A rooftop solar installer sends two or three person crews into homes, shops and factories to fit panels in a day or two. The work is only as good as the crew, and crews are hard to find, train and keep.
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Share your requirementsA rooftop solar installer works house by house or building by building. A crew of a lead technician, an electrician and a helper or two arrives at the customer's roof with a van, structures, panels and cable, and aims to finish in a day or two. Before that, a surveyor visits and a designer sizes the system. After it, someone fixes the meter, paperwork and any complaint. Crews are judged by the neatness of the roof, the behaviour in the customer's home and the number of jobs closed. Demand swings with subsidy news and the season. See also the renewable energy hub and the energy and utilities sector page.
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.
When the helper is missing, the whole day is lost, the customer is told to wait and the next job is pushed.
Helpers pick up how to walk a roof, tie off and carry panels from whoever is nearest, so habits vary from crew to crew.
Muddy footprints, a rude remark or an untidy roof become the company's reputation in the customer's street within a day.
Jobs per week is easy to count and rework is not, so fast crews are praised and the call-backs land on someone else.
A helper who has learned the work gets a better offer from another installer after one season, and the training is lost.
Crews are idle when orders dip and overloaded when a subsidy deadline nears, and people leave in both phases.
Start with the topics that matter most here: Learning and Development; Retention and Attrition Management; Employee Administration. Then work through the rest. Each topic is written for energy and utilities, not in general.
Training planned from need rather than from the calendar.
Who leaves, when, why — and which of them mattered.
Records, attendance, leave and the day-to-day HR that must simply work.
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.
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.
Induction, records, incident reporting and follow-through.
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.
An HR function that runs the same way every month.
The pieces a rooftop solar installers business puts in place, in an order that makes each easier. Open any card for the detail.
A short card for lead technician, electrician and helper stating the tasks each must do on a job.
What this coversHideA short card for lead technician, electrician and helper stating the tasks each must do on a job. Role design turns this into a clear ladder.
Tasks a helper must show before becoming a technician, signed off by a lead on a real roof, with a pay step at each stage.
What this coversHideTasks a helper must show before becoming a technician, signed off by a lead on a real roof, with a pay step at each stage.
Keep a reserve of trained helpers who can fill a crew at short notice, and tell customers early when a swap is needed.
What this coversHideKeep a reserve of trained helpers who can fill a crew at short notice, and tell customers early when a swap is needed.
One page on how to enter a home, keep it clean, speak to occupants and handle complaints, taught on day one.
What this coversHideOne page on how to enter a home, keep it clean, speak to occupants and handle complaints, taught on day one.
Record rework visits against the crew that did the job, so neatness is counted and discussed alongside speed.
What this coversHideRecord rework visits against the crew that did the job, so neatness is counted and discussed alongside speed.
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.
Crew attendance and reserve cover so a missing helper does not cancel a day.
A task-based route from helper to lead technician, taught and signed off on real roofs.
A view of why trained helpers leave after one season and what keeps them.
Hiring of helpers and electricians ahead of demand peaks.
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 energy and utilities, and one on each of the topics this page points to.
Engineers, technicians and operators leave energy and utilities firms for reasons that differ by project and plant. How to listen, ask better questions and act.
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Plastics training dies when it waits for a free Saturday. Tie it to mould changes, purges and cold starts, use one-point lessons and a visible skill ladder, and protect it in peak months.
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How to spot an unmanageable workload before it becomes an exit or an error, what to look at, how to talk about it and what to change, without guessing.
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Payroll says one joining date, the personal file says another and the manager remembers a third. How to establish a single trustworthy employee record and keep it that way.
7 min readRead articleMore on the GullyHR blog.
Enough to cover the absences you actually see. Start from your own record of lost days, hold a small reserve and review it each quarter rather than guessing.
Pair them with a trusted lead, teach one task at a time and have the lead sign each task off. Do not let a helper work unsupervised on a roof until the lead is satisfied.
Keep it short and concrete: shoes, noise, tidiness, who to speak to and what never to say. Practise it on the first day and refresh it after any complaint.
Include call-backs or customer feedback in the crew's measure alongside jobs completed. A small reward for clean closing records tends to shift habits faster than a reminder.
Not fully. You can smooth it by using quiet weeks for training, maintenance visits and surveys, and by planning leave around the dip. Idle weeks without a plan are when people look elsewhere.
First we would count job days lost to absence, ask your senior technician what a helper must know and trace call-backs to crews. A helper to technician ladder with a reserve pool is a natural first job, and scope goes into writing for your sign-off.
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