Glossary / Operations
What is Agency Labour?
Agency labour refers to temporary staff supplied by a recruitment agency to cover cleaning, portering or other roles, typically at a premium to directly employed staff.
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Agency labour is widely used in cleaning and facilities management to cover sickness, holiday and hard-to-fill shifts, but it comes at a cost premium over directly employed staff, along with variability in training, consistency and reliability from shift to shift.
This is one of the clearest areas where a robot delivers measurable savings: covering predictable, repetitive floor coverage with a robot reduces the volume of shifts that need agency cover, particularly unsociable hours like early mornings or overnight, which typically carry the highest agency premiums.
It doesn't eliminate the need for a flexible workforce entirely — agency staff remain useful for peaks, events and specialist tasks — but reducing the baseline reliance on agency cover for routine floor cleaning is one of the most common drivers behind a robot business case.
Common questions
- How do robots reduce agency labour costs?
- By covering predictable, repetitive cleaning tasks directly, they reduce the number of shifts, particularly unsociable hours, that would otherwise need agency cover.
- Does deploying a robot mean cutting cleaning staff?
- Not necessarily — many operators redeploy staff to higher-value tasks and reduce reliance on agency cover rather than reducing headcount.
- What unsociable hours does agency labour typically cover?
- Early mornings, evenings and overnight shifts are common, and these are exactly the hours a robot can run unattended most easily.
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