If you’re currently looking for competent candidates to fill the positions of your building maintenance department, you first need to by crafting job descriptions. However, to craft the perfect building maintenance job description it’s important to first understand the different job titles under building maintenance, which include maintenance workers, maintenance technicians, and maintenance managers.
To help you craft your building maintenance job descriptions, in this article we’ll go through what building maintenance is and list the typical roles and responsibilities of a building maintenance worker, maintenance technician, and maintenance manager.
Let’s get started.
What is Building Maintenance?
Building maintenance refers to all activities that ensure the proper functioning and upkeep of an organization’s physical infrastructure. These activities are categorized into a few broad terms – general maintenance, routine maintenance, and preventative maintenance.
General maintenance refers to attending to faults that have already occurred and require repair, however, the nature of these repair work is minimal, and doesn’t necessitate an emergency concern.
Whereas, routine maintenance refers to the scheduled inspections and general repair work and maintenance of building, equipment, and machinery in order to maximize their uptime.
Preventative maintenance includes inspection, identification, and correction of initial failures and faults in order to prevent them from becoming major failures.
What’s important to consider is how these broad responsibilities under building maintenance create the building maintenance job hierarchy.
Since general maintenance requires minimal training, the entry-level maintenance worker finds it easy to fill in and effectively carry out this role. Routine maintenance, on the other hand, becomes the focus area of maintenance technician because it necessitates a broad level of knowledge and skills in different kinds of maintenance work and equipment.
Finally, preventative maintenance, pertaining to its problem-specific nature, demands an experienced eye. Therefore, in ideal cases, maintenance managers are responsible to oversee preventive maintenance programs. However, for an effective, all-round maintenance, all three levels of professionals play important roles.
Building Maintenance Job Description Variations
As highlighted above, building maintenance department has a hierarchy of job titles with distinct focus areas in order to ensure an organized strategy for building-related duties including repairs, maximizing uptime, and prevention of equipment failure. You'll find that it is synonymous with the general maintenance job description or the facility maintenance technician job description.
Building maintenance departments delegate the tasks of general repairs to maintenance workers, optimum functioning tasks to maintenance technicians, and supervision of preventive tasks to maintenance managers.
However, these descriptions only entail their main job functions. There’s a lot more to building maintenance job descriptions. To give you a clear idea, here are summarized versions of the job descriptions of all 3 titles:
Building Maintenance Worker
Maintenance workers are responsible for the general repair and fixing of building and equipment.
Since maintenance workers job is skills-specific, employers do not stress on education. Most maintenance workers have a high school diploma/GED with relevant technical training and 2 years’ experience, including, electrical wiring, plumbing, HVAC (heating, ventilation, and air conditioning), carpentry etc.
To give you a clear idea, here are the typical duties and responsibilities maintenance worker job description entails:
- Inspect mechanical equipment to locate malfunctions and perform minor repairs.
- Complete minor maintenance tasks such as replacing light bulbs, conducting electrical repairs such as checking electrical wiring to identify issues, and carpentry repair including roofing and drywall repair work.
- Assemble, disassemble, and install equipment and machinery.
- Maintain, clean, and store building equipment and renovate building’s physical infrastructure.
- Assess functionality of all safety systems and electrical systems.
- Seek guidance and report to maintenance technicians and maintenance managers.
- Adhere to all safety and health regulations.
Apart from the above, maintenance workers are expected to read and interpret technical information including blueprints and repair manuals.
Building Maintenance Technician
Most routine maintenance activities fall on the shoulders of a maintenance technician. A maintenance technician knows how to use hand tools, power tools, and other specific machinery as required. Furthermore, they are also expected to have adequate management skills in order to supervise repair workers.
A maintenance technician typically possesses an associate’s degree in a relevant field with training and certifications focusing on areas such as plumbing, electrical wiring and flooring etc. Additionally, they usually have a minimum of 3-5 years of experience.
Here are the key duties and responsibilities of a building maintenance technician:
- Respond to maintenance requests, and handle any emergency and necessary repairs.
- Perform functionality checks on HVAC, electrical systems and safety systems and respond to their complex issues in order to meet health and safety standards.
- Assist the installation and setup of ventilation, refrigeration, and other systems, and conduct repairs if necessary.
- Provide help in the maintenance of building interior and exterior surfaces including drywall repair, plastering, and plumbing.
- Manage safety systems such as fire suppression systems, fire extinguishers, alarm contacts, and other building systems.
Remember – these are just few of the general duties and responsibilities of a maintenance technician, you can add and subtract from the list according to your organization needs.
Building Maintenance Manager
Maintenance managers are responsible for supervising the repair and maintenance of buildings and equipment. Even though they ensure maintenance workers and technicians carry out timely installation and upkeep of building systems, their key focus area is preventative maintenance (minimizing repair costs).
Since, their job title is a senior-level position, maintenance managers with a bachelor’s degree in engineering, or other related fields, with at least 5 years’ experience in maintenance, are high in demand.
Here are the typical duties and responsibilities of a maintenance manager:
- Planning, delegating, supervising the installation, repair, and corrective maintenance activities within the organization.
- Develop policies, procedures, and strategies for maintenance department within allocated budgets.
- Recruit maintenance workers and train them by developing and implementing training programs.
- Supervise maintenance technicians and help them resolve complex preventative issues.
- Ensure the maintenance department’s compliance with OSHA standards and other safety policies and procedures.
It is important to remember, maintenance managers are more involved in administrative tasks and are only responsible for delegating physical tasks (such as plumbing, carpentry, drywall repair)
Ending Note
The need for building maintenance isn’t new to any organization. All industries have an established maintenance department that oversees its building and equipment maintenance in order to ensure the smooth workflow and maximum uptime and industry output.
If you’re looking for potential candidates to fill in the positions discussed above, it is important to highlight their differences in terms of level of responsibility and focus areas of maintenance (general, routine, and preventative).
And then you can move on to creating an appropriate building maintenance job description for each. Finally, make sure that you seek profiles on popular job boards, like Indeed, Glassdoor, etc.
Josh is a partner at Maintenance Manager HQ.
