Archives for January 2024

A little extra sparkle we’ve created this year

January 30, 2024 by Lizzie Hill Leave a Comment

Our main role is to provide a sustainable cleaning service for our clients, that is of a high quality, is value for money, and surpasses expectations. In the background however, we’re working hard on projects that benefit our communities, the environment, our colleagues, and add value to our clients’ contracts.

Underpinning the provision of commercial cleaning services for you, our clients, is a commitment to operate sustainably in all aspects of our business: people, products, service partners and service lines.
Below are just some of the activities this past year which added some sparkle as a result of this commitment.
When we work together we can achieve great things, which can be seen in our success in paying 90% of our colleagues the London Living Wage. We invite you to be as involved as you can be in these activities, as a successful future depends on all our efforts collaborating together.

As a family business, it’s in our nature to look after our people. As a people and planet focused business, one of our focus areas is ‘Putting People First‘, which we consider in every aspect of our company. This means that we prioritise the mental health, wellbeing, and general heath of our colleagues and have onboarded initiatives that give our teams enhanced access to wellbeing resources that give our colleagues a sense of care and support round the clock.

RISE is our colleague health and wellbeing service. This gives our colleagues 24/7 access to personalised, on-demand advice and support from our team of mental health, financial and legal experts, plus much more. These include:

Virtual GP providing support 24/7
24/7 Employee Assistance Programme
Free flu jabs
Mental Health First Aiders

We believe our strategies assist us in ensuring we maintain a healthy, motivated, and engaged team, who enjoy being at work through enhanced wellbeing.

Earlier this year, we held a sustainability and social value showcase event to highlight our ethos of creating Better Places for our communities, people, and planet with like minded clients and industry influencers. With sustainability at the heart of what we do as a business, the event was a celebration of how we have introduced environmental initiatives into our delivery and helped our clients to move towards their Net Zero targets, as well as an opportunity to highlight the progress of our social value and sustainability journey.

We believe that how we deliver our services is just as important as the service itself, and strive to have a positive impact towards a brighter and more sustainable future. Our unique approach to sustainability has been celebrated through some notable award wins including the Planet Mark ‘Supplier Engagement’ Award and multiple Green Apple Awards not only in partnership with our clients but also recognising our significant project to turn our Service Support Centre into an exemplar of sustainability.

As a people and planet focused business, caring for our communities is in our nature. In 2023, we saw more social value projects than ever before with positive impacts that were immediately obvious. Year on year we continue to build the social value we create through working with our charity partners, with last year seeing the generation of £323k.
Our Christmas activity alone kept us busy throughout all of November and December, helping to provide support to vulnerable people over the festive season.

We enjoyed involvement from clients and Service Partners for much of this social value activity, resulting in amazing collaboration opportunities and relationship building. These initiatives do so much for our communities while providing amazing opportunities for collaboration across service lines.

Made Blue is a not-for-profit charitable organisation providing clean drinking water to communities in need around the world. Through the sale of sustainable products and services, Made Blue can invest in worldwide water projects that change lives. These projects generate access to clean drinking water in the places on earth where it’s needed most, helping to create better places in a sustainable and entrepreneurial way.

Through our partnership with Made Blue Foundation, we’ve donated more than 2.5 million litres of water to global water projects since June 2023. We’ve been handing out some of Made Blue Foundation’s sustainable water bottles as gifts at charity events, colleague appreciation days, sustainability events, and to our valued partners. For each bottle we give out, our charity partner donates 500 litres of clean drinking water to communities in need around the globe, while reducing the use of single use plastic bottles. In addition we have product usage based donations to provide a smart and simple way of allowing our clients to support their sustainability ambitions with access to this innovative project to help impoverished communities.

Our main job is to be a commercial cleaning company, and we strive to be the best in the market. We know our success is in part dependent on that of our clients, and we invite you to join us in 2024 as we all look to a more sustainable and successful future.

Our Electric Vehicle Fleet Grows

January 29, 2024 by Lizzie Hill Leave a Comment

Continuing our journey towards Net Zero.

As our sustainability ambitions grow, so does our electric vehicle fleet. We’ve committed to a Net Zero target and are investing in our business to help us to meet this goal.

We working to be a Net Zero business by 2030 and aim to transition to having a fully electric vehicle fleet by the year 2025 as an objective in line with this. This will support our overall target of reducing our carbon footprint and leading the way for businesses in our field.

