Maintenance Trends

Welcome to Maintenance Trends

We will be Blogging about Maintenance trends, advice, procedures, etc. We hope you enjoy our BloG topics. We will discuss a wide range of issues and perspectives, and we will muse a wide range of effective considerations that, I believe, many people in our field, if not most, have never stopped to ponder. Our initial post may be comprehensive, so let’s get going.

The most important part of any maintenance program, for hotels especially, may not be what you think it is. You may think it is the Service Technician, who actually performs much of the work. You may think it is a Lead Technician: the more skilled Technician who performs the more technically challenging assignments. You might believe it is the Chief Engineer, who ties together budget, assignments and staff members and oversees the operation. You may think the most important part of a maintenance program is an Area Chief Engineer, or District Manager. You might believe it to be the budget, or the FTE allowance. These are all good guesses, but there is no more important element of any maintenance program than the General Manager.

Clearly, this cannot be true, you may ask.

I will conclude that this is indeed true and will ask you to consider the following:

Hopefully, a percentage of people reading this are General Managers (GM’s, or GM). The GM’s participation, or lack thereof, in the maintenance program, from a perspective of knowledge and understanding, is paramount.

Oftentimes, the GM does the hiring of the Chief Engineer, and also has input, if not total control of the Maintenance Technician(s) and Maintenance Assistants as well. The GM’s ability to select effective staff is the starting point of all things, both good, and bad.

We will, in future issues, have hiring tips, but for now, we will assume that the staff are already in place and that the hotel is up and running.

The GM must ensure that the Maintenance staff understand and apply, certain principles and understandings, and that they are aware of legal regulatory obligations concerning a host of issues. Many GM’s may not be aware of these needs and rely on their Chief Engineer to guide the property through the maze of issues in these areas. This can be very troublesome. As Maintenance staff positions turn over and new staff come on board, a myriad of things can get lost in the change.

To make matters worse, more often than not, Chief Engineers are not consistent in their knowledge or abilities and one can find out down the road that important issues have been missed or have fallen through the cracks.

The difference in the quality of knowledge and application leads to a difference in hotel presentation. Changing of these positions almost always lead to at least a temporary, but sometimes long-term decline in Customer Service, room readiness, curb appeal, Preventive Maintenance (PM) program, Guest Satisfaction Survey (GSS) scores, and an overall decline in the property. If the staff changes become too frequent or too many, the entire program can fall apart.

When this happens, ownership looks to the GM for answers. A wise GM will take steps to ensure that important scheduling and protocol information is not lost in staff transitions. This can be tedious and time consuming, but it doesn’t have to be.

We will review, in brief overview form, basic outlines that can help a GM get on track and stay on track in the shortest, least possible timeline.

1. Have your Chief Engineer show you on paper, the complete PM program. This should include a complete listing of all rooms, areas (kitchen, dining, pool, shop, lobby, meeting rooms, roofs etc.) and mechanical PM, which should include a complete accounting of all HVAC, inside and out. There should be an outside unit for each inside unit (unless you have a multi-spilt system, such as a Mitsubishi, in which case, you would need to know which inside units were run off of which outside pads. At this time, Mitsubishi base can run up to 16 inside duct mini splits), boilers and when they are due for licensing, ice machines, back flow devices, sprinkler systems, alarm systems, commercial washing machines and dryers, elevator information etc.

 

2. You will need to see documented scheduling of each of the above items, and more, if you have additional items to be managed)

 

3. You will need to see a running documented history of when each of these items have been done over the last 5 quarters.

 

4. You will need to see customized PM sheets for your specific rooms and equipment.

 

5. You will need to ensure that staff have been, and are, keeping up with pool and spa checks and that they are competent in this area. Pool check logs need to be kept for 2 years in Oregon, for example, and should be protected from loss. In Oregon, spas need to be checked every 2 hours for PH and chlorine and the pool needs to be checked every 4 hours for Chlorine. There are also parameters that need to be checked daily, weekly and monthly. I make a habit of checking a tests once daily, and do the chlorine tests on pool and spa every 2 hours, as I am already there, and the spa PH check every 2 hours as well.

 

6. Your Chief Engineer should be keeping track of parts and supply orders. I make a spreadsheet in Excel and list items as I buy them. I put down the supplier (HD Supply is the best as it can be done on-line and you can set up so you can create an on-line list, including order numbers, that you use frequently. The spreadsheet should have the stock amount you desire, description of the item (ballast, battery etc.), supplier and order number. If your Maintenance staff are binge shopping for supplies it shows that they are ill prepared or simply bored and are looking to get off-site.

 

7. You, as a GM, must be accountable for your staff’s time. When your staff are not invested in their time management, it squanders precious resources and when the bottom line gets down to discussion, it is you, who must explain budget overruns. But how can you manage your staff’s time without spending all of your time chasing after them? See below (#8 – Parkinson’s Law and #9 Pareto’s Law)

 

8. Parkinson’s Law: Parkinson’s law is the adage that “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion”. As simple as this statement is, it may be beneficial to boil it down to what it means to us who oversee Maintenance Personnel. Basically, this means that any assignment you give your staff will take exactly as long to complete as the sum of the time you give them. Give them a 2-hour task and ask it to be done by the end of the day: it will be done by the end of the day, but not much, if anything additional will. Conversely, Horstman’s corollary to Parkinson’s Law: Work contracts to fit in the time we give it, expresses the other side of the coin. Therefore, it is better to give assignments; especially repetitive assignments, general timelines as a rule of thumb. Room PM’s are a perfect example. On your PM sheet, make room for a start and stop time for the room PM to be completed. You must insist these be filled out accurately.

