A long time ago I had a friend talk me into working part time at night for an office cleaning company that a friend of his owned. As you might expect it wasn’t exciting, but it wasn’t terribly hard either, just requiring you to move quickly and be thorough. What could there be to learn from an office cleaning job? I watched and asked a few questions, and I did learn a few things:

• The owner benchmarked each job by doing it himself a few times. Based on that he then paid his employees a fixed rate based on that estimation. If they wanted to work slower that was fine, but he knew what was possible and reasonable.
• Many offices don’t get all that dirty, so his way of making sure that the office manager knew that they were cleaning each night was to wash his or her coffee cup and set it squarely in the center of their desk.
• He sweated the details. For example, after cleaning he would sit in each bathroom stall to see the view of the ‘customer’.

I think those lessons apply to a lot of businesses, especially small businesses where no one has a more vested interest than the owner.  It’s possible to a manager more than a worker, but it’s really hard to maintain a business when you’re totally removed from the nuts and bolts of the work.  It’s good to earn your way up so that you don’t have to empty the trash, but you’ll never go wrong by doing it once in a while anyway to remember what the job takes.

I did learn one other lesson – office cleaning wasn’t the job for me!