In 1970 almost everyone who worked on the grid worked for the utility, they were employees and they had the knowledge and the trust of the company to do the work. As the post world war II workforce retired and was replaced the industry went through a period of learning the grid all over again. As part of that there were decisions made to start getting outside help. Initially it was only a few specialized jobs and it was mostly to bring back the skilled retirees for a couple of key jobs. But during the last 30 years, the result of this trend is that almost no utility does all their own work anymore.
In todays world we have not one but two workforce (and sometimes more) in the field at any given time. We end up treating them differently too, since the contract crews in many cases are not tied into the dispatch system and their qualifications are not at hand for the dispatcher. On more than one occation news crews have run video on the 6 O’Clock news of outages and crews standing around – what they did not know was the crew was contractors who were not allowed or skilled to do the work that needed to be done to turn the lights on.
As the work force continues to skew to contractors, and the current workforce retires and is replaced by a new generation, it is important to get all the people in the field able to work together. Performance based rates and other pressure makes it difficult to continue with business as usual. Integrated Contractors looks at the current situation and compares it to successful integrations in other organizations, helping you determine what steps you need to take to get back to the pre-1970 model of everyone working together for a single goal.
