How to Measure Home Services Technician Efficiency
Owners and managers of residential HVAC, plumbing and electrical contracting companies typically fall into one of two mindsets when it comes to measuring the efficiency of their technicians:
- “My techs are busy all day, so they must be efficient,” or
- “My techs are busy, but they aren’t making money. We need more jobs and more workers.”
Both are reasonable assumptions to make. But, as Tim McGuire of Pointman explains, both are harming your business, and here’s why: Being busy and being efficient are not the same thing.
Defining Technician Efficiency
If you bombard your techs with back-to-back visits, they’re keeping busy, but they’re not necessarily being efficient. If they aren’t producing the results you’re looking for, then the process is costing more time, money and energy than you can afford.
- Is the work being dispatched a match with my technician’s skill level?
- Does training need to be revisited or restructured?
- Have proper expectations been set so that a tech knows to move on to new tasks?
How to Use a Technician Efficiency Report
A technician efficiency report compares the time it takes a particular technician to complete a visit with the time it should take a tech to complete each visit. This “expected” time is called your total billable hours. Think of it as the time it would take an average tech — not necessarily the best tech — to perform a task.
To calculate how efficient a tech was on a specific job (for example, a capacitor replacement or a tune up):
- Take the total billable hours for the tasks performed (again, the time you expect it to take) and divide it by the actual time at the site.
- Multiply that number by 100 to get a percentage.
- That percentage is your tech efficiency rating for that particular visit.
If your tech took less time than expected, your efficiency rating will be over 100 percent. But if the tech took longer than expected, your efficiency rating will be under 100 percent. It’ll never be perfect, but ideally, you want to shoot for an efficiency rating between 75% to 150%.
Time to Talk Tech Efficiency
Where did your tech end up on the jobs you reviewed? Is he or she humming along between 75% to 150%, and deserving of a reward for contributing to the longevity of your business? Or clocking in around 50% efficiency, and perhaps in need of additional training or adjustments to certain workday habits?
Before taking any action on what you find in your tech efficiency reports, it is essential that you have an upfront conversation with your techs (no matter the skill level) about your billable hour expectations. You don’t want them rushing through each visit, but you don’t want them spending too much time on each visit, either. And you want them to feel like they know what they should be shooting for.
Flat Rates, Price Books and the Billable Hour
Whether you’re building your own price book or using one from a third party, tasks have to be thought of in terms of billable hours. It may seem contradictory, but even when you’re using flat-rate pricing, billable hours still come into play — you have to know how many hours a task should take so you can set expectations with your team and with your customers.
Use Our Free, Printable Tech Efficiency Worksheets
To make the efficiency analysis much easier, we’ve created a handy Technician Efficiency Report Worksheet and included it in our latest workbook, “Improving Time Efficiency: Tools and Tips to Help You Lead Your Team.” Here you’ll find a ready-to-use worksheet (feel free to print off as many as you’d like), along with several other practical tips to help you get your team running more smoothly and more efficiently.