We began this transition towards more sustainable electric vehicles in 2019, when we started moving away from petrol and diesel vehicles towards more environmentally friendly electric vehicles instead. We continue to build a more sustainable fleet and have acquired four new electric vans to support the growing demands of our in-house Vertical and Specialist Cleaning teams.

There are several reasons for doing this, including reducing pollution and not contributing to poor air quality or noise pollution in the built environment. As a people and planet focused business, our priority is to protect human health and the health of our communities.

Regular Cleaning’s electric fleet comprises 65% of all current vehicles, with plans to transition to a fully electric fleet by 2024-2025. All our electric vehicles are powered by fully renewable energy sources with guaranteed REGO certificates. This eliminates the use of fossil fuels and hybrid vehicles, enhancing the sustainability of our service.
The remainder of our fleet is all hybrid electric plug in, and we have eliminated all diesel powered fleet from the business.

This latest investment in our electric fleet aligns with our ZeroBy30 strategy and will save around eight tC02e per year. We are therefore actively reducing our emissions through this decision to continue to move towards 100% electric vehicles.

Sustainable Operations

Our electric fleet isn’t the only large investment we’re making in the sustainability of our business. We operate from a sustainable Service Support Centre where we recently invested in a building refurbishment to transform our space.

This refurbishment included the removal of our gas supply and switching to using renewable energy instead. This included the installation of improved insulation and heat recovery systems, extending the life of the building. We are also moving towards paperless operations in the field and utilising public transport where appropriate. This is all linked to our efforts to reduce the environmental impact of our operations.

Our business strategy and decision making is underpinned by a relentless drive to push sustainability at every opportunity. We are committed to be NetZero by 2030 and have a clear roadmap in place to achieve this. Not only will this enhance the sustainability of our business, but also our clients’ and service partners’ own sustainability ambitions.

Understanding the impact of our operational changes helps us build a picture of our carbon footprint from the bottom up. In this way, we can begin to provide details on our carbon footprint for clients and service partners, through for example, property level reports. We are ahead of the curve on our sustainability journey moving beyond just public commitments, to taking positive action and sharing our knowledge.

The growth of our electric fleet is just one of the many ways that we are actively enhancing our sustainability. We are proactive in reducing our carbon footprint and doing good for our local environment and community at large.

Regular Cleaning Office Refurbishment

January 15, 2024 by Lizzie Hill Leave a Comment

Achievements since transforming our office into a sustainable working space.

In response to the evolving post-COVID economy, Regular Cleaning initiated a comprehensive office refurbishment project with the primary aim of future-proofing the business and transforming it into a sustainable working space. This transformation aligned with the launch of the company’s sustainable strategy, ‘Better Places‘. The project sought to create a sustainable and efficient workspace, anticipating reduced operating costs and increased colleague retention.

What was the aim of the project?

As a people and planet focused business, we strive to operate sustainably in all that we do. The refurbishment project set out to achieve success in multiple areas related to this, supporting our sustainable business strategy to create better places. Four main strategic pillars make up this purpose, and the refurbishment project directly supported two of these:

Protecting Our Planet – This pillar links to climate action. Reducing carbon emissions and saving energy are both priorities for us, our clients and service partners. A key aim of this project was to improve the energy efficiency of the building as a working head office. This would contribute to our NetZeroby30 goal to be carbon neutral by 2030.
Putting People First – This concerns the well-being of our colleagues and communities. The refurbishment project also aimed to create a healthy and happy environment with a culture of equality and progression. The goal was to improve the well-being of our colleagues while in the office.

Project Involvements:

To deliver the newly launched sustainable business strategy ‘Better Places’, a series of targets were introduced. It was recognised that to achieve these, the business building required an overhaul, and we began working with our sustainability partner, ‘Just One’ on a list of improvement works to deliver a sustainable building for the future. The cost was budgeted at £750K with the anticipation that we would off-set this with reduced operating and talent recruitment costs through increased colleague retention levels. The project involved:

Installation of heat recovery units
Removal of the old gas boiler
Applying new building insulation
Installation of efficient lighting fixtures
Improved waste efficiency
Conversion to 100% electric fleet vehicles and installation of charging points
Interior design aligned to the brand
Layout to accommodate remote working and a bigger team of support colleagues

Key Achievements Since Project:

In our commitment to address climate change, we have successfully transformed our Head Office into a sustainable working space. The refurbishment project achieved remarkable success in multiple areas related to sustainability, including major changes to how the office operated, and how the building is heated, cooled, lit, and designed. By improving energy efficiency and carbon emissions, and converting the building into a collaborative space, we have done what we set out to do and made huge steps towards achieving our long-term goals.

