Designing recognition and support for custodial teams​
Project Goal​
​
Explore how the experiences of frontline workers can improve Guild, a company
providing education benefits and upskilling programs to workers at their partner companies.
Context
​
Custodial and janitorial staff are key customers for Guild but are rarely featured in their success stories. Early conversations with Guild surfaced challenges around outreach, trust, and learner retention, which I documented below:
​
​
​
​
Process​
​
Our team of 5 went out around the bay and observed custodial workers at their workplaces, conducting 8 in-depth interviews with workers for Walmart, Aramark, Stanford University, Peete’s and Hilton Hotels.
We observed something that came through in almost every interview: Custodial staff say they feel “invisible at work” and are doing “unseen labor.”
​Maria comes to work at dawn from East Palo Alto, where she lives with her husband and two kids. While cleaning is her job, it’s also a way of caring for her family at home.
“My daughter jokes that I can’t sit still,” she told us, “but I like things to be nice for her.” At work, however, she said “sometimes people look through you like you’re invisible. People don’t notice us when it’s clean — that’s how I know we did a good job.” Others echoed Maria’s sentiment. I helped synthesize interviews, revealing a deeper tension.
Custodial staff see their job as an act of care for people who use the space, much like cleaning to care for their family. However, they are in a catch 22 at work: because a clean space is the baseline, the better they clean, the less they are seen. This leads to them feeling invisible, because those they care for do not show care for them.
The custodial workers we spoke to told us stories like “I sometimes put bows on toilet paper, it makes them smile,” or that they put plants in a bathroom “so it feels homey for students,” transforming the job from a transaction to an act of care that often originates from the home.
​
I visualized these tensions in a map of activities and a needs hierarchy.
Custodial staff need to make spaces better for others in their work, but they also need to feel seen by those they clean for — and right now those are often in contrast, because those they clean for don’t notice their efforts when cleanliness is the baseline expectation.
​
In the rare instances when they did receive recognition for their care, it transformed their experience. One custodian told us about a time when a host thanked him after a repair and asked about his daughter. “Same job, but it felt different,” he said.
Reframe for Guild
When custodial staff would be building in Guild on top of already feeling invisible for their efforts at their workplace, they want to feel like Guild values them in ways that are meaningful to them.
Custodial staff are like the backstage crew of a theater, but they seek “on stage” moments of recognition. This is the basis of my reframe for Guild. Rather than treating custodial staff as transactional learners, Guild could act as a source of reciprocal care — acknowledging effort, marking progress, and building trust.
​
​I formed design principles with my team to underpin the how and why of improving Guild’s strategies and offerings.
I translated our insights into practical recommendations to help Guild better engage and support custodial staff and address challenges around outreach, trust, and retention​:
​
-
Rather than relying on digitized, benefit-focused marketing, Guild should also explore personalized outreach that acknowledges custodial workers’ unseen efforts and establishes trust before asking for commitment.
​
-
Coaching could shift from scheduled check-ins to more proactive, care-driven moments, recognizing progress and struggle in real time rather than waiting for learners to ask for support.