Service: Are You Ready for The Challengers, The Change Catalysts, The Choreographers?

I’m so excited for you all to hear this week’s podcast with Dan McClure, System Innovation Architect and Choreographer at Innovation Ecosystem. This is Dan’s second appearance on the Future of Field Service podcast; he was first a guest on episode 124 back in August of 2021. We all know how much has changed in the world of innovation since then, and Dan’s soon to release a book called Do Bigger Things: A Practical Guide for Doing Powerful Innovation in a Changing World (available February 13^th).

So, I knew going in there was a lot to discuss, but we quickly strayed from my agenda – real shock, right? We’d set our sights on discussing things like:

How has innovation changed in the last ten years, and how will it change in the next five?
How are technologies like AI impacting innovation? Do you see this as an opportunity or a challenge for organizations?
What’s key for organizations in navigating change/innovation well in today’s complex landscape?

While we did dig into all of these areas and more, what I want to share with you today is a piece of our conversation that’s had me thinking ever since about what innovation looks like in the service landscape and how ready companies may (or may not) be for more disruptive change.

You’ll notice in Dan’s title he refers to himself as “Choreographer” – we spend some time in the beginning of the podcast talking about what exactly this means and the hallmark characteristics. I think in some ways you can put it into a similar categorization of challengers and change catalysts – people who are excited by opportunity, who see the big picture, and who aren’t afraid of asking hard questions or sharing bold ideas.

These are my words, not Dan’s, and listening to him explain the choreographer role is well worth your time. Personally, it’s something I can really identify with – I’ve worked hard in my professional career to harness my choreographer-like traits for good, because often early on my excitement and passion was viewed more as “difficult” than creative. As an aside, and I wish I’d have thought to ask Dan about this, I have to wonder if women who have choreographer traits tend to be perceived differently than men with those same traits. I found myself early in my career being told I was “too emotional” when I’d speak up on an issue where I’d seen men in very similar situations received far differently.

Anyway, here I am getting off track! While I do resonate personally with a lot of what Dan shared about the choreographer’s role in innovation, what it had me thinking about that is relevant to you all is – how ready is service for this type of role? You hear every company speaking about how they are working to innovate, but how are they defining innovation? Are they introducing incremental improvement, or really redefining their value proposition or delivery models?

Walking the Talk

I’ve talked to many service leaders who are likely choreographers who see so much potential for innovation within their company but are stifled in not only action but even sharing those ideas because their executive leadership may lay claims to innovation but is quite comfortable with the status quo. I do believe this is changing, quickly, and that companies need to really consider how open they are to those who see the potential for change are willing to drive it.

I shared in my 2024 predictions that I believe “old-school” leaders will be ousted, and I think topic ties in. Cultures who operate in a manner where an elite few make all decisions based only on their very limited context won’t survive in the rapidly changing world Dan speaks about. Companies who recognize that innovation comes from diversity of thought and requires an environment where different perspectives and new ideas are welcomed will without a doubt take the competitive lead.

It seems many companies and leaders are following a script of what they know they should say – they are people-first, employee-centric, innovative – and so on. But is it true – is it genuine? It’s genuine when they say these things backed by a true recognition that it’s the only path to success; not in an obligatory manner.

If you identify with the choreographer description you’ll hear this week, Dan gives three options for how you can navigate a situation where you feel your ideas aren’t truly welcomed.

What does an organization who is ready for – or already supportive of – choreographers look like? A few things come to mind:

Leaders are truly open minded
Employees are empowered to share their feedback, input and ideas
Employee feedback is acted upon and communicated back
Diversity is not only deemed important but prioritized at all levels of the business
Those who show promise as the choreographer type are given opportunities to hone their skills

What would you add to this list? I’d love to hear from you!

During the Future of Field Service Live Tour in Stockholm last October, I had a chance to sit down with the team from Electrolux for a deep dive into their ongoing service transformation as part of the company’s overall customer centricity initiative. The service transformation a significant global project to replace a 40-year-old service management platform – sound pretty daunting, eh?

As you can imagine, updating such an entrenched system required a lot more than just ripping and replacing software. The Electrolux service team did not want to miss an opportunity to take a top-to-bottom look at service processes so they could really reap all the benefits of using new technology. Good on them for recognizing the reality that layering new tech on old processes won’t do much to improve operations overall.

To make an already major undertaking even more daunting, the first phase of their initiative did not go well. In 2018, the company rolled out a pilot solution in Belgium and not only did the solution not really work, but the vendor also went through an acquisition during deployment, which would have led to another major upgrade not too far along in the future.

Fortunately, Electrolux had the foresight to change paths before getting in too deep. The company decided not only to implement a new tool, but also to take a different approach.

"[T]his time we thought, ‘Let's do something different. Let's involve the actual end users and all the countries that would ever use this tool. They should be part of even selecting the vendor, selecting the tool,’” said Kristoffer Brun, Services & Repair Transformation Manager.

Electrolux also met with each potential new vendor to find out what their product roadmap would look like. With input from customers and internal stakeholders, and a future vision from the tech vendors, they slowly built a set of business requirements based on what they wanted their service operation to look like in the near-term and in the future. They also visited vendor references in person to see how potential software solutions were working.

After selecting IFS Service Management and successfully rolling it out in Belgium, Electrolux next turned its attention to Denmark. There are a lot of lessons to take from their experience there regarding change management, because as they described it, their Danish organization was very stable – with the highest average age of technicians in Europe.

That can be a huge hurdle, because long-time technicians can be resistant to process and technology changes. Electrolux took an interesting approach – they brought in an outsider to help lead the transition and serve as a change ambassador. The Danish team also met with the Belgium team in person to see the solution in action.

“We got to talk with the technicians, with the resource planners, the parts planners, the back-office team, and ask any questions we wanted,” said Peter Sandkvist, Transformation Manager. “They presented to us. And this specifically built confidence in the Danish team.”

How Storytelling Aids Change Management

Anna Mezzanotte, Service Operations Product Domain Expert at Electrolux, brought up another key strategy that Electrolux emphasized – the role of storytelling in change management.

“Because we really need to make sure to explain to all our business users why we're doing this change, of course, but also the consequence of not embracing this change. What's the opportunity cost at stake?” she said.

Just as important was explaining to the technicians what they could gain from the new system. “Make sure that you explain to all these agents that will work with the solution what's in there for them,” Anna said. “[H]ow will these new tools make their life easier and better?”

