Blog by Cheryl Stewart
Cheryl Stewart is the CEO of Andron Facilities Management, a family-owned cleaning and facilities management company founded in Aberdeen in 1980. Now in its third generation of family leadership, Andron employs over 2,600 people across the UK and has been a Living Wage Foundation Recognised Service Provider since 2019. Cheryl sits on the steering group for the Foundation’s RSP programme.
As a female CEO, International Women’s Day (IWD) is a moment I value because it gives us the chance to stop and recognise the women who make Andron what it is. Around half of our 2,600 colleagues are women with an almost even split across our management team. So much of what our business delivers comes down to the skill, commitment and experience of the women working across it.
IWD is also a reminder that challenges remain. When I first started in facilities management in 2015, women were far less visible in leadership roles. Progress has been made but the sector remains predominantly male at that level, while women continue to be heavily concentrated in frontline cleaning roles. These roles are skilled and demanding, and they sit at the heart of how buildings operate, but they are also the roles most directly affected when pay structures and working patterns fail to reflect the realities of daily life.
The Living Wage Foundation estimates that more than 250,000 people working in cleaning, catering and security remain in low-paid work. More broadly, women hold over 60% of all jobs that pay below the real Living Wage, and nearly one in three low-paid women regularly skip meals to make ends meet. When you think about the fact that seven in ten children in poverty in the UK are now in a working family, every bit of additional pay matters. For a full-time worker, the difference between the government’s National Living Wage and the real Living Wage is worth £2,418 a year, and £5,050 in London, which for many women in frontline roles is the difference between getting by and having some real stability.
While pay is part of the picture, working patterns and access to benefits matter just as much to women balancing work with caring responsibilities. At Andron, we offer full-time hours where possible so that colleagues, particularly women who might otherwise be stuck in part-time work, can qualify for workplace pensions and start building longer-term financial resilience. We offer daytime cleaning which moves away from the traditional early morning and late evening hours. We also offer flexible patterns like a four-day week where it works for the site and the team, and benefits like a virtual GP, enhanced sick pay and English language classes which, for many of the women on our teams, have been a real source of confidence.
The wider employment landscape is changing too. Through my role on the steering group for the Living Wage Foundation’s Recognised Service Providers (RSP), I’ve seen first-hand how conversations around pay and employment models are shifting across our sector. Today, there are over 16,000 Living Wage Employers and almost 200 RSPs, with around half a million people working in cleaning, catering and security now receiving the real Living Wage.
In 2019, I led Andron to join the scheme, when around a third of our contracts were paying the real Living Wage. We saw the benefits early on, and it’s since become an essential part of how we put our people first, with 91% of our contracts now paying the real Living Wage.
Reaching that point has depended on close collaboration with our clients, particularly as rising business costs continue to put pressure on the sector, making conversations around how we fund fair pay all the more important. Many of our clients share our commitment to fair pay, and where it isn’t adopted at tender stage, we work together to review services and find smarter ways of working so that we can uplift pay as soon as possible. When we took over the cleaning services at one shopping centre in Scotland three years ago, this approach identified a 10% saving in cleaning costs which was reinvested directly into uplifting pay, with staff retention at that site now sitting at 97%.
We strongly believe that paying the real Living Wage is an investment in our people that reflects our values as a business. When people are paid enough to live on, they stay longer, they perform better and they worry less, and clients benefit from a more settled, knowledgeable workforce who are well placed to deliver great service within their buildings.
International Women’s Day is always a good opportunity to talk about the challenges that women in the workforce still face. I hope that more businesses across our sector continue to commit to the real Living Wage, because the more businesses that do, the stronger our industry will be for the women who keep it running.