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January 31, 2024 | 26 Mins Read

Powerful Innovation in a Changing World

January 31, 2024 | 26 Mins Read

Powerful Innovation in a Changing World

Sarah welcomes back Dan McClure, System Innovation Architect and Choreographer, Innovation Ecosystem, and co-author of the soon-to-be released book Do Bigger Things: A Practical Guide for Doing Powerful Innovation in a Changing World to discuss how innovation will change in the next five years and how technologies like AI are impacting the ways organizations innovate.

Sarah Nicastro: Welcome to the Future of Field Service podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Nicastro. I am thrilled to welcome today's guest back to the Future of Field Service podcast. The guest today is Dan McClure, who is a system innovation architect and strategist or choreographer at Innovation Ecosystem. Dan was first on the podcast episode 124, of course I had to look that up, August of 2021 to talk about innovation, which is his whole area of focus and expertise. And Dan is soon to be releasing... He's co-authored a book that will be released on February 13th called Do Bigger Things: A Practical Guide for Doing Powerful Innovation in a Changing World. Dan, welcome back.

Dan McClure: Hey, it's really great to be here. Thanks.

Sarah Nicastro: It's great to have you back. I reference our first conversation to this day. And I didn't realize quite how long it's been because time flies, but there are a lot of things that I think about from that first conversation. And I'm excited to revisit some of those points, but also dig into some different things today. Before we do all of that, why don't you just give everyone a little bit more introduction to yourself? Our listenership has grown quite a bit since you were first on, so tell them anything you'd like to tell them about Dan and Innovation Ecosystem.

Dan McClure: Yeah. I am, as you've said, really an innovator, but maybe a different kind of innovator than a lot of folks think of when they bring up that word. I've never been a particularly good technologist sitting in the garage with my soldering iron trying to duplicate Palmer Lucky's experience, et cetera. I am someone who looks at the world and sees Lego blocks and then imagines how we might put those Lego blocks together in a different way. We call it an ecosystem innovation. And it's really been exciting because even since we've talked, so many of the challenges and so many of the opportunities of the world seems to be flowing this way. And so I feel like after a number of years, I've finally come into a world that really wants and needs the kinds of things that I and people like me do.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. And the book obviously is talking about in a changing world. And even since 2021, the pace just continues to speed and so we have to sort out what ways we can keep up. I think every company and the leaders within those organizations that would be listening to this podcast are trying to innovate in some way. It can look different for different organizations, but no one, at least they shouldn't be in a place of complacency and very satisfied with that. Everyone is aiming to keep pace and to sort out what their role is in this changing world. I love the way you frame that. And can you talk a little bit... I know we talked about this on the first episode you were on, but I loved it. And this is one of the things that I have thought of many times since. Explain why you like the word and use the word choreographer; what that means in your universe.

Dan McClure: Yeah. I think it's helpful maybe if I could do just a quick recap of the types of innovation, like the way organizations have responded to all that change. Because I agree with you, there's almost no organization out there now saying, "Well, I'm good. Nothing's going to happen to me."

Sarah Nicastro: If they are, yeah, it's not for long. You know? Yeah.

Dan McClure: Yes. It's like nature will sort those folks out. But that doesn't mean that everybody's responding to the challenge in the same way. And the tale of the choreographer is really tied in with this shift in how people are responding. If you were mid-20th century, 1950s, '60s, a lot of the innovation was around really technical detailed work. You would sit down, do a detailed design, create a project plan, and you'd go out and build a bridge or build an airplane. And it was the kind of thing that analysts, engineers, project managers, really helped advance the craft. And so when you look at the innovation books from the '70s and '80s, they're talking about that kind of innovation.

Then you had Denning come along. And he said, "It's all well and good that you want to build a new factory, but can't you make that factory work better?" And he came up with the idea that you can incrementally improve the operation and performance of things like factories but also things like products, continually making small tweaks and changes that move them forward and makes it more efficient, it makes them more valuable. And so there was-

Sarah Nicastro: A lot of process-based?

Dan McClure: Well, it's process, but also we've seen a lot of feature-based stuff. Go out and talk to your customer and find out what new feature they want and add the feature to your mobile app or to your physical product. And so that became another layer of innovation. And it didn't invalidate the previous step, but you got this new layer.

And then 2000 comes, the whole digital web. 2007, mobile phones are launched with the iPhone. And you have this entire new digital open field for people to rush into, and so you got the idea of digital product innovation based out of Silicon Valley product managers, user experience designers. Eric Reese is the titular god of this practice where you fail fast, you have minimum viable products. And it's resulted in millions of mobile apps being out there. All of those roles of innovation are tools that leaders are adopting.

But here's the thing: The world is now getting more complex and messier challenges. When we talked about the idea of change happening faster, you said, "Everybody needs to respond to change that's happening faster." It's not just faster, it's oh my God, we're being run over by a truck kind of innovation. And it's not the sort of thing that you're going to incrementally improve yourself, it's not the sort of thing that you're going to be able to launch a mobile app for, you're going to have to really reimagine your entire organization. Or if you're dealing with something like climate change, you're going to have to imagine a big, complex solution. And therefore, you need a kind of innovation that's designed to do complex stuff, which is a really long way to get to the point that choreographers are the innovators who help you do complex stuff.

Sarah Nicastro: Okay. And how would you describe what traits make choreographers uniquely able to do that?

Dan McClure: Yeah. If we imagine what complexity is about, it's about having a lot of different parts, right?

Sarah Nicastro: Mm-hmm.

Dan McClure: And hooking them together in new and original ways. Well, what kind of traits would be helpful there? You're going to be a big picture thinker. You're going to see more than just a narrow challenge. You're going to be a natural generalist. Instead of a jack of all trades and a master of none and you slinking away into the corner because you haven't been able to focus, you say you're very proud of that. I've learned all sorts of different stuff, and I can talk to you about all sorts of different things and bring them together.

And finally, there's a rebel storyteller involved with this. You're in a position where you see the big picture, you know how to bring lots of different pieces together, but a lot of folks can't do that. And therefore, you have to be the powerful storyteller that brings them along. And you've got to be willing to cross the boundaries and barriers of the status quo to help them make that change. Big picture, generalist, rebel, storyteller. You get those four things together and you can go muck about in the world.

Sarah Nicastro: Okay. I think that the reason I love this is I identify with those traits very much, right?

Dan McClure: Yeah, yeah.

Sarah Nicastro: But here's my question then. For folks like me that hear that and think, yes, that's me, what if you are within an organization that is maybe more traditional, maybe more accustomed to some of those earlier phases or variations of innovation you spoke through? How do you position that ability in an organization that isn't already doing it, that doesn't already get it?

Dan McClure: Yeah. Well, this is $64,000 question for choreographers.

Sarah Nicastro: And to the listeners, bless Dan because I'm completely off script, so thank you for going with me.

Dan McClure: Well, did I mention the other thing about choreographers is that we don't stay on script very well? Either as listeners or talkers. Yeah. At the grimace side of this is that you don't, and you get crushed by the jobs. In some organizations we go into and we look at them and we say, "Where are your choreographers?" And they're like, "Well, we don't have any of those. We've got project managers and we've got detailed..." And I say, "I bet you I can find them." And I go look for all the poor performing project managers. And those poor performing project managers are often choreographers in pain. That's what happens with some of them; you just basically get fit into a box that you're miserable in.

There's a second strategy, which is you go rogue. You get a little bit of space. Maybe somebody isn't paying attention to you. This is what I did on my first job is after hours, I was going off and doing choreographer stuff without necessarily any permission to do that. In some cases, you can find a sponsor for somebody to help you go rogue. You just go rogue. The challenge with being rogue is that eventually you get caught, and that means you may get pulled back into line, it may mean you get fired. There's a really cool study that was put out a number of years by Bozalan that basically said the people who are this choreographer profile as executives get fired a lot more than the other types of executives.

But the best scenario is that you actually use your storytelling skills. You use your ability to make people understand complex challenge, and you bring other people along with you. And it would be nice if they were already there, in which case you just revel in the fact that you've got a supportive environment. But oftentimes, because this is new to people, you're going to have to actually help them take the journey along with you.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. I think the rogue piece sounds very lonely.

Dan McClure: But it can be exciting in a rogue sort of lonely way.

Sarah Nicastro: Right. And I think what's interesting to me about this is we're talking... We've talked about how innovation has changed, and I want to talk next about how you think it will continue to change. But I do think for the people out there that are identifying with these choreographer traits, I think one thing I have found myself trying to tap into more is patience. Because I think those organizations that aren't quite there yet will have to get there. And so sometimes, I think it's biding your time while also honing your storytelling skills, right? And so I think-

Dan McClure: Yeah.

Sarah Nicastro: ... I don't know if an innate characteristic of a choreographer is impatience, but at least for me, I have not always been someone that's willing to play the long game, right?

Dan McClure: Yeah.

Sarah Nicastro: But I think to some degree, because of the fact that this isn't slowing down, it's not going to go away, companies are going to have to catch up to this need. I wouldn't suggest anyone stay miserable in a role that they're miserable in by any means, but I think part of it is waiting for the characteristics and the culture to catch up to one another. Does that make sense?

Dan McClure: Yeah, although I must admit I have that same sort of urgency, so if I'm not going to be a hypocrite, I will tell you I've never been very good at that. One thing I would observe though is since we've last talked, I've really seen a sea change in the recognition of the types of problems that organizations face and the need for this type of response. We do a lot of work with humanitarian organizations like the UN and international NGOs and things like that. And the UN was not the place where you saw a lot of pioneering, unstructured thinking, and partly because of the job they're doing; it's hard, difficult; people's lives depend on it.

A couple of months after we last talked, I was part of a UNOCHA meeting. And they had brought half a dozen big organizations from around the world to talk about their latest initiatives. And what was interesting is every one of them was suddenly talking about them as complex systems challenges. And I would've said six months before that, almost none of them would've been. There is this kind of sea change, I think, going on where organizations are realizing they need to act boldly and in big ways, and that you can't do that with the techniques and tools of the past. Yes, maybe we need to be patient, but maybe we don't need to be quite as patient as we would've before.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. No, that makes sense. Okay, if you were to get out your crystal ball and think about... We talked about these iterations of innovation. Where do you think we're going in the next five years? What do you think is going to be the biggest themes?

Dan McClure: I guess I don't have another revolution in innovation after the one that we've already seen, partly because I think we've been filling in the spaces of different types of innovation challenges. And this ecosystem innovation where you're putting together complex stuff fills in the last block that was missing. I could certainly be wrong about that, but it's still very early days so there's-

Sarah Nicastro: Do you know what I wonder?

Dan McClure: Yeah, shoot.

Sarah Nicastro: And maybe this doesn't fit, or maybe it's a characteristic of but not the next thing. I think a lot of it is going to come down to humanity. I at least see this shift, and I think it's tied in part to what you've said, but we've innovated so fast in these product-related and then-

Dan McClure: Technical function.

Sarah Nicastro: Right. And then the digital. And it's taken us more and more and more away from humanity. And I think that we're not going to be able to undo anything that's happened. And I'm not even saying that we take focus away from it, but I think that you see in the issues companies have around hiring and retaining talent, I see at least this big wave in leadership of sort of a very old-school mentality to a much more people-centric mentality. I think from a customer perspective, you've had such focus on and demand for speed, information, simplicity. And while no one is saying those things aren't important, I think what we're starting to lack is human connection. And I wonder if there might be something to that.