The other benefit of really understanding the “Why?” of the project and explaining it to employees affected by it, is that it also helps the implementation team better understand the project scope and its limitations.

Peter said that careful, detailed planning was another key part of their success. Not just planning who would complete what task, but also planning out communication and training in advance, and planning to establish some resilience in the project and in the team for when things did not go well. In other words, have a Plan B (and maybe a Plan C), so everyone knows what to do if something fails.

The Electrolux team also mentioned something that other field service leaders have brought up in our discussions before – the importance of having some fun and celebrating successes throughout the project timeline, not just at the end. Without those celebrations, change simply becomes exhausting.

What Electrolux did (through research, having a future vision, careful planning, and good communication) also helped build some future capabilities into the workforce and the management team. When the next project comes along that might create changes (even small ones) in the organization or the technology set, the team is better prepared to manage that process and accept those changes because a foundation of trust has been built.

As Anna noted, “If I have to pick up one of the most important lessons learned, I would say that – and again, I'm referring a lot to my IT colleagues here – remember that, [in the] end, it's not an IT project. It's a people project.”

I had a great, wide-ranging discussion with the Electrolux team. You can listen to the whole thing here.

By Sarah Nicastro, Creator, Future of Field Service

I am a huge advocate of the move toward a leadership style and company culture that honors the fact that they can’t accomplish their ultimate goals without their people and makes effort to truly respect, reward, and empower their teams. As such, I was thrilled to have the opportunity to interview Caroline Häggström Marklund, Managing Director and VP Customer Services Nordic at Vattenfall, at the October Live Tour event in Stockholm.

From the moment I first spoke with Caroline, I knew her statements of prioritizing a people-first culture had real authenticity and action behind them. With the correlation between employee engagement and customer satisfaction becoming clearer, we’ve fallen trap to many leaders and organizations who make empty claims of being “people-first” without an ounce of effort to back those claims up.

Vattenfall Customer Service is an example, however, of a company getting it right and its accolades don’t lie. Vattenfall won the Swedish Union's HBTQI award for most inclusive workplace, best service in the energy sector, and has earned its Great Place to Work certification. Lucky for our Live Tour attendees, they got to hear firsthand from Caroline what has elicited these awards and, more importantly, the right to claim people-first and mean it.

Reflecting back on our conversation, I see six key themes that stand out as foundational to what makes this work well rather than fall flat.

#1: Understanding & Accepting the Need

The companies making false claims are the ones who see employee engagement, satisfaction, and a people-first culture as buzzwords they “have to” care about; not as an opportunity to think and do differently that can pay dividends.

The reality is, due to the impact of the pandemic, generational ideals, talent shortages, and much more, a people-first approach is simply what’s needed today. I truly believe that companies who fail to embrace this reality will fall behind their competitors that do in short order.

“First of all, I think it's about common decency: Treat people well overall and in general, in business and in society. I think that's just what you do,” says Caroline. “But we've been through decades of automation and lean processes, and the tasks that are in our hands now are way more complex than what they used to be. In order to sort that out, people need to feel enabled and engaged. Also, when work is more and more relationship focused – relationships with customers, with the clients, within the organization, with colleagues and all of that – no matter what AI, our job will always be to sort of maintain relationships. If you're going to maneuver that world, I think you need to be given a lot of trust and freedom. It would be weird of me as a leader to say that I know exactly what all of the 400 people here in this organization need to do, because I don't. But I need to trust them that they know what to do if I tell them what the final goal is. I think a more complex environment, a more harsh overall climate in the world is leaning us towards this.”

In our complex and dynamic world, a prescriptive approach doesn’t lend itself to the agility needed and it stifles the creativity employees bring to problem-solving, brainstorming, and innovating. Like I said, the time for a new way has arrived – it’s just a matter of accepting it.

#2: Authenticity & Top-Down Support

One of the big points of caution that Caroline shared is to never, ever say you want to be people first – or, even worse, claim that you are – without being willing to do the work.

“It's about authenticity in a way, I think. That goes for, I mean, whatever culture you want to build. Sometimes I think that we don't realize that even if we don't sort of state what culture we want to have, we are still creating a culture just by acting in a certain way,” explains Caroline. “A people-first approach, to me, it's all about trust, and the people in my extended team and my closest team, they need to trust that I will put them first when the shit hits the fan and even before that. Therefore, it's about relationship, it's about trust.”

What happens when companies make the claim of focusing on or being people-first without any of the actions that make that claim a reality? They damage whatever trust they already had from their employees, and they lose respect, negatively impacting employee morale, company culture and often performance.

“If I want to earn people's trust, I have to be what I say I am, because if I'm not, it's hollow. If I state that I want to drive a people first culture and then act differently, then this is not going to have any power; rather the opposite,” warns Caroline. “In my view, it's like say that you want to do it and don't do it, it's the worst thing that you can do if you want to create something like that.”

While authenticity in the objective is critical, so too is top-down support – because an individual leader can believe in this approach wholeheartedly but struggle to take actions aligned with that belief if it isn’t shared by top-level executives.

#3: Trust the Payoff Will Come

Caroline stressed to me that there was one myth she wanted to be sure to address in our session, and that’s that a people-first strategy is soft or “fluffy,” not a path to achieving concrete, bottom-line impact. This simply hasn’t been her experience.

“Especially in customer service, it is all about relationships. If your people aren't comfortable or safe in their environment, how are they going to be able to have an open dialogue with a customer and do what is needed to do?” asks Caroline. “So, we started the journey of people and then performance because I am a firm believer, and now I also have clear evidence, that if you as a leader focus on enabling your people, setting them up for success, then the performance will follow. You need to measure it obviously, but you don't have to be ‘there’ if you're ‘here.’ Include and trust in people; it will come much easier.”

At the core, the belief is to stop prioritizing profit over people and trust that if we focus in the right ways on our people, the performance and profit will follow. Trusting this belief is something that more and more companies are beginning to do.

Caroline shared a story that illustrates how Vattenfall really built the momentum with this in her session. If you’d like to listen to the full story, you can find it on our podcast – but to summarize, early on in this initiative there was a problem with performance tied to staffing that needed resolved. Caroline took the steps she felt would resolve the issue, and it did not. The teams looked at her questioning what she’d do next, and she stated simply that she didn’t know – she needed them to tell her what they needed to succeed. This was a point where they realized her intent was genuine and that she wanted their input. They weighed in, she delivered what they needed, and the measurable results spoke for themselves in this approach being effective. Moreover, this was a turning point for building the trust that is necessary for the people-first model to work.

