For the past few months, I’ve been conducting the 2018 Utility Staffing Survey. This survey has become a biennial survey, alternating years with the Utility Fee Survey. The initial Utility Staffing Survey was in 2016 and, for sake of comparison, here are the results from that survey:

This is the first of two blog issues publishing the results of the 2018 Utility Staffing Survey. This issue will examine demographics of the survey respondents, staffing levels, and factors outside the control of the utilities. The next issue will examine staffing levels and practices each utility can control, such as such as payment processing and bill printing.

Demographics of survey respondents

82 utilities, representing 20 states, ranging in size from 134 to 90,000 active accounts participated in the survey. Check out the charts below of the various demographic data for the survey respondents:

Accounts per employee

To arrive at an accurate index to compare utilities of differing sizes and billing frequencies, I came up with the number of accounts billed annually per employee. This formula multiplied the number of active accounts by the number of times each account is billed annually (12 for monthly billing, 6 for bi-monthly billing, 4 for quarterly billing, and 3 for three times a year billing) then divided that product by the total number of office employees. The higher the result, the more efficient the office should be.

The results ranged from 300 to 46,957 as represented by the graph below.

One disclaimer applies. Two of the top five most efficient offices are local governments where payments are taken in a different department, so their staffing numbers do not include cashiers.

Annual customer turnover

I wondered if the turnover in customers would be a factor in how efficiently offices are staffed, so the survey asked how many applications for service (including routine move in/move outs and new construction) each utility processes per year.

Some utilities billing only property owners, and those will have a much lower turnover rate than utilities billing tenants.

Not surprisingly, the annual turnover rates ranged widely, from .05% to 45.63%. On the low end is a utility in a predominately rural area that only bills property owners. On the high end is a city with a large military installation nearby that bills tenants.

This year, unlike two years ago, there is a slight correlation between annual turnover rates and office efficiency. Of the 15 most efficiently staffed utilities, only four of them have annual turnover rates over 10% and only one of those is over 15%.

Major services billed

The final variable I examined for this issue was major services billed (water, sewer, electric and natural gas) looking for a correlation between the number of services billed and office staffing. I only considered the major services, because other services, such as garbage, stormwater, or area lights, generally are billed as flat-rate services and are not nearly as labor intensive to bill.

As was the case in 2016, utilities billing multiple metered services require more staff than those billing for only a single metered service. This was even more convincing this year, as 31 of the 32 most efficient offices bill for only one metered service, as shown below. The one anomaly also happens to be one of the utilities mentioned above that doesn’t collect payments.

Next issue

The next issue will analyze staffing levels and labor-saving practices each utility can control, such as automation and outsourcing.