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High-Performing Teams in a Labor Shortage
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Picture a team that loses two technicians in one quarter, and hiring replacements takes months, if it happens at all. That’s not bad luck. Deloitte and The Manufacturing Institute project around 1.9 million manufacturing jobs could go unfilled between 2024 and 2033, as the applicant pool hasn’t kept pace with demand.[1] For maintenance teams, that shortage can mean fewer people covering more work, more pressure on experienced technicians, and less room to absorb unexpected absences. High-performing teams aren’t the ones untouched by the shortage. They’re the ones that changed how they work in response to it, instead of just working the old way with fewer people.
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12 Habits That Keep a Short-Staffed Team Running Well
1. They Cross-Train Technicians Instead of Specializing Narrowly
Problem: When only one technician can handle a specific repair type, a shortage turns a single vacancy into a coverage gap for that entire category of work.
Impact: Teams stretched thin by narrow specialization lose flexibility exactly when they need it most, since covering an absence means covering for skills nobody else has.
Fix: High-performing teams cross-train deliberately and track who’s handled which repairs inside asset management history, so more than one person can handle the repairs that matter most before a shortage forces the issue.
2. They Protect Preventive Maintenance Time Even With Fewer Hands
Problem: With less staff available, preventive maintenance is usually the first thing sacrificed to make room for reactive repairs.
Impact: Skipping PM to cover a shortage trades a short-term staffing problem for a medium-term reliability problem, and the equipment failures that follow make the staffing shortage feel even worse.
Fix: High-performing teams protect a minimum viable preventive maintenance schedule even when short-staffed, rather than letting it disappear entirely.
3. They Prioritize Ruthlessly Instead of Trying to Do Everything
Problem: A smaller team tries to maintain the same scope of work as before, just slower and under more pressure.
Impact: Everything gets a little worse instead of the most important things staying good, and critical work suffers the same delays as low-priority work.
Fix: High-performing teams rank work by criticality during a shortage, and consciously defer or drop lower-priority tasks instead of spreading effort evenly.
4. They Document Procedures Before the Experienced Staff Leaves
Problem: A labor shortage often means losing experienced people faster than replacing them, and their knowledge leaves with them if nobody captures it first.
Impact: Every departure during a shortage compounds the shortage itself, since the team loses capacity and know-how at the same time.
Fix: High-performing teams treat knowledge capture as urgent during a shortage specifically, not as a nice-to-have for calmer times.
5. They Use Contractors Strategically, Not as a Default
Problem: Understaffed teams sometimes bring in contractors for anything and everything, without a clear sense of which work actually justifies the cost and coordination overhead.
Impact: Contractor spend rises, but the team doesn’t fix proportionally more, since coordination and onboarding eat into the capacity contractors were supposed to add.
Fix: High-performing teams reserve contractors for work that specifically needs them, such as specialized skills or temporary volume spikes, while handling the rest internally.
6. They Track Which Tasks Actually Need a Technician’s Judgment
Problem: Technicians spend time on tasks, paperwork, routine checks, and basic troubleshooting that don’t actually require their specific skill or judgment.
Impact: Scarce technician time goes to work that didn’t need a technician, while work that genuinely needs one waits.
Fix: High-performing teams identify which tasks require judgment versus which just require someone, and route the latter elsewhere when possible.
7. They Reduce Travel and Search Time, Not Just Headcount Requests
Problem: The instinctive response to a shortage is asking for more people, without first looking at how much of the current team’s time goes to travel, searching for parts, or hunting down information.
Impact: Adding headcount to an inefficient process just means more people doing the same wasted motion, instead of fewer people doing less wasted motion.
Fix: High-performing teams fix the time-wasters first, then evaluate whether the shortage is actually a headcount problem or an efficiency problem.
8. They Measure Workload Realistically Instead of Assuming Capacity
Problem: Leadership assumes the remaining team can absorb departed coworkers’ workload, without actually measuring whether the math works.
Impact: The team either burns out trying to hit an impossible standard, or quietly lets things slip without ever naming what work isn’t happening.
Fix: High-performing teams make the real workload visible, so decisions about priorities happen deliberately instead of by default.
9. They Automate Data Entry So Technicians Spend Time on Repairs
Problem: A short-staffed team can’t afford to lose technician hours to manual reporting, duplicate data entry, and paperwork that a system could handle.
Impact: Every hour a technician spends on administrative tasks during a shortage is an hour not going toward the actual backlog of repairs.
Fix: High-performing teams cut administrative burden inside work order management specifically during a shortage, since that’s exactly when the cost of wasted technician time hurts most.
10. They Communicate Honestly About What’s Not Getting Done
Problem: Teams under a shortage often try to project business-as-usual, quietly absorbing gaps rather than naming them.
Impact: Leadership doesn’t know what’s actually slipping until something breaks, since nobody flagged the tradeoff the team quietly made.
Fix: High-performing teams communicate specifically what they’re deprioritizing and why, so tradeoffs are visible decisions instead of silent ones.
11. They Make the Remaining Team’s Time Visible to Leadership
Problem: Leadership sees headcount numbers but not how the team actually spends that time, so requests for more staff lack the data to back them up.
Impact: Leadership makes staffing decisions on gut feeling rather than evidence, and a legitimate need for more people competes poorly against other budget priorities.
Fix: High-performing teams track and report where technician time actually goes, so a staffing request comes with real data instead of just an impression.
12. They Build Flexibility Into Schedules Instead of Rigid Shifts
Problem: A fixed shift structure that assumes full staffing doesn’t bend well when several positions sit vacant, leaving coverage gaps at predictable times.
Impact: The same total headcount produces worse coverage than it could, simply because nobody designed the schedule with flexibility in mind.
Fix: High-performing teams adjust scheduling structures during a shortage, rather than forcing a full-staff schedule onto a partial-staff team.
Where a CMMS Fits Into Handling a Labor Shortage
None of these twelve habits depends entirely on adding headcount. They focus on using the team you have more effectively while making it easier to see where additional staffing is actually needed. A CMMS can support that shift by reducing paperwork and search time while making work history and workload more visible. A documented record also stays with the organization when experienced employees leave.
- Work orders and reporting that cut manual data entry, freeing technician time for repairs
- Asset history that preserves institutional knowledge, procedures, and workarounds independent of who’s on staff
- Preventive maintenance scheduling that stays protected even when the team running it shrinks
- Time and workload data visible to leadership, supporting real staffing conversations instead of guesswork
- Reporting and KPIs that support maintenance management, downtime reduction, and equipment reliability decisions with fewer people
Frequently Asked Questions
Is the maintenance labor shortage really as severe as it sounds?
The shortage is well documented. Deloitte and The Manufacturing Institute project up to 1.9 million manufacturing jobs could go unfilled by 2033. Maintenance-specific roles are among the hardest to fill, since training a technician to full proficiency takes years, not weeks.
Is hiring the only real solution to a labor shortage?
No. Hiring helps, but many of the habits above address the same gap without adding headcount, by removing wasted time and making better use of the people already on the team. Both approaches usually need to happen together.
Which of these habits matters most to start with?
Two practical places to start are protecting preventive maintenance time and documenting institutional knowledge. The right starting point depends on where the staffing shortage is creating the most risk for the team.
1. Deloitte