This piece can be tough for a lot of leaders who are pressured to make numbers and hit short-term goals. That’s understandable and something that needs to be navigated, but the example Caroline shared of what happens when you trust the process paints a clear picture of what’s possible.

If you missed our podcast with Venkata Reddy Mukku, Vice President Worldwide Service & Support Organization at Bruker Nano Surfaces & Metrology, it’s another conversation that deep dives into not only his believe in a people-first strategy, but details on how he executes and what the benefits have been.

#4: Create – and Enforce – a No Assholes Policy

This next one might raise some eyebrows, but it has to be said – to make good on a people-first strategy, you must create – and enact – a no-assholes policy. To be honest, this is one area where I feel a lot of organizations with initially good intentions fall short.

The excuses start to feel like reasons, and next thing you know it’s – oh, we can’t get rid of them, they are a top performer. Yes, they are causing some issues with morale but they’re so-and-so’s hire, so we’re sort of stuck. Yikes, they aren’t effective but it’s a really delicate issue.

No. Just, no. For this to work, really work, you have to eliminate the toxicity that exists among the ranks – and that means all the way from frontline to top levels. As Caroline mentions, this is not only not easy, but it also requires executive support.

“At first I needed to do a little bit of a structural change and move leaders that stood for the former culture basically. It was also clear that they were not willing or able to be authentic in the new world or however you want to put it. That was one thing. It was important in order to really establish this culture of people first, I wanted to make it really clear that harassment or any kind of demeaning behavior to others is absolutely unacceptable,” explains Caroline. “We needed to move away from if you were a brilliant mind that created a lot of business, but in the process of doing so, you belittled others or stepped on others or were even mean to others, you were still sort of like a high performer. In my world, that doesn't add up. A high performer is a role model as well as delivering business value.”

This initial wave of change gave way to the formal no-asshole policy. “That's when I introduced the no asshole policy. If you're an asshole, you will not be promoted. If you act in that way, you will not be seen as a high performer. You need to be both. That was quite effective I think, but you need to then act on it,” she urges. “To stand behind what you say, then you need to have, when someone brings up that they have been harassed or have been in an incident or something, you need to dive into it quickly and deal with all the things that come your way then and not try to move past it. This was not easy. I mean it was a lot of discussion also in my management team when we did performance evaluation like, ‘But he's so great and then he does all of this.’ It was a shift. It was not easy.”

Not easy, but we all know sometimes the most important changes are the hardest ones.

#5: Confident, Vulnerable & Humble Leadership

Putting in place a people-first strategy or culture isn’t possible without not only authentic but adept leadership. And the leadership skills that work well in a people-first world are often different than those that worked well in a command-and-control type environment. So, what’s important?

What I took from Caroline’s retelling of her efforts at Vattenfall is that she’s confident but humble. She believes in the approach, she believes in her ability to lead well in a people-first environment, but she’s aware that she doesn’t have – or need to have – all the answers and must welcome and embrace the input of her teams. “My ambition is to have a people-first culture, but that doesn't mean that I will always make the right choice, right? I'm only human and I can make mistakes and I can communicate things in a way that doesn't make sense and absolutely doesn't feel people-first. Therefore, it is really important to me that people talk to me when they feel that. We want to get to a full-on people first culture, but I don't claim to be perfect and there will be mistakes along the way.”

She also stresses the importance of being genuine: “Don’t try to be something that you aren't because you will never be able to fake it in people's mind. Self-leadership and self-knowledge are super critical. If you want to lead a people first culture, you need to make sure to know what kind of culture you are actually driving or developing just by being who you are. If it is what you want it to be, then that's fine. If it's not the culture that you want, then you probably need to change your behavior first. Ownership of your own behavior I think is important.”

I don’t see this as being about abandoning what feels sincere, but rather finding out how to be you while also being willing to grow as a leader, evolve, and adapt your strengths to what works well in today’s world.

You do have to reconcile that it’s really tough to be people-first without getting personal. “I want to know my organization and I don't want to know it by PowerPoints. I want to be able to greet people and recognize them. It's getting more and more difficult the more we get, but at least meet the people in their onboarding and talk a little bit and get a connection to lower the bar for people to come to me if there's something going on that I would need to know. Getting to know people, show that you actually care.”

Building the relationships that make this approach work demands leaders to be a bit vulnerable. “You can't build a relationship based on facts, you need to build it on feelings,” says Caroline. “That doesn't mean that you have to be emotional in a sense that you're crying or raising your voice or whatever, not that kind of emotion, but just be aware that there are feelings all around. I don't think that's soft. It can be uncomfortable because you have to show who you are as well and what you are thinking or feeling about things, but you can never build a culture if you don't show who you are. That's been a journey for me personally as well.”

#6: Reflect & Course Correct

As Caroline pointed out above when owning that she won’t always get things right, the goal in becoming truly people-first isn’t perfection, it’s intent and progress. This means that reflecting often on the state of things and being constantly willing to course-correct is imperative.

“The feedback culture, the feedback loop is so critical for us to move past obstacles that come our way and for me to learn and be better. It's not just about the organization developing and growing, I need to develop and grow as well,” says Caroline. “If you're not humble or willing to receive feedback, you will not get it. If you never get feedback, I think that's a red flag.”

As you reflect and course correct, Caroline suggests coming back to your core values. “If you wonder what kind of culture you are driving at the moment, go back to your core values. What are the things that are really important to you, that have basically always been important? You were taught this when you were a kid or by a role model at school or whatever. That is a process to get close to your core values,” she explains. “If you don't really know or you aren't really sure, which is pretty common, then reflect over the things that makes you really, really mad. When something ticks you off to the end that you get really mad or frustrated about it, then you've probably met someone or something that shows the opposite of what your core value actually is. You can turn that around and do some self-reflection. I think that is a good start in self-leadership and then driving culture.”

Caroline’s point about reflecting on what makes you mad reminded me of talking with Cait Donovan of the Fried Podcast when she was a guest – she talks about how there’s power in resentment, because it’s telling you something so important. This example of self-reflection shows, again, how leadership is evolving and the thinking that lends itself to really progressing a people-first strategy.