Dan McClure: Yeah. Well, one of the things that's interesting, if you look back on those prior three methodologies, they have humanity in there, humanity in a very narrowly constrained kind of environment. If you're developing a digital product, you're paying attention to the user, but you're paying attention to one user with one need so you're simplifying humanity. The thing, once you start building up an ecosystem that involves people, organizations, technology, resources, and you're mixing all of those together, you're deliberately embracing all the elements of humanity. You're talking about trade-offs, motivations, rewards, ethics. And I think that's what's exciting is this next stage of innovation, it isn't either/or, it's humanity is a necessary component of what we're doing.

Sarah Nicastro: That's a good point. It's how does it all fit? Which is what makes it the ecosystem.

Dan McClure: Yeah, how do you assemble something where everybody wants to participate, everybody's doing the right kind of thing? There's no real bad results out of the whole thing. And those are complex, messy questions which you need a choreographer to help you work through.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. No, I get that for sure. Okay, let's then talk a little bit about how I would say 2023, the biggest buzz was AI, at least in the world that I'm existing in. And it was interesting because for me, it was met with very mixed reactions. I had service and business leaders that were full steam ahead on the possibilities, and I had ones that were saying, "I'm so sick of hearing about this." How do you see continuing advancement in technologies like AI factoring into the innovation equation?

Dan McClure: Imagine AI is a Lego block. Somebody's arrived at our door and they have a case of new Lego blocks that you can use. There's a couple of ways you could do something with that. One, you could go find an existing function, pop out that old function, and put in the new Lego block. Imagine we've got a doctor's office. We could put in an AI to help support scheduling doctor's appointments or we could put in an AI to check prescription that are being made by the doctor. This would be taking your existing ecosystem, popping out the old Lego block and putting a new Lego block. Perfectly valid.

After a while, it begins to be like, so? It's all better. Yes, it's nice, and you've got to be concerned about ethics and issues around doing that. If you're making a movie and the Lego block you're popping out is the live actor and you're putting in an AI version, that's got some more issues maybe more than just scheduling doctor's appointments. But those are pretty straightforward advances, and they don't fundamentally change the ecosystem you're working on. I would put those back in the older versions of what is innovation about?

Where I think it gets exciting for me as a choreographer is saying, "What if I take that piece of AI and I use it to reimagine the entire ecosystem so it unlocks a completely new approach?" Let me do a little imagining around what healthcare might look like. What if the AI became your doctor? The AI was constantly monitoring your Fitbit or your Apple Watch, the AI is constantly watching your environment in your house, the AI is tracking all the health data in your community, and it's also looking at your health history and matching it up to people in Phoenix who have similar health concerns. Now you have an entirely different way of prescribing and monitoring care.

And yes, you might still go to your physical doctor's office for something, but the ecosystem around this is completely different. And when you start doing something like that, then the game changes, then entirely different forms of care are available. For people who might've been left out of the care system before, the barriers of, "I can't get to a healthcare provider, I don't have the money for a healthcare provider. There's no doctors in my area," all of those things are transformed. And that's what you see with some of these big ecosystem shifts. That's where I think it's exciting is when the technology unlocks a new ecosystem.

Sarah Nicastro: Then the role of the choreographer, though, is to keep afoot in both of those worlds, right? Any company has to-

Dan McClure: Yeah.

Sarah Nicastro: You're not leaping from plugging out one Lego block to a whole new ecosystem, you need to be able to take the more incremental approach while looking toward but what does this mean for us in five or 10 years? And then-

Dan McClure: Yes, I'm going to challenge you there because I think, yes, you still probably should be looking at how do I swap AI at specific spots? If I'm a doctor's office, I should be making my prescription practices better, I'd say. But the time to invent a new ecosystem is almost always now. The path to get to that new ecosystem is not step-by-step change. Think about it. When the Ride-sharing concept came up, it wasn't cab companies that made the step-by-step shift up, it was somebody coming up with-

Sarah Nicastro: It was disruption.

Dan McClure: ... a new ecosystem that came in. The question is do you want somebody else to invent that new ecosystem or do you want to?

Sarah Nicastro: Right. Yeah. No, that's really interesting. Okay, let's talk about the book, Do Bigger Things. Tell us a little bit about what it's all about, but also what prompted you guys to put this out into the world?

Dan McClure: As we've already talked, there's a lot of excitement that both Jenny and I have around this idea of doing ecosystem innovations, making these disruptive new ways of doing things in the world and the choreographer roles that come along with that. The challenge we always had was people would say, "Oh, good. Tell me what book I should go read."

And what we found was there were really two problems. One, the ideas and concepts were scattered all over the place. Here's a list of forty-three books that you could go and get little pieces of this. And the other thing is it was still being held hostage by the PhD academics and the systems engineering optimization folks. Even when you did go read it, it was a little bit of modeling theory, et cetera. What we felt like was necessary and what we've seen has been true in the past is new innovation practices get adopted when the idea behind the innovation is laid out clearly, the roles are laid out clearly, and then there is a straightforward understanding of what the practice looks like. And we just didn't see that anywhere so we ate a little bit of our own dog food and did a choreographer bit around how do we present a complete picture of this ecosystem innovation practice?

Sarah Nicastro: Okay. What can people expect to find in the book? Who is it best for? And what will they be able to take away from it?

Dan McClure: We really tried to write it in a very accessible style. The book is based around stories and examples. We tell the story of choreographers doing amazing things with cataract surgeries in India and commercial innovators like Airbnb and community innovators who did amazing things during the pandemic. It's around these ideas of if you're going to understand something as complex as ecosystem innovation, you need to see some ecosystem innovations to see how that fits. That's the structure we've used.

We lay it out really basically three parts. What's the idea? Why do you need to do this? What are the people? And then what's the practice? And if you are somebody who wants to be a choreographer, this should be your handbook is our goal. If you're somebody who owns a gnarly, ugly problem or whose company is about to be run over by a bus, this shows you a path forward, and then you can go out and get your choreographer.

Sarah Nicastro: Okay, very good. When we think about organizations who are today navigating change, trying to sort through what type of innovation they should be focused on, et cetera, what would you suggest they be thinking most about keeping in mind?

Dan McClure: I think all of this is rooted in understanding just how big a change you need to thrive in the years ahead. This is true whether you're trying to run a business and Amazon's going to come in and just completely disrupt your marketplace, or it's true if you're an activist and you want to do something like make a real progress on climate change or want to make real progress on inequities in the world. You need to understand that little haphazard steps forward is not going to be enough for you. I think that's the beginning part. And as a leader or somebody who's actually driving their own actions, just embracing I need to be aspiring to make a bigger impact than simply the next mobile app or a little bit better change in this or that.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. I'm wondering, though, one of the challenge has to be for organizations particularly that have a long history to figure out how to have the objectivity they need to determine how big that change needs to be. I think when you are the one that's been a part of what's always worked for so long, is it possible to be objective? Or is there a practice of involving the right people to really assess what the innovation need is?

Dan McClure: Yeah, I think you need to invite some choreographers into the conversation. You're right, if your entire world has been focused on making the status quo work really well, you're going to be the kind of person who that's an important question for. And it's also you're going to have an investment deep into the status quo. One thing I think, though, that can help is changing the question, not asking, "Looking back, how much do I need to change what I've got?" But rather looking forward and asking, "What's the big new possibility here? And then how do I get there from what I've got?" And I think that makes it maybe not less scary, but certainly more exciting.

Sarah Nicastro: To me, this is the point where this conversation ties in with some of the leadership conversations that I've had recently on the podcast, because I mentioned earlier that I see this shift in more traditional approaches being replaced by a more modern approach. And there's layers to that, but I think we have leadership that has been rooted a lot in command and control, right?

Dan McClure: Absolutely.

Sarah Nicastro: And those leaders have historically felt the responsibility of knowing what's right and knowing what needs to come next; a personal responsibility. I think this is where a modern view of leadership is important because I think more modern leaders are humbled in knowing they don't know it all, they don't need to know it all, but they need to surround themselves with diversity of thought, right?

Dan McClure: Yep.

Sarah Nicastro: Because when you can do that and when you actually can genuinely ask... You may have choreographers, like we talked about earlier, within your business that are miserable because they're just trying to do the job that you've told them to do that have a lot of these ideas, so I think part of it is just becoming more open to the idea of welcoming creativity and brainstorming and listening to what people think and not subscribing to that very outdated mentality of, "Well, if I lead this organization or this function, I should have all of the answers." I think that puts people in a position of weakness.

Dan McClure: Yeah. And I think there's kind of three steps here. If there's the top-down control, "You're going to do what I say," then the next step up, as you inferred, was you have permission to talk to me. You have permission to bring ideas, etc. For me, the most exciting organizations are the ones where we see where the organization leader is saying, "I demand that you bring big, bold ideas." And this is what we're about is big, bold ideas. And you can just feel the energy change in those organizations because when the leader stops saying, "I'm grudgingly going to let you pitch things to me," and more saying, "The future is threatening to us if we don't act boldly," and just keeps reiterating that message in everything they do, you just get a different kind of energy.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, yeah. We're talking about the organizational view. In terms of individuals, how do you recommend leaders that want to help drive innovation, how do they stay energized? How do they ensure they're effective? What advice do you have for those people? And obviously reading the book is one step, but just if you were to share a couple of those things.

Dan McClure: Well, of course the answer is read the book no matter.

Sarah Nicastro: Yes, of course.

Dan McClure: Do you need to make tomato sauce? Read the book. No. I think it's really three parts here. First, it's understand the challenge and get excited about the future. I find, and I think this is true of most choreographers but I also think it's true about most leaders, being excited about what's ahead just makes all the rest of the stuff better. And if you're not living in dread but instead thinking, this is a world of huge change, and that empowers me to do something great, that just pushes you along.

The second bit, though, is you've got to make it easier to actually follow through on that vision. Now imagine if you wanted to rebuild your house and completely new floor plan. If you wanted to rebuild my house, which is this 100 year old house that I'm sitting in, you'd have to raise the whole thing, flatten it, and then build it up again. That would be traumatic. And I think that's the way a lot of folks see organizational change is we're having to take a bulldozer and just smash everything and then put the pieces back up. No wonder everybody finds that an awful experience to go through.

On the other hand, if you had a Lego house, what you could say is, "Here's the new future. We need to readjust it." Pull the Lego parts together and put them together in new ways. That becomes less painful, and it allows you to more quickly and effectively adapt to new opportunities. And so this is, I think, the organizational design part that comes along with the leadership. It's one thing to tell people you've got to change and you've got to embrace these new opportunities, but you've got to build an organization that's designed for change. And making it more like Lego blocks, for lack of a better metaphor, I think it's a big part of that.

Sarah Nicastro: What do you think makes an organization more able to change? The idea of the foundation of the house versus the Lego blocks, is it communication? What are the elements that allow that agility?

Dan McClure: I think there's just some how do you build out the pieces of the organization so that there's lines between them? Ironically, modular things have stronger lines so that you can hook them up in different ways. It might seem intuitively like you want to have infinite communication, but you really want to have ways to know how people interact and communicate with each other.

Technology can make a huge difference. I think one of the most underestimated management decisions that Amazon made was that every piece of technology they built would be able to be deployed separately in the cloud. And as a result, they built an organization whose technology was designed to do new things. And you see them doing radically new things. They enter healthcare, they enter publishing. They've entered all these new fields, and partly it's because they've got Lego blocks that allow them to do that. I think you can use your technology, you can use your organizational design, and then you've got to get managers who are on board with the idea.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. You talked about the mindset of, I guess I'm paraphrasing, but not looking at what lies ahead as overwhelming dread, but more so excitement around the possibilities. And we talked about some different aspects. Any other advice you can share on mindset or tools or practices that you think help move toward impactful change?

