Every public works director wants to know how the work is going. Every crew member worries about how that will be measured. Both are right.
Numbers about people can help a city plan staffing, spot training needs and recognize good work. They can also be misleading if they ignore the difference between a five-minute sign fix and a two-hour water leak. Sentra 311's worker efficiency reports are built to give useful answers while keeping that context.
Where the numbers come from
Worker efficiency is built from the status changes workers make in the app: en route, on site, resolved. That has two benefits:
- The person who did the work gets the credit, even when the request was assigned to a crew.
- Office closes aren't counted as field work. A dispatcher who closes a duplicate from the desk doesn't show up as a field worker.
Steps longer than eight hours are treated as a forgotten tap and left out of the time calculations, so one missed button doesn't skew a month.
What's measured
For each worker, over any period:
- Jobs closed and jobs worked.
- Days in the field, and jobs per day worked.
- Median travel time, from en route to on site.
- Median time on site, from on site to resolved.
- Time to close, from filing to resolution, in calendar or business time.
- SLA met, for the jobs they closed.
- Callbacks, jobs a resident reopened as not fixed.
- Resident rating, when residents rated the work.
- Open now, jobs assigned to them today.
We use medians, not averages, for times. One three-hour job shouldn't make a worker's typical job look slow.
The division view
The division page shows every field worker in a department side by side, with totals and a comparison to the previous period. A chart shows jobs closed per day or week, stacked by worker. A map shows where the work happened, one color per worker. Supervisors can sort the table by any column, download it as CSV or print it.
The individual view
Each worker has a report page with:
- Their numbers next to the team average, labeled "Better than team," "About average" or "Below team."
- A map of every job in the period, numbered in the order they were done each day. Pick a day and the map draws the route along real streets.
- Jobs per day, a breakdown by request type, and a list of every job with arrival time, travel, time on site, outcome, SLA and rating.
Some measures, such as days in the field and total time driving and on site, are shown without a better or worse label, because more isn't better or worse.
Using it fairly
The numbers are a starting point for a conversation, not a verdict. A few practices we recommend:
- Compare like with like. Look at the "by request type" table before comparing two workers. A worker who takes all the water leaks will have longer times on site.
- Look at trends, not single weeks. One bad week is noise.
- Pair numbers with photos. Close-out photos show the quality of the work, which no number captures.
- Use callbacks for training, not discipline. A high callback rate often points to a missing tool or unclear standard.
- Share the reports with crews. People trust numbers they can see.
Questions we hear from crews
"Will this count against me if I take the hard jobs?" That's why the reports break work down by request type and use medians. A supervisor can see that someone handles most of the water leaks and compare like with like.
"What if I forget to tap On site?" The job still counts as closed. It just won't have a time on site. Steps longer than eight hours are left out, so a forgotten tap doesn't make a job look like it took all day.
"Who can see my numbers?" Supervisors and admins with access to reports for your department.
What it's good for
Used well, these reports answer practical questions. Do we need another worker in Streets? Did the new routing cut travel time? Which request types take longer than we planned? Who's doing great work that nobody has noticed?
That last question matters. In most cities, the people who quietly close the most jobs are not the ones anyone hears about.