In addition to an individual leader maintaining an open feedback loop with their teams, it can be really helpful to combine that with a company-wide assessment of employee engagement, satisfaction, and feedback to make sure that a people-first approach isn’t being adopted in just one area of the business but across the board.

By Sarah Nicastro, Creator, Future of Field Service

Field service organizations are struggling with several staffing problems simultaneously. The workforce is aging, and experienced technicians are retiring – taking valuable institutional and technical knowledge with them. Younger workers entering the labor market often lack the technical skills needed for field service work, or viewed by some potential employers as too demanding when it comes to pay, scheduling flexibility, and work environment.

For companies on a growth path, an inability to resolve these issues can stymie your ability to take on new business or even to deliver quality service to existing customers. But by leveraging some creative thinking and the right technology, service organizations can address at least some of these labor challenges by developing an upskilling or development program.

Setting up an internal training or career development program can seem daunting, particularly for companies already struggling to hire enough people, who are short-staffed and feel there’s already too much to do. While an investment of time, a well-designed upskilling initiative can pay dividends when it comes to attracting and retaining workers.

First, it helps the company stay on top of technical training. Whatever industry you are in, servicing your customers gets more complex every year. Products are always changing, along with the environments in which they are installed. A good field service operation should already have an education/training program in place so that technicians are up to date; the upskilling program can piggy-back on that.

Second, a focus on upskilling can help attract new hires and keep them around. Competition for technicians means that many companies are going to have to hire relatively green employees with non-traditional backgrounds and provide a lot of upfront training to get them up to speed. By providing training and certifications not only at the beginning but on an ongoing basis, field service organizations can become more attractive to their pool of potential employees and have more success retaining existing talent.

Upskilling Increases Employee Engagement

How? Upskilling and career development keep employees engaged. We know that there’s a correlation between employee engagement and customer satisfaction, so this is a worthwhile effort. It also provides employees a path for growth within the company, empowering employees to strive at their pace toward advancement and better pay, while sending a message that the company is invested in them.

Finally, these programs can potentially help keep retiring workers around a little longer by offering them opportunities to shift their work responsibilities as they age. You can also ask older employers to stay on, perhaps on a part-time basis, to help run these training programs.

Training is labor intensive, but technology can help. A number of solutions and applications have emerged that can bolster training/upskilling programs without the need for hiring more trainers:

Augmented/virtual reality tools allow technicians to virtually diagnose and repair equipment. There is no substitute for hands-on training, of course, but this type of 3D virtual instruction can accelerate the process.
Virtual collaboration tools leverage this type of AR/VR interface so trainers can work with new employees (or even techs operating in the field) remotely. A handful of trainers or senior technicians can support new employees (and each other) from anywhere.
On-demand training assets can be accessed by technicians on their mobile devices. This can reduce some classroom time, which can help keep the training schedule manageable. This type of flexible, self-directed training can be appealing to younger workers.

I wrote recently about the importance of career development, and interviewed Jennifer Morehead of Flex HR about how these programs can benefit service organizations. An important theme that came up was that you must consider taking care of your employees needs in the same way you look at providing good service to your clients. If your technicians are not happy or they don't feel like they have the right tools to do their jobs, that will eventually affect client satisfaction.

That element of workforce development also came up in my conversation with Gyner Ozgul, former President and COO of Smart Care Equipment Solutions. In describing the Smart Care training/development program – which provides opportunities to become managers, trainers or sales reps – Gyner told me “We've been very clear to map out each one of those for our technicians, so they feel that this is an organization that no matter what path they take, they can feel supported and be successful.”

How has your company approached upskilling and development? What challenges have you faced, or opportunities have you created? I’d love to hear your experiences.

By Sarah Nicastro, Creator, Future of Field Service

The Harvard Business Review published an interesting piece recently on project management approaches and the debate between people who prefer the structured waterfall method and those who have embraced agile management methodologies.

Most of you are likely familiar, but to recap, the waterfall approach is a more traditional way to manage a project with clear steps and milestones that must be met before moving on to the next phase. For example, a simplified model for a software installation would have a product selection phase, followed by a test/pilot, and then a full rollout.

Agile, on the other hand, emerged from software development projects and focuses more on group collaboration, rapid iteration, and continuous change. So, for companies that were writing software, the idea was to deliver a product quickly, and then work with beta users and clients to work out bugs, identify new functionality, and provide upgrades and patches fairly frequently.

Because agile was pretty successful in the software industry, other types of businesses began adopting that approach for other types of projects. As you can imagine, this much different style was not enthusiastically embraced by everyone, but it offered some clear value in terms of time-to-market, and in addressing the weaknesses of traditional project management – namely, rigidity, an inability to adjust to changing conditions, and late discovery of problems that resulted in costly rework.

In field service, agile has been deployed not just for specific projects, but also as a general business practice that can help companies respond more quickly to changing customer, staffing and financial realities.

The Pros of a Hybrid Approach

The HBR piece suggests a hybrid approach that combines some of the rigor of waterfall (having clearly defined goals and good documentation) with the flexibility of agile (being able to pivot based on stakeholder input or new information). That basic premise fits field service well, particularly when thinking beyond project management. Service is an industry where technicians need to rigorously adhere to service level agreements, safety requirements, and other processes/practices, while also being able to creatively solve problems, adjust schedules, and respond to volatile levels of demand with a workforce that may have varying skill levels.

That's why agile as a mindset instead of a methodology is more valuable in this environment. A few years ago, I spoke to Amanda Moore at Schneider Electric about that company's adoption of agility. She also emphasized that you need structure and buy-in – there has to be a clear understanding of where you want to go and what type of organization you want to be, as well as an alignment across groups.

Luckily, field service technicians have long embraced agility, whether they would refer to it that way or not. Even when arriving to conduct fairly straightforward repairs, they always have to be prepared for the unexpected – a problem they were not expecting, an environmental condition that could make the repair take longer, or some other type of issue that they couldn't anticipate.

Further up the chain of command, agility has become increasingly important. Field service organizations need to be flexible enough to respond to changing customer demands that, in some cases, could significantly shake up their business model. Instead of break-fix service, clients may want preventive maintenance contracts or guaranteed uptime. You may need to incorporate remote service to address staffing shortages or invest in training resources as equipment becomes more complex, integrated, and connected.

