What is a cleaning job sheet and why is it important?
Cleaning is an essential part of food safety for any business no matter which step of the food chain you are part of.
If you allow your facilities to become unclean, you leave yourself at the risk of a huge variety of food safety hazards.
For example, poor hygiene could easily result in your customers becoming unwell because of cross contamination or attract a pest infestation.
Cleaning job sheets are designed to help you and your employees know exactly what items must be cleaned, how these items should be cleaned, and the frequency with which they should be cleaned.
Consistent levels of cleanliness and hygiene throughout is essential to the success of any food business in a variety of ways, including:
- Helps to prevent legal action and/or costly fines caused by poor food safety and hygiene offences being levied on your business.
- Helps you to build a robust reputation that in turn can attract more customers to your business.
- Allows you to thoroughly evidence your compliance and due diligence to auditors or the authorities.
- Greater employee understanding helps to continuously drive improvement in the quality and safety of both the food products you provide and your processes.
How to create your own cleaning job sheet.
When planning to create your own cleaning job sheet, you need to consider all the information that needs to be collected to ensure that you and your employees are thoroughly aware of when a specific item must be cleaned and how it should be carried out.
We recommend using a table format to document your cleaning job sheet as not only is it one of the best ways to present data for reference purposes, but it also allows you to present a lot of detailed data in a clear and easy to read manner.
Your first column should be designed to detail the name of each item that must be cleaned.
Remember to use a new row for each separate item, for example your raw meat chopping boards should be in a separate column to your ready to eat boards.
Following on you should include a column where you can record how frequently each item must be cleaned.
Next you will want to include a column where you can thoroughly detail the cleaning method for each specific item in a way that it can be easily referred to if needed by your employees.
This should then be followed by a column to record any precautions that individuals carrying out the cleaning of each individual item should undertake.
For example, some items may require the individual to wear PPE before undertaking cleaning.
In our free example which you can download below, we have also chosen to add a column where you can record which specific cleaning chemicals should be used for each item e.g., soap or sanitiser, how the chemical should be diluted, and the contact time it should have with the item or surface being cleaned.
Remember to evaluate your cleaning job sheet periodically to check if any items need more frequent or different cleaning or if any new items need adding to your cleaning job sheet.
It is also important to regularly check that all your employees understand and can successfully carry out the tasks detailed in your cleaning job sheet and that the sheet is always available for reference.
Using Jomo247 to manage your cleaning and hygiene practices.
Your cleaning schedule records must be thoroughly maintained and kept up to date to ensure that you can not only evidence your compliance to your customers but also any official regulatory and/or legal authorities.
One way you can do this is through food safety software.
With Jomo247 you can implement and manage a comprehensive health and safety system in one centralised location, accessible wherever you are with access to the internet or mobile data.
Once your cleaning job sheet has been completed it is automatically stored in your system and can be quickly accessed and referred to by the relevant employees at any time they may need.
With all you documentation stored in the cloud evidencing your compliance to your auditors has never been easier as you can invite them directly to your hub for no extra fee – we charge per action NOT per user.
With our tagging feature you can easily reference all your relevant cleaning and hygiene processes and procedures and locate them quickly on that all important audit day.
Your employees can also upload photographic or video files to evidence they have successfully completed their cleaning tasks and establish accountability throughout your business.