Dan McClure: Yeah. One of the things that came out of the last generation of innovation practices, the digital product innovation, was the useful concept that failure wasn't a catastrophe, that risk is okay. And in fact, we should be failing fast. And I think there's a lot of context where that makes sense. If you're trying out a lot of little ideas and you want to find out which one sticks, failing fast is cool because then you don't invest too much in an idea that didn't work.

If you're going to be building ecosystems, you don't get that opportunity. You don't get the chance to say, "I built out an entirely new ecosystem. Ooh, I've failed. I'm going to throw that all away." And in fact, every move you make, because now we're involving people and we're involving organizations and we're involving real decisions and choices by folks, you don't even get to test it a whole bunch of different times. You've got to test it, understand what's going on, and then adapt.

I think one of the biggest shifts that you're going to see with innovation is moving away from the idea of failing fast and just throwing out the losers to how do I learn and adapt quickly and well? And it's a different skill. Learning is still important, getting fast feedback still important, but now your response is, "How do I take this big, ungainly, messy thing that I'm building and adapt it based on that part?"

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. Not throw it away, but figure out how... Yeah.

Dan McClure: Yeah, continue to morph it.

Sarah Nicastro: Yep. Yeah, that makes sense.

Dan McClure: It's more like a marriage with the future than a first date.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. No, that's great. All right, I love this. This has been a great conversation. The book comes out February 13th, right?

Dan McClure: Yeah.

Sarah Nicastro: And where will everyone be able to find that and you? Let them know how they can connect if they want, et cetera.

Dan McClure: Yeah. The most obvious place... And we're trying to make this available as much as possible around the world because the work we're doing and the choreographers we engage with are really global. That's part of what makes it so exciting. Amazons and all your different Amazons around the world, we should have that available. There will be availability in bookstores, but that will be dependent on which market you're in and to what extent there's printing. I would say Amazon and those other online channels are the best place to grab things. We'll have it in digital audiobook. We've got a really cool Aussie speaking narrator for our audiobook. It's fun.

And then, yeah, if you want to reach out to us, innovationecosystem.com is the place. And just to let you know, as a preview, we're setting up a community for choreographers, which will be hosted on LinkedIn. And so that's another place you'll be able to hook up with not only us but our peers in the choreographer community.

Sarah Nicastro: Awesome. And when will that be happening?

Dan McClure: I don't know. We're still building the ecosystem. We're hoping in weeks kind of thing as opposed to months and months. But it's work in progress.

Sarah Nicastro: Follow Innovation Ecosystem on LinkedIn, I would imagine-

Dan McClure: Yep.

Sarah Nicastro: ... to hear more about the community. And we'll do our best to link everything in the show notes as well so people know where to go to find everything we've talked about. But thank you so much, Dan, for the wonderful insights. I appreciate it.

Dan McClure: Yeah, this is such exciting stuff and such exciting times. I really appreciate the chance to get on and ramble on about it.

Sarah Nicastro: No, it is exciting. And I think one of the things that's important and what I like about the idea of what you're doing with the community is the more you can surround yourself in content, in interactions with people who are excited about the possibility instead of nervous or threatened, it helps you feed off of that energy. And so I think the idea of the community is great, and I'm personally very excited to read the book.

Dan McClure: All right. Well, thank you very much. Have a great weekend.

Sarah Nicastro: All right. Thanks, you too. You can find more by visiting us at futureoffieldservice.com. While you're there, be sure to sign up for the Future of Field Service Insider, which is our monthly newsletter, to make sure that you don't miss any of our articles or podcasts. The Future of Field Service podcast is published in partnership with IFS. You can learn more at ifs.com. And as always, thank you for listening. Okay.

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The State of Service in 2024

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The State of Service in 2024

Sarah shares her thoughts on what will take focus in 2024 for organizations focused on field service.

Sarah Nicastro: Welcome to the Future of Field Service podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Nicastro. Here we are in January of 2024, and I am once again being asked to predict what will come in the world of field service this year. I've shared before that the idea of predictions, I find a little challenging because I just know that none of us can really predict the future, but I'm always asked my thoughts and happy to share. So we'll say with that caveat, well, certainly I can't predict what's to come. I'm going to talk about some themes here, four themes that I think will really be key to the service landscape in 2024.

I'm going to do these at a high level, but I am hosting a webinar next Thursday, February 1st at 10:00 AM Eastern Time, with some wonderful guest speakers. I have Roy Dockery of Flock Safety, Tom Mills of Field Solutions Group, and Bob De Caux, who is the resident AI expert at IFS. And they're joining me for a very informal open forum conversation where I'm going to ask them what they think of these predictions and have them give their thoughts on what they see to come as well. So we'll put the link in the show notes, but be sure to join us for that. I think it'll be a nice dynamic chat more so than just me talking to myself.

So the first thing, obviously I would be remiss to not mention is the AI buzz. And I think what we're going to see in 2024 is that buzz turning into action. It was interesting to me to be attending events with service leaders throughout 2023, the mixed emotions around the topic of AI. Some of them were really genuinely excited about it and had some strong opinions on the role it will play for their organizations. And others I think were honestly sick of hearing about it and feeling that there were more important topics to be discussed in the content they're reading, the sessions they're attending, et cetera. So a mixed bag, but the buzz was there nonetheless, and it remains and with good reason.

I shared in a conversation a couple of times last year that to me, this wave of AI and what's possible is the next really foundational shift in the way we work. So digital transformation was the first, and I would say maybe getting a handle on data the second, although some still haven't done that. And putting that data to use and really looking at what's possible with AI and automation today, I think is what the focus will be going forward. So the thing about AI is it's a pretty vague term. There are a lot of AI based technologies, some of which have actually been in use for a very long time. And I think it's important when we think about the AI buzz and the AI action we need to take, grounding that in what will be and what can be valuable to the business. Anytime you see a technology that takes over the headlines like this, you have a lot of people that feel they need to jump on the bandwagon, and they do that in a very rushed way that ultimately can hinder their success rather than contribute to it.

So I think yes, the buzz in my opinion is warranted, but really leading with what are you trying to accomplish? What are the areas of opportunity and the biggest challenges for your business and how does this fit into that is more important than rushing out and doing X, Y, or Z just because it's trending and it's cool. So I think it'll be really interesting to see how companies really dig into what has been buzz and they look for the opportunities to take action with technologies that truly are ready for primetime. I think it's more so a matter of business readiness. So is the business ready for it? Is your workforce ready for that amount of change? Is your data infrastructure ready to be leveraged in the way that it can, et cetera? So again, next week during the webinar, Bob De Caux will be on and he's going to be talking a little bit about some of those readiness indicators. Also, how to assess what the best fits are, et cetera.

So the second theme I think is around leadership. And I see that this year and moving forward, I think a lot of old school leaders are going to be ousted. And I want to be clear, when I say old school, I do not necessarily mean age. I mean more so mindset. If you've seen any of the content that we have published recently with Carolyn from Vattenfall, that type of thinking that people first mentality, leadership and action, I think is really the wave of the future. Obviously, some organizations are already there and have been there, a lot aren't. A lot have really leaders in place that have quite outdated opinions and methods and practices and beliefs. And I just don't think that with the talent landscape being what it is, with the customer expectations that we're facing, that we can afford to allow that type of old school leadership to persist.

So Roy, who's speaking on the webinar next week, actually is publishing his very first book, and I'm excited. My copy is in the mail. It should be here before next week. So we'll be able to talk a little bit about that. But this concept of leadership is something that is incredibly important to him. So I'm really interested to get his take on just how quickly will this evolution shift. Just because I think that we're going to see progress in this area, it doesn't mean that I think every old school leader will be eradicated by the end of 2024. And also there's a lot of complexity to that. Carolyn shared in the session we did in Stockholm, she had the no policy, but how hard that was to actually put action behind because it's something that people support in theory until it becomes a reality that is more layered and complex to make those decisions. So I'm interested in that topic and that conversation.

The next theme is around how customer experience will demand service silos dissipate. So this is something that we've seen happening. Mark Hessinger from 3D Systems was on the podcast a while back. He was talking about his shift even in title from customer service to customer success and what that represents for their business. We had Bob Feiner from Dell on a while back talking about think rings, not trophies. So we've seen this start.

I think that the way service is evolving, it's going to become more and more prominent because one, I think customers are going to tolerate even less, the disconnectedness that does still exist in a lot of organizations. And two, we talk about the world of outcomes. Ultimately, I think they're going to look for more and more integration of those things and more and more of a really landscape view of how service providers can assist them in their business objectives, which I think is just again, going to really reinforce and expand the need for companies to break down those silos.

Electrolux is another example. We've done quite a bit of content with Electrolux because their service transformation is something that is based on them deploying IFS technology. But that service transformation is just one piece of a bigger company objective around customer centricity. So I think things like that, that really fundamentally change some of the organization of processes within and technology used by organizations, we're going to see more of that.

And finally, the role of the field technician will begin to be redefined. We've seen this coming, but it's one of those things where because there are short-term talent challenges, it's really easy to say, "Yeah. Definitely it's changing, but let's just worry about right now." I think we're going to start to see some of those changes really take shape, and we're going to see some of the organizations that are leading that charge having to figure out what this means and what this looks like. When we talk about AI and automation, there is just no way that we don't end up having to really dig in and take a look at what the service function means, what its core value proposition is, how it's delivered, and what that means in terms of how it changes the makeup of our talent.

So there's again, plenty of examples of this. Tony Black of Husky, he was on the podcast this past year or last year I suppose, and he talked about their move to Predictive, ultimately a change in service delivery model. And I think it's a really good example to go have a listen to, but it is just one piece. There's a lot of things driving this evolution around what is a field technician? What do they do? Does that role become multiple roles? How much of that role is replaced by AI? How much automation will customers tolerate? What aspects of human centricity are imperative to maintain? And is it the field technician that does that or is it someone else? Is it more of a sales role? Is it more of a customer success role. So there's a lot of interesting things to talk about here.

And Tom, who will be joining is his firm, the Field Solutions Group specializes in talent acquisition, and they do a lot of primary research. So they have a lot of things that we can dig into to talk about that topic a little bit more. So those are the four, if not predictions, areas that I think are going to be top of mind for everyone in 2024. Obviously, you will see those things represented in the content that we create here at Future of Field Service, and you can stay tuned for conversations around these things and taking a real world look at how companies are changing or where they're struggling to change, et cetera.

And as I mentioned, if you have an opportunity to join us next Thursday, February 1st, I think it will be really a good opportunity to test my theories with some people that I respect a lot, their insight and ability to bring some interesting things to the conversation. So stay tuned for more here. Join us at the webinar if you can, and I will look forward to seeing you next week. So we'll put the link to the webinar in the notes. You can find all of our podcasts and other content at futureoffieldservice.com. The Future of Field Service podcast is published in partnership with IFS. You can learn more at ifs.com. As always, thank you for listening.

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January 18, 2024 | 21 Mins Read

Building Competence in Service – Today and Into the Future with Alfa Laval

January 18, 2024 | 21 Mins Read

Building Competence in Service – Today and Into the Future with Alfa Laval

In a session from the Stockholm Live Tour, Sarah talks with Ann Sørensen, Global Competence Development Manager at Alfa Laval about how to build competence in service for today’s needs but also with an eye to the future. This conversation touches on training of the front line workforce and career pathing to leadership development and employer branding, and a variety of other topics that factor into an effective talent strategy.

