Labor shortage in the cleaning industry 2026 — how to keep the team together and manage the sites
Recruitment in the cleaning industry has tightened every year. We'll go through concrete ways a smaller team can manage the same number of sites — without sacrificing quality.
In Finland, recruiting professional cleaners has clearly become more difficult in recent years. Turnover is high, substitutes are not always found, and experienced supervisors burn out patching empty shifts. The situation cannot be solved with one trick, but the basic structures of operation management directly affect how many employees the company actually needs to manage the same sites.
Why is turnover so high specifically in the cleaning industry?
Typically, a new cleaner leaves the job within the first three months if onboarding has been confusing: the site instructions are on a different paper than the keys, the supervisor doesn't answer the phone at five in the morning, and pay is delayed because hours were not logged in time. None of this is the employee's fault — all are system issues.
Another major reason is unpredictability. When an employee receives their work shifts only the night before, they start looking for another job immediately. Keeping the calendar planned 2–4 weeks in advance is a simple but crucial retention tool.
Three operational fixes that reflect on cash flow
- Site cards on mobile: door codes, alarms, keys, special instructions, and contacts all in one place, not on paper.
- Automatic prevention of overlaps in work shifts — no more two cleaners at the same site and no forgotten sites.
- Location boundaries for the start of working hours: hours only start at the site, and payroll receives clean data without manual corrections.
Onboarding in 1 day — not two weeks
When site cards, instructions, and routes are in a mobile app, a new employee can manage their first day without the supervisor trailing behind. Practically, this means that with one supervisor's capacity, three times as many new hires can be onboarded compared to a paper-based model.
This is directly about money: every day a new employee is productively at the site and not next to the supervisor reduces the payback period.
Finding substitutes before a crisis
Most cleaning companies have quiet hours in the afternoons. If the system shows employees' available capacity in real-time, substitutes can be offered first to their own workers — not to the temp agency at €38/h. This often results in a 3–6% margin improvement annually.
Want to see Eemel ONE in action?
In a 30-minute remote demo we walk through your cleaning company’s processes.