Measuring the Performance of Electrical Maintenance Workers
It’s difficult to accurately measure the performance of maintenance workers because there are so many variables. Consider what happens if you reduce performance measurement to merely counting completed PMs or completed repair jobs. You’ll reward those who do subpar work because they will take shortcuts to rack up completion points. But if you grade people based on thoroughness, you reward people for being inefficient and performing unnecessary steps.
Why measure performance in the first place? There’s an adage, “You cannot improve what you cannot measure.” One way some systems get around this is they grade the entire maintenance crew for a given plant area or building on a given shift, then every member of that crew receives the same grade. This doesn’t address individual performance or give useful feedback to any particular employee — and it can cause some people to engage in free rider behavior. You must hold individuals accountable.
Many companies have a standard employee appraisal form, but it is a standard form, which means it’s generic and not designed for evaluating the performance of maintenance individuals. You may still have to use it for company HR purposes, but that doesn’t mean you can’t also use something else.
Obviously, you can’t hook a DMM to a maintenance worker and get a performance readout on a display. Any performance measurement is going to be far from granular. It’s meaningless to give Roger a score of 95 on PM performance and give Rick a score of 93. Such scores pretend there’s accuracy in a system that depends on subjective evaluation.
The grading scale needs to be simple with broad ranges instead of precise numbers. For example:
- Not acceptable
- Needs improvement
- Satisfactory
- Very good
- Excellent
You also need to limit it to a few metrics, so that people can easily see what’s important. Decide on a few key areas, and explain that supervisors will also be looking at other aspects of performance, but these are the ones that are measured regularly. Suggested areas:
- Safety
- Efficiency
- Thoroughness
- Workmanship
- Work quality
And unlike the annual performance appraisal, which is not particularly useful to the employee who went a whole year without getting performance feedback, this system should be used continually. The point isn’t to give people a score at the end of the year; it’s to help them improve their performance. Remember that adage? You want maintenance workers to be continually improving, so you need to be continually measuring their performance. You may help them by advising them how to improve their performance. The feedback needs to go both ways, so that management can address performance barriers that employees identify.
Here’s an example of how it works. If Miguel got low marks on workmanship because he leaves scrap material behind to boost his efficiency, his supervisor can use this system to help him better balance the two metrics. Miguel might not have understood how to efficiently clean up, and his supervisor can show him some tricks of the trade to making that process take less time. Or maybe Miguel doesn’t pick up the scrap because he doesn’t have the means to safely cart it out of the area and dispose of it properly; management needs to address this performance barrier.
People respond much better to simple goals they can readily achieve than to complex layers of idealized metrics that are collectively designed to make them fail. If they fall short today, the supervisor can provide assistance (coaching, formal training, OJT, etc.), so that in the near future, they perform at the next level up. This raises not just performance but also the sense of job satisfaction that makes people look forward to coming to work — even if it is a tough job like maintenance.
