Managing and Scheduling Field Crews

A key to company success can be handling how crews function every day.

By Ed Butts, PE, CPI

Although this month’s column is primarily directed towards those of you in personnel management, I also
think many others can benefit as well, particularly those aiming for a future supervisor role.

I intend to draw from some of my personal experiences and share suggestions, which you might be able to use in what I think is one of the most ignored functions of business management: managing and scheduling field crews.

Managing Field Crews

The phrase “managing a field crew” is actually a misnomer—because a foreman, supervisor, manager, or business owner is really managing and directing a group of individuals who happen to work in the field.

Individuals come in all shapes and sizes, strengths and weaknesses, intelligence, abilities, quirks, and personalities. Applying a “one size fits all” mentality to any group of people is a sure-fire recipe for disaster.

Obviously, this does not mean you must handle each employee with kid gloves. Treat them fairly, equitably, without bias or prejudice, and above all, legally based on applicable federal and state laws.

It is critical that a manager treats everyone in their field crew as equals and does not unnecessarily demean, embarrass, or insult them, particularly in front of peers and coworkers. This means a supervisor or owner must work with employees as individuals and not simply cogs in an assembly line.

I have found there to be many diverse types of field workers. Most who regularly work in the field including well drillers, pump installers, servicemen, and helpers are talented, interesting, and dedicated people with diverse backgrounds and experience bases. They are trustworthy, intelligent, understandably proud of their accomplishments and abilities, and are usually receptive to learning new tasks, receiving promotions, and taking on roles with increased responsibilities.

As with all professions, there are always exceptions. Sadly, some field workers look upon their job strictly as that: an 8-to-5 job. They track their timecards and are consumed with work breaks, hourly wage rates, and fringe benefits, particularly on government projects that pay a prevailing wage.

This can occur sometimes to the point of being a dangerous distraction. These employees don’t recognize the opportunity provided to them and are in it strictly for money and benefits—not for personal growth or recognition, company or project accomplishments, safety or efficiency, or possible advancement to a greater role of responsibility.

Since they are generally not interested in efficient or safe work practices, they often stifle and penalize project productivity and safety, which can also have a damaging impact on coworkers’ morale.

These individuals frequently have a hard time concentrating on the job at hand and thus can represent a genuine safety risk to fellow employees. These individuals should be reassigned or dismissed by first using feedback and objective evaluations from trusted and experienced foremen or supervisors.

All negative activities and traits should be observed and documented by an objective witness and supervisor. The focus must be maintained on the employee’s safety risk to themself and others as well as their impact on productivity. Personality clashes, dislike, and disagreements with employees must not become a deciding factor.

Prudent caution should be exercised when soliciting or receiving subjective feedback from coworkers. The reason is perceived laziness, shirking or inadequate work performance, personality or rhetorical differences, and clashes between coworkers can create bias and negatively impact the opinion of one worker towards another worker.

Again, the principal objective should always be towards preserving worksite safety; that is, dismiss or reassign a field worker before a work-related accident occurs and when it is apparent their continuation or presence on the worksite may represent a genuine safety hazard.

A second type of field worker are those with adequate talent, ability, knowledge, and experience but who feel they have “learned it all” and do not need advice or supervision from anyone. These are often individuals who were self-employed in the same industry but haven’t succeeded on their own.

They are frequently the toughest individuals to work with as a manager doesn’t want to stifle their production and work ethic, but they are often the ones who unnecessarily rush to complete a task, attempt to take on a two-man job alone, or frequently jump into a situation without fully considering the potential outcome.

Whether it’s a continual desire to prove themselves as someone with all the answers, the impact from these acts often results in expensive equipment damage or personal injury. To avoid potential issues, it is important a manager properly outline company policies regarding expectations, safety, and work limitations and procedures to all employees.

Another group of individuals are who I call the “potentials.” These constitute employees who have excellent work ethics, diligence, and good attitudes but who are inexperienced with the tasks and may have problems fully grasping the work, especially more technical-based tasks such as complex electrical or plumbing work.

This is not to imply they are unintelligent or untrainable but may initially lack the adequate background and knowledge to effectively apply their unique talents to the task. I have found this group of workers who show potential often are the most satisfying to work with and worth the patience to allow them to learn the trade as their desire to learn new tasks is often greater than trained individuals who already know their jobs.

