enx magazine

and starts driving home at 4:30 is stealing over $1500 of non-sellable time each month. If you have a five-person field service department this number quickly extends to over $90,000 in throwaway service labor hours per year. By being available to work 40 hours per week, your five techs can do the work of an additional employee . . . without any additional cost to the company.

Imagine what could be accomplished if your sales reps actually worked 40 hours per week. Even more divisive than the harm to the sales and service department is the overall effect on the rest of your staff. The problem extends to all other workers within the company. The clerks, warehouse workers and other administrative workers (who in most cases are paid less money than those working in the field) are acutely aware of the fact that field workers are held to a different standard of expected hours of work. I often hear dispatchers and sales secretaries lament, “Why should I show up at the office at 8AM when I know the sales rep or tech is still in bed?”

Life is not fair. But management can change the company’s expectations or just complain about the findings of the GPS reports. All the technology in the world will not change human nature if there is no cause and effect.

A company owner, who recently spent thousands of dollars installing state-of-the-art GPS machines in their fleet of company cars, lamented to me,” Before I thought my sales reps were taking off early. Now I am positive that some days they do not even pretend to be working. I know one is having an affair. Another goes golfing twice a week. On days they are required to attend a 3:00PM meeting, many go to the same health club for a couple of hours.”

“I spent $20,000 on GPS tracking systems to prove my people aren’t working. The problem is they still are not working. I am just more acutely aware of the seriousness of my problems. The sales manager seems to work even fewer hours than the other reps. Everyone wants higher commissions, bigger bonuses and more leads. The GPS systems prove to me that the majority of my full time paid sales staff works at selling about 20 hours per week. Maybe I should be grateful that most of my field techs are at least working about 6 hours per day.”

Most companies (inadvertently) bonus those workers who are paid for 40 hours each week, but only work part time. For example: A tech is paid $18 per hour for a forty-hour week. If he only works 30 hours per week, in effect he gives himself a raise earning $24 for each of the 30 hours worked. He is receiving a bonus of $6 per hour for not working.

Let’s look at the bigger picture. Over the course of a year, an average tech with 5 years of employment with your company is being paid for 15 days vacation, 5 days sick leave, 80 hours of training, 125 hours of paid break time and 10 hours per week of allowable goof-off time. That equals 735 hours of paid, unworked hours. 735 X $18 per hour = over $13,000 of being paid for not working. Add to this the cost of benefits and responsibility of carrying their portion of the overhead and the tech’s costing the company over $50,000 of burden rate for hours paid, but not worked.

Having the ability to track productivity has nothing to do with attaining productivity. All the measuring technology will not replace proactive management. There is no substitute for setting up written, signed, agreed upon, inspected, and managed expectations of each full time employee actually working 40 hours per week. It will not happen on its own. It will be difficult to change a worker’s mindset if management makes no attempt to enforce a policy of full time work for full time pay.

If you are not going to actively manage the need to have field employees work full time, think twice about investing thousands of dollars into a GPS system or other technology items that monitors employees work output.

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