01 / Daytime
Day porter services
Staffed daytime coverage for lobbies, restrooms, breakrooms and common areas while the building is busy.
View detailsGuide
Porters and janitorial: who does what.
They’re not the same job, and they work best side by side. Here’s how to split the work.
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Janitorial cleans. Porters maintain.
Janitorial crews come in after hours and clean the whole building: suites, offices, restrooms, floors. Porters work while the building is in use and keep it looking the way the janitorial crew left it.
Why one isn’t enough in a busy building.
A building with hundreds of people moving through it can look rough by noon no matter how well it was cleaned overnight. Porters fill the gap between nightly cleanings.
A simple way to split it.
Give the janitorial crew the deep work: offices, suites, vacuuming, mopping and full restroom cleaning. Give porters the in-use work: restroom checks and restocking, trash runs, lobby and elevator touch-ups, spills and entrances.
Avoiding overlap.
Write both task lists side by side so nobody does the same task twice and nothing falls between them. Porters should know what the overnight crew covers, and the crew should know what porters handle during the day.
Starting porter coverage.
Peak-hour porter coverage focused on restrooms and lobbies is a simple place to start. We walk the building, map the busy times and write a porter plan that fits around your existing cleaning.
Services
Services this guide covers
Pick the coverage you need. We’ll staff it and run it.
02 / Restrooms
Restroom checks and restocking
Scheduled restroom rounds: cleaned, stocked and inspected throughout the day.
View detailsRestrooms: one room, two crews
Restrooms are where the split matters most. The janitorial crew does the full clean at night: toilets and urinals scrubbed, floors mopped edge to edge, partitions and walls wiped. During the day, the porter holds that standard with restocks, sink and counter wipes, bin changes and spot-cleans between visitors.
When both task lists name the same restroom, write down which tasks belong to which crew. Our restroom checks pick up exactly where the nightly clean leaves off.
Who stocks the supplies
Supplies are the most common gap between crews. Decide who orders paper, soap and liners, who stocks the closets and who fills the dispensers. Dominion can supply and restock them, or porters can work from your own stock. When you keep your own, one split works well: the janitorial crew stocks closets overnight, and porters fill dispensers through the day from those closets.
Put stocking levels in writing. If a closet comes up short in the morning, the porter flags it before the lunch rush instead of discovering it at noon.
Night porters next to the night crew
Some buildings run night porters and a janitorial crew in the same hours. That works when the two task lists never touch. Janitorial takes tenant suites, offices and the full restroom clean, and the night porter takes the lobby, entries, elevators, amenity rooms and everything outside. The day porter vs. night porter guide explains when that second shift is worth adding.
Putting both task lists on one page
List every area in the building down the left side and both crews across the top. Mark each task once. Any area with two marks is overlap, and any area with none is a gap. Review the sheet with both crews when coverage starts and again whenever the building changes.
A few useful answers
Common questions.
Can porters cover a gap when the janitorial crew misses something?
Yes. Porters handle spot fixes during the day and report repeat misses so the overnight task list gets corrected.
Does adding porters change what the janitorial crew does?
It shifts their time. With porters keeping restrooms and lobbies up during the day, the nightly crew spends less time catching up and more on suites, floors and detail work.
Who should tenants contact when something needs attention during the day?
Your property manager, who passes it to the porter on site. Porters handle in-use issues like spills and empty dispensers right away and send suite cleaning requests to the janitorial crew.