Shifting priorities, tight budgets and changing facilities are prompting managers to seek ...

— By Kelly Patterson, Assistant Editor

Mapping out a successful staffing plan includes both finding the right people and using them the right way. Unfortunately, budget constraints, a tight labor market, and growing and changing facilities conspire to make the staffing challenge that much more difficult for engineering and maintenance managers. Nonetheless, managers understand the importance of the issue to facilities’ success.

“Staffing is a high priority and needs to be successfully addressed because staffing plans significantly affect customer service, downtime and cost issues,” says Thomas A. Westerkamp, a maintenance management consultant.

Though there obviously is no single answer to facilities’ diverse staffing challenges, managers are looking at all possible solutions when it comes to putting the right people in place to carry out the maintenance mission.

Setting priorities
The challenge of staffing is heightened by the sheer volume of tasks that maintenance and engineering departments are called upon to make.

“With 8,000 maintenance work requests a year, you have to prioritize,” says Rip Courter, who is director of maintenance and operations at the La Mesa-Spring Valley (Calif.) School District. “We have to remember that we’re in the customer business, not the maintenance business.”

Unfortunately, years of underfunding for maintenance and engineering departments in many organizations has left many departments in sometimes dire straits.

“I have 130 schools and 10 people on staff,” says Frank Farris, chief engineer for the San Francisco Unified School District. “Mainly, we just put out the fires. If it ain’t broke, we don’t fix it.”

Says Dave McAtee, buildings and grounds superintendent at Creighton University in Omaha, Neb., “With 2.5 million square feet and 35 employees, we’re understaffed. That’s pretty close to ridiculous to maintain.”

The effects of improper staffing — often understaffing — are all too common in facilities.

“Short staffing tends to let the preventive maintenance pile up undone,” says Mark Breitenstein, manager of facilities and technical services at the Midwest Research Institute in Kansas City, Mo. “You tend to get a higher number of repair calls. You have to balance the urgent or unplanned workload based on two factors, is it a critical need or is it a people-sensitive need. Doing the right things organizationally at the right time is very important to success. Helping your staff understand how this impacts the department — and them — is a basic necessity.”

Often, the biggest challenge for managers involves convincing upper management in their organizations that the success of their maintenance mission requires a larger staff. Unfortunately, proving the need for additional staffing is difficult without all of the facts and figures to make the case.

Westerkamp says success in this effort often lies in having an accurate backlog and work measurement system to show where more employees are needed.

“You will know by craft how much workload you have,” he says. “Each 2,000 hours of work equals one person. You can say, ‘I’ve got 10,000 hours of work to do. That means I need five people.’”

Growing demands
It is necessary to regularly reassess staffing plans, and consult backlogs and equipment history records. Workloads often change, especially as a result of facility expansion or renovation projects.

“We are finding that we are identifying more areas each year in which we need support,” McAtee says. “There are more areas we should be servicing and looking at whether we want to train someone on new technology or contract out.”

Westerkamp says that typically, maintenance and engineering departments have major weak spots because they too often do not have a handle on the workload, nor is there a well-documented backlog of labor hours of work to do broken down by trade.

“It is important to have a formal planning function, a small group of highly skilled people,” Westerkamp says.

Setting the plan
In most cases, managers are forced to develop a staffing plan that works best in their facilities, with the understanding that they will have to adjust those plans to meet changing demands and priorities. Courter says in his district of 23 schools, he assigns one multi-skilled maintenance worker to each school.

“Then you decide how you want to use that person," says Courter. "In smaller school districts, multi-skilled people are the best. For (districts) over 15 schools, it doesn’t work anymore. It gets too technical.” In larger districts, he says, it would be necessary to rethink or adjust the staffing plan to meet facility demand. For example, he says, one person would be responsible for just HVAC and kitchens at five schools.

In staffing the custodial department, Courter says he follows a formula developed by California state school officials that calculates the number of custodians needed based on factors such as square footage, the number of classrooms, and the number of students.

“But this number (of custodians) usually turns out to be too high,” Courter says.

Courter divides his grounds care staff based on tasks, such as turf mowing crews, that are assigned certain areas based on location and size of landscapes. In the case of inclement weather, the grounds care staff follows an alternative plan. In the summer, extra staff is hired.

Multiple skills a must?
Breitenstein says he has come to terms with the realization that in his organization, one plumber — or any other trades person, for that matter — cannot just perform one trade. Increasingly, to meet facility staffing needs, managers are looking for workers with multiple skills.

“We need someone who can be on the on-call list who also does snow removal, lighting and light plumbing,” McAtee says.

Managers say that having maintenance workers with a variety of skills results in a more flexible staff and increased productivity. For example, when installing a motor or pump, one person can perform both the mechanical and electrical work, instead of having one person for each part of the task. But multi-skilled personnel are not only more difficult to find, they are more expensive, too. And there are other challenges with this concept.

“Many of the candidates you screen want to stay in their discipline,” Breitenstein says. “Maintenance is different than field trades. In years past, I have had people state ‘They do not clean up, that’s a janitor’s job.’ ”

But a complete maintenance repair plan includes finding a problem, making repairs and cleaning up debris, he says, adding that customers expect “a full circle of services.”

Finally, when managers require multi-skilled staff, pay levels often become an issue. Many managers cannot hire the set of skills needed.

“This is where training and patience pay off,” Breitenstein says. “You find a great attitude, some skills and ability. This does not cost you either way. Pay for the skill or pay for training, and support services to fulfill the needs.”

Making adjustments
“One of the biggest things going on with schools right now is expansion,” Courter says. “Schools are getting bigger, and there’s a need for additional staffing.” He says his staff has built 151 portable classrooms within the past year, and with those additional classrooms, Courter needs more custodial employees to clean them and more HVAC staff to provide them with air conditioning. The changes also mean modifying existing staffing plan and individual workloads.

“I’m always looking at fine-tuning job descriptions and asking, ‘Are they doing what they’re paid to be doing?’” he says.

Most strategies to address staffing issues are designed to give managers peace of mind. For instance managers who document labor hours and workload histories are apt to have more success adjusting their staffs to better meet facility demands. But the specter of staffing changes is never far away.

Says Bob Getz, director of physical plant and auxiliary services at William Rainey Harper College in Palatine, Ill., “I’m always concerned if I have the right people and the right number of people. Staffing problems are a recurring thing.”

“My biggest problem is the economy,” says Pieter Van der Have, director of plant operations at the University of Utah. “It has been too good. We have problems attracting and retaining employees.”

Once employees retire or move on to higher-paying or more challenging positions, managers are left to face a dwindling pool of skilled workers.

“All the good guys are working,” says Frank Farris, chief engineer for San Francisco Unified School District.

Managers find themselves hiring people they otherwise would not and settling for less qualified personnel. As a result, they are beefing up their training programs, which is taking up valuable time and money.

“With the money I have to hire people, I can’t find anyone,” says Bob Getz, director of physical plant and auxiliary services at William Rainey Harper College in Palatine, Ill. “Everybody’s got a job. How can you complain about that? How can we be unhappy when the economy is so good?”

With less qualified staffs, departments get behind on work requests and providing customers with the service they expect.

“It is a challenge to communicate to the campus community that the standards are what they are and we can’t do anymore,” Van der Have says. “Expectations build up, and the inability to meet those expectations continues.”