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Our Services
idverde provides a wide range of green services, including grounds maintenance, landscape creation, and advice services, to both private and public sectors across the UK.
Estate cleaning to properties in the North West & North East of England
With the onset of the COVID-19 crisis when the contract was still in its early phases, our colleagues have had to adapt quickly to meet the challenges presented by higher intensity cleaning regimes, and to ensure we can work safely, while also ensuring the safety of Guinness Partnership’s residents.
Our role
idverde has been providing cleaning services to housing organization the Guinness Partnership since November 2019, when we commenced a phased start to a four-year contract to provide estate cleaning services to the Partnership’s properties in North West and North East England. The initial commencement date saw idverde providing services to 20% of sites, with the remainder following on in April 2020.
Adapting services during the Covid-19 crisis
With the onset of the COVID-19 crisis when the contract was still in its early phases, our colleagues have had to adapt quickly to meet the challenges presented by higher intensity cleaning regimes, and to ensure we can work safely, while also ensuring the safety of Guinness Partnership’s residents.
Some of the challenges we’ve overcome include:
- Cleaning teams of two people would normally travel to site in a bespoke cleaning vehicle, but this was not possible due to social distancing regulations. Our solution was to arrange teams into family or household groups (such as husband and wife, parent and son/daughter, siblings) in order to conform with the regulations while maintaining two-person teams to support workload and mitigate lone-working risks.
- There was a limited number of vehicles available to support additional teams, but we were able to relocate vehicles from other areas to support the increased number of teams and to meet the higher workload demands.
- Parts of the contract were still in mobilisation phase when the lockdown came into effect, and a number of the staff transferring in from the previous contract provider were shielding and so were unable to come into work. To overcome this, we worked with existing staff to change shift patterns to compensate for the employees unable to come to work.
- Additional services and site visits were needed, as many of Guinness Partnership’s residents are classed as vulnerable. We therefore adopted a 7 days per week clean to ensure the stringent hygiene standards in high risk areas could be met.
Results
In August 2020, the lockdown measures were relaxed in most areas, and so Guinness Partnership has now relaxed its seven day per week cleans, with idverde now returning to providing the specification it was initially contracted to carry out pre-pandemic.
idverde Business Manager, Nick Rimmer, says: “The Guinness Partnership have been very satisfied with our service to date, and this should only improve as we progress, as we now appear to be through not only the initial set up phase, but also the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. idverde is in a strong position to deliver the high level of service required should there be a further wave.”