It also helps to have a technology platform that enables that type of flexibility. Field service management platforms not only need to provide flexible and responsive scheduling, but also equip technicians and managers with tools that can help them report new conditions or customer needs, and then use that data to provide better service or create new offerings to take advantage of emerging opportunities.

An agile approach to field service provides companies with the ability to adapt in what has become a rapidly evolving market. For companies that have implemented agile methodologies for projects, consider the successes you've seen there, and how they can be applied more broadly across the company – from the way technicians respond to events in the field, to how management sells service to new and existing customers.

By Sarah Nicastro, Creator, Future of Field Service

We have talked to a lot of different management consultants over the past several years about ways our audience may be able to improve leadership effectiveness, their management style and team interactions. Among these conversations, trust and open communication are always key considerations for improving team interactions.

Eric Papp is a management consultant, trainer and motivational speaker based in Florida, who has written a number of books on effective management approaches. He speaks often at industry conferences, including the recent Mechanical Service Contractors of America conference in October. His latest book, Manage Promises, Not People : How To Create A Self-Managing Team, is focused on trust building that can help teams be more effective. I spoke to him recently about how some of these principles can be applied in field service organizations, particularly since so much of what service does is fulfilling promises – not just the promise of doing your best work within a field service team, but also the promises companies make to their clients in their service agreements.

Can you explain the concept of promises in the context of the workplace?

Promises in the context of work are what an employee would tell their manager. So for example, the employee promises they will be at work at 9 a.m. What happens if they are late? The manager sees a potential conflict. Do I let it go? What you can say is, “You showed up at 9:20. Do you know what impact that had on me as a manager? I had to call someone in, or we had to be at Ms. Johnson’s house at 10 and we didn’t make it.” Then you set future expectations. Will you send me a text if you are running late? You help them raise their awareness level.

It’s the same thing on a field service job. The technician goes out and takes care of the problem, but the customer calls and says they left mud tracks throughout the house and didn't put their booties on. What is going on? You don’t want to make the employee wrong, but you want to elevate their level of power. There are always gaps between what people say and what they do. Managing the promise instead of the person helps you identify those gaps, get better at it, and as a manager you should look in the mirror and recognize when you do it, and then come from a place of humility and growth. There has to be a level of trust.

In field service, employees frequently work remotely, in some cases do not physically see their managers more than once every week or two. What are some of the challenges that remote work places on this way of trust building?

This is why it’s so important to manage the promise and not the person. If you don't see someone for a whole week, and they are on their own, it’s more crucial. You want to have that level of trust that they are doing what they say they are doing.

In the book, you make some points about overpromising. In our industry, that is often more of a management or corporate-level problem when setting terms with a client about service that will be delivered. The field technicians wind up paying a price for that. How can organizations scale back that impulse to over-promise just to win business?

You all have to be on the same page. If management over promises, the technician has to do their best to fulfill that promise. Then it’s up to them to have that conversation with a manager, so they know what you ran into that made it exponentially more difficult. As a manager, you have to be open to that input.

You see customer trust start to erode when someone comes out to the site and does something completely different than what was promised, or they contradict the promise. That’s when you lose the customer's trust and you don’t get a call back.

You also need to do some reflection. What did I set out to do today, and what percentage of that did I actually accomplish? A lot of people fall into the optimistic fallacy, where we truly underestimate the time and effort something is going to take, and then overestimate our ability to accomplish it. It’s part of being human.

Where are some areas you see a lot of managers can make improvements on ability to lead, rather than just manage, and how the idea of honoring promises can be worked into day-to-day interactions.

Coaching conversations are really important. If you manage promises, that lends itself to better coaching. That is what you are really called to do, even though so few managers are able to do it because they are bogged down with administrative tasks. But your job as a manager is to improve outputs. How do you do that? You look at your employees that are out there doing the work, and figure out how you can best support them. Have meetings with them, and use those coaching conversations to get them to the next level.

You also have talked about the gap between having knowledge and being able to use it effectively. In field service, technology has given us a lot of information about equipment performance and technician activities, but that can lead to micromanagement.

If you are managing a promise, then micromanaging is not happening. You have trust and communication.Sometimes having more information can be paralyzing. I see that in sales, where people think they have to have all the research done before they pick up the phone and do any business development. You should be focusing on the right touch points. You may have data on gas mileage, or break times, but it really comes down to a few key touchpoints. In field service, that may be how many clients did you see, and are they happy with your service? What is your track record for getting called back again by those customers?

The more information you look at, the more you can get lost in the weeds.

I have spoken to a few consultants and authors about workplace conflict, and I wanted to ask you to discuss healthy versus unhealthy conflict, and why that is important for good management.

Healthy conflict is being able to talk about what matters without people getting offended. We can talk about performance, and not focus on personality. In a lot of organizations, they don’t talk about problems until they are so painful they have to do something. As humans, we are trained that conflict is bad. You have to navigate healthy conflict at work like you’re in a marriage. You don’t see eye to eye on everything, but how you approach those issues and talk abou them can mean the difference between bringing the team together or putting a chink the armor.

If you don’t address things, that leads to unhealthy conflict and builds resentment. People may harbor these things for years. Conflict makes people uncomfortable. As a manager in a coaching conversation, if you don’t bring up these issues earlier then your team thinks what they are doing is okay. “I’ve been operating this way for months, and you're just now bringing it up?” Things can really fester.

That ties into another point you made in the book about the value of clarity in management.

Clarity is power. If you know what you want, it's much easier to get what you want. As a manager you want to be clear on your standards and not be wishy-washy when communicating them to your employees, or going back on what you said. Having that consistency goes a long way to being effective as a manager, because employees know what the expectations are and what kind of support they are going to get.

Clarity also impacts delegation. There are times when we get inundated with decisions and you can be hesitant. If you aren’t clear on the end result when you are delegating things, you may not get what you were looking for. People who are good at delegation know what they want and can articulate that. Where we run into issues is when we don’t really know the end result we are looking for, and then you can’t communicate it.

By Sarah Nicastro, Creator, Future of Field Service

Here is something that a lot of people who shifted from office-based to remote work during the pandemic won’t find surprising – a new study from Censuswide and Fiverr International (a freelancer service) found that a lot of workers are most productive outside of normal business hours, and a majority of respondents said their current work arrangement/schedule was not working for them.

