Overview

About Janitronics

Janitronics Facility Services is a family-owned janitorial services company that has been operating for over 50 years. Headquartered in Albany, New York, the company supports customers across New York State and into Vermont through three business divisions: residential cleaning, janitorial commercial cleaning, and window cleaning.

The Challenge

Hearing from a workforce that is rarely in one place

Janitronics has a diverse frontline workforce of 1,900 employees that speak multiple languages. Given the nature of the work, employees do not spend time on a computer, and email is not always the most effective way to reach them.

Before Awardco Engage, Janitronics had used basic surveys and Microsoft Forms for some feedback collection. The process provided limited measurement and required more manual effort to sort through the results. For an HR team supporting employees across customer sites, the challenge was not simply asking a question. It was making the question easy to find, easy to answer, and useful to act on—and then creating an ongoing connection after employees shared their feedback. Janitronics wanted listening to feel like a meaningful part of the recognition and appreciation employees experienced in their everyday work, while making space for ongoing dialogue and visible action throughout the year.

“It's definitely very diverse, and it's definitely hard to connect with everybody. So Awardco actually makes that much easier with the option of choosing your primary language and translating some of that content already on the platform.”
— Frank Eschberger, Human Resources Business Partner, Janitronics

The Solution

Connect listening to everyday engagement through recognition and communication

For Janitronics, collecting feedback was only the first step. To make engagement part of everyday work for employees spread across customer sites, the company needed a familiar, ongoing way to reach people, invite their input, and show that participation led to connection and appreciation. Recognition was an important bridge: employees were already using Awardco to recognize coworkers and receive rewards, so Awardco Engage could meet them inside an experience they knew rather than asking them to adopt another standalone survey tool.

Janitronics introduced Awardco Engage as the next step beyond its earlier survey process. The company used the same platform for surveys, recognition, rewards, announcements, reminders, supervisor reinforcement, and points incentives. This gave employees multiple reasons to return, making listening feel connected to the broader employee experience.

The mobile experience is especially important for a frontline workforce. Most employees interact with Awardco™ through their phones, and the mobile app gives them a simple way to recognize coworkers, receive updates, and complete the engagement survey while moving through their workday.

“Setting up the survey is very, very simple. It has different categories of things that you may want to look into as an employer.”
— Frank Eschberger, Human Resources Business Partner, Janitronics

For Team Clean Specialist Katie Feiden, that accessibility shows up in everyday use. She uses the mobile app to recognize coworkers and said the experience is “very simple, very easy to use.” She also completed the engagement survey on her phone, describing it as easy to complete and typically taking five to ten minutes.

Turn survey setup and reporting into an admin advantage

For Frank, Awardco Engage reduced the friction of building a survey and interpreting its results. The question library’s categories and pre-written questions helped Janitronics identify the topics it wanted to explore without rebuilding every question from scratch. Frank used Awardco Engage’s recommended core set of 19 questions, making it easier to assess engagement across a broad range of topics without developing an entirely new survey. The templated format simplified deployment, while reporting and metadata filters—connected directly to Janitronics’ HRIS hierarchy—made it easier to analyze results by region, location, supervisor, and other available dimensions.

“Setting up the survey is very, very simple. It has different categories of things that you may want to look into as an employer.”
— Frank Eschberger, Human Resources Business Partner, Janitronics

That combination gave Janitronics more than a response file. It gave the team a way to look for patterns across a dispersed workforce, identify areas that needed attention, and bring more useful signals into conversations with leaders.

Awardco Engage’s confidentiality features also mattered.

“The survey does have a lot of security and privacy features, which is great. I know it doesn’t matter what survey you do; people always ask, ‘Oh, is this really anonymous? If I take this, am I going to get something from my supervisor the next day?’ But going through the data—and even when some supervisors have asked, ‘Can you see who put that comment in?’—you really can’t see that stuff when you filter through. It definitely gives employees a sense of security and a safe space to provide true feedback instead of just what they think the company wants to hear. That’s important because we can’t take action if we don’t know what the true concerns are.”
— Frank Eschberger, Human Resources Business Partner, Janitronics

Close the feedback loop with visible follow-through

Janitronics is treating listening as a two-way commitment. After reviewing the results, the team shared key findings with regional leaders and the frontline employees who participated. The goal is to show employees what the company heard, what it is changing, and what it is still working through.

That feedback has already informed how Janitronics approaches recognition. Some employees prefer face-to-face appreciation rather than recognition that exists only in an app, so the company refreshed its branded AwardCodes™ and distributed them to supervisors as an option for on-the-spot recognition.

The result is a more flexible recognition experience: digital recognition can connect people across locations, while a physical card can make appreciation tangible in the moment.

