Dropping in on window washers

Campus window washers David Cubine and Justin White clean a difficult-to-reach window on the Allen Library using a lift.

FS Blog: How did you get into this line of work?

Daniel Jung: A buddy of mine was a high-rise window washer and has some connections here. At the time I was really into rock climbing, which matched some of the temperament and skillset for this job, such as not being afraid of heights and having a mindset revolving around safety.

FS Blog: What’s it like to be a window washer on campus?

Daniel Jung: I love doing this job because we get to see all of campus. We’re in different buildings every day, we aren’t doing the same thing in the same building every day. Because of the work we do we get these spectacular views. We start close to sunrise, and seeing Mt. Rainier and downtown Seattle when the sun first starts hitting them is just incredible.

This job can be difficult and slow sometimes because of how seriously we take all of the different safety issues. It’s hard because our crew may want to finish up an entire building, but it’s missing some anchor points and there’s no safe place to put a lift, or we may not have the equipment to access particular areas safely. We value safety above all else, so sometimes we’ll leave a building unfinished until we can come back to it and access those areas properly.

We see so many different buildings on campus, and we regularly coordinate with Facilities Services’ masons, roofers, glazers, pressure washers and the groundskeeping crews. We share a lot of lifts and equipment with them. This makes it hard over the summer, because it’s the best time for working on the outside of buildings, and sharing a lift with other FS departments means a lot of competition, and fewer opportunities for our team to have the lift. This summer we met that challenge by renting a lift, and to maximize our use of it, performed over-time work including on weekends.

FS Blog: Tell me about some of your team’s accomplishments.

Daniel Jung: Recently we joined the International Window Cleaning Association and we are hoping to follow some of their best practices alongside all of our OSHA safety requirements. There’s a special safety certification course that we’re hoping to complete this fall.

We recently had a Fire & Rescue technical team talk to us about what to do if a worst-case scenario were to occur. Techniques we could use, best practices, all of that.

FS Blog: What are some challenges your team has faced?

Daniel Jung: Safety regulations change over time, and it’s been difficult for our team to keep up. It’s our top priority to be safe, so it pleases me to see how our enthusiastic crew takes safety as seriously as they do. We always go above and beyond to set extra safety measures so that we can help ensure that our team leave from work in the afternoon the same way they came into work in the morning, capable of doing the same the next day. I’m most passionate about safety.

I’m sure if you ask Safety Manager Tracey Mosier, Safety Analyst Chris Pennington or Safety Trainer Barb Brown they’d tell you their inbox is completely full of emails from me. We also work with Tom Pittsford at Campus Engineering pretty regularly, as he’s able to provide some schematic drawings that tell us what anchors around campus are actually safe to use. We want proof that the anchors can hold much more than a human.

Another challenge we faced was that our team was understaffed for a long time – for a while it was only me and one other person, now we’re up to a team of six including myself, and we’re only down one person.

FS Blog: I know staffing has been an issue for your team, tell me about your journey to becoming nearly-fully staffed.

Daniel Jung: I’m excited that we’re almost fully staffed. I’ve also worked with Crystal Ryan, assistant to Gene Woodard, to get positions posted more quickly than in the past when they open up. We’ve even looked at making minor changes to the job postings so that we can get more applicants in here. We’ve actually found that climbers make a good fit for this position because they aren’t afraid of heights, and they’re comfortable wearing harnesses and working with ropes.

For us, in filling these positions, a big part of it has been finding people who are safety minded. Trust is a big part of our team: I need to rely on my team members when I’m going off the side of a building.

Our team is very close-knit. Everything has worked out well for us and we all get along.

FS Blog: Looking at the future of your team, what are you most excited about?

Daniel Jung: Looking to our future, one of our big plans is to try and get a regular schedule in place. We’re collecting data on how long it takes us to complete different tasks so that we’re better able to estimate and schedule work. Our goal is to make our customers happier by decreasing the cleaning-rotation schedule.

Now that we’re nearly fully-staffed we’re able to go to buildings across campus more frequently.

Any member of my team could walk through campus and tell you exactly how long it’s been since certain windows were visited. We can tell just by looking at them whether they were cleaned last week, last month, last year or a few years ago.

I’m excited to see the glistening on the glass on more buildings more frequently in the future.

Window washing team lead Daniel Jung stands with his team’s Lean idea board, whiteboard and map where his team tracks ongoing and upcoming projects.

FS Blog: What are some of your favorite buildings to work on?

Daniel Jung: One of my favorite buildings to work on is Foege Hall. It has a dedicated swing stage, which makes it much easier for us to clean. I know one of the team’s favorite buildings is the IMA’s top floor, because once you finish with the top floor it’s just a straight drop down that we get to rappel, which is pretty fun.

I’m excited to work on campus’ new buildings too. I work regularly with the Capital Planning & Development, and John Kelly at Environmental Health & Safety who do a good job at keeping our team in the loop. I always bring someone in the crew with me to planning meetings, and we’re involved when the building is still in its design phase so we can see where all of the access issues for the building exteriors might be.

FS Blog: What do you want folks across campus to know about your team?

Daniel Jung: I want customers to know that no building has been forgotten! We’re striving to get to every one of them. If people have questions about their building they can always contact me.

The crew is awesome. We’ve only received positive comments and feedback about our crews.

Because our team has had this backlog for so long we had fallen behind. We’re still trying to play catch-up, but we’re excited for a time when our work is scheduled and more proactive. Having a fully-staffed team means that our larger, ongoing projects aren’t slowed down when we handle daily requests.

Campus buildings have these million-dollar views and we want everyone on campus to be able to enjoy them.