A few caveats, of course. The survey is mostly focused on office-based and freelance workers, so field service managers may look at this data and (justifiably) say, “So what?” But the data points do point to a general dissatisfaction with the way work is scheduled, and given the staffing and retention challenges faced by the industry, we should all be looking for innovative ways to balance employee scheduling needs with customer demands.

So, some data from the research:

About a third (32%) of respondents said they prefer to work from home, or to at least be able to choose where they work each day.

Somewhat counterintuitively – given all the complaining about how demanding Millennials and Gen Z employees are – Baby Boomers were tops in preferring remote/work-from-home scenarios (40%), while just 29% of Millennials and 32% of Gen X respondents cited remote work as their preference.

28% of Millennials who said they preferred remote work said it was because of childcare needs.

A little more than three-quarters of respondents said they could complete their current workload in a 4-day week.

The big one, though, is that 76% of respondents said their current work arrangement did not meet their ideal preferences. Entry level workers were about 20% less likely than the most senior employees (directors) to report their job met their ideal work preferences.

Field service businesses, of course, usually pride themselves on a service-anytime-anyplace approach to stay competitive – stuff breaks outside of normal business hours, and peak demand can be tough to predict in a lot of markets. But technicians face personal scheduling obstacles, too, and a lot of them are not necessarily preferences and are outside of their control. For entry-level and middle-aged technicians that have kids, childcare is not only expensive, but in some cases just unavailable.

In fact, there are 100,000 fewer childcare workers than there were before the pandemic, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. School schedules do not map well to work schedules in most cases. A lot of current scheduling practices are holdovers from a time when one parent stayed home, but those days have been gone for decades. Employers are going to have to reckon with how their employees juggle work and family time, or they will continue to lose good employees.

In addition, a lot of younger employees have not bought into what is sometimes referred to as Hustle Culture. They prefer to put hard barriers between their personal time and work time and are not as willing as older workers to put in extra hours, for example, to move up in an organization. (Gallup has data on this, but there are plenty of articles about the phenomenon, including one I wrote here.)

Balancing Always-On Service with Employee Satisfaction

But how flexible can field service really be for technicians, given that customers often require or demand service on weekends, service in the evening, or may need technicians working at their facility for more than 8 hours to repair critical equipment?

I would say service organizations probably can’t offer the same flexibility that an office-based role can, they can most definitely be a lot more flexible than they are now. It just requires an openness to accept that circumstances have changed and lean in to creativity and technology to figure out how.

We’re beginning to see examples of companies leading the charge. My favorite example was shared by Mitie Fire & Security at our Birmingham, UK Live Tour event in May. Mitie uses IFS Planning & Scheduling Optimization, an AI-based engine that was put in place to automate scheduling and dispatch but is also being used to give flexibility to the technicians. The company has begun allowing technicians to choose their own start and end times since PSO will simply factor that in as another criteria and optimize accordingly. This allows technicians to feel more in control of their days, the company has experienced no negative impact and shared that it’s only helped with employees’ mental health.

Plenty of service companies dispatch from home – technicians take their service vans/trucks home every night, and head straight to their first assignment from their own driveway. Rotating schedules can help provide some time off during hours that techs may need to tackle childcare (or eldercare for their parents). Organizations can be more flexible about breaks to accommodate childcare — it's not uncommon to see plumbing trucks or taxis in the pickup/dropoff line at some schools. When you start allowing yourself to think differently, you will begin to see opportunities to increase flexibility for your teams.

It wouldn't hurt to ask your technicians what kind of schedule they want. That doesn't mean you have to give them exactly that, but by mapping their requests to customer requirements you could probably come up with at least slightly more workable schedules. Don't forget that your technicians are people, first and foremost. What do they have to schedule around? Is it childcare? Family illness? Hobbies? If you can find a way to work with employees when something comes up (a sick child, for example), it is ultimately a more productive approach than the shift-swapping or loss of paid hours that the technician has to organize on an ad-hoc basis.

Have you had any experience trying to increase the flexibility of your field service organization when it comes to work-life balance for employees? Drop me a line and let me know what you did.

By Sarah Nicastro, Creator, Future of Field Service

This Spring, I wrote about my less-than-happy travel experience flying from Cleveland to London. During that multi-day odyssey I experienced both the upside to automation (the impressive United Airlines app) and some of the downside effects on human interactions that these automated systems can have.

With AI conversations taking place at every turn, I keep thinking about that balance between automation and the human touch when it comes to service. I came across this Harvard Business Review (HBR) piece that has a fairly optimistic take on how workers can maintain their relevance as more companies evaluate AI tools like ChatGPT to take on everything from online service chat functions to writing marketing copy and even creating art.

The crux of the article is that AI is automating intellectual capital in the same way that machinery automated physical labor during previous eras. Just as machines, for example, allowed us to lift heavier and heavier things, AI helps us solve more complex problems because it can evaluate a lot more data than a mere mortal, and throw gobs of computational power into coming up with new solutions.

There are limits, though. AI is not thinking so much as analyzing an immense amount of information, and most of the information was created by flawed, biased people, which means those same biases can creep into the results – and in the case of automated service systems, programmers are often trying to restrict solutions to a fairly limited set of known scenarios.

Once you exhaust those scenarios, the human factor comes into play – a real person must intervene and evaluate the situation. This is where another AI risk surfaces – the limitations of the automated system can start to seep into how employees deal with customers. Service representatives start looking at problems through the lens of what the automated system allows them to do, rather than using their own knowledge to come up with solutions.

The HBR article touches on this, too. For real people working in tandem with an automated service system, it is important to remember the qualities that humans bring to the equation that AI lacks – creativity, empathy, and emotional intelligence.

Creativity, Empathy and EI Remain Critical in Service

Creativity is already critical, both in the call center and in the field, but will be even more important as AI-based systems handle most of the straightforward customer interactions that can be easily solved or routed via automation. When exceptions occur, we will rely on the knowledge of our people to apply a level of curiosity to the situation that AI systems just don't have.

Empathy and emotional intelligence are another story. We know that today’s definition of good service is not just about fixing a given problem, but also being able to effectively connect and communicate well with customers and, in many cases, play a role in driving their business outcomes.

