10 Effective Strategies for Reducing Turnover on Maintenance Teams

Supporting the Team That Keeps Your Organization Running: How To Reduce Turnover in Maintenance

Your maintenance team can be the heart and soul of your company. But if they’re working in an environment that is inefficient, conducive to burnout, and stuck in the 20th century, some maintenance employees may not be around for long. 

You know you can’t keep your assets running without maintenance workers, and slowdowns in work hurt productivity, leading to more downtime and lost revenue. So what can you do to reduce turnover in maintenance?

We’ll discuss factors that contribute to a high turnover rate in maintenance, things you can do to reduce this, and which CMMS software has the best options for implementing your plan. 

Table of Contents

• Factors That Contribute to a High Turnover Rate in Maintenance

• 10 Tips on How To Reduce Turnover in Maintenance Teams

• An Elevated CMMS: Strengthen Your Maintenance Team With an Asset Operations Management (AOM) Platform

Factors That Contribute to a High Turnover Rate in Maintenance

There may be many factors contributing to a high turnover rate in the maintenance department of any given company. These include:

• Compensation that isn’t competitive with other businesses in the industry

• Poor work environment

• An aging workforce

• Situations that aren’t conducive to a good work/life balance

• Problematic relationships with management

• And more

These kinds of issues cause a high rate of both absenteeism and turnover among maintenance workers. The Association for Manufacturing Excellence reports absenteeism and turnover rates of 37%, which is extremely high — especially compared to a rate of 3.5% across all other industries. 

What Impact Does High Maintenance Turnover Have on an Organization?

High maintenance turnover can be devastating to an organization. One of the biggest effects may be when long-term employees leave and take all their knowledge with them. This forces employers to hire new workers, often with less experience, and spend lots of time and money training them to do the job.

Consider the following statistics:

• It may cost 50% of an employee’s annual salary to replace them.

• On average, it takes companies 44 days to fill an open position.

Being short-staffed also affects the team’s ability to keep up with maintenance — both scheduled and unscheduled. And this can affect a company’s bottom line. Overall, you may see more downtime and less production, leading to lost revenue.

10 Tips on How To Reduce Turnover in Maintenance Teams

Reducing turnover in your maintenance crew can be tricky, but the following tips can help. To make implementing these tips seamless for your team, you can use UpKeep’s CMMS software.

Request a demo to see if our system is right for you.

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#1: View Maintenance as a Strategic Area of Your Organization

In some companies, a maintenance crew is often invisible or forgotten until something isn’t working properly. 

But maintenance teams aren’t just hanging around waiting for something to break. If you view them that way, technicians may feel like their work isn’t valued. This can cause frustration and lead to higher turnover. 

Creating a positive culture around your maintenance team’s efforts will go a long way toward improving morale. Make sure everyone is aware of their performance, including:

• Number of work orders completed

• Number of assets repaired

• How many hours of downtime were prevented

When your maintenance crew sees that you understand how important they are to your organization, they are more likely to stick around.

#2: Create an Environment That Supports Communication

Maintenance technicians should feel like their supervisors hear them and value their input. After all, the company couldn’t run properly without their services.

Let your team know that you’re open to their suggestions and want to know what their expectations are. This may be related to anything from workload to resources to division of labor.

When you give your maintenance team feedback and are welcome to receive theirs, you help create a positive environment for your employees, giving them a sense of well-being that can reduce turnover.

#3: Standardize Your Processes

If your team is constantly changing due to turnover, it may be difficult to get the same maintenance results repeatedly. But we know that consistency is crucial to keep things running smoothly.

When you standardize your processes, you don’t have to rely on one person who has all the information (and may no longer be with the company). This could look like:

• Creating checklists for regularly scheduled maintenance

• Creating an asset management policy

• Having standardized reports for each maintenance step

When everyone in the organization is on the same page and working together toward goals, maintenance employees won’t be as frustrated and may be less likely to quit.

#4: Digitize All Documents

Let’s say Jacob has been maintaining the same pieces of your equipment for years and knows them like the back of his hand. If he suddenly leaves your organization, this knowledge could be lost — and you’ll have to start from the beginning.

Making all your asset records digital means that anyone should be able to step in and learn new processes, performing maintenance operations without the headache of trial and error.

It is reported that ineffective training can cost companies upwards of $13.5 million per 1000 employees each year. Digitization can help cut these costs dramatically. 

