Mike Andes explains how operations managers can diagnose and improve low crew efficiency scores. He walks through a checklist: verify job estimates (are jobs misquoted?), assess whether pay-for-performance is actually incentivizing staff, and audit operational routines (service-area drive times, meeting formats/frequency, equipment/parking/maintenance). He emphasizes small, relentless tweaks (shorter stand-ups, routing, equipment upkeep) that collectively raise efficiency.
Chapters
So if my efficiency score is 50%, I know immediately people are not getting enough budget hours done. First thing I'm looking at is are we misquoting jobs? So if efficiency score is low, I mean, are we misquoting jobs? You're doing the estimates. You would know. And I'm going to guess you're not misquoting it. Assuming your estimates are accurate, we can cross that off the list. Okay, estimates are accurate. I'm putting the correct amount of budget hours and they're still at 50% efficiency score. Okay, we know a 50% efficiency score is not good because we talk about what is good in the book. And so then the next thing I'm going to be like, okay, well, the estimates are accurate, but our phishing score is low. Are people slacking off and like, oh, well, no, we have pay for performance. Well, is anyone above base Pay? Not at 50%. Probably not. So no one's actually incentivized by P4P. That's why people do P4P. And they're like, oh, no, it didn't change behavior. Like, no, everyone's efficiency is 30 to 50%. Of course they're not. They, they think you're a scam by doing P4P because they've never seen a dollar of bonus on P4P. No one's hitting base pay. Now what? Okay, efficiency score. What's your service area? Are you driving 30 to 40 minutes for your first job? Okay, how long is it taking for your team meetings every morning? Are those stand up? Are they sit down? Because all that wasted time is going to bring down your efficiency score. So that's what a great operations person starts doing is tweaking all the little knobs. Okay, we're not going to have a daily stand up. We're going to three times a week. Okay? It's going to be a stand up, not a sit down. Because I know that just standing up. Everyone half the time that the meeting takes and no one's getting paid for that. Labor revenue is not being produced during that meeting. So an operations manager starts to fanatically think about efficiency. How we park the trucks, how we do the blades, how we do the equipment, how we do repairs, how we do maintenance on the equipment, all that things, they start to dial in because they start seeing affects the efficiency score.
