This page used to be called custodial staff. That is American vocabulary for a European sector that calls itself schoonmaak, facility services or dienstencheques. The work is organised around contracts with client organisations, and one fact shapes everything else: these people work inside a building that belongs to somebody else, at an hour when almost nobody from either organisation is there.
05:40, and the building is empty
Offices are cleaned before people arrive or after they leave. Schools between the last class and the caretaker's rounds. Shops after closing, production areas in the changeover window. The shift starts when the client's day ends.
So the two mechanisms most companies rely on to make training stick, a supervisor who sees the work and a colleague who can be asked, are both structurally absent. What the cleaner does not know at 05:40 gets improvised, and the improvisation becomes the method.
The rules that apply are the client's, and they change per contract
A cleaner on three sites in one week works under three sets of rules: where the waste goes, which areas are restricted, the alarm procedure, who to phone when a door was found open, which floor cannot take water. Almost none of it sits in the employer's handbook, because none of it belongs to the employer.
Belgian law puts an obligation on the other side of that contract. Welzijnswet of 4 August 1996, art. 9 requires the client in whose establishment external contractors work to inform them before work begins about risks, prevention measures, emergency procedures, first aid, fire fighting and evacuation, and to verify that the contractor's workers received the appropriate training and onthaal (structured reception and induction). In practice that verification arrives as a question to your account manager. A cleaning company that can answer it per person and per site is in a different commercial position from one that cannot.
Products are the part with a hard instruction duty attached
Cleaning is chemical work. Dosing, dilution, which product never meets which other, ventilation, gloves and eye protection, what to do when something is splashed, and what to do about the unlabelled container the client's caretaker left in the cupboard.
Codex art. I.2-21 requires sufficient and adapted training aimed at the worker's workpost or function, given during working hours and not at the worker's expense, repeated as risks evolve. Art. I.2-20 adds that only workers who received appropriate instructions may access zones with serious and specific hazards. In the Netherlands, Arbowet art. 8 lid 2 requires instruction adapted to distinct tasks, and lid 4 requires the employer to supervise compliance with it. A new product is exactly the trigger those articles name, and here it lands on people spread across forty addresses.
A team that is never the same team twice
Turnover is high, hours are short, and a large share of the workforce arrives through agencies or, in Belgium, through the dienstencheque system. Someone starts on Monday at a site the company won three weeks ago and the person who did the handover has already left.
One correction worth making here, because Belgian marketing copy gets it wrong constantly: the werkpostfiche (workstation record sheet) is required for temporary agency workers only for workposts or functions subject to mandatory health surveillance, under Codex Boek X, Titel 2. Not for every assignment. Where it does apply, X.2-17 is unambiguous: without a fiche and without having been informed, the worker may not be placed on that workpost at all. Where it does not apply, the instruction duty still does.
Instruction people can follow in their own language
Teams here are multilingual by default. A safety instruction that exists only in Dutch is not an instruction for half the crew, and a sheet left in the cupboard proves nothing about who read it.
Aristotl takes what you already maintain, the product sheets, the site instructions per contract, the opening and closing rounds, and turns it into modules of three to five minutes on the cleaner's own phone, translated per person, with no laptop and no app to install. Assign per client site, so someone starting Thursday on the new hospital contract gets that hospital's rules first. Completion is recorded per person, per site and per version, which is what you hand over when a client asks whether the people in their building at 05:40 were instructed.
Bring one contract's site rules and your product list to a demo, and we will build the first module from them.