Building a Preventative Maintenance Plan to Help Tackle the Effects of High Turnover

High turnover is one of the most persistent and costly challenges facing construction companies today. With fewer people entering skilled trades and more opportunities luring experienced workers away, maintaining a consistent and capable workforce has become a serious hurdle.

In a world where labor shortages are increasingly common, a proactive maintenance plan can make all the difference in keeping projects moving on track.

When trained technicians leave, they take their expertise and knowledge of how a company operates with them, leaving gaps that rushed training or temporary hires can’t easily fill. As a result, equipment maintenance tasks often become inconsistent, leading to more frequent breakdowns, safety issues, and missed project milestones.

“There’s a domino effect,” explains Rob Meldrum, Lubrication Engineer at ExxonMobil. “If a critical piece of equipment goes down, everyone’s still getting paid, but nothing’s getting done. Those expenses add up fast.”

The good news is that a thorough preventative maintenance plan can help combat the instability of high turnover and give companies a “plug-and-play” approach for new hires or external workers to follow to keep operations running smoothly.

So, how do you craft the right maintenance program for your operation? That’s where we come in.

“When I’m on-site with a customer, it's not just about providing lubricants — it's about being advocates for them when things go wrong,” Rob says.

Here are the four steps we take to create a maintenance plan that safeguards against high turnover:

1. Evaluate your operations: We’ll take a look at all your assets and expenses to help determine the right lubricants for your machines. From there, our experts can help you select the proper lubricants for your equipment and build a program based on the machines you have, duty cycles, and the number of technicians you have on hand.
2. Create a maintenance to-do list: From changing fluids to inspecting equipment to replacing components on a scheduled basis before they fail, a sound preventative maintenance plan that’s methodical and optimized makes it easy to check all the boxes. Our team of experts can help determine optimal drain intervals so it’s easy to stay on track.
3. Conduct root cause analysis: When we understand our customers’ business, we may notice if a component is failing early and can get to the root of the problem. With a free expert consultation, we'll send parts to one of our labs, dissect the parts, and gather data to find out why parts are failing based on the machine’s history.
4. Implement used oil analysis: By sampling used oil with our Mobil℠ Lubricant Analysis program, we can see how the oil — and your equipment — is performing. Then, we can help customers see where they might be able to extend oil drains and keep equipment running longer*, so skilled technicians can spend less time conducting unplanned maintenance.