Sarah Nicastro: So Anne's role is, global competence manager at Alfa Laval, and the reason I wanted to have this conversation, after the others is because I think, uh, it will tie into each of them, right? So there's so much about the change that's taking place that then affects what we're looking for in talent when we bring them in, what we need from the talent that we have, what will.

You know, get people to be able to do these next versions of the roles we're asking them to do and what will keep them engaged and empowered as employees. So I thought it would be a nice way to sort of reference back some of, uh, the points that have come up throughout the day and, talk about it from that, uh, lens of, of talent and competence.

So, before we do that, tell everyone, uh, a little bit more about yourself and Alfa Laval. Super,

Ann Sørensen: yeah. I am, I'm from Denmark. Wow. You heard about something in Denmark. So working in central and learning in, uh, in global service operations, as I said, my background is in banking, marketing, and then over as a trainer and the pedagogical approach.

I, uh, one of the key elements in my career has been developing people. , and then I added a lot to the organization later on. Privacy. I am a horseback rider. I used to compete in show jumping. , it, this time it's a little bit, you know, a smaller one, Icelandic horse. When I'm, when I'm at home, I'm living in the countryside.

I'm living on a farm, but I commute and I travel a lot. 26 different sales companies around the world with service operations. A lot of stakeholders to take care of. I am, , I am sitting in the matrix between three big divisions, marine, food and water, and energy. And on the same hand side, I then sit with these 26, uh, different sales companies.

So, it's quite a bit

Sarah Nicastro: of complexity.

Ann Sørensen: It, it is, it is. Yes. But also with the great challenges. And great people. Yeah. Yeah.

Sarah Nicastro: All right. So all of the things that we've talked about today. Okay. , the changes that are taking place in service. , you know, the different ways customer expectations are evolving in different industries ahead.

We talked about people first. We've talked about technology. , we've talked about leadership, you know, all of these different things. , all of those realities, of what today's landscape looks like, and how is that shaping competence strategy?

Ann Sørensen: So if we look at, into the Alfa, I mean, the strategy, uh, within the competence is of course connected to our service strategy and the transformation that we launched back in, uh, 2020, because.

We were very much vision-driven, which is a benefit, uh, for, for, uh, for having this, you could say drive, going on. So if we look at the competence landscape, what happened in that transformation was that we, built it up around some cornerstones, which of course the competence is needed, to click into, right?

So first of all, we said to attract and retain people. A very clear career path that we knew was needed. Otherwise, it was, it would be really difficult. Then the service advisor, that was what we called them, not trusted advisor. We had a lot of discussion about this. The advisor, what does it now take, to educate, uh, and, and give those kinds of competencies standing there just in front of the customer and bring back more business, not being a salesperson?

Then, of course, we also have what we call, you could see the digitized way of working, uh, the more, uh, connected, we call it the connected field service. Now, what does that mean? Is it about being remote? Is it about, you know, being able to crunch the data that connected equipment can kind of gather? Or, or how do we go about this?

And then, the last one was more the presence building. But what we, what you call that, what we always pay attention to is safety. So we had that as a core and it's still, of course, safety, safety, safety, that is, that is, you know, so building the strategy about this, of course, paying attention to what is happening around us with the new generation coming in.

It's, it's, it's, it's fun. It's challenging. We have. We have, uh, some kind of, you could say, uh, inbuilt, dialects, maybe also internally. , we, uh, like to act as one. Uh, so we bring down the silos between sales and service. , We know that that is, uh, a key element because when you're out there in front of the customers, you need to act as one.

You need to have a joint effort. And that's a journey, uh, as well. Yeah?

Sarah Nicastro: Yes. A lot. I think, you know, this area of, you know, how do we attract, uh, hire and retain talent? How do we give them the skills they need in today's environment? It's an area that is so challenging. I think a lot of companies, have kind of, uh, not admitted that they've given up, but it's, it's something where it's very easy to just focus on the aspects you can't change that makes it hard instead of doing what you can to change, okay?

Do you know what I mean? Like, it's very easy to point to things that, you know, you don't have control over as the cause. And not separate out reflecting on how it is that you do as an organization need to evolve. and so, you know, we talked about, why I spoke about diversity this morning in the workshop that we were in, you know, we talked about some of the ways that services evolving.

and I think we'll continue to in the next few years. I think will allow us to bring, people into the service realm that haven't been a part of that workforce before or haven't, you know, for a variety of reasons. And I know one of the things that we spoke about, uh, that is important for Alpha LaValle and I think, also something others should consider is, Uh, the importance of considering what is your employer brand, right, and, and how well known or not, uh, and how well received or not is that in your potential talent pool.

And I think an important distinction is not just your historical potential talent pool, but the, the broader, you know, communities that could become a part of that talent pool. So can you. Talk a little bit about, you know, how you view the importance of the company brand, and some of the things you do to position Alfa Laval as an appealing place for people to work.

Ann Sørensen: Yeah. Employer branding is extremely important. If I go, just to have that headline, uh, and look into the 26 different sales companies. I mean, we don't say one size fits all. Of course, the brand, uh, the way that we go about our culture is extremely important. , we have a lot of, you could say, we are struggling in getting our field service on board, right?

We have positions that have not been filled. We hear, you know, we cannot keep up with the compensations and benefits. But if you ask me, yes, if it's a dime or two, or, I mean, of course, we should not negotiate. We should always be listening. For me, I mean, the culture and what we do for our people to grow, I think should be the brand of Alfa Laval.

And, what I hear when I try to investigate this is that, well, you don't. Only say that you do it, but you are doing it. And so I think that is, you know, confirming a little bit that, well, we, we, we, we walk the talk. So doing this branding is, very much up to the local sales companies. I try to encourage them and be creative in how they go about this.

What we did. And that is something that I normally share with them. I, uh, used to work in Alfa Laval, but in a business unit. We, uh, we met, uh, how can we do this in employer branding? Because I didn't know about Alfa Laval before I was there, kind of by coincidence. So I said, how can we do this? So we mapped who has this kind of, you could say, uh, connections to the universities, to the schools, who are sitting in that kind of environments, what part of those communities and how can we, with a joint effort, kind of put Al Farawal on the map.

So we, we were, we were sharing a lot of, you could say, different positions. in, in the local society, but also reaching out to the different universities and colleges, to put our brand there.

Sarah Nicastro: I think, you know, Hanela, we spoke about, you know, recognition of, of the Kone brand and, and, you know, you mentioned, you don't necessarily think about it until you're knowing to look for it.

Right. And, and I think in service and field service, there's so many brands like that, that. You know, you don't realize everything that goes into, you know, getting the products and goods that you have every day or keeping the world running unless you're looking. And I think, you know, as a whole set of industries, thinking together about how we bring more awareness to the fact that there's almost this whole other world of career potential for folks, that you don't think, you know, when you're a child, Oh, I want to grow up and be a nurse.

I want to be a teacher. You know, people don't say, Oh, I want to be in field service, or I want to be, you know, in, in one of these particular industries. So how do we, how do we think about creating that broader awareness, you know, obviously within individual companies, but also overall? Now you mentioned you in the matrix, you are, are in a central role.

Working with the local HR teams and local business leaders to execute strategy. sounds like a recipe for some friction. Yes. So, uh, how do you, you sort of navigate that and, and stay aligned on, you know, what the objectives are and, and how to go about it?

Ann Sørensen: A very good question and not so simple to answer just, uh, you know, in, uh, yeah.

So, uh, going about this, from the beginning, uh, when we, when we have this launch of the strategy, of course, we have to buy in from the MD from the, from the management. I am not part of HR. I'm a competent manager. I sit outside HR, but of course, the ones that I'm collaborating with closely are HR. It took a while to get the buy-in, uh, from the HR because we, we don't understand this, technical stuff and know.

But you understand people and you understand people's development. You sit locally as, as people, you could say, you are taking care of the workforce locally. , but they had a hard time because I could not answer questions about the cancers or high-speed separators. I'm not a technician. So they were, they would, they, they have, they, they were not the, and it's back to communication.

I need to hold up the mirror. Of course, I do. And then, but there was, it took some time for the buy-in. Now, these days, we see that HR is hiring business partners for service. So we see that we are on a journey and they are paying attention, but because they can see how we are, you know, how do we get the talents?

How do we onboard them in a good way? How do we make sure that we retain them? They are part of making that happen locally. I mean, from central. We can always ask, uh, we can also answer, you know, the why, we can also say what, but the how, it needs to be there out locally. That's very, very important. And that's how we work decentralized in Alfa Romeo.

But now they also start asking for the how. Yeah. It's a journey. And, um, one, one transformation creates a lot of spinoffs. Now we are looking into different ways to put up academies. How can we capture newly educated, bring them on board, and train them? Maybe we train a bit too many. We know that field service is a great place to start, a career in at least Alfa Laval.

Can we, can we push them into sales? Can we go, can we open the doors for repair or projects? That is something that we're working with. And again, one size does not fit all. Yeah.

Sarah Nicastro: So let's talk about frontline talent. Okay. Okay. So. Um, when, when you're bringing frontline talent into Alpha Label, uh, what is the competence focus and strategy?

Ann Sørensen: The competence focus is that we, we normally, is also a shift that has happened. I mean, we, um, are focusing much more on the attitude and behavior that we have ever done. Of course, there needs to be a kind of a basic understanding, uh, for, for, for mechanical stuff, depending on, uh, which layers of field service we, uh, we, we are, we are in a need for.

We have four layers, uh, in the career path. Um, when we look at it, it's also for them to, to be, you know, uh, flexible, you know, adaptable and agile, but they also need to have this kind of, you could say, um, continuously learning approach. And I think that the, the, normally the ones that we go about is very curious about, you know, investigating in their career, investigating in, in what can happen.

And we know. They will be shifting very, very fast. So we also are looking into, and that is maybe performance. I was smiling when you said that maybe performance, uh, not over people, but how can we break the learning curve faster? How can we make them up and running in a faster way? Maybe bringing in these modern tools, maybe, uh, you know, embrace them and figure out how can we simulate?

How can we? You know, train them, uh, in a, in a good and a fast pace. That is, that is where we are. And we, we, we fail sometimes we stumble and we, we get up and we learn. Yeah.

Sarah Nicastro: Is soft skills, is part of, the training?

Ann Sørensen: It's very much part of the training. And, uh, we haven't launched it yet. We are launching an onboarding program very soon.

We have put some of the behavior training that we normally do a little bit later, we put them up from the beginning. Because, you know, how do you go about listening to the customer? How do you go about asking, asking questions? Do, uh, have that, you could say, awareness that we are perceiving differently. So when we speak about a scope and stand there in front of a frustrated customer, how do we go about it?

How do we communicate? So we are bringing some of that behavior training. We try to not make soft training. We like to call it behavior training. Um, the more in the early stage for their onboarding, that is, that is what we are doing now. And now let's see what is happening. Um, because we, we train, we also see we have our field force.

We have invented what we call a sales lead app because we like them to identify potential out there. They should identify. They should not be salesperson. And we have had this, and you're not going to turn me into a salesperson. No, I have never had the intention. That is for other people. But you have an app.

If you see something potential, push it forward. We have some salespeople capturing on the other hand. They are advisors. And they, that is very, very important. They are, they are there to advise, not to sell.

Sarah Nicastro: You mentioned the career path. So what does that look like for a new technician coming in?

Ann Sørensen: A new technician coming in, if he starts on the basic level, he would, uh, have a very transparent, uh, learning plans.

