We’re delighted to welcome Sharon Biscette to the Heathlands management team, which is headed up by home manager Gladys Danquah.
As Canford Healthcare’s only hospitality & services manager (so far), Sharon has a unique place within the organisation. It’s a multi-faceted role for which she fully utilises her extensive and varied experience, gained within the care, hospitality and services sectors.
London-born Sharon knew from an early age that she wanted to work in hospitality. After leaving school she completed a training course in hotel reception, housekeeping, kitchen and reservations. She spent the next few years working in West End hotels, before moving into retail with Debenhams and C&A in Oxford Street. There she worked on the floor, helping with displays and merchandising, meeting customers and answering questions.
Sharon loved her job but once she started her family she needed more flexible hours, and so began her career in care. Starting as a care assistant, she spent the next decade working her way up within such residential care providers as Sanctuary Care Homes and HC One, before moving to Bupa as housekeeping manager. There Sharon instilled her meticulous standards into her team. This meant doing a shift every so often with each housekeeper, especially if they were new, as a way of getting to know their strengths and weakness, and assessing who needed support or further training.
After Bupa Sharon moved out of care and specialised in cleaning services and facilities management. She went on to have a series of area manager roles with several large companies including City Facilities Management, where she oversaw 90 cleaning and facilities staff within 12 London sites, contract cleaning and support services specialist GSA (working with Marks & Spencer and TK Maxx, among others), the Apleonia Group (looking after FedEx, Kimberley Clark and Biffa) and Asda. There, she was responsible for the cleaning and maintenance of 20 stores, overseeing 200 cleaners and facilities staff. This was a full-on role, but Sharon always relishes a challenge. At her own request, the Asda management team sent her to the worst store in her region. “The store they chose was a disaster to start with, but within three months I had sorted it out,” she says.
Sharon, who lives just two minutes’ walk from Heathlands, feels that her retail, hotel, care and service delivery/facilities experience has stood her in good stead for working at the home.
“This is an exciting new role that uses all my experience every day,” she says. “Although the environment is different, my priorities are the same – raising standards of cleanliness and presentation, and meeting the expectations of users, in this case, our residents and their families. They simply want a home that is comfortable, clean, well-equipped and attractively furnished.
“I am thrilled to have the opportunity to enhance the hospitality experience of all our residents, as well as working alongside staff to help improve how we deliver these services,” she adds.
Outside work Sharon enjoys spending time with her children and is also a dedicated Liverpool FC fan. She loves travelling, especially to far-flung places – the USA, Morocco, St Lucia, Barbados, Antigua, Tanzania and Dubai – and takes her parents on holiday every summer.
It’s probably no surprise that her hobbies include art, interior design, DIY and gardening, and she regularly visits the cleaning show exhibitions as “innovation in this area is constantly evolving”.
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