It’s the middle of the busy season, and your team is feeling the strain. Work requests are coming in, equipment issues are disrupting schedules, and tasks keep piling up.
You’ve been through this chaos before…but want to go through it better this time.
You know days will be hectic. Things will break down at the worst possible time. A steady stream of summer events adds even more to your plate. And you’re still trying to fill two open positions for seasonal help.
But how can you handle all these obstacles while keeping your team focused?
In this article, get some tips and insights into managing your team during the busy season and beyond.
Organize and Prioritize
While you don’t want the mountain of deferred maintenance to keep growing, you need to be realistic about what your team can achieve during their shifts.
Take inventory of the tasks that need to be completed. Find the organization method that works best for you. For example, you can separate recurring work into daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly tasks.
Next, prioritize each task. You can use a system of numbers, colors, or words–whatever gives your team a clear understanding of what absolutely needs to be done, what should be done, and what can be put off if necessary.
Once you have the tasks and priorities plotted out, it may be easier to discover ways to be more efficient.
Stress Preventative Maintenance
It may seem like adding preventative maintenance tasks to an already busy day will increase the overwhelm. Ensuring your equipment operates at its best helps prevent breakdowns when they are needed most.
Staff spending 15 minutes on an inspection or PM task can save hours of schedule disruption by preventing a breakdown.
Find time each shift to delegate some PM tasks to your staff. The little extra time spent can minimize breakdowns and help staff stick to their schedules.
Evaluate Your Staff & Staffing Assignments
It’s no secret: staff work differently. Some you can rely on to make good decisions and be efficient. Others, well, need a little more guidance and supervision. Even among your better-performing workers, there are some tasks they probably do better than others.
For example, one staff may mow like a pro, but when it comes to painting a room, there is not enough painter's tape in the storage locker to catch the excess paint drips.
Are you assigning tasks or creating crews based on your team’s individual strengths and weaknesses?
For example, are you pairing new or seasonal staff with some of your more “trustworthy” crew? Doing so helps staff learn the ropes correctly and sets the stage for employee culture.
A few strategic staff changes may improve efficiency and get more work done each shift.
Understand Your Workflows
It also helps to understand how long tasks take and whether there is any variation among the staff. If one mowing crew can complete a route in 4 hours, but it takes the other crew just under 5 hours, you may want to investigate why.
Chances are both crews are doing the job well, but they are doing it differently. Developing standard operating procedures (SOPs) for routine tasks will help ensure staff completes them most efficiently. Create SOPs so technicians with minimal skills and training can easily understand and complete the tasks.
Once the SOPs are created, start tracking the time it takes to complete the task. Then, calculate the average time it takes to complete the task or series of tasks. Use the results to help modify scheduling.
Collecting this data may be difficult during the busy season, but if you use computerized maintenance management software, it is automatically collected and ready to be analyzed to develop task standards.
Avoid Multitasking
While it seems like multitasking will get more work done quicker, this is often not the case. Research shows that our brains aren’t wired for multitasking. Focusing on multiple tasks at a time can reduce attention and performance and may cause more time-consuming errors.
Allow your staff to focus on one task at a time and to do it well. The increased focus may allow them to get the work done sooner.
Keep Communication Open
Does your team have a clear, efficient way to communicate with each other? A way to quickly communicate issues, report problems, and record progress?
Communication could be challenging in a park maintenance setting. After all, getting in touch with someone isn’t as easy as walking to the office down the hall. Your staff is spread out among multiple parks and facilities throughout your area.
Evaluate how your team communicates schedule changes, issues that need attention, and other situations that require timely responses.
Sometimes, a call or text isn’t enough to communicate what needs to be done. You may have to attach instructions, GIS locations, or photos. What methods do you have in place to quickly share this information to help get tasks completed faster?
Remove Inefficiencies
Are there time-consuming things that you or your team are doing because, well, that’s the way they have always been done?
Are there processes or administrative tasks that seem more like formalities than productive uses of time? Maybe it is how work requests are created, inspections are filed, or inventory is tracked.
During the busy season, there may be too much going on to evaluate all the processes that can be trimmed. But if you notice some procedures that seem to take more time than they’re worth, make a note to review them with your team.
Use Technology to Help
Technology exists to make your job easier and team more efficient. A CMMS can help you automatically schedule inspections and preventative maintenance tasks. It also gives you a standard platform for creating work requests and automatic work orders when an inspection line item gets marked as unsatisfactory. You can communicate with staff and attach files related to tasks or assets for easy viewing.
Once the busy season is complete, you will have the data you need to make decisions on how to prepare for next year.
The Takeaway
There’s no denying this is the time of year when most parks and recreation agencies are at their busiest. Managing staff and workflows is challenging, to say the least. Luckily, there are some things you and your team can do to help organize the chaos. Change may not always be easy, but when the team starts seeing the benefits from it, adopting better practices and new ways of doing things can make the busy season much less stressful.