Ron Holt – Maid on a Mission

OK, Tara’s obviously not my biggest fan. Tara mentions three things that I’d like to address.
1. Mileage reimbursement. Tara’s right. We compensate our employees for their mileage (employees drive their own cars) based on the house, not the amount of miles traveled per day. In other words, an employee is paid a set rate based on the zip code of the home or business. This system works out to somwhere between 10-15 cents per mile. Also, an employee is reimbursed if he/she designates who actually drove the vehicle. With nine cleanings teams cleaning every day, it’s impossible to keep up with everything. At some point, we have to rely on the employee to help us help them. In this employee’s case, she did not designate who drove. We needed to speak to the other team member to determine who drove. The other team member was still out on assignment at the time, so we couldn’t determine who drove. We know this…. Our mileage reimbursement program isn’t the best in the world. The reality is that we are the only company in our three locations that reimburse for mileage. There is one other company that provides employees with a company car. This is our desired plan, but it costs money to do that. So, we think our current system is fair. Not great, but fair. After all, each employee can still deduct the the majority of their mileage on their taxes.
2. Our cleaning products are diluted according to the product’s specification. It’s a set formula. Our customers have never complained about our cleaning products. Simple Green is not supposed to be dark green anyway.
3. Our former employee is obviously confused about our pay for performance plan. Each new employee signs an agreement that describes how the pay for performance plan. We do this because we want each employee to understand how it works. Here’s how it works: An employee clocks in and out like any other job. You clock in when you leave the office in the morning and you clock out when you walk back into the office. We do not pay by the job or house. An employee’s hourly rate is determined by our customers. Customer feedback is measured by allowing our customers to rate the service on a scale from 1-10 each time. From that, we calculate an average and correspond that average to a pay scale. In other words, your hourly rate is 100% determined by customer feedback. Some people make real good and some people make real bad. It’s up to each employee. The lowest wage is minimum wage($6.40/hr) and the highest wage can be up $11.25/hr. The average wage is somwehere between $8-$9 per hour. That being said, we have several employees that have never earned less than $10 per hour. You write your own paycheck with us.
We’re not perfect. We may have even over-reacted with this employee. I don’t know. What I do know is that this employee quit during the middle of the day. We were left to figure out how to make the rest of her schedule work. As a result, we were probably a little stressed because of her sudden departue from our company. Our frustration got the best of us I guess.