Fair Dispatch Can Lift Technician Earnings and Shop Profit at the Same Time
Every dispatcher knows which tech gets the cream work. Senior guy with the clean van. The one who never complains. Whoever's closest to the owner's office. Over time, it shows up in paychecks.
The quiet assumption has always been that fair dispatch costs money. New research in Computers & Operations Research (2024) says otherwise.
The model balanced three objectives at once:
→ Firm profit → Customer satisfaction → Equity in technician earnings
Finding: fairness often improves alongside profit, not against it. The assumed tradeoff is smaller and more situational than industry intuition.
Why this matters for retention: the tech most likely to leave your shop in 2026 isn't your bottom performer. It's your solid mid-level tech who shows up on time, does clean work, and watches higher-revenue jobs route to two preferred colleagues. They see it. They have options now.
Simple audit you can run today:
Pull 90 days of jobs. Sum per-tech revenue, grouped by experience level. If the spread between your highest and lowest earner (comparable tier) exceeds 40%, you have a fairness problem and a retention problem building under it.
Three practical moves:
1. Measure. Most owners have never pulled this data. 2. Rotate the cream. High-revenue diagnostics and installs shouldn't default to the same two techs every week. 3. Explain the model. Techs don't expect perfect equality. They expect transparency. Resentment grows in silence when nobody knows why work gets assigned the way it does.
Fair dispatch isn't charity. It's retention math.
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