Ask a cleaning business owner about staffing and the complaints arrive fast. Good people are impossible to find. Young workers won’t stick around. Turnover is the cost of doing business. Wells Ye has heard every version of those lines, and he doesn’t buy any of them.
Ye is the founder of EmployJoy.ai, an AI-powered hiring platform built for residential and commercial cleaning companies. He ran a house cleaning business in Evanston, Illinois, before launching the platform and is the author of Revolutionize Service Industry Hiring: Discover the Secrets to Exceptional Success. On the question of whether the industry’s transient reputation is simply the way things are, his answer is direct.
“Is this under our control, the owners, the CEOs, the company managers? I think my answer is resoundingly yes, it is under our control,” Ye said. “Then the question is, are we doing a great job to execute our control? That’s two separate questions.”
What actually keeps a cleaner around
Ye builds his case from the bottom up, and the foundation is a predictable schedule. “If everything is unpredictable, yes, our job will be unpredictable. Their stay will be unpredictable. That’s literally the definition of transient,” he said.
Competitive pay sits on top of that. Next comes something owners tend to underrate. Research on employee retention often finds the quality of a worker’s manager weighs as heavily as pay, sometimes more. For a cleaner working at night alone in a facility, the manager is essentially the whole company.
“All the cleaner knows about the company is through the manager,” Ye noted. “So it’s really important to understand the huge impact of management.”
Above that, workers need to see a future with the company: what the pay could look like down the road and which positions they could grow into. At the top is recognition and a sense of belonging.
“We recognize their great performance, and we let them feel that they belong here because they are unique,” Ye explained. “They are not just a janitor or a house cleaner. They are a unique person that we care for.”
He acknowledged residential cleaning makes predictable scheduling harder. Even there, Ye argued, most of the list is the owner’s call. Pay, managers, growth paths and recognition are fully in the company’s hands.
When the bid sets up turnover
Having control and using it well are different things, and Ye sees pay as the place where the industry most often fumbles. The problem usually starts long before a cleaner is hired. It starts at the bid.
“One part of where we see that we, as an industry, potentially are not doing a good job is under the pay because we are bidding so low,” Ye said.
If a bid forces a wage below what other cleaning companies pay, or below what an Amazon warehouse or a gig app offers, the position won’t hold anyone for long. “Then we are going to have to hire that cleaner again and again and again,” he added. “Then we just made this position a transient job.”
The root cause, in his view, is bidding work without first benchmarking the pay rate the job will actually need to stay filled.
The young workers complaint, reconsidered
Plenty of owners and hiring managers have decided younger workers simply don’t want to work. Ye thinks that perception doesn’t hold up, and he points to the people making the complaint.
Bureau of Labor Statistics data from its long-running National Longitudinal Survey of Youth shows that Americans born between 1957 and 1964, the tail end of the baby boom, held more than five jobs on average between ages 18 and 24. Younger generations have followed a similar pattern. Workers born in the early 1980s averaged 5.1 jobs from ages 18 to 23. Job hopping early in a career isn’t new.
Ye encourages owners to stop asking only about motivation and start looking for a mismatch between what was promised and what the job turned out to be.
“If the schedule isn’t stable, if the physicality wasn’t explained properly in recruiting, if the pay is not as we predicted during the recruiting, then it is no longer a motivation problem,” Ye said. “It becomes a mismatch problem.”
Younger workers, he noted, are quicker to walk away when a job doesn’t match what they were told. That puts the focus back on how the job is designed, how honestly it’s described during recruiting and how carefully candidates are selected for fit.
“Let’s focus on what we can control, what we can do something about,” he said. “That is our job design, how we select them, how we keep them.”
Some turnover deserves a party
A company can do all of this well and still lose people. Picture a solid crew of 20. Someone is going to leave eventually. Ye’s first step when it happens is to sort good turnover from bad.
His example of good turnover is a college student who works for a cleaning company for about a year and a half, shows up reliably, does excellent work and then leaves after graduating for a professional job. That isn’t a loss to mourn. Ye thinks it should be celebrated in front of the rest of the team, with the company taking real pride in having supported that employee through a degree.
“We celebrate. We want to have a party in front of other employees to say, you did a great job. We’re so happy. We’re so proud,” he said. “That should be a very genuine emotion.”
The idea behind it is a two-sided win. The company gets a dependable worker for a meaningful stretch, and the employee leaves better off than when they arrived. “Only with these two, you will see a sustained employment,” Ye explained. “If one side is winning, the other side is not winning, either side, I think it’s going to be disruptive.”
Bad turnover calls for a harder look, and it often traces back to a bid that was too low. Ye said fixing it means the owner revisits the financials and pricing strategy, while managers help shape the plan and carry it out. Recruiting deserves the same scrutiny. A single job posting can now draw 70 or more applicants, many using AI tools to apply, and Ye doubts a hiring process designed a decade ago can sort through that volume and find the right fit.
Paying more and spending less
Asked for the one idea owners and hiring managers should hold onto, Ye returned to that two-sided win and how long it lasts. The goal is to keep the arrangement working for both sides long enough that training, onboarding and engagement pay for themselves.
“When we have a sustained win-win, the transient label, the revolving door, just stops. Then you will see stabilization,” he said.
There’s a financial payoff hiding in that, too, even for companies that raise wages to get there. “Even though you pay them more, you avoid paying the high turnover tax,” Ye said. “It’s going to beautifully come to your financials as well.”
