Choosing the Hours to Staff Your Float Center – DSP 114

How do you figure out how many people to hire? What’s the ideal hours for a float employee to work? Is there such a thing as too many hours? Too few?

Graham and Ashkahn share their insights with staffing Float On and what their staff looks like to cover all their shifts running a six tank, 24 hour float center.

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Transcription of this episode… (in case you prefer reading)

Ashkahn: Okaly blokaly guys, welcome back to the podcast.

Graham: Today we have a good one. It’s about our staffing, “How many staff does it take to run your shop? How many hours are they working on average?”

Ashkahn: Good question, listener.

Graham: Yep. Thanks for sending that in, and we’ll talk to you all next time.

Ashkahn: Have a great evening.

How many staff does it take to run a shop? There’s two ways to answer that question. How many people do we have there at any given point in time, and how many total people do we have on staff? This sounds more like they’re asking how many total people we have on staff.

Graham: But we might as well answer both of them.

Ashkahn: We have two people on at a time at our place, and that’s a whole other conversation I think about, how many people you need working at your shop at any given point in time.

Assuming you have that part figured out, it takes us about, for a 24 hour operation like ours, with two people on staff-

Graham: And six tanks.

Ashkahn: And six tanks. We have about usually 12 to 14 employees. Somewhere in that range.

Graham: I just double-checked. We’re doing some training right now of some new people coming on, so we might lose maybe one of those? But we have 14 people right now.

Ashkahn: We always seem to hover somewhere in that range. Twelve seems to be the lowest, and 14 seems to be generally the highest that our staff pool goes. That does not involve us, so we’re not really working any hours in there.

Graham: It does involve two shop managers as well, so of those 14 right now, two are managers, and 12 are more regular shop staff.

Ashkahn: Those managers are working hours too, and when they’re working, they’re working as one of those two people, so it’s not like two people plus a manager. It’s a manager there for however many hours, and then they’ll also work hours not at the shop doing more managerial stuff.

Graham: Pretty much the only time we’ll have more than that is when we’re doing deep cleans, when more people actually makes things go faster. You can crank through more tanks at a time.

Ashkahn: Right.

Graham: Or when we’re doing training, so if we have someone who’s coming on board and doing training, then we’ll have our two regular staff and then the third person who’s training up will also be there, shadowing them and helping out and learning.

Ashkahn: With 14 people, we tend to have a mix of how many hours those people are working. We have a handful of those that are closer to full-time in the mid to high thirties every week. We also have a handful of people around part-time, like 20 hours-ish a week, and usually just a few people down lower than that, like 12 to 20 hours a week.

Graham: If we let people get down there, it tends to be staff who have been with us for a really long time, and maybe they’re even transitioning into doing other things with their life but still want a presence in the shop or something. It’s nice to have their experience.

We found just practically, when you start getting down below 20, or I’d even say often 25 hours a week, it gets really hard to have people stay up to date on everything that’s going on and changing, and which tanks are down, and what pump is having trouble, or anything like that.

If there’s something new they have to learn and they’re only working eight or nine hours a week, just practically it’s been very hard to keep them in the loop and as good as the other staff members.

Ashkahn: It’s kind of like one shift. If someone just has one shift a week, in your shop it tends to be tricky for them to be as caught up as everybody else is.

Graham: Definitely, I’d say, and looking at ours it definitely is around the 20 hour week is where most of our people are, like 20 or above. Then it’s about two-thirds are in that 20 to 30 range, and then one-third is in the 30 to 40 range. It seems to be. At least the current breakdown.

Ashkahn: How many of those people have other jobs?

Graham: Quite a few. I think at least everyone who’s under that 30 hour mark, and some who are above the 30 hour mark also have other jobs that they’re working.

That’s an interesting decision. Obviously, you need to make your own decisions for your float center too.

Some of the philosophy that went into this, and a lot of it, was even less philosophy and more trial and error, was just that in the process of trying to get people who are working more full time, it means that if anything goes wrong with one of those people, or if you have to let go a full time person, another one of your full time people is sick, it’s really hard to find anyone to cover those shifts.

Obviously, the more people working full-time, the less overall people you need at all, so there’s just less hands around to actually cover those shifts.

Ashkahn: The other side of that is pretty much the less people you can run any sort of business with I think the better. With more people comes more difficulty across the board. You have to communicate between a larger group of people.

Graham: Which gets exponentially more complicated.

Ashkahn: Even small things like buying food and beer for a staff meeting becomes more expensive the more people you have. A small agile team tends to be a better general philosophy in terms of business, but you have to balance it out with making sure that your current employees can take time off if they need to take time off or go on a trip if someone wants to leave for a week and a half to go travel somewhere.

I’ve always wanted to run a business that allows that. I would hate the idea of someone not being able to go on a trip because we can’t get the shifts that they’re working covered.

Graham: It’s not like we started out with this kind of number in mind, or had all of this really planned out necessarily, but just organically growing to it. We really haven’t had to turn down many vacation requests or anything like that.

Ashkahn: Almost none. I actually can’t think of one that someone has sent in, and we’ve denied it.

Graham: And at this point the amount of shifts that you or I have to cover is none. With this current set up our managers are pretty much able to swing in to cover if any of the other staff can’t. At least for us, again, with six tanks and running a meager 24 hours a day, we seem to find our stability 20 to 40 hour range and with 12 to 14 staff.

Ashkahn: It’s still organic. We have no system in place to keep it that way or keep these numbers the same. These aren’t policies that we have or anything like that. It’s just stabilized to that over the years, and it tends to hover right around those numbers.

Okay, well as always, make sure to grab em before they’re all gone.  If you guys have

other questions our there, you can always hop over to floattanksolutions.com/podcast and type them in. See you later.

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