Gas Elimination and Renewable Energy Adoption:

A significant milestone in our sustainability journey was the complete removal of our gas supply. This shift from gas to fully electric heating and cooling was one of the the major operational changes and encompassed the removal of the old gas boiler, installation of heat recovery units and enhanced building insulation. Our office now exclusively relies on renewable energy generated from REGO (Renewable Energy Guarantees of Origin) accredited sources. This has resulted in renewable energy accounting for an impressive 29% of our total energy consumption at the site.

The Heat Recovery system plays a significant role in making spaces more environmentally friendly by avoiding large-scale heat loss. While maintaining comfortable room temperatures, they retain up to 90% of the heat from the air they replace, making them more energy efficient than normal air conditioning systems.
Our Energy Recovery Ventilation system provides business synergy in terms of costs, health, well-being and productivity.
Enhanced building insulation increases temperature control and energy savings, while improving soundproofing and structural integrity. This reduces our overhead costs at a time of increases in energy prices.

Thorough Energy Assessment:

Before embarking on the refurbishment journey, we conducted a comprehensive energy review of our Service Support Centre (head office). This assessment aimed to identify potential energy efficiencies prior to the refurbishment to lay the groundwork for an impactful transformation. This included the installation of efficient lighting fixtures, waste efficiency improvements, and the conversion of fleet vehicles to 100% electric. In doing this, we have achieved significant improvements around energy efficiency, as well as a decrease in carbon emissions at our office building of 5 tonnes C02 emissions. The majority of this reduction was attributable to the refurbishment work carried out in early 2022.

Planet Mark:

These changes not only reduced comparable gas usage, but also resulted in our Planet Mark certification in 2022. Going hand in hand with our sustainable business strategy, ‘Better Places’, this allowed us to meticulously measure our carbon footprint. This data from Planet Mark has pushed us to make significant changes to meet our sustainability targets and NetZeroby30 goals.

In November 2023, we received the Planet Mark award for ‘Best Supply Chain Engagement‘, acknowledging our commitment to engaging with our supply chain and our efforts to advance sustainability standards within our industry.

Green Apple Award Recognition:

In September 2023, we won the Green Apple Award for Office Building Refurbishment. This award acknowledged our commitment to sustainability and our drive to be the most sustainable cleaning company in London. Having transformed our office into a sustainable working space, this esteemed recognition attests to the investments we are making to lead a sustainable business, and the transformative changes implemented at our Service Support Centre. These have had substantial environmental benefits, utilising renewable energy and supporting our NetZeroby30 targets.

Pioneering Sustainability and Net Zero Journey:

These awards underscore our dedication to our net zero journey and signify the positive environmental impact achieved through our sustainability initiatives. Our multifaceted approach aligns seamlessly with our overarching sustainability targets, showcasing a harmonious blend of environmental responsibility and operational excellence. These accolades are a testament to our continuous efforts to lead the way in sustainable business practices and contribute meaningfully to a better future.

Employee Well-being:

The project extended the building’s life by 10 years, positively impacting the local economy by retaining the office location. We also transformed the look and feel of the interior through the refurbishment, updating the building to create a light, calm, and functional space to offer a popular and sustainable workspace for our workforce.
Notably, colleague satisfaction, as per a post-refurbishment survey, showed an impressive 78% giving a 5* rating, indicating the success of the project.

Parts of the building were transformed to accommodate an ever-expanding team, provide mixed functional offices, and create collaborative meeting rooms. This included converting some storage and operation facilities to accommodate post-COVID work patterns and a subsequent implementation of a hybrid working policy to further improve colleague well-being.

Results:

We have transformed our Head Office into a sustainable working space that is ahead of the curve, highlighting our commitment to tackling climate change, starting at home. The project was a success in achieving what we set out to and having a positive impact in the areas we identified as our aims.

Since re-opening, we have further seen the kind of space best suited to our working requirements, and have made small further adjustments to the interior layout to create additional medium-sized meeting areas, which were not part of the initial design. The workforce re-inhabited the building in April 2022 and the refurbishment has continued to prove a success amongst colleagues more than a year on, standing as a testament to the success of the project.