Jeddah Municipality is to introduce soon a new Forced Ranking (FR) system to audit the city's three cleaning contract companies by evaluating the performance of their staff and rewarding – or punishing – accordingly. Abdul Majeed Al-Batati, assistant to the Deputy Mayor for Services, said that managers would employ the FR system to single out the best and worst cleaning workers and give each individual a work-performance grade. “The purpose is to reward staff performing up to standard and to retrain or dispense with the services of those who do not,” Al-Batati said. According to Al-Batati, Jeddah will be divided into three main auditing zones - north, central and south – which in turn are subdivided into “areas” and then “centers”. The three cleaning companies will be required to appoint a manager for each area and a supervisor for each center. “Auditors will conduct weekly evaluations of designated locations based on criteria such as street cleanliness, the availability and suitability of rubbish bins, and other factors,” he said. “They will give scores out of five, with one being the worst and five the best. The scores will then be translated into totals out of 100.” The first phase of the plans is currently under way and involves the training of municipality staff in FR auditing methods and techniques. “For example, trainee auditors are shown pictures of streets with rankings of five and others ranked as one, and are given an explanation of the Continued from P1 criteria by which those rankings were reached,” Al-Batati said. “Trainees are then asked to give their own rankings to other photographs and justify them. The objective is to standardize evaluations so that cleaning companies across the city are assessed in the same way.” “The purpose of the FR system is not to punish cleaning service supervisors, but rather to give them an incentive to increase their scores for better results,” Al-Batati said. “As is well-known, if a job is done 90 percent perfectly, the focus will be on the ten percent and people will complain. A weekly FR evaluation will help to accurately identify these failures.” Mohammad Al-Ghamdi, the director of Jeddah Hygiene, said that the FR system would bring significant improvements to the level of public hygiene. “The main aims are to improve the cleanliness in every district across Jeddah and motivate cleaning companies in their work by rewarding those who achieve the best scores,” Al-Ghamdi said. The scheme follows the hiring of a consultant from the Scot Wilson Group, a British environment consultancy firm with 80 offices and over 6,000 employees worldwide, to help the city improve its cleaning services. The Scott Wilson Group – a “global integrated design and engineering consultancy for the built and natural environments”, according to its website – has since 2007 been working on a master plan for Jeddah's North Corniche Road, and recently won a contract to provide project management support to the new Haramain High Speed Rail Project.
