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Why telecom employees leave and how to understand why
Why field engineers, network operations and installation staff leave telecom jobs, and how to ask about on-call, travel, targets and growth at exit.
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Telecom · Telecom tower and infrastructure companies
HR for Telecom Tower and Infrastructure Companies: Site Teams, Uptime and Work at Height
A tower company earns from sites that stay powered and reachable, and that depends on small teams working alone at remote locations. Here is how to organise the people behind them.
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Share your requirementsA telecom tower and infrastructure company owns or manages towers, rooftop sites and shared equipment that operators rent. It is paid for sites that stay up, so the work is power, access, security and repair across hundreds of scattered locations. A technician typically looks after a cluster of sites, driving between them to deal with generator, battery and cooling faults and to meet tenant operators' engineers. Climbing, electrical work and night call-outs are part of the job. Much of the work is given to vendors, so the company's own staff manage contractors as much as they do the work. Head office handles tenant accounts, site acquisition, billing and energy management. See also HR for telecom.
- Plan
- Hire
- Onboard
- Manage
- Develop
- Perform
- Engage
- Retain
- Exit
- Improve
When HR is weak in telecom tower and infrastructure companies, you may see
- One technician, many sites
- Work at height is hard to supervise
- Vendor crews are not on your records
- Skilled technicians are poached by operators
- Uptime penalties travel upward
- Travel time is not counted
- Head office and sites barely meet
These are the places the people side of this kind of business tends to give way. The rest of this page works through them.
Who does the work in telecom tower and infrastructure companies
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.
- Site maintenance technicians
- Tower climbers and riggers
- Cluster and zone managers
- Energy and power management staff
- Network monitoring staff
- Site acquisition and tenant relationship staff
- Vendor and contractor supervisors
- Safety and quality staff
Where HR strains in telecom tower and infrastructure companies
One technician, many sites
A technician covers a cluster alone, so a fault at night or on a holiday depends on one person being reachable and close.
Work at height is hard to supervise
Climbing happens at remote sites with nobody watching, so how safe it is depends on habits, equipment and training that are hard to see from the office.
Vendor crews are not on your records
Climbers and fuel or power crews come through contractors, and the company cannot say quickly who was on a site, trained by whom and when.
Skilled technicians are poached by operators
Operators and equipment vendors hire the same technicians, so the best ones leave once they know the sites and the tenants.
Uptime penalties travel upward
A tenant's complaint becomes a penalty, and managers chase technicians without a clear picture of what is a fault and what is a staffing gap.
Travel time is not counted
Long drives between sites and unplanned call-outs are not reflected in roster or pay, which wears down the people who cover them.
Head office and sites barely meet
Finance, tenant and acquisition teams work separately from field staff, and each side blames the other when an invoice or a site problem escalates.
HR topics for telecom tower and infrastructure companies
Start with the topics that matter most here: Health, Safety and Wellbeing; Retention and Attrition Management; Employee Administration. Then work through the rest. Each topic is written for telecom, not in general.
Health, Safety and Wellbeing
Induction, records, incident reporting and follow-through.
Retention and Attrition Management
Who leaves, when, why — and which of them mattered.
Employee Administration
Records, attendance, leave and the day-to-day HR that must simply work.
HR Strategy and Workforce Planning
How many people, in which roles, by when — and what they will cost.
Organisation Design
Structure, reporting lines and who is allowed to decide what.
Recruitment and Talent Acquisition
Requisition to joining, the same way every time.
Onboarding and Probation
A first day that is the same for the fifth joiner as the first.
Compensation, Payroll and Benefits
Salary structure, payroll inputs and a month that closes on time.
Performance Management
Goals, reviews and ratings that hold up in a conversation.
Learning and Development
Training planned from need rather than from the calendar.
Career and Succession Management
Named backups for the roles that cannot be vacant.
Employee Engagement and Experience
Communication, recognition and the conditions people actually work in.
Employee Relations
Two routes — one for complaints, one for conduct — kept separate.
Policies, Compliance and Governance
Policies a manager can apply, and obligations with owners and dates.
Exit and Alumni Management
Resignation to relieving letter, in a defined order.
HR Technology and Automation
Records that survive people, and approvals that do not queue.
HR Analytics and Management Reporting
A short monthly pack management actually reads.
HR Operations and Governance
An HR function that runs the same way every month.
What a working HR set-up looks like
The pieces a telecom tower and infrastructure companies business puts in place, in an order that makes each easier. Open any card for the detail.
Define clusters and cover
A cluster sized by distance and fault history rather than site count alone, with a named back-up and a published on-call rotation.
