What are you doing to Fix the Maintenance Crisis?

If our 401k's ever recover we may think about leaving but in the mean time we will fight the decline of maintenance budgets. Our engineering department, as well as a lot of other organizations, have always been looked at maintenance as a COST center. We must find a way to make upper management look at us as a profit, and at the very least a savings center. We all look at trying to make our businesses more GREEN or at least environmentaly friendly. Saving electricity, water and polution control are biggies in California as well as other states but here we have such tight restrictions not only polution makes it hard to breathe.

 To bring  new people into the maintenance field we try to hire people that are not only willing to learn but are also eager to get in and try new and inovative things. Mentoring is a fairly inexpensive way to train these people but it also gives us OLD TIMERS  a chance to pay back all the people we learned from in the past. I have never been this old before so every day is a new experiance.      

Joel:  Great comment  from John C. I too now am soon to fit into the block of old timers. I am absolutly amazed at the lack of initiate to learn a trade or skill from todays generation. In addition too my repair skills, I have over 15 year experience in housekeeping. I am never hardly ever approached by todays workers to learn the art of floor finishing or carpet extraction.

Over the next few years, building maintenace professionals will become increasingly challanged to find repair and cleaning personnel, especially with this current minimal pay scale. Workers, on the other hand , have to actually take the time to learn value for their employer. Training is not going to be handed to you on a platter....you have to take initiative.

There is no question the knowledge of the boomers is good.  In some cases it could be better.  my solution.  Send them back to school to brush up on the things they might not know so well.  They will be good learners as they will be kicking themselves around the classroom for doing it wrong all those years.  

When they finish that exercise then put them half on the job as inside consultants and as teacher to the new staff.

The majority of buildins are being run by broom pushers, amy of whom are not able to understand what they should be doing.  Most are not passionate.  Most do not know.  It is not their fault.  The profession was not well thought of until the current fuel expense and air quality awareness.  It was always there.  management simply didn't realize how important it was.

Now all of a suddeen its a crisis.  Keep those baby boomers, and pay them well.  The old steamheads are dead.  Let's do the best with what we have.

Hi, I'm Stephen Kleva, president and CEO of Insparisk, a national safety inspection company. We manage safety inspection for boilers, elevators, building facades,  and other equipment.

We see the same trend. Finding inspectors can be a big challenge. The current generation of boiler inspectors--many of whom are licensed plumbers with specialty certifications--is aging toward retirement, and  workforce trends show little prospect for their replacement in adequate numbers.

P&C insurers who have traditionally carried out the bulk of the inspections are also finding it increasingly difficult to secure and retain qualified inspectors. Jurisdictions that carry out their own inspections are encountering similar challenges, compounded by the competing demands of limited municipal tax dollars.  

We don’t have a solution for adding new workers, but have found that we can greatly increase the productivity of inspectors through technology. We have developed proprietary technology to make our inspectors as efficient as possible, increase accuracy, add value to the inpsection process, track and manage information on inspections and preventative maintenance activities --all of which leads to data and information that is more easily accessible and more visible and can more easily support decision making.