The summer surge is nearly upon us—is your business ready?
We all know the warmer season is accompanied by an increase in inspection demands. Schools are upgrading while students are away. At the same time, commercial and private properties are finishing projects while the weather is good, and tourist spots are seeking safety reviews before visitors arrive in droves. In other words, there’s much work to be done…if you have the staffing for it.
Our recent Fire & Life Safety Report survey found that staffing is still a primary concern for numerous fire inspection businesses, with 46% of respondents stating it’s difficult to find technicians. That, when paired with a season that can make or break relationships with clients and significantly impact your revenue goals, means staffing needs to be a priority.
If you don’t have enough employees to perform inspections—or the employees you have are exhausted and unsupported—the work slows down. Backlogs, slower processes, and unhappy customers tend to follow.
You don’t want that, and we don’t want that for you. Keep reading for six strategies to keep your fire inspection company cool during the summer surge.
1. ASSESS YOUR CURRENT TEAM
Who do you have, what are their strengths, and where are the gaps? Look at your technicians and any office/administrative/support staff you have working for you. Where, exactly, is work getting bottlenecked? Maybe your technicians are working quickly, but your reliance on paper is slowing down the administrative side. Or perhaps you’ve got a technician with specialized skills who is being assigned work that is not entirely in line with their training.
Finding out exactly where you need to staff up narrows your hiring target range — you’ll be casting a smaller net for more specific employees.
2. HIRE THE RIGHT SUPPORT STAFF
If you have technicians juggling their regular duties and handling a lot of administrative work, it’s time to bring on support staff. Let them handle scheduling, client communication, and any necessary paperwork, freeing up your technicians to perform actual inspections, services, and installations.
Augmenting your support staff may even give technicians time to perform more of their intended work, effectively trimming the summer backlog.
3. LOOK INTO PART-TIME WORKERS
Not every employee needs to be a full-time, 40-hour-a-week worker. Retail and hospitality operations have brought on additional workers for the busy season for decades; there’s no reason fire inspection can’t do the same.
There are a few ways to go about this, including:
- Bring on technicians who specialize in specific types of inspection—by performing those inspections, they’ll effectively free up other technicians to do additional work.
- Bring on technicians who may want more flexibility/fewer hours—maybe they’ve got families to support, or they’re eyeing retirement but aren’t ready to hang up their boots just yet.
- Bring on technicians who are looking to work for a specific season e.g., work during the summer and relax in autumn and winter).
4. PARTNER WITH STAFFING AGENCIES
Advertising, interviewing, and hiring take time and effort that not a lot of fire inspection businesses can afford to spare. Teaming up with a staffing agency can help cut down some of the time and effort associated with hiring. The right one handles the search for you. You’ve still got to interview and make the offer, but a good staffing agency can present qualified candidates who meet your requirements.
5. CREATE A TRAINING PROGRAM
The Fire & Life Safety Report found that 16% of owners state their applicants lack work experience, and a further 13% state they lack skills. In an ideal world, we’d be able to hire well-trained technicians who would get to work right away…but we remain in a serious shortage.
If you want to increase your employee base, you need to be willing to hire inexperienced technicians and train them. Creating a training program frees you to do just that: yes, you’ll be hiring inexperienced, untrained technicians, but you can train them into exactly the employees you want.
And training isn’t only for junior technicians; you can also cross-train existing staff who may have skill gaps, allowing you to spread work more evenly across your operation.
6. FOCUS ON RETENTION
Once you’ve got your A-Team, you want to keep them there, right? Make sure you’re providing the kind of environment people want to work for. Things like:
- Bonuses or other incentive programs during peak season.
- Encouraging your people to take PTO and having the structure in place to back them up when they take time off.
- Workplace perks like snacks, coffee, a nice place to kick back, and so on.
GET AHEAD OF THE SUMMER STAFFING
How can you best support your crew during summer’s intensity? By giving them the kind of platform that will make their work lives much, much easier. Inspect Point streamlines every aspect of fire inspection, from scheduling to creating proposals, performing inspections, invoicing, and even training. When the work process is streamlined, your technicians can get more done, helping you get ahead of the peak season and stay ahead through the rest of the year.
Get your summer started the right way by requesting a demo.
