Guides
How to write a handyman service standard with one worked example and four tests
A practical guide to writing a handyman service standard, with one worked example of a sticking door, four wording tests, and how to keep the set usable.
What to take away
- A standard is a completion test, not a method. Write what the finished work must be true of, and let a competent person choose how to get there.
- Write one standard properly before writing twenty badly. The first one teaches you the format.
- Four tests catch almost every unusable standardthe substitution test, the argument test, the absence test, and the boundary test.
- Standards are worth writing for the jobs you do often and the jobs that go wrong often. Nothing else earns the maintenance.
- A standard nobody can find on a Tuesday morning does not exist.
The format
Each standard has five parts and fits on a page.
Five parts of a standard
- Job name in customer's language
- Completion test as conditions
- Assumptions it is written against
- Exclusions and licensed-trade boundary
- Record left behindphoto and tick
Notice what is absent. No method. No tool list. No step order. Those belong in training, because two competent people will reach the same result differently and a standard that specifies the route will be ignored the first time the route is blocked.
Worked example: rehanging a sticking interior door
Job as the customer would say it: the bedroom door sticks and does not close properly.
Door completion test
- Closes from a light push and latches
- Full arc with no contact anywhere
- Even gap, no daylight at one corner
- Hinges and strike secure in sound material
- Removed hardware refitted and tight
- Disturbed paint made good or recorded
Completion test. The door closes from a light push and latches without being pushed or lifted. It opens and closes through its full arc without contact anywhere. The gap around the door is consistent enough that no daylight shows at one corner and not another. Hinges and strike are secure in sound material, not in enlarged or filled holes. Any hardware removed is refitted and tight. Paint or finish disturbed during the work is made good, or the customer has been told it will need attention and that has been recorded.
Assumptions. The door and frame are sound rather than swollen or rotten. The floor covering is not the cause. The hinges are a standard type and replacements are available if needed. There is no evidence of movement in the surrounding structure.
Exclusions and boundary. Structural movement of the frame or the opening. Anything requiring work on the wall itself beyond making good. Replacing a fire rated door assembly, which is its own question and is referred.
Record. Photograph of the closed door showing the gap, and a note of what the cause turned out to be.
That standard is under three hundred words and it settles almost every argument that this job produces. The cause note is the part that pays for itself, because after twenty doors it will tell you what fails in your local housing stock.
The four tests
Run every standard through these before it goes into use.
Four tests before use
Substitution test: could a stranger produce the result?
standard is written down
your judgment is missing
- The substitution test. Could a competent person who has never met you produce the result from this alone? If it needs your judgment to interpret, the judgment is the part you have not written down.
- The argument test. If a customer disputed the outcome, would this page settle it? A standard that describes effort rather than result settles nothing.
- The absence test. What does the technician do when an assumption turns out false? A standard with no answer to that will be abandoned at the first unusual house, and the answer is usually the same: stop, describe, get a recorded decision.
- The boundary test. Does it say, explicitly, where this job stops and a licensed trade begins? That boundary is settled once with your state licensing board and your local building department, then repeated in every standard it touches.
Choosing what to write standards for
Two criteria, and only two.
What to write standards for
Write now
- Frequency
- Fills your week
- Trouble
- Returns and disputes
- Set size
- Small and trusted
Let it wait
- Frequency
- Twice a year
- Trouble
- No rework logged
- Set size
- Forty, stale in a year
Frequency. The jobs that fill your week are where consistency pays, and they are also the ones where a small variation multiplies across many customers.
Trouble. The jobs that generate returns, disputes, or long time overruns. Your rework log names these for you, which is why the log has to exist before the standards do. The measures behind that are set out in the service quality overview.
Everything else can wait indefinitely. A set of forty standards, most of which cover work you do twice a year, will be stale within a year and nobody will trust any of it.
Keeping the set usable
Three properties decide whether a set of standards survives contact with a working week.
Keeping the set usable
- Findable in seconds, from a phone, in a van
- Dated and owned by a named person
- Amended by evidence, not by opinion
- Changes when rework log shows same cause twice
- Changes when jobs overrun the standard
Findable in seconds, from a phone, in a van, with cold hands. If it lives in a folder somebody has to ask for, it does not exist.
Dated and owned. Each standard carries the date it was last changed and the name of the person who owns it. When a technician finds it wrong, they know who to tell.
Amended by evidence rather than by opinion. A standard changes when the rework log shows the same cause twice, or when a job repeatedly takes longer than the standard implies. Not because somebody had a better idea in a meeting.
The completed records that come out of these standards are business records, and the general obligation to keep them is described in the IRS guidance on what kind of records to keep. The per-visit routine that produces them is the quality assurance checklist.
Where standards meet the rest of the business
A standard implies a kit. If the completion test requires a fixing appropriate to the substrate, the van has to carry fixings for every substrate you meet, which is a stocking decision covered by the opening equipment checklist and organized through the van and kit setup.
A standard implies training. Reading it is not being trained on it, and the difference is the first thing to get lost when somebody is hired in a hurry. How that handover works is part of how people are hired and trained.
A standard implies a safety position. Where a job has a hazard attached, the standard should say so and say what the technician does about it, which is what OSHA means by a program that finds and fixes hazards on a schedule in its recommended practices for a safety and health program.
And a standard eventually shows up in what customers say about you in public. Consistent output produces consistent reviews, and how those reviews may be solicited is set out in the Federal Trade Commission's guidance on soliciting and paying for online reviews.
Common questions
How many standards does a small business need?
Fewer than ten to start, covering the jobs that fill your week. Add one whenever the rework log names a cause twice. A business with three good standards is in better shape than one with thirty nobody reads.
Should a standard say how long the job takes?
Keep duration separate from the standard. Times belong in your estimating data, which changes with experience, while the completion test should not change just because somebody got faster.
Who should write them?
Whoever does the job most often, edited by whoever handles the complaints. The first person knows what the result should be; the second knows which parts customers argue about.
What if a technician disagrees with a standard?
That is useful information and should be easy to raise. Either they know something the standard does not, in which case it changes, or they have a habit the standard exists to correct, in which case the conversation is the point.