As a GM, you must know, and be accurate yourself, in general timelines it should take to do this work. If you don’t know, that’s okay. You can find out by taking your best Technician (Probably your Chief Engineer) and set up a room to be PM’d. You needn’t inform him ahead of time concerning this. Tell him that you are doing some QA work and ask him to get his PM cart, or tools/supplies and take him to the room.

Most cell phones have a stop watch. At the door, start the stop watch and ask him to PM the room. We will discuss a complete list of tasks this will require at another time.

Take notes. What is he doing? Change to a new paragraph each time he changes what he is working on. Don’t have him take on extensive time consuming issues on this particular PM. If you can’t keep up with writing notes, consider using a voice recorder in your phone to document the steps. Have him write any work that will take longer than 15-minutes, or that he isn’t technical enough to complete or doesn’t currently have the supplies in-house, on the back of the PM sheet. You will put this into your work order system. This way you can more uniformly project completion times between staff members. This should be surprisingly fast. For a 400 to 450 sq. ft. room with one batch and no kitchen, this will probably take 15 to 45 minutes.

Have you least skilled Technician do the same thing in a different room. You should notice the same PM procedure. If you do not, base staff members have not been trained, or have not been trained correctly. This is a standard task and the assignment should be easily interchangeable between Technicians. When the room is done, note the time. The timeline between completion of the room PM’s will be the variance between time that you will allow for this task.

Therefore, if one employee performed the work in 24 minutes and the other staff completed it in 50 minutes, you can expect that your standard timelines for this work is around between 25 and 50 minutes if the state of the rooms, and of the work to be done, are similar. Typically, minus any painting or more time consuming issues, a PM should take 20 minutes to a half-hour. If some staff members have woefully extended timelines on this task, say; an hour, you have found a source of trouble. This increased time is injuring your budget. Make no mistake about this: time lost in unproductive applications or squandered with incompetence or lack of accomplishment can be a threat to your own position. Every District Manager or owner can see the lost dollar value in poorly spent time. Maintenance and upkeep is an expensive item and the powers that be want your staff to demonstrate efficiency, effectiveness, cost control of time and effort and a work effort that is saving them money. Your staff members should be mostly equal regarding time spent on most issues and the quality of the issues done.

If your staff need to run back and forth for supplies or tools, they are not well thought out and will need to review their needs more thoroughly and set up their carts with sufficient necessities.

Ensure they always fill out their start and stop times and your first task in having Parkinson’s Law help you work on your team’s efficacy is done. You may find hesitance on your staff’s part to do this. This is not a difficult task. It takes some minor practice to make sure the time is documented and documented correctly. If you have staff members who simply cannot seem to manage this simple request, you will need to be more direct with your demand. You may find that staff who refuse to complete the time in/out portion of the PM sheet may be your least productive and may be protecting their lack of accomplishment(s) by simply not filling the requested timelines for the work done. Without this information your ability to evaluate if they are working or doing something else is handicapped and you should know that when certain employees will not document their work time, it is often that they cannot document it because the missing time reflects missing production. You must get your staff on-board here and develop a uniform timeline for most of the general work that they will be doing. You will then assign ballpark timeline assignments for these task based upon your findings. You can (and should) do this will every task in each department you can think of.

9. Pareto’s Principle (Law): The 80/20 rule. Also known as the law of the vital few, dictates that in many events, roughly 80% of effect come from 20% of cause. Other ways of looking at this are; 20% of your staff take 80% of your management time; It take 80% of your staff’s time to perform 20% of the work, and, in 20% of their time, they produce 80% of their work. 20% of your staff come up with 80% of your solutions. Pareto noticed this when, upon observing his garden, he found that 20% of the pea plants in his garden produced 80% of his peas. When this thought was extrapolated to other considerations, it was found to be true in wealth distribution, economics, and even in natural world facts.

If you look at this proposal from a position of interest, you will observe that you have some “Rock Stars”, on your team who out perform their peers. The challenge is to investigate and find out what qualities make 20% of your people so superior and to see if those qualities can be assimilated by the other 80%, or taught through in-servicing perspectives. When you use Parkinson’s Law (short and precise timeline assignments) along with Pareto’s Principle (80/20 rule: direct the best people to perform higher levels and cutback, or reassign ineffective staff, you will see amazing results.

10. New Overtime Rules. New overtimes rules are scheduled to take effect December 1, 2016. That will increase the annual wages for salaried exempt employees from $23,600.00 to $47,476.00. Is your hotel ready for that change? Currently Overtime hours are mostly absorbed by salaried staff members, who often do not actually fit into the salaried exempt requirements. These are the staff members who work longer shifts, day and hours to fill in for sick, absent, late staff, or for terminations, vacations etc. Your salaried staff are set to get a big raise. Make sure they are up to carrying the load for you.

Some companies are terminating their baseline salaried staff members and finding better options by replacing their Chief Engineer or having him/her take on more than one property, or moving up a good maintenance tech, but keeping him hourly, and replacing the planning and scheduling and organizing with an out of house company to help with such things are PM scheduling, organizing, Mechanical documenting and maintenance scheduling etc. The savings can be substantial by replacing a minimum of $47,476.00 a year for a Chief Engineer, with a $2.00 increase ($4,160) for a lead Tech and approximately an additional $6,000.00 to $7,000.00 a year for a Management Service for these tasks. Savings? A minimum of $36,316.00 along with an increase of productivity.

Life isn’t so bad in the hotel business after all, is it?

Until next time,

Best Wishes,

Maintenance Trends