We work with that. And we normally go about, if you are a separation specialist or a thermal specialist, then there are several paths that you need to kind of, you could say, master. Mm hmm. If you want to grow. This is a conversation you have with your manager. So the onboarding is also where the manager, so we are taking the manager, uh, there as well.

So that conversation is not necessarily only for the PD talk or, uh, development talk or what we call it. That is something that is going on constantly. So if you have a wish, to go into a business, of course, there needs to be a need. Uh, but then, uh, we would like to encourage our people to grow in that sense.

So there needs to be a promotion going from one step to another because the compensation and benefits are there and embedded as well because there needs also to be this what's in it for me. Why? Why should I develop? Um, now we can also see in some areas of our business, um, maybe we have, um, uh, a market that is, you know, flattening out a little bit.

Okay. So how do we then reskill our people? That's also part of it because we want, to retain our people. And we want to, uh, because they, they know, you know, I'm not being booked for anything. What is happening? I like to choose myself. I'd rather go out than, than, you know, they give me a, a note that I'm not here anymore.

I, so, we need to start those kinds of conversation, uh, quite early. Yeah. Yeah.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. We, we spoke in, the breakout earlier about the importance of, you know, when it comes to retention, uh, younger talent wants to feel that they have opportunity to progress. So having this progression, having it be clear from the beginning, uh, making sure they know that there's an opportunity with that for them within the business.

Um, but we also talked about the fact that, as you mentioned, you know, um, can be better. We can't expect that field technicians are going to come into the role and stay there for 20 or 30 years like they did before, right? And so We need to be preparing for that and, and figuring that out. Um, but also we spoke about, uh, the reality that it can be better to retain them within the company, even if it isn't within service, right?

So if, if they're a talented individual and, you know, they, they have an interest or an aptitude to go into sales or to go into product or something else, right. Making sure that you have, uh, measures in place, um, to be able to. to do that.

Ann Sørensen: can I add a comment to that one? Because of what we do normally, we have a policy that we say we have open recruitment.

So if we have kind of internal posts, you know, people can go and look if they are curious about, you know, maybe I would need to fulfill a career within Um, Maybe being a manager or maybe being in sales or something else. Um, and then if you apply for an internal position, you will always get some kind of conversation with the hiring manager or with the HR.

So, and that is also bringing things to the surface, right? So you have a person who is now in the mood to look for something different. And if that person does not dare to supposed to or give that opportunity, you at least know that that person has put down an application or a wish to do something different.

So that is also for me a local responsibility from HR to then support, okay, we know that you are in this situation. How can we support you in, being the best candidate, if that's what you want to fulfill? To get an open and honest conversation with. With the employees. Yeah, that's not always happening. I know, but that is what we are aiming for.

Sarah Nicastro:. Yeah. So we also talked about, um, you know, I think a lot of, uh, folks, uh, at the moment in service think of, um, you know, competence and, and training and development, uh, about the frontline workforce, new employees come in, what do we do to get them up to speed?

Right. Um, but yeah. We also need to be thinking about how crucial it is, um, not to overlook competence and ongoing development, uh, from a leadership perspective. Um, so, can you talk, uh, a bit about, you know, what you're doing to make sure leaders, as well, are having the opportunity to develop and learn and grow, um, Because that has a huge impact on retention.

Ann Sørensen: It has a huge, huge impact. Um, I need to step one step back into history and I probably said this already to some of you. Uh, when we launched the transformation, we could see that the enablers for having that change happening were of course the leadership or the managers. So we, um, we, we initiated a transformational leadership because we were looking for that entrepreneurship.

We were looking for the vision-driven, we were looking for people having to buy in, and at the same time, we added to that training that people need to work strategically. Um, before we kind of put that program, uh, in, in action, we said, well, this is a personal journey, your manager. So we would like to offer you a 360-degree leadership evaluation.

Maybe you want a position because you are a fantastic engineer and maybe you are still working hands-on because in smaller sales companies. The manager might be out there working himself, right? Or he loves to do that, so he goes. Um, so in, in some occasion, we, we also by that could see that, okay, we have a layer of, of, of, of managers, uh, they get these kinds of scoring, they get the insights themselves because this is, I mean, you are a bit vulnerable when you are on a journey like this. After all, it's very much personal development.

Uh, and what was it you called this policy? What was it? No assholes. No assholes. So, from Central, um, when we looked into that, we could see if there were some assholes, uh, further up, right? Because how were you treating your people? Because what we offered the managers was that we said, you have a 360, you have feedback from your [00:24:00] managers and your surroundings, and if your manager may not be treating you well in this, maybe you'll get a big surprise, and that has never been addressed, uh, because the manager has never.

Talk to you about these issues, but suddenly you see it in a 360-degree leadership evaluation. What kind of, you could say, communication is that? So that was also an eye-opener for us. So from the central, we saw it was a bigger need than just what we, could address, from the transformation point of view.

Right now we are in the, the, in the, um, uh, what you say, the situation where we are looking into how do we, how do we, Move our service operations manager to become more strategic. We know that our field service managers might be more operational. So will we force them to take those strategic decisions?

Maybe not. Maybe not. So we will also need to go back, and we have not done that work yet, but that is what we are discussing right now. We know the team managers, because I spoke about, you know, the span of control. Uh, if you are a leader, the span of control cannot be 20 or 30 people. Um, so we have a layer of team managers that we also need to educate.

And, um, I think, uh, we are having a big attention here, because speaking of culture, we need them. Speaking about being close to your people, and retaining your people, you need to understand what it takes to, to thrive. What, and the motivational, yeah,

Sarah Nicastro: yeah, no, I think it's so, so important. And I think, um, you know, we, we spoke earlier about the fact that, uh, there's statistics on this.

I just don't have them handy, but, um, you know, companies drastically under-invest or don't invest at all in leadership, uh, training, and ongoing education. Um, and in service, in particular, if you think about, um, you know, historically, the way to reward a strong individual contributor is to make them a manager, you know, a director, uh, and, and have them progress through the ranks.

The challenge with that is, you know, them being a strong individual contributor as a field technician doesn't necessarily mean that they're a strong leader. And so, um, You know, we have to be very careful as we sort of push toward this, you know, more innovative future. Um, do you have the right capabilities within leadership teams to spearhead that, right?

And, uh, if not, you know, um, I know this wasn't the context you said about the gentleman who you brought in that was sort of a, an outsider in the, in Denmark, um, rollout, but it, it can be the same idea. You either need to augment that. Um, invest in, you know, building up those capabilities and certainly, you know, look for people that truly should not be in those positions because it will just ruin, uh, the culture and the morale and, and, you know, increased turnover. So, um, I think it's, it's a really important, uh, area.

Ann Sørensen: I can add to when we did the 360, right? And we had this coaching session because we offered an external coach, a session for that, the trainer. Uh, or the co-facilitator of that leadership training, and then, uh, I acted as a coach as well.

And some of the managers, they were not there, they were not comfortable. So the match was not there. So some of them are not in, those positions today and they are happy. I mean, this is normally also how it goes. I mean, if you, if you cannot see anything else, maybe. Can be a manager then..

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. I think it gets into a different conversation, but I think we need to come up with a way to reward strong individual contributors who do not just put themselves in charge of other people.

Because for some people, you know, not only do they not incline toward that, but, uh, they may not want to do it. They, may not be good at it, right? Um, and, and so, You know, how do we acknowledge their, um, excellence without just saying here, you know, there's a team. Good luck. Um, okay, so, so, Anne, as you look out over the next, you know, three to five years, um, when it comes to talent and, and competence, uh, what do you think the biggest things are that A, we're going to need to be looking for, um, and B, you know, we're going to need to be Uh, thinking about being prepared to address,

Ann Sørensen: I need to maybe put another statement here as well because I see a certain trend as well internally.

And maybe it's not only internally, but I see more of our field service moving from one country to another. I see a lot more crossing borders and, and going for local contracts in different countries. If that's the case outside Alfa Laval, I have investigated. But I see an increase in trend in that I see people going from this area to this area and they, they're okay by having a local contract.

They take the whole family, they go and, they start a new adventure. And of course, there is support, uh, connected with having internal movements. But, uh, I have also recruited when I was senator, I also recruited people from, from, from different countries outside of, and they were also kind of, you know, support in that kind of movements.

If that's, if that's a trend going on outside of, I haven't investigated that, but I see It's an increase in trend inside. Um, that's one thing. Um, AI is one of, of, uh, the things that we're talking about a lot. I was, in Stockholm a few weeks ago at a learning conference. And, uh, AI was of course the underlying theme.

And I think we can benefit a lot from those tools in our, in our area, so

Sarah Nicastro: I agree. I think, um, I certainly don't want to give, the connotation that I'm anti-AI to anyone. I just think what I am is anti-everyone jumps on a buzzword, um, right? And so I think. You know, uh, earlier we had a, a conversation, um, from a question about knowledge management.

Like, to me, that is an area where AI could provide tremendous value and service because we have a wealth of data and knowledge just sitting there waiting to be leveraged. Like, so my mind just goes to, you know, what are some of the Real world today problems we could solve let's start there, you know, and then get to some of the more

Ann Sørensen: forward thinking stuff I also see it more as a tool. It's more a tool to achieve what you are aiming for. Mm hmm. Yes. Yeah

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January 10, 2024 | 35 Mins Read

Tetra Pak’s Proven Ways of Supporting Field Force Wellbeing

January 10, 2024 | 35 Mins Read

Tetra Pak’s Proven Ways of Supporting Field Force Wellbeing

Sarah is joined by Marco Hugo Guiterrez, VP of Customer Service Operations, EMEA at Tetra Pak, who shares a detailed look at how the company is putting more emphasis on employee engagement and working to promote and maximize field force wellbeing.

Sarah Nicastro: Welcome to the Future of Field Service podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Nicastro. Today we're going to be taking a look at how Tetra Pak has created proven ways to support their field force well-being. I'm thrilled to be joined today by Marco Hugo Gutierrez, who is the Vice President of Customer Service Operations for EMEA at Tetra Pak. Marco, welcome to the Future of Field Service podcast.

Marco Hugo Gutierrez: Thank you very much, Sarah.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah.

Marco Hugo Gutierrez: Thank you for inviting me.

Sarah Nicastro: Absolutely, thrilled to have you. So this is a topic that you did a session on at Field Service Europe in Amsterdam in the fall and I know it was incredibly well-received and I think with good reason. When we caught up to talk about this, I think it's such an important area for people to be focusing more on and you have such great specifics about how you and your team and Tetra Pak is doing that. So we'll get into all of that but before we do, just tell everyone a little bit more about yourself, your role and also the Tetra Pak business in case they're not familiar.

Marco Hugo Gutierrez: So, thank you very much. Let me start by introducing Tetra Pak as a company. Our company is currently a leader in the food and beverage industry, mainly in the area, so processing and packaging. We are present around the globe as a full system supplier, meaning that we deliver not only the equipment but also the materials like packaging material, caps, et cetera. And we supply also services to, let's say, maintain and keep updated lines during the lifetime of these lines. Consumer knows us mainly through our packages. But we also have a very, very important install base in the processing area, the processing of the liquid that we normally process or other food categories. With more than 100,000 processing equipment and more than 9,000 packaging machines around the globe. For today's discussion, I think one figure that is really relevant is the amount of field service engineers. We have a very strong local presence in the world with more than 2,500 engineers around the world.

