We live in a fairly remote area. The economy doesn’t support great salaries. We have found that majority of talented and experienced maintenance people, as well as many other trades, leave the area for better paying jobs elsewhere. Having this issue really makes getting talented people, for what our company was willing to pay, was difficult. I have pushed to expand our salary cap to help alleviate this issue. Now that we have done that, I have been able to hire one full time tech, and given him a decent raise after 90 days, as well as a good part time tech. With being a start up company, they had never dealt with the need to pay for experience and talent on the level we need. Now we have found that being more particular on who we hire, we can afford to pay more for that talent. It costs more, but it also gives us the opportunity to have teammates that can complete work in a more timely manner with greater level  of quality work. This in the end is cheaper. I’ve never been one to believe throwing money at a problem can solve anything, but in this case it makes the cure a lot easier to come by.

With us being small team labor shortage doesn’t really effect us thankfully.  We have a core team of four maintenance workers who have all been on staff for a long time.  We actually used to have one more but realized we didn’t need to refill that position after he left because of how efficient the rest of the team is and how well the department was being managed.  

What I can speak on is how important it is to retain skilled workers like we have if you’re able to find them.  There really isn’t a specific strategy we implement for retaining workers other than treating them right and with respect and providing yearly raises.  If there are ever issues, we talk about it and work them out as soon as possible.  We try to be accommodating but at the same time not be push overs.  Ultimately, we find our workers seem to find our work environment preferable to other competition in the area so it’s mutually beneficial in the end. 

I have seen how difficult it is to hire though as we had to hire for a front desk position recently and that was quite a challenge.  Eventually, we found ourselves having to increase the advertised wage and offer earlier paid time off incentives in order to get quality candidates.  

we continue to struggle with resources. We typically try to attract talent from those looking for a training and career path. We offer various skill levels the opportunity to train at each level for 2-4 years prior to moving up. The struggle for us is that we have a vast array of equipment. We try to focus on fundamentals to cross train maintenance on all of our equipment. Once we find good talent we have a long retention, but getting individuals in the door is a struggle for us. Creating procedures is something that we hope to be a tool to help us attract and retain new maintenance individuals moving forward.