Your maintenance staff is a precious resource in keeping your facility afloat. Without them, your operations will quickly deteriorate as equipment and machinery fall short of performance standards. Your maintenance staff also ensures that your facility is a safe and clean place for employees to work, and a pleasant place for tenants or customers to visit. They are an integral part to your success.
Despite the importance of maintenance in the workplace, these hard-working individuals are often left out of the conversation until an emergency arises. This sets a poor precedent, as your maintenance staff can’t help you succeed to their fullest potential if you do not include them in your day-to-day operations. A lack of preventative maintenance and communication with the staff leads to detrimental equipment errors.
Mistakes only become disasters when they are either swept under the rug or miscommunicated. When an under reactor or overreaction occurs, it can lead to breakdowns in equipment or in trust among the staff. And when communication breaks down, the blame game begins.
Rather than blaming staff for failing to report warning signs of equipment malfunction, or blaming the maintenance team for failing to spot them, you should facilitate communication between the two. When your onsite staff and outsourced maintenance team can work together, you can improve performance and outputs to a scalable degree. Here’s how:
Set goals. When your facility is in reactive maintenance mode, the primary goal is to push equipment at maximum performance output until it breaks down. There is no maintenance goal, other than fixing breakdowns as quickly and efficiently as possible once they occur. However, you can operate your facility more sustainably by implementing preventative maintenance service. Communicate clear performance goals with your maintenance staff, and they can develop a preventative maintenance plan to achieve those objectives.
Cooperate, don’t criticize. Criticism has its place in business, there’s no doubt. However, criticism of work can quickly turn into criticism of character if not kept in check. If you have issues with the quality of service with your maintenance staff, the first step should be to reach out and ask for a meeting. As your maintenance staff is not onsite all of the time, the disappointment may be due to a misunderstanding rather than a failure to perform quality service. Before you accuse, ask your maintenance staff to help you come up with more clear expectations and solutions to the issue you face.
Learn from mistakes. Preventative maintenance service only gets better with time. As your maintenance team learns about your facility needs, they can adjust your maintenance schedule for more efficient and cost-effective procedures. You both can learn from maintenance mistakes made in the past, and develop a stronger plan to prevent equipment failures in the future.
These changes of mindset can help you and your MaintenX team work together to meet facility goals. Contact us to learn more about our preventative and emergency maintenance services.