About myself; I would describe myself as professionally passionate about industrial services with almost 25 years dedicated to this area mainly working for Tetra Pak, but I started in the oil and gas industry. I started as field service engineering in fact. So I had also the experience being there in the field. Then I moved to sales, having different positions. Then I became a service director in France until 2018. And then since then, I have been working managing big organizations of field service operations with today I have a team of 1,100 employees delivering maintenance installations, TPM products, and also training for our customers. I'm also very focused on transformation of the service delivery model. I think that things are changing quite often, and for our customers and also when it comes to the people that we have and we'll talk about that today. And always looking for getting the right balance between two systems data and people.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, I love that. And some of our podcast listeners may remember Sasha Ilyukhin who is also at Tetra Pack and has been on the podcast a couple of times. And I think it's interesting, you and he both started as engineers yourselves. And I've said to him before and I'll say to you, I think it makes me think two things. One, it's so nice that you have that firsthand perspective because particularly with a topic like today's topic, there's a deep understanding you have about the struggles or the challenges and things to avoid that that would be hard to appreciate as much just secondhand. The other thing that I think is really interesting though, and I'm thinking of you and he both as examples of this is sometimes with all of the changes that are happening in leadership style and company culture and things like that, we have been talking more and more about how in field service specifically, you have a lot of leaders who progress through the ranks and sometimes this is done as a reward for individual contribution, even when the person isn't necessarily super interested in or well-adapt to be a leader.

So what I love about this example and Sasha as well and others, is when you see a leader who has progressed but really is strong at the role and, to your point, is looking for ways to not get stagnant, but to continue to look at the environment. What's changing, what do we need to do differently, how can we be better? It's really powerful, so I love that. All right, so we're talking today about field force well-being, all right. And what I want to talk about first is what makes this topic? We hear a lot in the news about employee burnout, turnover, employee mental health, all of these things. What makes these things so particularly important for a field workforce?

Marco Hugo Gutierrez: Yeah. Well, I think that several factors came into a place at the same time. I think that from one side, COVID was an accelerator of all these, of this situation. I think in general, the life of the engineer has a factor that is different to other jobs. For example, in the back office, not that is a traveling factor. The fact that they are normally out of home or they have compromised their personal life with a professional life in a much more, let's say, complex way. And what we see normally in the field is we don't normally see a lot of people with burnout. It's something that, at least in Tetra Pak, we don't see a lot of burnout in the field. But what we understand is that being engineer, you have to face normally quite tense situations because you need to, for example, restore a line and the customer is waiting for restoring the production. And there is a lot of tension.

I mean, there are several situations that you need to handle and you have to do this at the same time traveling. So on top of all the things that are coming from our normal life, families issues or health issues, etc, on top of that, you have this complication. This is from one side. So Junk in Generations, they have now other alternatives that are coming from the fact that we have below technologies that really improve the collaboration. Let's say for example, today is quite easy to see that companies are offering positions as programmers, as automation engineers, as remote support engineers, that allows the people to work much closer to their homes, etc. And this is something that we have to, let's say, understand and adapt to the way we set up our services in order to give as much as possible flexibility. So the engineers, they get the best of being engineer. That is, I think is to have a tremendous impact on the operations of the customer to have a very high value for the customer, to be exposed, at least in our company, constantly to international environment.

Talking with, working with people from all the companies, from the countries, being updated constantly to new technologies. I mean, it's a very dynamic job and at the same time, it's really rewarding. When you have a breakdown, you go there, you fix the machine, and then the line is producing and the customer is able to achieve the production target. This is really powerful. There are not many jobs that gives this satisfaction. So I think there's a balance between the benefits of the job and the complexity of the lifestyle that having other alternatives in the work market that allows you to work more closer to your family, etc, sometimes is for us, it's a challenge to find the right model to offer something that is attractive for the talented people.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. No, that makes sense. And I know you and I spoke about that oftentimes the stress that the field force can feel isn't really related to workload. It's some of these other external factors, and often it can be a sense of isolation. And so then there's this need in the labor market, we see people wanting more and more flexibility. And so there's the as is challenges, there's also what's coming, what's continuing to change. And so I know we spoke about the fact that not only is this balance important to strike today, but it also really important for companies to be thinking about what's coming and that having a focus on well-being and employee engagement like we're going to talk about today is going to be even more important as we go into the future. Yes. So what do you think is coming along that's going to make this focus which is already very important, even more critical as we move forward?

Marco Hugo Gutierrez: Yeah. As I said before, I think that we will... Today we can say we are happy not to have a very high turnover of engineers. We are in the level of 5% which is pretty good on. But I think that more and more, it is going to be more difficult in some markets to attract talent. We already see it in some markets, especially in some areas, U.S, Mexico for example, where it can be Europe, where more and more opportunities are the diversification of the different options for engineers or technicians is becoming bigger. In other markets what we see is that this is socio-economical situations in some areas, like for example, Africa or Middle East or other regions of the world where we see that really the talent retention is going to be in the future, something to take care quite a lot. So I think that, as I said before, we didn't see also in Europe, for example, this big great resignation wave, it didn't happen so heavily.

But yes, I think that in the future, we should be able to offer model of work modalities we allows the engineers to have more flexibility, for example, when it comes to planning their personal life. Also, I think that it's going to be important to have the chances to give them rotations. Rotations in the back office as for example, if they have a situation at home, at home with the family to be able to stay for six months as remote support engineer or other positions that doesn't require to travel so much so they can settle down the situation at home and then return. So I think more and more we will need to be more and more flexible. And I think that the remote support will play an important role in that aspect.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. And I think what you're doing right now to be proactive, to know that will become more and more important and to get ahead of it is the way to do it versus waiting for a great resignation and then try... So it's this idea of, and we talk about this on this podcast a lot too, spending time waiting for things to go back to how they were is useless. It's not happening. And so the quicker we can just embrace, "Listen, things have changed, they are changing," we aren't going to be successful infinitely just operating the way we always have. So how do we adapt? It's really important. Now we're going to talk about these steps that you're taking along employee engagement, employee well-being but before we get into those, the one aspect you mentioned to me to put yourself in a good space from the beginning is hiring well. So can you talk about what you mean by that? What does hiring well look like for these roles at Tetra Pak?

Marco Hugo Gutierrez: I think it's absolutely vital because if you don't hire the right profile from the beginning, you will never fix it later on even if you give trainings or whatever. I think it's important to also hire the people according to the right profiles. Looking at the type of service they're going to deliver. It is not the same, for example, a technician who repairs vending machines in the same city than a field service engineer that is working the industry of pharmaceutical or food industry in different locations around the world, overseen large installation projects or even managing big service contracts, the type of stress and levels and responsibilities different. So it's important to consider both, the technical skill and experience and also the software skills that are normally the ones that creates more stress on the person and more problems.

So we have to be really good at evaluation. At evaluating these skills during the recruitment process. And it's also very important from the beginning during the interviews to set really well expectations about the job, what is the job about, what, let's say, circumstances you will find developing your job in a daily basis, et cetera. That way everybody's prepared, you know exactly what profile are you hiring, and you are somehow sure that he's going to develop well his job.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. That makes sense. So it is getting good at the evaluation process, knowing what you're looking for. And I like the point about also setting expectations because I think especially in a tight labor market and we know we need to fill roles but what you don't want to do is sell a vision of the job that is not accurate and then you're causing problems for yourself once folks get into it. And yeah.

Marco Hugo Gutierrez: Sarah, we cannot forget that an engineer is one of the roles that is more expensive to develop and so, having engineers that you spend a nice amount of money and time to develop properly and suddenly he discovers that, well, that was not what he was expecting, is a problem.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. And in more ways than one, for sure. Okay, so Tetra Pak has a program called Tetra Pak Mental Wellbeing. Okay. Can you tell us about that program?

Marco Hugo Gutierrez: Well, this program... I mean, increasingly our company has been having more and more focus on the well-being of the employees. But after the pandemic, we refocus a little bit even more in the mental area, the mental health. So we want our people to be not only physically but also mentally healthy. For different reasons but one of the main is that if you are full of energy because you feel well, because you are, then you will go to work, happy to work, happy to collaborate with the rest of your peers but you will transmit that energy also to the customers. And you will come back afterwards to your home full of energy because you have been enjoying doing your job and you have the right conditions. So what we want is our employees to be conscious about the importance of the mental wind, help them to detect symptoms on themselves and also to detect it on the rest of the colleagues if somebody is in a very high peak of a stress, for example.

And we want really to be able to give them an environment to talk safely about this topic. So the program has three main objectives. One of them is the stigmatize, the mental why we have this campaign, "It's okay not to be okay," that we think that is really important. And one of the key things of the areas project is that we are providing also psychological support 24/7 in the local language to our employees, but not only to our employees, but also to the families. So this is very well received in the company. And also one of the objectives that we are achieving is to create resilience in the employees and also in the managers by delivering trainings by sessions. I was reading yesterday that we closed more than 10,000 employees already did the trainings, more than 1,500 managers also received the trainings. So it has been a very intensive campaign but it is really working and paying off and there is a lot of satisfaction coming from it.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. Well, and you mentioned that Tetra Pak has been fortunate not to see a lot of burnout. But again, one of the best ways to safeguard against that is to be proactive and de-stigmatizing the issues, normalizing the conversations, making people feel that not only do they have someone professional to talk to but that if they're feeling not okay, they can go to their manager, they can go to someone and speak up goes a long way toward not letting people get to that point. So I think that's a great focus area.

Now, to go beyond what is happening within the Mental Well-Being program, you started an employee engagement initiative and the first step was surveying your workforce to get direct input which I think is so important because often you see companies come up with these programs or initiatives based on what they think, not what people actually feel or want or need. And so, can you just talk a little bit about what was, I guess first, what was the catalyst to go further than this corporate well-being program? And what things did you ask in that survey that set the stage for the steps you've been taking?

Marco Hugo Gutierrez: Sure. So everything started in 2020. So we realized that we got completely used to have the scoring of the employee engagement surveys for the field force were always behind. And we all have the issues as well, it's normal, they have more complicated lifestyle and blah, blah, blah. But one day we said, "Okay, this cannot be like that. We are sure that we can really catch up at the same level as the back office employees." So we started in specific field force wellbeing improvement project in Europe called Blue Cap. At the time, the ability value was expanded to other regions like Middle East and Africa. So the first objective for us was to capture the feedback of the field service engineers because yeah, most of us have a background of field service engineers but we wanted to know today, tell us in each one of the country what is specifically what makes you enjoy and have, let's say, a happy delivery of your job, let's say that.

And which ones prevents you to feel proud of your job? What things makes you feel stressed, frustrated when you are in a normal service delivery? It was very interesting because we thought at the beginning that we would have something different in each market, but no, there were a lot of things that were common to the markets. Some of the things related to the specific lifestyle of the engineers, some things related to the way the Tetra Pak was managing certain areas of the operations, but there were also a lot of things that were very local, very much local to the market. So this allow us to know at the time, very well in detail, what was the reasons behind this dissatisfaction and also help us to create a very strong, let's say, action plan at local level, global level, but always created from the proposals and the input of engineers.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. Now can you share with us Marco, some of the most important things that you uncovered in that survey? What stood out to you as, whether it's the most impactful to you personally, the biggest commonalities, what did you find that you knew you needed to take action on?

Marco Hugo Gutierrez: I think you already mentioned at the beginning, one of the probably most important things is this factor of isolation. Okay. This is probably one of the most critical areas. So from this point, you start to understand a lot of things. Never forget that the engineers, they are normally remotely managed, okay? They are normally not stepping into the office. So for them to get, let's say, positively contaminated by the company culture is more difficult for them to be updated on the latest decisions or reasons to do some specific movements in the company. If they do not have a good manager that really keeps them very well updated, can result into an isolation, even further isolation. So by the end, you can have... If you have the bad luck to have one manager that doesn't have the time also to really coach and manage the engineer, you may have an engineer that is closer even to the customers than to the company culture.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah.

