What Should a Commercial Office Cleaning RFP Include?

A Structure That Works

1. The premises. Address, floor, total area, and a breakdown: number of workstations, private offices, meeting rooms, restrooms, pantries or kitchens. Floor types and roughly how the area splits between them. Approximate linear metres of internal glass. Attach a floor plan if you have one.

2. Occupancy. Headcount, and how it is distributed across the week. Hybrid patterns matter: three heavy days and two quiet ones is a different job from five even ones.

3. Access. Hours the premises are available, freight elevator hours and whether an operator is required, alarm procedure, and your building's vendor requirements. Get the insurance wording and registration process from your managing agent first and include it, so respondents can give you a realistic start date rather than an optimistic one.

4. Required scope. List the tasks and the frequency you want for each, rather than asking for a standard package. Separate nightly work from periodic work such as carpet extraction and floor restoration.

5. What you expect respondents to state. This is the part most RFPs omit:

• Labour-hours per visit, and how the crew is made up
• Everything excluded from the figure, listed explicitly
• Whether cleaners are employees or subcontracted
• What screening and training is completed before a first shift
• Who supervises the work, and how often it is inspected
• Insurance carried, and confirmation they can meet your building's requirements
• The initial term, what follows it, and the notice period
• How a failure is escalated, and who answers out of hours

6. Process and dates. Walkthrough window, submission deadline, decision date, intended start date.

The One Line That Changes the Responses

State in the RFP that proposals without stated labour-hours will not be compared. It costs you nothing, and it removes the bids that were priced from a template rather than from your floor.