A building maintenance company keeps lifts, pumps, electrics, plumbing and air conditioning running at client premises. It sells availability, and the owner's challenge is rostering trained technicians, covering night calls and keeping skills current across trades.
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Share your requirementsA building maintenance company holds contracts for offices, residential towers, hospitals, factories and malls. It places electricians, plumbers, HVAC technicians, lift mechanics and general helpers at sites, and keeps a roving team for breakdowns. Contracts ask for people on site at set hours and a response within a set time at night. Work ranges from routine rounds to emergency repairs, and mistakes can mean water damage, power loss or safety risk. Technicians hold different trade skills, and few have papers that match what they can do. Supervisors manage several sites. The firm is paid for coverage and response, so absence, a missing licence or an untrained helper turns directly into penalties. See also HR for facility management.
These are the places the people side of this kind of business tends to give way. The rest of this page works through them.
HR here has to work for each of these groups, not only the office. The set-up below is written with all of them in mind.
GullyHR runs talent acquisition for permanent roles in building maintenance companies. For each role we agree the job description with you, find and screen candidates against it, and support the offer through to joining. Tell us the role and the number of people, and we start there.
We recruit permanent employees. We do not supply contract or temporary staff.
Every business interviews, but few have a written process that works the same way for every role and every interviewer. GullyHR designs yours, from the role brief to the offer, trains your managers to run it, and can run it for you on the roles you hand us.
We agree what the role must deliver, the must-have and nice-to-have skills, and how each will be scored.
Screening call, assessment, interview rounds and decision points, sized to the role and the number of people you hire.
Structured questions for each role family and a rating guide, so two interviewers judge the same answer the same way.
A short briefing for your managers on what to ask, what to avoid and how to give a clear yes or no.
Who approves, how the offer is made, and how candidates are kept informed from first call to joining.
Night cover is thin, and the person called may not hold the trade the fault needs.
Who can safely handle a panel, a chiller or a lift is known by word of mouth, with little record of what each was tested on.
Without enough technicians, helpers are asked to do more than they have been taught, and accidents follow.
A post unfilled at a site with a response clause means a deduction even if the work is done later.
Rounds are skipped, logs are filled in later and small faults grow into large ones.
Who attended, what was done and what part was used is written on paper or not at all, so repeat faults are argued about.
Lockout, work at height and electrical isolation are practised unevenly, especially under time pressure.
The client's own building team sees who is good and offers more to keep him on site.
Start with the topics that matter most here: Learning and Development; Health, Safety and Wellbeing; HR Operations and Governance. Then work through the rest. Each topic is written for facility management, not in general.
Training planned from need rather than from the calendar.
Induction, records, incident reporting and follow-through.
An HR function that runs the same way every month.
How many people, in which roles, by when — and what they will cost.
Structure, reporting lines and who is allowed to decide what.
Requisition to joining, the same way every time.
A first day that is the same for the fifth joiner as the first.
Records, attendance, leave and the day-to-day HR that must simply work.
Salary structure, payroll inputs and a month that closes on time.
Goals, reviews and ratings that hold up in a conversation.
Named backups for the roles that cannot be vacant.
Communication, recognition and the conditions people actually work in.
Two routes — one for complaints, one for conduct — kept separate.
Policies a manager can apply, and obligations with owners and dates.
Who leaves, when, why — and which of them mattered.
Resignation to relieving letter, in a defined order.
Records that survive people, and approvals that do not queue.
A short monthly pack management actually reads.
The pieces a building maintenance companies business puts in place, in an order that makes each easier. Open any card for the detail.
Each technician against each trade and equipment type, with a note of who tested him.
Each technician against each trade and equipment type, with a note of who tested him. The learning and development process supports it.
A named on-call person for each main trade, with a back-up, a fair allowance and rest after a call out.
A named on-call person for each main trade, with a back-up, a fair allowance and rest after a call out. See the attendance and shift process.
Time reported, time attended, work done, parts used and sign-off by the client, on a phone form.
Time reported, time attended, work done, parts used and sign-off by the client, on a phone form.
Isolation, permit and height rules explained, practised and checked at least once a month.
Isolation, permit and height rules explained, practised and checked at least once a month. The workplace health and safety work covers it.
A cap on sites and a visiting plan that includes night rounds.
A cap on sites and a visiting plan that includes night rounds.
Pay steps tied to the trade tests passed, not just years served, so skill is visible.
Pay steps tied to the trade tests passed, not just years served, so skill is visible. The compensation benchmarking work helps.
Before changing anything, find out what is true today. These checks take an afternoon and tell you which of the topics above to start with.
Share your requirementsConfirm with a qualified professional. What applies to you depends on your business, your state and your arrangements, and it changes. This page describes practice. It does not state a legal position.
The services below fit this kind of business best. Each starts by recording where you stand, and every later report compares against that. We do not promise outcomes.
A skills grid and trade tests so the right person reaches the right fault.
Skill-based on-call rosters and clear rest rules after night call-outs.
A practical safe-work routine for isolation, height and electrical jobs.
Pay structure that rewards tested skill and holds on to key technicians.
Start with a free conversation, or see the paid HR Diagnostic.
Understand the business, its workforce, current processes and HR challenges.
Find the missing, weak, inconsistent or person-dependent processes.
Create the structure, processes, policies, SOPs, dashboards and systems needed.
Help HR and department managers actually adopt the new system.
Digitise repetitive and approval-based workflows where it is worth doing.
Track hiring, attendance, employee cost, performance, training and attrition.
Strengthen the people-management system continuously, not once.
From the GullyHR blog: one on HR in facility management, and one on each of the topics this page points to.
Housekeeping, technician and security staff at client sites leave for reasons head office rarely hears. How to ask, what to look for and how to act on it.
7 min readRead article
A founder's guide to hiring freshers and running a first-year programme: campus or open drives, a screening round, a training plan by quarter, mentors and checkpoints.
6 min readRead article
A shift, weekly and monthly safety routine for rubber plants that names who checks platen guards, mill trip bars, autoclave doors, burst-test cages and slings, and who acts on near misses.
7 min readRead article
Every growing company reaches a point where the founder approving everything stops being speed and starts being the bottleneck. Twelve signs it has happened, and what to fix first.
9 min readRead articleMore on the GullyHR blog.
Count the night call-outs in your records by trade, and cover each main trade with one named person and a back-up. Review the rota when contracts change.
Test and record. A short practical check for each task type, signed by a senior person, beats reputation. Keep the record with the person's file.
List the jobs a helper may do alone, with someone, or never. Train them towards a technician grade so the line is clear and fair.
Trace each to its cause: absence, response time or a missing skill. Fix the biggest cause first, usually cover for absences and clear call logging.
Most firms do. Make it clear what is paid for being available and what for being called, and give rest after a long night. Confirm the legal treatment with a professional.
We would ask how night calls are covered, how skill is checked and how site visits are recorded. A good opening project is a skills grid and an on-call rota. Scope is written down for you to accept or change.
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