If an automation system is in place, by the time a customer gets through to an actual employee they are usually pretty frustrated (this was true with my own travel experience last month). Their problem has not been addressed through the AI layers of service capabilities. The call has been escalated, probably right along with their blood pressure (speaking from experience). Making sure employees know how to recognize that frustration and respond accordingly (even if it means going off script) is critical to achieving high levels of service. Active listening and empathy at this stage goes a long way to helping the customer feel like their needs are being understood and addressed, even if the employee involved in the engagement cannot solve their problem right away.

This is why service organizations really need to understand that automation and AI are not an end unto themselves; they are tools that work best when they are put in place to unencumber frontline workers from menial tasks, democratize knowledge, and enable the irreplaceable human touch to be applied in the times it’s truly warranted.

Service leaders face immense pressure related to the challenges to hire capable workers at the same rate their most experienced technicians are retiring. AI and automation present a huge opportunity here to take some of the burden off these teams and organizations – these systems can not only manage mundane, repetitive tasks, but can potentially help technicians become even better at their jobs. But the human touch is always going to be the difference maker when it comes to customer satisfaction.

Last week at Field Service Connect in Denver, event organizer Mark Scherzer told of a billboard he’d seen that said, “AI took my job…to the next level.” I believe we need to put teams minds at ease about the risk of AI to their livelihoods; there’s plenty of work to go around. AI is here to uplift those teams, to make service more streamlined and seamless, to eliminate wasted time and efforts and focus truck rolls and in-face time to value-added activities, and to make knowledge it takes to help the customer accessible at the second it is needed. AI is here to take field service to the next level; the importance of human touch shouldn’t be in question.

Have thoughts on this issue? Please share your own experiences and thoughts on AI and how you see it innovating field service.

By Sarah Nicastro, Creator, Future of Field Service

On a recent podcast, I spoke to Dr. Josh Elmore, Principal Consultant at Court Street Consulting and Adjunct Professor at both Columbia University and the City University of New York, about how industrial and social organizational psychology affect leadership and team building efforts.

We talked about the history and evolution of organizational and industrial psychology, and how the focus had shifted from managing environments to understanding motivations and incentives among employees and team members along different tiers of interaction. When it comes to getting teams to move in one direction toward an organizational goal, this type of analysis can be helpful in terms of finding ways to achieve buy-in and avoiding burn out.

I asked Josh about the concept of team facilitation, which in his work as a consultant often involves getting leaders to regularly check in with team members and really listen to what they are saying about new policies, workflows, communication, and decision-making processes and roles. This is especially critical for teams that may be working remotely or in a hybrid environment.

Leaders also need to give team members space to talk about some of these issues that are not part of their daily work processes.

“Oftentimes that space needs to be intentionally developed,” Josh said. “[H]aving some support and having the ability to get folks together and start coordinating your effort and building that continuous practice of just checking in and making sure that … you're all heading towards the same destination [is important], and also creating space to where people can think creatively and bring up challenges as they come along so it doesn't build up.”

Josh also outlined some best practices for what he calls team hygiene. Leaders need to make sure that teams are coordinated, that there is sufficient communication, that members are delivering on their agreed upon goals, and that no one feels like the effort is not evenly distributed.

The Importance of Continuous Listening

He also described a model for change management built on continuous listening. That means team members have the ability to provide feedback while the change is ongoing. This builds a conversation and gradually helps everyone get on the same page.

“However you frame your change management initiative, you're always going to have pushback,” Josh said. “Where are you going to have resistance? Where are you going to have folks that are on board and championing the change? And as you build out this apparatus, this scaffolding for the organization, which is out of your leadership in change, you can test ideas.”

In many organizations, there is seemingly constant change and evolution as companies innovate and reorganize around those innovations. Josh recommended that leaders reframe the environment as fluid and dynamic, so that everyone can come to terms with the non-stop evolution.

“It doesn't necessarily make sense to frame things as stable if they're not,” he said. But instead of having that instability make the team nervous or anxious, it can be presented as an opportunity for growth and innovation. “Things are happening here, and it can be exciting. It could be a motivator as opposed to something you should be afraid of.“

As a lot of other experts I have spoken to emphasized, Josh said that regular communication is critical to this process. The more you involve team members and employees in the process, the more you (as a leader) are going to learn to improve how you introduce and deploy new procedures and technologies.

“I think being in that process of evolution is not easy. And if it's not easy for you, it's not easy for everyone else,“ he said. “And so if you're a leader, how do you make it easier for everyone else, or at least make them feel bought into the process?“

You can listen to the entire podcast here.

By Sarah Nicastro, Future of Field Service

Gone are the days that field technicians would gladly stay in their same role for ten, fifteen, even twenty or more years. Today, retention of talent is increasingly important – and the approach must be far more intentional and layered than what retention demanded in years past. When we talk about what is imperative for retention in today’s talent landscape, one of the topics that often arises is career development strategies.

Career development strategies can help to keep employees engaged, give them opportunities for promotion or growth so that they see a future with the company beyond what they’re currently doing, and allow your business to map various talents, skills, and drive to not only different roles within field service and service at large, but throughout the company. In fact, many organizations have begun using field service as a way to bring in and nurture talent to feed into other areas of service as well as sales, product, operations and beyond.

A focused career development program can attract younger workers to an organization because it makes them feel empowered to take the lead of their own career journey. I spoke to Jennifer Morehead, CEO of human resource outsourcing and consulting firm Flex HR, about ways companies can improve career development initiatives, even at smaller service organizations that may not have a lot of traditional paths for promotion.

How do you define career development?

I think that when you are looking at a job description and you hire someone for that job, you want to be continuously mindful of all the elements that are required within that job. That way, you can train and continue to train your employees for all the different elements mentioned in that job description.

Look at the organizational chart of your company and think about who shows promise in terms of perhaps moving into management at some point. Think about what may be ahead for them and train them on those duties as well. That really gets to career development. Honestly, if an employee stays on a fairly similar track in your company, and maybe they stay in one position for a long time, there are a lot of changes in every industry in terms of technology and how we work with clients. There are things they need to be trained on even if they are not moving up, or if you need them to stay where they are.

What are some mistakes you see companies make when it comes to career development?

Mainly it is not offering development. The new generation of employees coming to our workforce is very interested in training. They want to know more, and they want to learn more.

That's a challenge for people running a business. It is already challenging to meet the needs of your clients. It's easy to get into a mode of thinking an employee is doing a good job, and you don't need to train them anymore.

I would challenge business owners to say no, your employees really want that training and will look for it one way or another, so it might as well be you providing that training to them.