They generally recognize the reward from doing a job is in the results from the final job itself. I recall one employee who we hired as a pump installer trainee during the 1980s although his background was as a schoolteacher. Already in his mid- 40s, he decided he wanted a change of profession and wished
to actively work outside more often. Although he obviously lacked the initial knowledge and experience to install a well pump or wire a pressure switch, his enthusiasm to learn was stellar and he took to the business like a duck to water.

Unknown to us, each night he would read and study pump manuals and installation instructions on submersible and vertical turbine pumps. This was the same thing I did when I was 16. Even after a bad day, he showed up at work the following day with renewed enthusiasm to relate what he had read the previous night and to learn new tasks. He never whined about an assignment but looked forward to them as learning opportunities.

Within a few months of being hired, we were assigning him to perform simpler pump and pressure tank installations as well as service calls. He even liked the challenge of working on jet pumps!

His personality and genuine zeal for the work also became evident with customers, as we received several complimentary messages regarding his likeable personality, attitude, and friendliness. This is the type of employee we all wish we had—someone who is fundamentally intelligent, trainable, and likeable but without an outsized ego overruling his ability.

A Schedule Is a Schedule Is a . . .

Think about the above phrase for a few seconds. Is a work schedule really just a simple matter of redundancy or is it actually an overlooked way of optimizing, in other words getting the best, production from your field crews—one that could lead to increased profits for your firm?

I like to think that it falls somewhere in the middle. Certainly, a well-planned work schedule is not the most vital form you will prepare during any given week. Although the weekly or daily field crew schedule is often regarded as nothing more than a bothersome chore, there are ways to not only make it easier on you but make it a method to improve the production of your crews, and even office staff.

First, the basic format of your schedule is more important than you might think. For example, do you use a daily or weekly work schedule? Many firms, especially larger ones, tend to plan two to three weeks in advance to accommodate available equipment, work backlog, and the influx of new projects.

Although this is not necessarily a bad idea, if your advance schedule is planned too far ahead, rigid, and without adequate flexibility to handle those inevitable “water system crises” that always come up when you least expect them, you may find yourself surrendering a valuable long-term client for a one-shot service call.

Our business is unique as we can almost never predict a well or water system failure in advance. Therefore due to the critical nature of our product, we usually must respond immediately to that failure.

How many times have you had a customer call in a panic? You know how it goes:

“Jim (by the way, sir, my name is Ed), that pump ya sold me (this is when you know it’s got to be your fault) has been making this noise for a couple of months, and since I’m having a party tomorrow, I want ya to come out and fix it right now. After all, I have that expensive five-year warranty ya sold me!”

You always respond with:

“By golly, Bill. We can rush right out and take care of that little pressure switch problem for you. All I gotta do is cancel that new pump installation at the hospital I had planned for today. After all, they have only been out of water for two days, and you do have a five-year warranty.”

I know I may be exaggerating a bit, but what do you do? Do you completely drop whatever was previously scheduled and send your crew rushing out to Bill’s house at warp speed?

I mention this to illustrate a point: Your schedules should not be so rigid that you cannot accommodate an actual emergency. On the other hand, customers cannot realistically expect you to modify your established schedule for a problem that can be fixed tomorrow.

The second point is that it’s up to you—not the customer—to decide if their problem is really an actual emergency. Sure, we all know that most of our customers will consider every problem they have as an emergency, requiring your immediate attention, but you must be the person to make that judgment call.

Finally, I want the main takeaway from the example to be always prepare your schedules with enough flexibility to accommodate the real emergencies but retain the proper judgment to decide whether the call really warrants changing your established schedule.

Daily or Weekly Schedule?

In our business, many people I know regularly prepare a crew schedule for each and every workday with the theory that a daily schedule is the only way they can plan for those unexpected out-of-water calls.

In most cases I believe that practice to be inefficient and potentially costly. Although there are always exceptions to every rule, a weekly work plan and schedule generally provides numerous benefits over a daily work schedule. Five good reasons are:

1. A weekly work schedule allows the job planner to allocate needed resources such as vehicles, specialty tools and equipment, drill rigs, hoist trucks, and manpower, so they will be in the proper place at the proper time. In many cases, equipment may need to be moved a great distance from one site to another, and the advance notice contained in a weekly schedule provides this time.

2. Contrary to the belief of many business owners, most employees (myself included) don’t like to be left in the dark and prefer to know where they will be going the next workday and what kind of job they will be doing. They don’t like this information being sprung on them at 7:30 a.m.

