On this week’s Grease the Wheels we get into some of the things that the “people of the chair” don’t see about your average technician working in the automotive industry today. Doctors have a hard job, but typically people don’t evolve as fast as automobiles- otherwise we should really have Bluetooth by now! We also take a deep dive into the way that technicians are paid and explore a particular instance where pooling hours not only worked out fantastically for all of the techs working there, but also improved shop workflow dramatically- by having specialized technicians work on the things that they were good at, while the rest of the shop killed it on maintenances.
We also propose an addendum to the pooling of hours for a service department: taking the lowest guy and highest guy and paying them what they turn, and having the rest of the technicians in the shop paid on all of the other hours turned. This way the high performers are not penalized, and the people who can’t pull their own weight are not taking advantage of a high performing shop. One thing is clear, flat rate is not going anywhere but if it worked a little bit better that could stop the bleeding of technicians industry wide. Or they could go to salary like the manufacturers would prefer, but let’s be real, that’s not going to happen!
Also Uncle Jimmy picks the pile for E65’s and not one person complains about it.
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