#5: Make Safety a Priority

There aren’t many people jumping at the chance to go to a job where their lives are literally in danger. But if you aren’t ensuring that the proper safety protocols are put in place and followed, this is what it could lead to.

The importance of safety trickles down from the top, so make sure that training is priority one. You can also use technology to make the work environment safer. This may include things like:

• Probes

• Sensors

• Robots

A Gallup poll about this issue suggests that highly engaged employees lead to a safer workplace overall, so following all the tips on this list can help make safety a priority.

#6: Provide the Right Tools and Equipment for the Jobs at Hand

Maintenance teams can’t be expected to do the important job of keeping assets functioning optimally with outdated tools and equipment. And they’ll probably also resent you for not giving them what they need to be successful, which is likely to lead to higher turnover rates.

Earlier, we discussed the importance of communication between maintenance teams, management, and owners. Part of that open communication should asking workers what they need and taking suggestions for purchases of new tools and equipment.

When maintenance teams have buy-in and know their voices are being heard, they’ll want to do their best with what they’re given.

#7: Foster the Next Generation

Many maintenance employees are aging out of the industry. To keep the workforce strong, you have to support younger people on maintenance teams. 

One way you can do this is with continuous training. Maintenance crews should not be considered “one and done” when it comes to training. As your industry and technologies are constantly changing, regular training is required to keep up with implementation, learning new skills, and more.

Having the right technology at your disposal can help everyone be on the same page. 

UpKeep CMMS has been voted the #1 software for maintenance and reliability teams. Using an important tool like this can help the next generation of maintenance workers step into place seamlessly.

#8: Strike a Balance Between Supervision and Autonomy

People need to know they can ask questions and have support when they need it, but no one likes to be micromanaged. Giving your maintenance team members autonomy in their work shows that you have confidence in them and aren’t interested in authoritarian leadership.

Employees who feel more freedom to complete their work in the way that works best for them while fitting within the expected framework are more likely to stay at your company.

#9: Minimize Administrative Tasks

Filling out paperwork and completing documentation isn’t how most people want to spend their time, and it isn’t properly utilizing the talents of your maintenance team members. If you can find ways to minimize this — say, through automation or software — you’ll give your workers more time to do what they love, decreasing burnout and lowering turnover rates.

#10: Utilize the Right Software

A computerized maintenance management system (CMMS) software is essential to enhancing your maintenance operations. Modern teams have come to rely on UpKeep’s easy-to-use mobile solutions to help them:

• Streamline maintenance operations

• Optimize assets

• Get real-time performance data

• And more

If you’d like to let us show you how UpKeep can strengthen your team and reduce turnover in maintenance, request a demo today.

Request a Demo

An Elevated CMMS: Strengthen Your Maintenance Team With an Asset Operations Management (AOM) Platform

UpKeep has tons of user-friendly features that will enhance your operations. Here are a few that we think are particularly important to employers interested in reducing turnover.

Preventive Maintenance Program

Maintenance professionals are the heart and soul of keeping your organization running the way it should. They don’t need to be delivering checklists one by one and chasing down team members to ensure that work has been completed.

UpKeep’s preventive maintenance program gives you tools to automate tasks such as:

• Scheduling equipment maintenance

• Creating alerts about inventory levels

• Tracking costs

• Repeating work orders at a set duration

• Creating automated preventive maintenance checklists

PM tools can help maintenance teams be more productive and efficient. Giving your employees a CMMS to make their job easier makes it likely that they will be more satisfied and you’ll see less turnover.

Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) Capabilities

Ditch the paperwork and make data-driven decisions with UpKeep’s EAM functionality. This centralized, company-wide intelligence can help asset management teams easily track:

• Maintenance updates

• Warranties

• Depreciation

• Asset decommissions

• And more

Not having to spend hours of their day completing paperwork or trying to hunt down important information can save maintenance team members time and reduce burnout.

Mobile-First Design

Maintenance teams are often on the go. CMMS software solutions that provide limited accessibility — for instance, installed on one or two computers back at the office — aren’t going to be helpful to them.

UpKeep’s modern CMMS software was created with mobile users in mind. It helps teams easily track, access, and manage all maintenance activities no matter where they are. Your maintenance employees will be happy to stay with your company when you give them what they need to make their jobs easier — and they can access it right from their pockets.

Contact us and try UpKeep’s mobile app for free today!