(OS1)ian - The Official Language of Cleaning
What we have in the custodial industry is “a failure to communicate.” That’s because unlike other professions, housekeepers and custodians don’t have a professional language. It is a veritable Tower of Babel in housekeeping operations. Janitors in the United States currently speak Spanish (several dialects including Mexican, Cuban, Venezuelan, Puerto Rican, etc.), Polish, Russian, Korean, VietNamese, Chinese and various dialects of English (Southern, Northeastern, Western, Californian, Midwest and Cajun). Did we leave anyone out? Of course we did. It can’t be helped.
Instead of spending a fortune hiring translators and cutting down trees to print training materials in twenty different languages, we decided to copy what the airlines did. Let’s have all the cleaning workers learn to speak and write the same language, worldwide. And so we don’t hurt anybody’s feelings, we’ll make everyone on the team learn a new language together. The new language is "(OS1)ian".
(OS1) is a standardized system everywhere. Everybody works with the same tools, materials, books and tasks. We teach cleaning workers a specific, professional language. We originally tested (OS1)ian on the third shift at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Cleaning workers on that crew spoke Chinese, Russian, Romanian and Western Massachusetts. After training, we were all speaking the same language. Later on, we taught (OS1)ian to a group of cleaning workers with disabilities. That provided an opportunity to teach (OS1)ian to workers with dyslexia, functional illiteracy and other cognitive and perception disorders. (OS1)ian worked great!
(OS1)ian has been added to the (OS1) Boot Camp and (OS1) Basic Training courses and the Cleaning Industry Trainers Guild has added it to their curriculum and are currently teaching it all over the map.