Marco Hugo Gutierrez: So, isolation for us is something very important. So to recover this sense of belonging on the engineers, to keep them updated, to demonstrate them the value and the contribution they do to the company is absolutely vital. And that was probably one of the most relevant things. This factor of isolation that seems that is not very relevant but it's extremely relevant.

Sarah Nicastro: Oh, I think it's incredibly relevant. I mean, when you said you had folks that say they feel closer to the customers they serve than they do Tetra Pak. And then we didn't really talk a lot about this in the beginning, but one of the things that stood out to me and our prep conversation is you talked about that oftentimes, we talked about the fact that it isn't really the work that stresses technicians out the most, it's these other things. And you actually said to me and you know this because you did the job, that there's this dopamine that comes from... For a technician, you're there to solve problems and fix things and every time you do that, you feel this reward and this success but it's with the customer. So the company Tetra Pak in this instance has to be very careful not to let that relationship grow and the relationship between the company and the employee not grow.

Because it is great that they feel that sense of ownership, that they feel that sense of accomplishment when they solve these problems, that they're so close with the customer but that can't be at the loss of not having that with Tetra Pak because then there's just a lot of things that come into play. And I think, just to share a bit, I've been remote for five and a half years, well over five years since I took this role. And regardless of what level I've gotten to in the company or who all I work with, there are times that you do feel detached from what's going on because you're on your own. And so looking for those ways to foster that is I think really important. And the more people can feel that connectedness, that belonging, not only does that only help them care more but it's imperative to retention and satisfaction and yeah.

Marco Hugo Gutierrez: I think it is very important. For us in the services business, we want the guys very close to the customer with high empathy with the customer needs. As somebody told me when I joined the company, they told me, whenever you enter into the plant, customer problem is your problem. And you don't leave until the problem is fixed now. So this is the way it has to be but at the same time, they have to be understand, they have to understand why the company is making several decisions. Because if you don't have the full picture and you don't have the sense of belonging, you may not understand that in the long term or in the midterm, some of the decisions of the company will clearly give a benefit to the customer in terms of better service or a new tool, new implementations of new service modalities or whatever.

So yes, they have to be very close to customers and that's why the customer trusts them so much but at the same time, we have to secure that they are very much understanding and feeling the culture of the company. Otherwise, it's complicated.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah.

Marco Hugo Gutierrez: To handle transformations and changes.

Sarah Nicastro: And I would think in the worst case, it can almost become an us versus them situation, meaning the technician and the customer almost versus Tetra Pak if they don't understand versus everyone's in it together, right?

Marco Hugo Gutierrez: Right.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. Okay. So let's talk about... Now I have, you know because you saw my outline, I have a whole bunch of bullet points. I don't want to read all of them. What I'm going to do is just let you talk about what happened after the survey, what actions you've put in place and then I'll just keep... If there's anything we missed, we'll come back to it, okay? So let's just talk about, you have this firsthand input, you see these commonalities, you see these areas of both what makes these people so fulfilled and then also what the stressors or the struggles are. So what did you do with that information?

Marco Hugo Gutierrez: Okay. So what we did, first of all is we group somehow the different proposals, the different problems and proposals coming from the field force. That was the first thing that we did now. So for example, when it comes to management, there was one part related to leadership. And when it comes to leadership, what we find out is that the better are the managers, let's say develop, the better define is what is their job about, the job, they're managers, when it comes to the solution, when it comes to customer management, when it comes to other areas. I mean the better this is defined, the better is... The easier this is to let's say block sometimes of the service delivery manager, in our case the team leaders for the engineers, to focus on the people development, okay? Because there's always a temptation to run behind the issues and what is the spare part you need and not giving enough time for the engineers to coach the engineers.

So we want engineers that are properly updated by the company, we want engineers that are properly managed in the sense that they are supported. So if there is a crisis in the customer, we avoid that the engineer gets stuck trying to fix the problem at all price with this hero syndrome that we were talking about. So they suffer, everybody suffers. So we want to refocus as much as possible the managers to have the right proportion of time dedicated to the teams. Another thing that we were working for example, is in recognition. So it's about securing that they are really recognized by the company for all the tremendous contribution they do to the business. I mean, at the end, the engineers, they are in the... Sometimes, I use a terminology that is... I mean, we are always with the dead body on the floor, no?

Sarah Nicastro: Mm-hmm.

Marco Hugo Gutierrez: In front with hands full of blood, which means that we are there always in the middle of the problem. They are always in the center of the storm. So once the problem is solved, they feel like, "Wow, we fix everything. Everybody's celebrating. But guys, we are still here."

Sarah Nicastro: Who cares? Yeah.

Marco Hugo Gutierrez: Yeah. Exactly. We were here until two o'clock in the morning securing the line. We normally do a recognition of these kind of things but at the same time, we think that it's not enough and they tell us it's not enough. We like to see more, better recognition, more structure, et cetera. Another area that for us, probably one of the most relevant that I heard is about we want to have a career path that is clear. We want to have a career path that is really showing us the way on how to develop our professional life in Tetra Pak. So we completely rebuilt it and rebuilt our career path and our job structure in a way that now is very visible for them how to grow within the company, in which areas they can grow even outside the field service world. Okay? And they have a clear career advancement criteria.

So everybody feels that there is a fair career that is a transparent way to move within the company, that they know that their managers will be the ones supporting also to build up the competencies to move to the next position. So this is also very much welcomed by them. Other things are more related to the new technologies that we are implementing. So for example, for training, we are implementing much more, let's say, distance learning modalities or blending online trainings with other type of systems we have now available. So that is helping us to give them more updated, easier way than before. And also I think another thing that is extremely important is about the support we give them. One of the things that frustrates more the field service engineers is probably the fact that something is not ready for the moment of the service event.

If you arrive to maintenance event, you have spare parts missing or something is failing with supply of some material or something is not properly communicated. They were the ones telling us which are the key things they feel that are failing most commonly and also the ones that are impacting more than others. So that way, we were able to, let's say, review the processes internally between the different operations team and then that way, we were polishing and polishing. Still nothing is fully perfect but at least they see that we are really listening and we are, let's say, closing gap by gap now.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. Okay. So a couple of things I want to go back to. I think the recognition is so incredibly important because to me... Well, so is the relationship with the manager but those two things to me are what I think of when I think about improving that sense of belonging. Because I think if you have a good relationship with your manager and you feel acknowledged and valued and rewarded and recognized, then some of these other things you'll overlook more or be more patient with as you fix some of the support systems, et cetera. But the thing that I loved when we talked about recognition is you said, "We're ensuring field force efforts are acknowledged at the company level and tied to company objectives." And this is where I think a lot of organizations go wrong, because to your point, someone probably had always acknowledged those tremendous efforts.

It was probably their manager saying, "Oh, we really appreciate. Thanks for staying late, thanks for doing what it takes," whatever. But I think this is where the historical perception of field service almost puts companies at a disadvantage because it has been siloed. So they may be recognized in that silo but it's not always tied to, is someone outside of their direct line acknowledging what they're doing and are they showing how it's helping the company achieve its primary objectives? Because we know it is, it's just that a lot of times the work to tie those things together or the thought to do it or the communication to get that message out is where we're lacking and I think that this is a really important area of opportunity for a lot of organizations to get better at because it does matter so much and it isn't about huge bonuses or something like this. It's about knowing that people see those hours you're putting in and that they matter.

Marco Hugo Gutierrez: Exactly.

Sarah Nicastro: And I think those really the emotional side of that isolation, it's such an important way to help alleviate that. So I just wanted to come back to that one because I think it's not just about their direct manager saying, "Hey, great job." It's about that company-wide visibility, it's about shifting that perception across the organization of how important field service is and how much what they're doing ties to the overall goals. So.

Marco Hugo Gutierrez: Yeah.

Sarah Nicastro: I love that. I think the career planning such an important piece as well, especially with new talent coming in. And I love the idea of essentially you're saying now everyone's playing from the same playbook. There's no one getting advanced at a different rate pace or on different criteria that someone can say, "Well, that's not fair." It's very clear folks know what they need to do. They can own their own journey, they can feel a sense of empowerment to move at the pace they can. We talked about working, the work you're doing to ensure all of these supporting functions like spare parts are optimized so that they're not being this source of pain. A couple other things is one thing I want to come back to Marco is you intentionally set aside the pay discussion when you embarked on this initiative, knowing that anytime you're asking employees for input, it's likely to come up.

I understand why you wanted to set that aside because that matters to everyone, but you wanted to get into what else matters, what really deeply matters. But my question is how did you get them to set that aside and then when was it appropriate? Because I know you have set some transparent pay standards, et cetera. How did you get them to set it aside and when was it time for you to come back to it?

Marco Hugo Gutierrez: Okay. Good. No, I think this was at the beginning, an important discussion. No?

Sarah Nicastro: Mm-hmm.

Marco Hugo Gutierrez: Do we include or don't we include the money discussion? But as we know, money is normally a hygienic factor, meaning that employers are not necessarily demotivated by hygienic factors but on the other hand, the requirements are not met and they may feel clearly dissatisfied. Salary policies today for us is not a problem. So we are constantly looking at the market data, reviewing market data to ensure that we remain competitive as employers. As mentioned before, there are many other factors that probably one by one you may think, "Well, this is not so relevant for the employees," but at the end, if you put everything together, all these things from the support side in the career path, et cetera, putting them all together makes completely the difference between being engaged or not. And as you said, we wanted to have full focus without being distracted by the money discussion and we discussed it with them. We told them, "Guys, we are not talking about this because we have other forums to discuss these areas." And it was reasonably well perceived.

Sarah Nicastro: Okay.

Marco Hugo Gutierrez: By them to say, "Look, okay, let's focus now on these other areas, leadership, support, recognition, et cetera. Let's continue fixing this." They have other forums if they need, and they know that they are other forums in some places we talk about generally negotiations with their work councils or whatever. There are other forums for that. And I think at the end, they know properly that having a good, let's say, being properly covered when it comes to the salary for them, what really makes a difference in the daily base are the other things, these small pieces that really makes a difference in their frustration level or in their enjoyment level.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. No, that makes sense but I do think, so for people listening, I want to say a couple things. I think a reflection that you've already gotten to a decent place of good, fair and transparent pay. Because if that weren't the case, they would not have been as receptive to setting it aside. So we had an event in Birmingham in the UK back in May and I remember a gentleman, we were at a round table discussion and he was so frustrated, rightfully so, but he just kept saying, "We have technicians coming and training and then leaving for 50 cents more an hour." And I said, "With all due respect, if it's 50 cents an hour, they're not leaving for the money."

Marco Hugo Gutierrez: Exactly. Absolutely.

Sarah Nicastro: And so the thing is, if it's easy to blame the big picture on that one thing, but number one, you have to pay people fairly and if you're not based on market trends, based on competitive landscape, et cetera, that's an issue that needs to be righted. I remember we also had a working group maybe two years ago where we were talking about... I had an HR expert come and speak to our service collaborative, and we were talking about everything related to recruiting, hiring, retention, et cetera. And one of the things that came up is that a company was struggling because the rate of people coming in was way higher than the rate that they had been paying people. And she said, "I know you don't want to hear this, but you need to balance it out." I mean, it's just, that's where we are today. And so yes it's hard, and yes, you have to figure out how to do that in a stepwise way, et cetera. But I mean, paying people fairly is foundational to this conversation.

