5 Traits of Effective Maintenance Management

As the link between an organization's management team and maintenance workforce, a maintenance manager is responsible for connecting the dots between the management team's goals and maintenance workers' performance as well as filtering and passing information between these two groups.


Today's maintenance departments are under constant pressure to minimize costs and improve results while adhering to an organization's mission. The job of a maintenance manager is to ensure that the maintenance workforce does what senior management wants and acts correctly to achieve business objectives. A maintenance manager who doesn't perform his role well could cause problems for an organization.

Great maintenance managers are loyal to their respective organizations, putting the well being of the business first and ensuring that no harm is done to the management or employees. To be successful, maintenance managers must also be capable of managing and motivating people. Here are 5 traits that effective maintenance managers have.

  1. 1.     Sets high work quality standards

Maintenance managers are responsible for setting skill standards for their maintenance technicians to meet and must define the level of quality that they expect from finished tasks. In addition to knowing what excellence looks like, maintenance managers must be able to recognize substandard results and performance.

  1. 2.     Works closely with planners and schedulers

A maintenance manager is responsible for ensuring that maintenance work is performed in a safe, timely, and efficient manner. Maintenance managers must provide technicians with the guidance, tools, and information they need to work efficiently. In addition, they must work closely with planners to know what the workload will be in the coming weeks and what the work will require of maintenance technicians. Maintenance managers should also meet with the scheduler near the end of each shift to confirm what work will be completed the next day and which jobs can be started safely and surely.

  1. 3.     Has strong communication skills

Maintenance workers should know what they have to do and when they have to do it at all times, all the while keeping accurate records of their work. It is up to maintenance managers to organize daily meetings to distribute work orders and schedules as well as set expectations. Maintenance managers should ensure that every meeting has a time limit and specific purpose. Effective maintenance managers also understand that communication is a two-way street because staff ideas and feedback are crucial to an organization's success.

  1. 4.     Stays informed of every job at all times

Maintenance managers must stay informed, knowing exactly what is going on with every job at all times. Staying informed involves organizing a mix of formal and informal meetings as well as periodically visiting different work sites.  Occasionally, maintenance managers must go and see how each job is progressing. When checking on a maintenance worker's progress, a maintenance manager ought to ask if there's anything he can do to help the worker. If the maintenance worker is facing roadblocks or difficulties, then the maintenance manager should help him resolve those issues.

  1. 5.     Values training and education

Effective maintenance managers understand the value of continuing education and how it makes maintenance technicians work more efficiently. Maintenance managers should ensure that there are funds allocated in the annual budget for at least a week or two of training and retraining for all maintenance technicians.

Maintenance managers are always looking for smarter, simpler, and more effective ways to perform maintenance. In order to uncover opportunities to improve processes, however, maintenance managers must have access to high-quality computerized maintenance management software and ensure that maintenance technicians enter complete and accurate data into the system. Computerized maintenance management software is designed to collect historical information and quickly sort and analyze a wealth of data. CMMS software automates work management processes, enhances the mobility of maintenance workers, and enables organizations to take a proactive approach to maintenance.

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