Tuesday, October 14, 2014

Letting Workers In Your Home - How to Protect Your Family

How to Protect Your Family When Letting Workers Into Your Home -
5 Easy Steps
We work inside people's homes daily as a professional carpet cleaning company. Being known for our great reputation in the Bradenton and Sarasota communities, including being referred by the majority of the flooring stores and top real estate in the area, helps our clients to feel more comfortable. 
We primarily serve referred and repeat clients, but we realize it can be scary to have a stranger in your home. We do everything we can to make you feel comfortable, including clearly identifying ourselves by our uniforms and business cards. Being fully insured and performing a complete background check on every new employee helps us further decrease any risk when we send someone to your home. We even send an e-mail with a link to our team members pictures and a brief biography.
You may not always have a level of comfort with every worker that comes to your home. Some companies or individuals have workers that may dress slovenly, their appearance may be intimidating, or they might act unprofessionally. I once had a cable installer who couldn't keep his pants up the entire time he was in my home. Do you think I couldn't wait for him to leave? What can you do to keep you and your family safe when you invite workers into your home?
At Overturf's Cleaning, on our wall we have outlined our Mission, Values, and Purpose. Our purpose is to protect Southwest Florida from uneducated, uninformed, and even downright unscrupulous service companies. A great way to do that is to be educated on what to look for.
Employment Screening Resources (ESR) recommends five easy steps for people to protect themselves in their homes:
1. Deal only with reputable local businesses (I like word-of-mouth referrals). A business should be able to tell you what precautions they take in hiring someone they plan to send inside your house. If the company you are talking to does not know the specifics, make them find out before you let their workers into your home. If the carpet cleaning firm, plumbing company or other service business will not give you the answers you need, then call someone else. Fly by night, or here today gone tomorrow businesses are unfortunately common in the carpet cleaning industry. In doing some work for a local rental company, I discovered many of these fly by night scammers will rent the equipment to run their scam until they've gotten all they can out of an area, then they move on. Red flags are generally when they advertise extremely low, to-good-to-be true prices. Remember what dear mother said about 'when it sounds too good to be true.'
Also, don't let a small business tell you that it is too expensive or difficult to practice safe hiring. Isn't it better to pay a little more to company that has done the work to make sure they are not sending a dangerous person into your home? There are a number of steps any small business can take to make sure they are hiring safe and qualified people that cost next to nothing. It's just a matter of having a commitment to customer safety, as opposed to just hiring anyone they can find to do the job. Do you really want a company in your home that is cutting costs in important areas? Where else might they be cutting costs? 
2. If you are hiring an individual and not a firm, what do you know about them? The best protection is to do past employment checks or reference checks on people who dealt with them in a business capacity. A great question to ask their references: "If you had the opportunity, would you hire this person again?" Their answer will usually be very telling. If you know that a person has been gainfully employed for the past few years, it lessens the possibility they have been incarcerated for a serious offense. Make sure they check out. If it does not seem right, then find someone else. A professional screening firm or private investigator can also be contacted to perform a criminal check.
3. For a sensitive position such as a nanny or caregiver, spend the money it takes to do it right. Do a background check, contact a pre-employment screening firm or private investigator to check out the person. The most critical checks are past employment to verify where the person has been as well as a criminal check. The company we use typically charges less than $100 for a full background check, and can even be less depending on what states the person has lived. When the well being of loved ones are on the line, the extra investment in security is well worth the small costs involved. Background checks can be done for a very reasonable rate these days.
4. Use common sense. You may not check out everyone that comes to your home. A business for example, may come to your home just once to briefly drop something off or make a home repair. BUT use common sense. Have other people around if possible. Do not leave confidential information (such as checkbooks or credit card bills) or valuables lying around. In addition, do not tell store clerks or a person making a one-time visit anything confidential about your personal life, habits or customs that could make you a target in the future. For example, you don't need to tell a stranger if you are leaving town, or give information about your usual schedule, or if people you live with are away. And if you are uncomfortable for any reason, or something does not seem right, do not let the person in.
5. False sense of security--Be careful about do it yourself background checks on the internet. There are some Internet sites that seem to suggest that they offer a national criminal record search. Unfortunately, a person may be lulled into a completely false sense of security if the name they are searching does not appear on one of these databases. In fact, the appearance of a person's name on a database is not an indication the person is criminal any more then the absence of a name shows they are not a criminal. Why? Because these Internet services are based upon databases that are best used by professional investigators or screening firms in conjunction with a number of other tools. The databases by themselves are not an authoritative source. Many of the Internet databases are names assembled from correctional or law enforcement databases, or from court repositories that are only as accurate as the individual counties that report records. There is no way to know if the records are complete, accurate or up to date, or if the record is even about the person you are looking for. Actual court files normally must be obtained to locate identifiers. In addition, there are large holes in the geographic coverage.
A consumer is much better off contacting a professional who knows how to utilize such databases, as well as numerous other tools in order to do a legal background check.
We're not telling you this to make you paranoid about every service person that works at your home. However, it is important that you don't expose you or your family to potentially dangerous situations. We just want you to be aware of what to look for and how to identify an uneducated, uninformed, or downright unscrupulous service company.
So use caution and common sense so your next service experience can be an outstanding one! Overturf's Cleaning is not just a floor & fabric care consulting company. We work with a wide variety of local businesses, and we would be happy to refer a trustworthy company to you. Give our office a call if we can be of assistance, 941-301-9555.