Feature
Take On Staff Shortages Without Falling Short This Winter
Adam Brindle, Managing Director of Grounds Care Group explores why more organisations are outsourcing snow and ice clearances and what to consider when taking this step.
With virtually every industry competing fiercely for skilled staff, outdoor FM is being particularly hard hit as experienced staff retire, access to overseas workers dries up and young people staying in education longer struggle to identify with careers in grounds care. For many businesses, these challenges have reached a tipping point: At one of our customers - a large further education college, the head groundsman - a veteran of forty years - had been struggling to recruit an understudy and to find staff living locally. As winter came around, these pressures had started to bite. Where previously the college’s estates team had been handling snow clearing and gritting in-house, the shortage of staff willing and able to be on site early in the day was leaving the campus and its hundreds of students dangerously exposed to the risks of trips and falls.
Without staff to throw at the challenge, the recruitment squeeze had exposed the inherent inefficiency of how they - and far too many organisations - take on winter conditions. Previously, in-house staff had been arriving in the morning and reacting to the weather rather than proactively gritting according to forecasts. Moreover, working reactively presented a significant opportunity cost - preventing other maintenance essential tasks from being carried out, complicating forward planning and tying up skilled staff with handling snow and ice clearance.
For the college, the combination of staffing pressures and the exposure to potential liability led to the decision to partner with a winter maintenance specialist for the first time. This is becoming a more common trend as organisations seek to outsource this specialist area. The pandemic has also had an impact, and we have seen businesses struggling to get staff back into the office seeking to find ways to reduce the overhead of their buildings.
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