Besides the obvious advantage of being able to plan for special clothing for inclement weather or dirty work, most people simply want to know what they will be doing on any given day in advance. This greatly improves employee morale and makes the employee feel they are part of the business as they are included in the need-to-know group.

3. A weekly work schedule allows for advance planning with the client and any subcontractors or other parties involved with the project. This is an advantage for large projects as most of us have little or no day-to-day control over our clients’ schedules or subcontractors’ work schedules.

4. A weekly work plan allows for staging and preparing for the next day’s work when the field crews come back from a job early. With the proper motivation and direction, most individuals will take the initiative to unload their rig from the present day’s work and start loading for the next day’s job.

Besides the advantage of eliminating wasteful employee downtime, the ability to leave the yard early the
next day clears your yard faster, reducing congestion, and provides a full day for work at the site, possibly reducing or avoiding overtime. Proper advance notice also permits the allocation of non-stock material.

5. A weekly work plan makes it easier to schedule required maintenance and repair on vehicles and other equipment as the maintenance can be planned in advance, lessening the unavailability of the piece of equipment.

Post Time

Should your work schedule and crew assignments be posted, or should you keep them to yourself and your management personnel? To me, this is a no-brainer.

Obviously, if you don’t post or distribute the work schedule, you can avoid (or more accurately, delay) the inevitable complaints from that one employee (we all have one of them, don’t we?) who complains about everything you ask them to do, everywhere you send them, and everyone you send them to a job with.

However, there is no way we will ever avoid having to deal with that kind of person. So why try? It is much more important to keep most of your employees who care about their jobs, not to mention your customers, happy. I not only think it is vital to post your work plan, but I feel that a written copy of the work schedule should be distributed to all employees at the beginning of each work week.

Once again, it comes back to treating your employees as you would want to be treated. Shielding them from their upcoming work schedule has virtually no benefits that I can think of, but it can cause a significant amount of resentment.

Of course, dealing with those inevitable emergencies will require the occasional modification (and possible reprinting) of the schedule, but the advantages far outweigh the disadvantages.

Preparing, Posting and, If Necessary, Revising the Schedule

Although there are always exceptions to every rule, there are a few common threads that apply to every size of company.

At my former company, with the need to schedule up to 25 field employees with up to 50 projects going on at any single time and more than 40 pieces of equipment, we had to plan our work schedule well in advance. Sometimes the schedule was up to a month in advance to allow the distribution of equipment and keep things on track. This was especially important when considering the needs of our client and subcontractors, construction schedule, and material delivery.

All too often, clients are ignored or disregarded when planning a work schedule, as if they should be able to adjust their activities to the plan. For facilities that must remain in operation, such as operational water or wastewater plants, this can be a source of client resentment and a death knell to the contractor.

We would start most weeks on the preceding Friday morning to plan the upcoming week’s work. All relevant personnel such as those in sales and engineering and involved with the planning or sales of projects would gather and spend two to three hours discussing the next week’s schedule.

Obviously, the time and effort needed to prepare a work plan will vary according to the size of the business, conflicts with equipment and field personnel, and the complexity of projects, but the basic concept still applies. All personnel would submit their work requests to the work planner—in our case, our assistant manager—with an estimate of the number of personnel and time requirement as well as equipment and subcontractor needs.

The assistant manager would then correlate the requests from all parties and prepare a schedule based on priorities, deadlines, coordination issues, weather considerations, employee vacations, holidays, equipment and material delivery, and available vehicles and other equipment. This would sometimes require up to a full day to complete, but it usually resulted in a fairly smooth work week.

In addition to the tentative work plan, the assistant manager would also leave flexibility for unexpected calls and provide a list of downtime tasks for every employee for those days that the employee might have two to three hours left at the end of the day.

Although it was customary to have the employees check in with the assistant manager upon return to the shop in case an emergency or a change of plans for the upcoming day had occurred, the employee was expected to work on his downtime task list should the assistant manager not be available or no other work task was needed.

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I hope I have provided some basic concepts for your use. I realize that every company is different and some of the procedures I used may not work for your business. If nothing else, please at least consider the concepts, as many of the principles I discussed can be used in some form regardless of the size of your business.

Until next month, work safe and smart.

Ed Butts, PE, CPI, is the chief engineer at 4B Engineering & Consulting, Salem, Oregon. He has more than 40 years of experience in the water well business, specializing in engineering and business management. He was honored by the National Ground
Water Association with the 2025 Technology Award. He can be reached at epbpe@juno.com.