) Regulations 2006, requires that when a service contract changes hands, the employees assigned to it transfer to the incoming contractor on their existing terms.

It means an incoming contractor inherits a workforce, its pay rates, its length of service and its liabilities, rather than starting clean. Getting the transferring list and its terms wrong at bid stage is one of the most expensive mistakes available in this industry.

A waste transfer note is the document that must accompany any transfer of non-hazardous waste in England and Wales, recording what the waste is, how much, who handed it over and who received it.

It is the paperwork behind a tonnage figure. A waste number in an ESG report that cannot be traced to transfer notes is an estimate however confidently it is presented.

The connected estate

An anchor test is the periodic inspection and load testing of the fixed anchor points a rope access or fall arrest system attaches to, certifying them as safe to use.

An expired anchor test blocks the work whatever the schedule says. It is the most common reason a facade drop cannot be assigned, and it is knowable weeks in advance.

A BMU, or building maintenance unit, is the permanently installed cradle and davit system on a building roof used to lower operatives down an elevation for cleaning and maintenance.

A drop is one vertical section of a building elevation, worked as a single descent by a rope access or cradle team, and numbered so that work is addressed to a section rather than to the whole building.

A facade contract is delivered drop by drop, so the schedule, the completion record and the photographs belong to the drop. "The north elevation was cleaned" is not a record; "drops 1 to 6 completed, 7 blocked on an overdue anchor test" is.

Facade and access

An elevation is one face of a building, named by orientation or feature, such as north elevation, atrium elevation or podium.

Elevations are priced, scheduled and risk-assessed separately because access equipment and method differ between them.

A permit to work is a formal written authorisation to carry out a specific high-risk task in a specific place during a specific window, issued by the site controller before the work starts.

Common in confined space, hot work, electrical isolation and high-level access. The permit is the control; work outside its window is unauthorised even if the task is identical.

Rope access is a method of reaching high-level work positions using ropes and associated equipment, carried out by technicians certified under a scheme such as IRATA, and governed by the Work at Height Regulations 2005.