What are some ways you have seen organizations successfully embed this idea into their company culture?

I think the process that allows for it to happen includes one-on-one meetings with every manager and their direct reports on a regular basis, ideally weekly. You have a meeting to understand where the employee is, their mindset, how happy they are in the company, what they do need in terms of development, where do they feel like they are not being trained enough. That cycles up to an executive manager meeting that should be once or twice a week.

Look at who is ready for a promotion. If we need this person out in the field because they are so good, how do we get them into a training role where they are training their coworkers? In a small company, anything under 200 people, there are a lot of opportunities where you can create these positions for people that are incredibly customized for them, where they can feel like they have more responsibility or have more autonomy in what they are doing.

Let’s have this person train his colleagues in customer service, maybe give them a bonus to do that. There are lots of ways to be creative in terms of career development in a small business. It may not be as vertically aligned as in a larger company, but you can be creative in terms of ways you give leadership opportunities to your people.

How do you incorporate development into performance reviews?

I would nominate a few people in your business to put the performance reviews together. But a performance review is less important than the one-on-one meeting where you are giving feedback specifically and in real time.

We are not in an economy as employers who are desperate to find employees, where we can sit there and go a whole year and give them a two out of a five score and expect them not to quit. You have to be nuanced about it. The real feedback comes in the regular meeting where most of the time should be spent focusing on positive feedback. You talk about what they are doing well, and then point out what they can improve on.

You need to acknowledge and appreciate all the things they do right. Employees really want to be seen. They want to be acknowledged for the good work they are doing.

How can companies identify candidates internally for promotion or advancement?

I think a lot of people in a small organization who are going to be promoted potentially are not going to have had management experience. Just because they are a good employee doesn't mean they are automatically going to be a good manager. The person promoting them needs to understand that. Things you are looking for are the ability to be comfortable while being uncomfortable. You have to step outside of your comfort zone. You have to think on your feet and look for a problem-solving attitude. While you are teaching your staff to be problem solvers and investigators, you watch to see who is really showing that talent. Look for employees who are bringing new issues to you with solutions attached. That is someone who can succeed well in a manager role.

What about employees who are happy in their roles? How do you encourage development, when promotion really isn't part of their plan?

I think you have to look individually at what makes them tick. What motivates them? If it motivates them to work a straight-eight and go home and not think about anything outside of work., that's a great employee in 2023. They enjoy doing what they do, do a good job, but don't have aspirations for growth. You can still get in front of them with different ideas or maybe you create on your own a customer service training program.

When we talk about walking into a customer's home in 2024, what's new? A lot of people are working from home. How do we get in there and provide service without disturbing them? Be mindful and thoughtful of what we are seeing out there and how we can coach our people with this, so they aren't left in a lurch when they are on a job site.

What is important for them? What gets on their nerves? We can be proactive and get in front of that before they quit in a year. They might want to see nice solid wage growth if they do a good job. Maybe they don't want to deal with issues outside of working hours. You can continue to sell to them, so they know there are growth opportunities available to them if they are interested down the road, while letting them know you are happy to have them where they're at right now from a work standpoint.

You can also find responsibilities outside of the main technical work they are doing where they can have some leadership – like organizing charitable work or company events.

You can also have company-wide employee engagement meetings where you ask what kinds of training they would like. What do they want to see? Just having that open communication with employees can uncover a lot of opportunities.

Share

Stay Connected

Related Content

A Data-Driven Approach to Field Service Success

Are Robots in Field Service on the Rise?

6 Actions That Have Spurred One Company’s Success in Hiring More Women into Field Service

Most Recent

Creating CX That Fuels Business Growth

A Data-Driven Approach to Field Service Success

Are Robots in Field Service on the Rise?

Share

Stay Connected

Related Content

Creating CX That Fuels Business Growth

Q&A: A Kellogg Professor Weighs in on How to Support Women in the Workplace Every Day of the Year

A Multifaceted Approach to Creating Sustainable Service with Sarah McKay

Most Recent

Creating CX That Fuels Business Growth

A Data-Driven Approach to Field Service Success

Are Robots in Field Service on the Rise?

Share

Stay Connected

Related Content

Creating CX That Fuels Business Growth

Q&A: A Kellogg Professor Weighs in on How to Support Women in the Workplace Every Day of the Year

A Multifaceted Approach to Creating Sustainable Service with Sarah McKay

Most Recent

Creating CX That Fuels Business Growth

A Data-Driven Approach to Field Service Success

Are Robots in Field Service on the Rise?

Share

Stay Connected

Related Content

Creating CX That Fuels Business Growth

Q&A: A Kellogg Professor Weighs in on How to Support Women in the Workplace Every Day of the Year

A Multifaceted Approach to Creating Sustainable Service with Sarah McKay

Most Recent

Creating CX That Fuels Business Growth

A Data-Driven Approach to Field Service Success

Are Robots in Field Service on the Rise?

Share

Stay Connected

Related Content

Creating CX That Fuels Business Growth

Q&A: A Kellogg Professor Weighs in on How to Support Women in the Workplace Every Day of the Year

A Multifaceted Approach to Creating Sustainable Service with Sarah McKay

Most Recent

Creating CX That Fuels Business Growth

A Data-Driven Approach to Field Service Success

Are Robots in Field Service on the Rise?

Share

Stay Connected

Related Content

Creating CX That Fuels Business Growth

Q&A: A Kellogg Professor Weighs in on How to Support Women in the Workplace Every Day of the Year

A Multifaceted Approach to Creating Sustainable Service with Sarah McKay

Most Recent

Creating CX That Fuels Business Growth

A Data-Driven Approach to Field Service Success

Are Robots in Field Service on the Rise?

Share

Stay Connected

Related Content

Creating a Customer-Centric Service Sales Approach with Hany Salah

The Promises of Predictive Service

The State of Service in 2024

Most Recent

Creating CX That Fuels Business Growth

A Data-Driven Approach to Field Service Success

Are Robots in Field Service on the Rise?

Share

Stay Connected

Related Content

Creating CX That Fuels Business Growth

Q&A: A Kellogg Professor Weighs in on How to Support Women in the Workplace Every Day of the Year

A Multifaceted Approach to Creating Sustainable Service with Sarah McKay

Most Recent

Creating CX That Fuels Business Growth

A Data-Driven Approach to Field Service Success

Are Robots in Field Service on the Rise?