Finding good employees is difficult. Keeping them on board is no picnic, either.
But at Hoover Electric, Plumbing, Heating & Cooling in Troy, Michigan, co-owners Marcus Piwonski and Matt Hedges deploy a simple but effective team building strategy: Hire good people and don’t micromanage them.
“A lot of times, people have overbearing managers who just won’t get out of the way,” Piwonski says. “We don’t do that here.”
Piwonski firmly believes that employees prize empowerment — the ability to work independently and make decisions without interference from managers — more than money, time off and other employee perks.
“The CEO of Delta Airlines doesn’t fly planes,” Piwonski emphasizes. “That’s someone else’s job. I think we do a good job of getting out of the way and letting people do what they do.”
In that vein, the company encourages technicians to think of themselves as running mini companies from their service vehicles. Hoover supplies the training and the materials; the rest is up to technicians.
This approach has positively impacted not only employee retention, but recruitment as well. Word spreads quickly among technicians about local companies’ reputations, and Piwonski says it’s not unusual for a technician to come aboard from another company, followed by more from that same company. In fact, Piwonski estimates that 75% of the company’s employees were hired through referrals from family members or friends.
“I sometimes worry about the perception that we’re poaching technicians,” he says. “But lots of people reach out to me or my managers and sometimes there’s even a domino effect where two or three people leave from the same company to come to us. The way I see it, we’re not poaching those employees — those companies are losing employees.”
Piwonski also cites three other factors that help attract employees: reliable equipment, no on-call work and a simple pay structure. Technicians can choose hourly pay accompanied by bonuses if they hit certain targets or commission-based pay, he explains.
The key to using the latter is setting attainable goals, as opposed to setting unrealistically high targets that can motivate technicians to sell customers things they don’t need, Piwonski says.
“Upselling is a dirty word around here,” he says.
Technicians use iPads equipped with ServiceTitan software to perform evaluations of every home’s plumbing system and create three levels of service recommendations graded green, yellow and red (the latter is the highest priority). The recommendations include photos taken by the technician, Piwonski says.
“They’re just recommendations, so there’s nothing to upsell,” he says.
Read more about Hoover Electric, Plumbing, Heating & Cooling in the July 2024 issue of Cleaner magazine.
