Most technicians see overtime as a good thing.
They get more pay.
They get more time to finish the job.
And they get to show how diligent they are at work.
The downside is the stress of working more hours. But to some people, that stress is worth the extra pay.
I get it.
I’ve had my fair share of overtime back in the day.
But the truth is, for your organisation, overtime is more EVIL than you might think.
Here’s why.
If you’re working in a reactive maintenance environment, chances are you have an excessive backlog of work.
It’s either you have way more work than you have resources for… or you’re not productive enough.
And often it’s a combination of both.
Now…
Normally, companies cope with this backlog by increasing overtime and in doing so, they increase their capacity to get work done.
Your technicians are happy because they get to take home more pay.
As a result, they are motivated to put in more overtime hours. And they’re not motivated to be more efficient.
Here’s where things go wrong.
If you pay lots of overtime for a long period of time, there will be a huge financial incentive NOT to improve your working conditions.
Your technicians want to keep the reactive culture because they can earn more money this way.
And the longer that persists, the harder it is to break away from it.
Eventually, you will encounter resistance when implementing improvements that reduce overtime (like planning & scheduling).
It becomes a vicious cycle that’s very difficult to escape from. Reactive maintenance results in more overtime. And overtime encourages a reactive maintenance culture.
If you’re a manager, you need to make sure that it doesn’t get to this point.
If you want to solve your backlog problems WITHOUT relying too much on overtime, then the first thing you need to do is increase your productivity.
That means eliminating waste from your maintenance process.
And the first step towards that goal is effectively implementing Maintenance Planning & Scheduling.
If you want to learn how to effectively implement Maintenance Planning & Scheduling for your organisation so you can stop relying on overtime, then you can check out our online course using the link below.
If you are already stuck in the reactive world with plenty of overtime, not all is lost. Implementing Maintenance Planning & Scheduling is still the way to go.
You just need to make sure you build a strong case for change to convince your organisation and your technicians that this change will be for the better in the long run.
And that is where the final course module on implementing planning and scheduling comes into play.
