How technology can help attract – and retain – electrical utility and contractor workers

Since COVID, employers in just about every industry have been scrambling for workers. This is happening particularly in the trade fields as older workers retire in greater numbers. And while electrical utilities and contractors have not had quite as many issues attracting new workers as, say, the construction industry, they too are struggling to retain workers.

One industry expert last summer stated that at least 80 percent of energy employers are having trouble hiring qualified workers. In addition, while non-retirement attrition remains consistent at 15.4 percent, almost all of those leaving (64 percent) are workers with less than five years on the job.  Ignoring for the moment the cost of recruiting and hiring new employees, the turnover of new workers means that fewer workers last long enough to be considered experienced – bad news in an industry that is at once critical and dangerous.

How technology can help attract and retain electrical utility workers

An often-overlooked strategy to retain electric utility workers and contractor employees is technology, particularly in the form of field data collection software. Read on to learn more about how it can keep your employees content – and on the job.

The workday ends when you get into the truck

In the past, those performing electrical utility field tasks found their days to be long. After working for eight hours out in all kinds of weather, those using pen and paper to record the data collected had to either get back to the office or retreat to a home office with a laptop to enter all the notes, observations, and data collected by hand throughout the day.  Once the data was entered, the worker would use the data to create a report to send to the client or supervisor, painstakingly adding photos to attempt to annotate findings, or location information to pinpoint the site of observations.

Those using spreadsheets in the field didn’t fare much better – while the data was entered, it still was in an unfinished form that would require the manual creation of reports, along with the time-consuming tasks of annotating observations with photos and location data.

All this data entry and clerical work resulted in a workday that was not only physically demanding but also extraordinarily long. This could lead to worker dissatisfaction and burnout. To add insult to injury, contractors are often paid by the job, not the hours, so these additional hours can be uncompensated.