“We try to be as transparent as possible.”
— Frank Eschberger, Human Resources Business Partner, Janitronics

Reinforce the behaviors that matter on the frontline

Recognition at Janitronics is designed to make important work visible. Leaders recognize safe work practices, helping teammates, taking on special projects, coming in on days off, going above and beyond, and positive customer feedback.

Site Manager Andrew Goodman sees the platform as a way to spotlight the behaviors Janitronics wants teams to repeat. When employees see specific examples of people helping one another or taking initiative, they can better understand what good teamwork looks like in practice.

“The platform helps to put a spotlight on good behaviors—things that demonstrate people going above and beyond or outside their normal scope or taking initiative.”
— Andrew Goodman, Site Manager, Janitronics

Recognition creates connections across sites. Katie has seen those connections firsthand:

“I’ve had people the next day at work go, ‘Oh, hey. Thanks for the Awardco shout-out,’ just randomly walking by in the hall. And then, also, people I’ve trained that wind up going to different sites, I can still see they’re around by Awardco, and I could be, ‘Hey. They’re still doing well.’”
— Katie Feiden, Team Clean Specialist, Janitronics

Those small moments help a distributed workforce feel more like a team.

The Results

Janitronics has achieved more participation, clearer signals, and a stronger connection between feedback and action. Recognition plus feedback has contributed to retention by helping employees feel appreciated and connected, particularly in a demanding frontline job that sees a high percentage of turnover in the broader industry.

Janitronics has seen:

• Overall annual turnover decreased from 87.8% to 77.8% year over year, a 10% improvement 
• Turnover is now approximately 50-80% under the industry average of 130-200% 
• 90-day retention increased from 54.9% to 60.8% year over year, a 5.9% improvement
• 90-day retention is now approximately 11% above industry average

A stronger first response from a dispersed workforce

Janitronics’ first Awardco Engage survey generated 527 responses from 1,913 invited employees, for a final response rate of 27.55%. That represents a 123.8% improvement over April 2025 and a 154.2% improvement over October 2025. The Engage survey received more responses than those two previous surveys combined.

Frank attributed the increase to a combination of factors rather than one isolated feature: the in-platform experience, reminders, announcements, supervisor partnership, and points incentives all helped Janitronics reach employees.

The result was a larger sample of employee feedback than the company had received from its previous two biannual surveys together.

“We had more participation from our first survey with Engage than we did from the two previous biannual surveys that we did combined.”
— Frank Eschberger, Human Resources Business Partner, Janitronics

Better visibility into what employees are saying

Janitronics can now examine feedback through available metadata, including regional and location-level views, while maintaining confidentiality protections. That makes it easier to move from a company-wide score to more specific questions:

• Where are employees feeling supported?
• Which locations need attention?
• What themes should leaders discuss with supervisors?

Andrew said the latest survey surfaced useful “golden nuggets” for his leadership conversations. Janitronics is continuing to build the operating rhythm around those signals, including plans for future biannual surveys and pulse checks for new hires and longer-tenured employees.

A feedback loop that informs recognition

Janitronics is not treating survey results as a report that disappears after the survey closes. The team plans to publish results and follow-up actions on the Awardco homepage, then use what it learns to refine communication and recognition programs.

When combining their recognition data with engagement into the nascent Awardco Culture Graph™, Janitronics was able to identify both company blind spots (where praise can mask the issue) and undervalued strengths (quick wins to highlight and maximize). While recognition data can be overly positive and engagement data tends to focus on areas of improvement, the combination of the two gives true insight into the company culture. This graph gives the team direction on how to proceed with the highest value plans.

“I love using data to inform the programs we run with employees. Being able to understand the relationship between recognition and engagement is the next level of being able to meaningfully impact how people experience their time here at Janitronics. This Culture Graph is unlike anything I’ve seen, and I’m excited for the future innovations the Awardco team will continue to bring to the Engage product!”
— Frank Eschberger, Human Resources Business Partner, Janitronics

One example is the refresh of AwardCodes. Feedback indicated that some employees value face-to-face recognition, so Janitronics made branded cards available to supervisors who want to recognize people in the flow of work. That gives leaders another way to show appreciation immediately, especially when they are not working at a desk.

What comes next

Janitronics plans to move 7-, 30-, and 60-day new-hire feedback into Awardco Engage, helping the team gather early input during a period when turnover is typically highest. The company also plans to use pulse checks to see whether employees notice progress before the next biannual survey.

That next phase reflects Janitronics’ broader approach: consistently follow-up with survey results, share what the company learns, and use recognition and communication to make the response visible.