What this coversHide
Define clusters and cover
A cluster sized by distance and fault history rather than site count alone, with a named back-up and a published on-call rotation.
What this coversHideA cluster sized by distance and fault history rather than site count alone, with a named back-up and a published on-call rotation. The attendance and leave process can carry the roster.
Make height and electrical work a controlled activity
Who may climb, what equipment is checked and who signs it off, with training recorded against the person.
What this coversHide
Make height and electrical work a controlled activity
Who may climb, what equipment is checked and who signs it off, with training recorded against the person.
What this coversHideWho may climb, what equipment is checked and who signs it off, with training recorded against the person. The health, safety and wellbeing work can set the routine. Confirm the requirements with a qualified professional.
Keep a register of vendor crews
Every contractor's climbers and technicians listed by site and date, with their training status, kept by the company.
What this coversHide
Keep a register of vendor crews
Every contractor's climbers and technicians listed by site and date, with their training status, kept by the company.
What this coversHideEvery contractor's climbers and technicians listed by site and date, with their training status, kept by the company. The HR documentation process covers the file.
Pay for call-outs and travel fairly
Clear rules on night call-outs, travel and standby, so the people who carry the uptime are not carrying it for free.
What this coversHide
Pay for call-outs and travel fairly
Clear rules on night call-outs, travel and standby, so the people who carry the uptime are not carrying it for free.
What this coversHideClear rules on night call-outs, travel and standby, so the people who carry the uptime are not carrying it for free. The compensation and rewards strategy work sets the structure.
Give technicians a path
A route from technician to cluster lead to zone role, so staying has more to offer than a rival operator's offer.
What this coversHide
Give technicians a path
A route from technician to cluster lead to zone role, so staying has more to offer than a rival operator's offer.
What this coversHideA route from technician to cluster lead to zone role, so staying has more to offer than a rival operator's offer. The competency and talent management work builds it.
Start by checking where you stand
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 requirements- List who is on call tonight for each cluster and who covers if they cannot be reached.
- Check when each climber, including vendor climbers, last had height-safety training.
- Ask the three most recent leavers where they went and why.
- Count how many sites each technician looks after and the longest drive between them.
Confirm 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.
How GullyHR helps
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.
- Health, safety and wellbeing
A routine for work at height and electrical tasks, with training recorded against each person, including vendor crews.
- Attendance, shift and leave
On-call rosters and call-out records that show who covered which cluster and what it cost them.
- Retention and attrition
A look at where technicians go and what would have kept them, so the next resignation can be prevented.
- Competency and talent management
A skills ladder for technicians and cluster leads, so promotion is based on what people can do.
Start with a free conversation, or see the paid HR Diagnostic.
Our HR transformation approach
- 1
Assess
Understand the business, its workforce, current processes and HR challenges.
- 2
Identify gaps
Find the missing, weak, inconsistent or person-dependent processes.
- 3
Design
Create the structure, processes, policies, SOPs, dashboards and systems needed.
- 4
Implement
Help HR and department managers actually adopt the new system.
- 5
Automate
Digitise repetitive and approval-based workflows where it is worth doing.
- 6
Measure
Track hiring, attendance, employee cost, performance, training and attrition.
- 7
Improve
Strengthen the people-management system continuously, not once.
Blogs worth reading first
From the GullyHR blog: one on HR in telecom, and one on each of the topics this page points to.
HR Management
The safety poster nobody reads
A laminated notice, an annual drill, and an incident register with three entries in two years. What workplace health and safety looks like when it is real.
7 min readRead article
HR Management
How to recognise and address employee workload problems
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.
5 min readRead article
HR Process
One employee, three versions of the record: fixing employee information management
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.
Questions owners ask
It depends on distance, fault history and the road conditions in your region. Work it out from your own records of call-outs and travel time, not a standard ratio, and review it when the fault pattern changes.
Responsibility is often shared between you, the vendor and the tenant, and the contracts matter. Confirm the position with a qualified professional, and in practice keep your own record of training and equipment checks.
Pay and travel terms matter, but so do a career path, a reasonable on-call load and a manager who responds. Ask leavers why, and fix the commonest answer first.
A fair structure for standby, call-outs and travel helps people accept the load. The rules should be written and applied the same way across clusters.
Use one core set of policies and add short annexes for field conditions, such as standby and safety rules, so nobody is held to rules that make no sense at a remote site.
We would ask who is on call tonight for each cluster, when climbers, including vendor climbers, last had height-safety training, and where recent leavers went. A sensible first piece of work is defining clusters and cover, plus a register of vendor crews. After that, we agree the scope in writing so you know what happens next.
More on HR for telecom
All 10 business types in telecom · Find another business type
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