Back to blog 01/24/2022

How Outsourced Facilities Maintenance Turnover Can Impact Your Business

Contributed by Christopher Payne Regional Sales Executive

The Importance of Selecting a Facilities Maintenance Partner with High Employee Retention

Employee turnover, in industries like facilities maintenance services, has always been a challenge and is usually over the average rate of 200 percent. These service providers are required to manage a host of difficulties associated with employee turnover including high administrative cost of new hires, increased training costs, inconsistent on-site performance, reduced profitability, to name a few. To put this into perspective, consistently high turnover for facilities maintenance service providers is expensive, but it can also cost customers on different levels.

With new employees frequently joining and leaving the facilities maintenance service provider, customers are likely to experience several service related issues include:

• Inconsistent Service Delivery – New personnel can bring both, challenges and opportunities for the service provider. Sometimes the skills and talent of new employees can lead to improvement in service quality but in most other situations, customers experience insufficient performance standards.
• Unreliable Performance – Customers can also bear the brunt of facilities maintenance turnover with the new personnel leaving out some of the assigned duties, using inadequate supplies and chemicals, and causing workplace safety hazards. As a result, the customer facility may not be cleaned and maintained according to the contract and scope of work.
• Insufficient Training – Low employee retention makes it difficult to achieve consistency and stability in service output due to the high costs of employee training. While numerous facilities maintenance companies have designed ample training programs to deliver outstanding performance, these programs deliver insufficient results with a high turnover. Consequently, not having a clear understanding of customer expectations and scope of work leads to poor service delivery for the customer.
• Increased Safety Hazards – Environmental health and safety training is critical to ensure facilities maintenance employees are able to protect themselves as well as the people around them. The stringent workplace safety practices ensure mitigating various risks including workplace injuries like trips and falls among many others. However, high employee turnover results in less time and resources for the service provider to ensure all new employees are thoroughly trained to work with exceptional service quality and safety standards.

Diversified Maintenance focuses on implementing effective recruitment and employee retention strategies that have resulted in maintaining turnover rates at less than half of the industry average. The Company offers well-designed employee training and development programs along with a variety of performance rewards, employee recognition, and incentives programs. While fostering a positive learning environment, dedicated team of managers use various hiring sources and channels to access the right pool of candidates. To learn more about the benefits of partnering with a facilities maintenance company that works with a proactive approach to resolve turnover challenges and ensure high retention rate, send me a note at: Chris Payne cpayne@diversifiedm.com.