Most facility managers spend a lot of time thinking about who has access to their building during business hours. The after-hours question gets less attention, and that is exactly when the cleaning team arrives.
If you cannot name every person who has been in your building this week with a cleaning role, that is worth thinking about.
Why building access is the number one concern for facility managers
Commercial cleaning happens when your staff are gone. The lights are off, the office is empty, and someone you may never have met is moving through every area of your premises, including server rooms, executive offices, storage areas, and anywhere else that requires a key or access code.
One unverified person in your building after hours is a risk your insurance policy, your IT team, and your building manager would all take seriously. Yet most facility managers have never seen a police check for a single member of their cleaning team.
What police-checked actually means in practice
A police check, formally known as a National Police Certificate in Australia, confirms that a person has no recorded criminal history that would be relevant to the role they are performing. For a commercial cleaning context that means no history of theft, break and enter, fraud, or other offences that would make unsupervised access to a business premises inappropriate.
It is not a guarantee. But it is a documented, verifiable step that separates a professional cleaning operation from one that hires without any formal screening process.
What it is not is a once-off exercise. A police check reflects history at the point it was issued. A professional cleaning company re-screens team members regularly and maintains records that are available to clients on request.
How Gold Keys handles site induction
A police check gets someone through the door. A site induction tells them exactly what to do, and what not to touch, once they are inside.
Every Gold Keys team member goes through a site-specific induction before they are ever given independent access to a client’s premises. That induction covers the areas to be cleaned, the areas that are off-limits, any specific instructions about equipment or materials not to be used, emergency procedures, and the communication protocol if anything unexpected is found or happens during a clean.
That induction is documented. If a new team member is assigned to your site, the induction happens again before their first shift, not after.
Every clean is then logged through Connecteam with a timestamped record of who was on site, what was completed, and when they left. If you ever need to know who was in your building on a specific night, you can find out in under a minute.
What to ask your current cleaner
If you are not sure whether your current cleaning company meets a basic standard for building access security, here are four questions worth asking directly.
- Are all team members who access our site police-checked and do you have the certificates on file?
- Do you conduct a site-specific induction before a new team member works on our premises independently?
- Can you provide a record of who was on our site and when for any given night in the past three months?
- What is your process if a team member is no longer employed, how are access devices recovered and how are we notified?
If any of those questions are met with vagueness, the answer is probably no.
The standard you should expect
Building access trust is not a premium feature. It is the minimum standard for any commercial cleaning company operating in a professional environment. Police checks, site inductions, documented cleans, and a clear process for staff changes are not extras, they are the baseline.
If your current arrangement does not include all four, it is worth understanding what the alternative looks like.
Book your free site visit and we will walk you through exactly how Gold Keys manages building access, including what documentation we maintain and how you can access it at any time.
