Do you think your office is understaffed?

Have you had to justify the number of positions in your office to upper management?

Or maybe you’ve wondered how your office staffing compares to similar sized utilities?

Here’s your chance to find out…

Confirming my suspicions

In a recent business review I completed for a customer, I suspected their office was understaffed. In order to determine if my suspicions were correct, I e-mailed 30 of our largest customers and asked a handful of questions about staffing.

The results of that informal survey were intriguing enough to make me want to conduct a more formal survey across a larger base of utilities.

To accomplish this, I’ve developed a Utility Staffing Survey. In addition to asking how many positions your office has, the survey includes questions about labor intensive practices such as payment processing and bill printing.

Additional resources

In the past, I’ve written about valuable resources for utilities. One of these is the Environmental Finance Center at UNC. The Environmental Finance Center recently developed a new Financial Health Checkup for Water Utilities Tool. This free tool is designed to help assess the financial performance of your water and/or wastewater utility.

I’ve mentioned SmallWaterSupply.org newsletter in the past as a resource for small water utilities. They are still providing the same great information, but they’ve changed their name to the easier to remember WaterOperator.org. You can read more about the name change here.