Contractor Health Archives - The 7-Power Contractor

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New Practices for Covid-19

By Al Levi |

There’s an ancient proverb that says, “The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is today.”

I know many of you have taken steps to put additional systems and processes in place to keep customers and employees safe in the midst of this pandemic. Kudos to you.

Haven’t done much of anything or still scrambling?

What you need to know is it is not too late! The need for additional systems and processes around this virus (or heaven forbid, future virus pandemics) is not going away anytime soon. It’s going to be some time before everyone is vaccinated and even then, there will be some people that may not be able to receive those vaccinations—and those people will need your services, too.

Here are some helpful protocols you could put into place fairly quickly to make customers and staff alike safer.

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Checking In vs Snooping

By Al Levi |

In a bunch of management articles and blogs I’ve read in the last few years, there is more and more discussion about the ever-growing amount of time being wasted in the office (remember when all your office staff worked in the office?). It still happens with personnel there, at home, and also with staff in the field.

The issue I’ve had from the beginning of my first becoming a manager, then an owner, and now an industry-consultant is to find what is the right balance between checking in on staff and what amounts to spying on employees.

I will confess that while at work I’m all about work, and that is pretty much what I expected from my employees, and that’s what I teach my clients to expect from their employees. That doesn’t mean there isn’t a need for time to… just hang out, chat, and share a laugh. Remember, we come to work as much to socialize as well as just to collect a check.

To my mind, that time of coming together whether in the break room for office staff or at the local 7-Eleven ™ or Circle K™ is vital to team building. It’s worse when people are “stealing” productive time to do solo-time wasting activities.

Yes, COVID has changed things for now, but in the long run, I believe more people will be working safely in an office again or at least some hybrid of home and office. Productivity studies and issues of disconnection from the company are still pointing to the need for face-to-face time and not just FaceTime or Zoom Meetings.

A friend of mine who worked his whole life in big corporate America told me that there was an art to always looking busy whether it was pouring over stacks of reports in the old days when stuff got printed that then turned into staring at the computer when the stuff moved to digital. Productivity didn’t change much… People just found new ways to look busy.

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Does the 12-Hour Workday Work?

By Al Levi |

The idea of moving the normal 8 hours a day to 10 hours or even 12 hours a day has been around a long time. And the idea of a longer workday comes and goes with the business cycle and, many times, where we are in the economic cycle and unemployment rate.

In the contracting business, we’re typically all expected to work more than the traditional 40 hours a week and, therefore, more than an 8-hour day.

The nature of most of our businesses that are deemed essential is that we’re necessary and time-critical.

Drains overflowing, water cascading from your second floor bathroom into your dining room, no heat on a zero-degree day with howling winds in winter, or no cooling on a 90-plus-degree day in summer… all are time sensitive for sure. It is going to test you and your staff needing to put in a very long day and, many times, day after day too.

Working hard is one thing, but there is a point of diminishing returns.

Here are just 5 signs to tell you when you’re getting to the downside…

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Leading with Humor

By Al Levi |

Wouldn’t you agree that the work we do as contractors can literally be life and death? It’s serious business!

I definitely feel this is true.

A plumbing or drain company keeps good water from bad water. Just go online and look up the plague. You’ll see what existed in the world before proper  plumbing and sanitation changed it for the better. And plumbing and drain companies keep these systems functioning the way they must so we can stay alive and avoid illness. Without us, many people would be sick and dying.

A heating and cooling company not just keeps us warm in the winter and cool in the summer (which is very nice). In extreme cases for the young, the elderly, or the infirm, it too can be life and death. Remember, we “play with fire” as I told my own techs. Plus, we “play” with gas and fuel oil and even high voltage that in the wrong hands, untrained personnel, or even the inattentive tech can become very dangerous.

And electricians literally wrangle lightning and light our homes, power our communications abilities, and, in many homes, it is the “fuel” that provides the heating and cooling too. We take it for granted, but here too a lack of seriousness and attention to detail can cause real damage to life and property.

All of this is serious business.

BUT we can’t be deadly serious from sunup to sundown. We do need to be focused when we’re doing our work in every phase of our business, but we’re human beings, and without a break from it… it will wear you down if there’s no time to lighten up.

Here are just three ways humor helps:

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The Importance of Power Napping

By Al Levi |

One of my first jobs at my old company was working with the credit manager, Meyer. Meyer was an interesting guy — really ahead of his time in the early seventies. One of the things that he did was to drink six to eight glasses of water a day. Another one of the tricks that he used for managing his age (being in his late sixties) was to take what he called a power nap during his lunch break. He explained that the nap gave him more energy when he got back to work.

As years went by I began working very long days. One day I stumbled across an article about the people of Japan. It was about how they were very industrious and worked extremely long days, which included required socializing with clients at the end of the day. One of the things they did was to build a room at their offices for people to take power naps — a 15 to 30-minute nap each day. This restored their thinking by giving both the body and mind a chance to rest and reset.

Why You Need to Stop and Eat Lunch

By Al Levi |

When the busy season hits, most of us are guilty of dashboard dining. For those unfamiliar with the term, it means we don’t have time to stop and eat lunch so we roll through a fast food drive-in and eat as we drive. If we’re really patient, we’ll take all of two minutes to pull over in the parking lot, pile the food up on the dashboard and swallow our food whole without coming up for air.

Some people in an office order in and eat away while they’re trying to handle the phones, computers and more.

What’s worse than all of this is skipping lunch altogether. I should know I used to do that all the time years ago.

It didn’t help my weight since I was generously only 40 pounds heavier than I should have been according to my doctor and my knees. The reason is simple. When I skipped meals especially late at night when I was running calls, I would finally stop to eat and now I was ravenous and I’d eat everything that wasn’t nailed down.

Fortunately, a smart mentor of mine schooled me about the need to stop even if it’s just for 30 minutes to recharge the batteries and to shake off what’s transpired.

The funny thing is when I got disciplined about this good habit I was actually more effective and more productive than when I’d either wolf down my lunch or skip it altogether.

Living On Caffeine, Nicotine, And Something Else?

By Al Levi |

Everything is much clearer in retrospect. I look back at my days as a contractor and things are clearer now than they were when I was facing problems to overcome.

I was living on caffeine to get me up and running in the morning and I needed more to keep me awake during a mid-afternoon crash. Even with my morning and afternoon caffeine doses, I still needed more to get me through long nights of work.

Caffeine wasn’t the only problem, I also was a non-stop eating machine. When I was young, I could sort of get away with it, but all the bad habits were being put into place at a tender age.

7 Tips to Survive Returning from a Vacation

By Al Levi |

How much do you dread going on vacation just because you know the hell you’ll face when you return to work?

I know I always loved and hated going on vacation.

That’s because I had to kill myself to clear up the backlog of work so I could go on vacation, there were calls I had to field about work while I was away, I was worried about what was going on while I was gone so I was always checking in and finally there was the pile of stuff waiting for me to do when I got back.

It got to the point I started to dread going on vacation instead of relishing them as a chance to unplug and recharge.

The occasional disaster and the routine foul-ups drained any joy feeling I had from having gone on vacation.

That is until I learned how to fix my company and fix my thinking. I was the problem and I finally decided it was going to change.

Here’s how my brothers and I learned to not only take charge of our company but get our lives back one vacation day at a time:

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