Insurance for office cleaning and janitorial services

How underwriters look at office cleaning insurance

To an underwriter, office cleaning is core janitorial work. Crews are usually rated under the main janitorial classes: ISO 96816, Janitorial Services, for general liability, and NCCI 9014 for workers' comp in most states. Nobody is on a roof or running heavy plant equipment. That's the good news.

The harder questions are about trust and access. Your crews work in someone else's building, mostly at night, mostly unsupervised, with keys, access cards and alarm codes. Expect an underwriter to ask:

• how many buildings you clean, how big they are and how often (nightly, 3x weekly)
• whether you run day porters during business hours
• how keys, cards and codes are issued, logged and taken back when someone leaves
• whether you run background checks before a new hire works alone
• how much of your work is routine cleaning versus floor stripping or carpet extraction
• whether you sub out any buildings, and whether you collect those crews' certificates

How office accounts go wrong

Office claims rarely come from one dramatic event. They come from ordinary nightly tasks done on surfaces and equipment that belong to someone else. Most fall into three groups.

Damage to the building's finishes. Lobbies and elevators are full of marble, terrazzo, brushed stainless and wood veneer. The wrong product or pad can etch, streak or scratch them, and the building wants them replaced.

Damage that travels. In a multi-tenant building, water or a chemical spill on one floor can reach the tenant below. One overflowing mop sink can mean claims from several businesses.

Missing property and access. A tenant's laptop or a petty-cash box disappears, or a key ring goes missing. These aren't liability claims at all. They point to a bond, crime coverage or a lost key endorsement.

Example scenario: the elevator cab

A night crew in a 12-story office building wipes down the elevator cabs with a product that's too harsh for the brushed stainless panels. By morning, two cabs are streaked and dull. The property manager wants the panels replaced. Because the damage is to the exact surface your crew was working on, a standard general liability form may exclude it, which is where a client-property buy-back earns its place.

Example scenario: the mop sink on the third floor

At 10:30 p.m., a cleaner leaves the faucet running in a third-floor janitor's closet. Water seeps through the slab into an accounting firm's suite on the floor below, soaking ceiling tiles, carpet and a file room. The firm's damage wasn't the part of the building your crew was working on, so this is the kind of loss general liability is generally built for, subject to your policy's terms.

Example scenario: the badge in the glovebox

At 2 a.m., someone breaks into a route supervisor's car outside a 24-hour pharmacy and takes his bag. Inside are the access badge and suite keys for a four-tenant professional building. The property manager shuts off the badge that night, then has the suite doors re-keyed and sends you the invoice. A lost key endorsement may pay for the re-keying. Whether it also pays to reprogram badges depends on its wording.