One of the toughest areas for any business can be employee retention and staffing. In the best of circumstances, employees can feel unappreciated or underpaid for their skill level. For some, the challenge of feeling unqualified to complete tasks given them because of lack of education or training can be enough to send them to the unemployment lines. And when it comes to the restoration industry, throw in some unique challenges like long days, after hours call out, hurricanes, and sewer backups, and let’s just say the struggle can be real!
In our industry, you have upper management, supervisors, administrators, and what I like to call the front line. The front line employees are the ones who handle sometimes not-so-pretty stuff. Things like fire cleaning, demo, water extraction and mitigation, pack-outs, after-hours emergency board-ups, removing sewage from a bathroom floor, and decontaminating a crawl space. This is also the area where staffing and retention seem to be the most difficult, and it’s no wonder. The above work conditions that I just mentioned are not exactly ideal.