And so I think I just want to give you credit to be able to set that aside means you were already doing a good job at that.

Marco Hugo Gutierrez: Okay. Great to have you recycle that.

Sarah Nicastro: And so for someone listening who isn't, you're going to really struggle to get into some of these other things if people are really feeling unfairly compensated. That's going to be an emotion that's hard to set aside to get into what else matters. Yeah. All right. So how would you describe the benefits that you've seen so far from this initiative?

Marco Hugo Gutierrez: Well, I said before, initially in the past we were, let's say somehow assuming that it was normal to have this lower employee engagement in the field force. So first of all, today we understand with a lot of accuracy which are the problems, what is the problem description? The problem statement for each one of the market and in general, for them. We know exactly which areas we should work as soon as possible to improve their... So the low hanging fruits that will improve their lifestyle and their professional life. Second, all the plans that we have put already in place in a quantitative way, what we see is that the employee engagement surveys scores are going up. And especially in some markets where it was traditionally very difficult to, let's say, get this level of recognition from the employees about it, I'm really feeling engaged in my job. Suddenly we are moving at the same or even in some cases, higher than the back office positions.

Sarah Nicastro: Mm-hmm.

Marco Hugo Gutierrez: Okay. So that's for us one of the key things. And we also see that we have a reasonable, I would say in some cases even higher workload for the utilization of the engineers. But at the same time, we see that as before, we have a pretty contained turnover of engineers which means that they're happy and they see that they are participating in the solution. So because they are part of most of the plans that we are creating to help them, they are piloting all the solutions before. So we use their testimonials to tell to the other colleagues, "Guys, I'm already doing it. This is working, let's implement it." So I think that one thing is that we know what was the problem, now we have with clarity what is the problem. Second, we know how to improve it using their own proposals, the proposals of the engineers. And third, I think is very important that they are the ones selling it in some of the cases which is also very important.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. Now, what would you say are the biggest learnings or pieces of advice you would share with others based on the process that you've been through here?

Marco Hugo Gutierrez: Yeah. I think first of all, as I said, listen to them, make them part of the solution and the design and the piloting of all the actions and keep them very much updated. Keep them updated about how it's approaching the actions, the plan, at the global level and at the local level. This is one of the key areas. I think it is very important to be transparent from the beginning about what is not possible because sometimes there are a lot of good ideas but some of them are not potentially possible, feasible, for financial reasons, for organizational reasons, or etc. And the last thing that I think is very important, if I have to give it, is yes, try to keep as much as possible these high unique factors well covered, well managed. So for example, the money discussion and put it aside, focus one by one in each one of the areas. So split into different discussions, support, leadership, etc, the discussion with engineers. Because that way, you manage to get real useful insights that later on will help you to create good improvement plans.

Otherwise, it's going to be everything mix and fuzzy, and it's not going to be really efficient.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. No, that's great. And the one thing I wanted to say too is on the, keep them informed piece, the other thing that you said that you've done is to show where you're making investments. To show them, "Here's what you told us. Here's the action we created. Here's what we're investing in to make this piece easier or this part better."

Marco Hugo Gutierrez: This is right.

Sarah Nicastro: And I think, again, that helps with that sense of feeling valued. You're showing them, we're willing to invest in not only, again, not only your success because their success is the company's success, but your satisfaction, your engagement, your feeling of fulfillment because that's important to us, right?

Marco Hugo Gutierrez: Absolutely.

Sarah Nicastro: And that's, I think, one of the overall key things here in this conversation is just that we can't be so focused on the company's success that we forget that these people are what leads us there. And you have to genuinely put effort and care into them as people to get that outcome. And I think it's really important and you're doing a wonderful job. So I appreciate you coming and sharing all of this with us and with our listeners and I'm excited to see how the journey continues.

Marco Hugo Gutierrez: Thanks a lot, Sarah. Thanks a lot.

Sarah Nicastro: Yes, thank you Marco. You can find more by visiting us at Futureoffieldservice.com. While you're there, be sure to sign up for the Future of Field Service Insiders so that you receive the latest content to your inbox every other week. The Future of Field Service podcast is published in partnership with IFS. You can learn more at IFS.com. As always, thank you for listening.

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Vattenfall Customer Service's Prize-Winning People First Strategy

January 3, 2024 | 19 Mins Read

Vattenfall Customer Service's Prize-Winning People First Strategy

In a session from the Future of Field Service Live Tour event in Stockholm, Sarah welcomes Caroline Häggström Marklund from Vattenfall to discuss their award-winning people-first strategy in customer services.Tune in to gain valuable insights into building trust, debunking the myth of a "soft" people-first approach, and creating a workplace culture that truly puts its people first.

Sarah Nicastro:

I am going to welcome up Caroline from Vattenfall to have a chat. Caroline, welcome.

Caroline Häggström Marklund:

Thank you.

Sarah Nicastro:

Thank you for being here.

Caroline Häggström Marklund:

Thanks for having me.

Sarah Nicastro:

Yes, of course. Okay, so tell everyone a little bit about yourself, your role.

Caroline Häggström Marklund:

Yes. Okay. I am Swedish, born and raised in the north of Sweden. Probably one of the coldest people from the north because I'm always freezing, so I guess that was not my place. I have a history in economics but have been in, I would say general management since almost 15 years. Most of those years I've been in construction, building power plants; not me literally holding the tools, but working with the people that build the power plants. Then these last couple of years I've been introduced to the customer and sales world of utility at Vattenfall. That's where I'm now. I live here in Stockholm. I also have two cats, Cat and Gilbert. They are big on Instagram. My side job is social media manager to them.

Sarah Nicastro:

Okay. Well I'm going to have to follow that. Okay. Yeah, great. Okay so what Caroline and I are going to talk about this morning is Vattenfall customer services prize winning people first strategy. Now, so the people first journey has led to a number of proud moments: so, 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.

Caroline Häggström Marklund:

Yeah.

Sarah Nicastro:

So all wonderful accomplishments and as I mentioned, really representative of putting a lot of effort into thinking about what is our culture like? What is our leadership style? Are we putting people first? So that's what we're going to speak about. As you mentioned, you can give some advice, but you can also share some setbacks and some mistakes made, so we'll get into that. So can you talk just a little bit, sort of set the stage for the journey Vattenfall has been on in terms of people first. How did it start? What has that evolution looked like?

Caroline Häggström Marklund:

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, not what they are allowed to do on paper basically. 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.

Sarah Nicastro:

Yeah.

Caroline Häggström Marklund:

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.

Sarah Nicastro:

Yeah, I was thinking of asking the audience for a show of hands, but I don't know who all would be honest anyway, but I think there are a lot of organizations that are still in the ‘performance over people’ mentality, culture, and I think this is again, one of the biggest areas of shift we're going to see. So, before we talk through some of the specifics of what Vattenfall has been through and what you've seen on this journey, let's just take a step back and can you speak to, what are the factors you think are underpinning the need for this evolution, this shift, the 180-degree switch?

Caroline Häggström Marklund:

Yeah. 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.

Sarah Nicastro:

Mm-hmm.

Caroline Häggström Marklund:

But then I also think that we've been through a number of decades of automation and lean processes, and there are now, the tasks that are in our hands now are way more complex than what they used to be. And, in order to sort that out, people need to feel enabled and engaged. I think that also when work is more and more relationship focused, I mean it's about 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, I think. If you're going to manoeuvre 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 what all of the 400 people here in this organization, I know exactly what you 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. Think more complex environment, a more harsh overall climate in the world is leaning us towards this.

Sarah Nicastro:

Yeah. Complex and dynamic, right? I mean that's the other thing when you talk about in manufacturing lean and these sort of very process rich, prescriptive environments where that command and control type leadership can work, I'm not saying it should, service is a different world. Particularly today, you have just constant change, real time connectivity, so many things. It is complex and it's very dynamic and trying to tie teams to a prescriptive approach, not only slows things down, it limits their creativity and ultimately I think their fulfilment.

Caroline Häggström Marklund:

Absolutely.

Sarah Nicastro:

Okay. So one of the big points of caution you said when we spoke, which I really loved, is don't say you want to be people first or even worse, that you are without being willing to do the work.

Caroline Häggström Marklund:

Exactly.

Sarah Nicastro:

This is similar to what I said about diversity. Everyone, people first again can be looked at as sort of a buzzword. No one wants to say we are not people first.

Caroline Häggström Marklund:

Right.

Sarah Nicastro:

But if you're going to make that claim, you have to be ready to do the work.

Caroline Häggström Marklund:

Yeah.

Sarah Nicastro:

So, explain why that is such an important point.

Caroline Häggström Marklund:

I think that goes for, I mean, whatever culture you want to build. I think 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. A people first approach is all about, 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.

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. 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. If you don't say it and you still do it, fine. I mean it's going to happen then.

Sarah Nicastro:

Right.

Caroline Häggström Marklund:

It's about authenticity in a way I think.

Sarah Nicastro:

Yeah. Okay. The other really important point that you made is that I think one big myth and also one of the reasons there are still so many companies who are performance over people, is because people see a term like people first as fluffy.

Caroline Häggström Marklund:

Mm-hmm.

Sarah Nicastro:

It's soft, something that isn't going to get the job done, right? Now, you know this isn't true.

Caroline Häggström Marklund:

Mm-hmm.

Sarah Nicastro:

So, talk about how you have achieved concrete, bottom-line impact, and how we need to break the myth that this is something soft.

Caroline Häggström Marklund:

Yeah, I have a really good example that is sort of a long story, but I'm going to try to make it a little bit shorter. So, in the beginning when I started at customer service, we had really, really poor operational results. We were far, far off from reaching our targets both on customer experience and being available for customers and hence also cost. It had been like that for quite a while. When you started to look into it, it was pretty clear that the organization was understaffed. Over years, they had made savings by just reducing the amount of people but not actually changing anything in a process or system landscape, so you were just on and on in a process of doing the same with less people. And that had eventually exploded as it will do. Not only were people tired and disengaged, but they also were not able to reach the targets.

We did quite a quick turnaround recruiting 30 people, which is quite a lot. That was 10% increase in staff in the entire organization. That's what we needed to do in order to meet the demand. The demand is also, I mean we sell when people call us, so it's also a value creation in that. We did, we had the staffing, three months later we were supposed to meet our targets, but still we were off, we didn't meet the targets. I was puzzled because you told me what you needed and you told me what you were struggling with, I gave it to you, why isn't it happening? We were a little bit closer but not as close as we were supposed to be then.

Then I had a dialogue with the entire organization, I was like, "I don't know what to do now because we have what we're supposed to need in order to deliver on these targets. Why aren't we delivering?" The gap to the targets was quite big, but every individual contribution would've been quite small, which was very interesting. In general, the customer service agents in our team, they talk to six to seven customers per hour. If they would have increased that with half, we would've reached the target on individual level. I mean it was not a lot. Then I was just like, "I don't know what to do. You need to tell me what you need."

We were at the end of the year, we had a great opportunity to close the year and be off at a really good start the year after. And then I think this organization were not used to the leader being like, "I don't know, you tell me." So people started to react and wake up a little bit and it led to us establishing an internal campaign that we called Save December; the year is fucked, but we can still save December and get a head start into the next year.

What we did was just focusing on saving December as a common goal and let go of all the processes, all the measuring our KPIs that we had, all the individual targets. I was just saying to each team that, "You need to achieve this and you just do it in whatever way you want and focus on having fun at work," basically. We invested in buying candy and the inspirational walls and where you could write quotes. We had music in the entrance when you walked into the office to get a little bit of feeling. That was basically it. That and the dialogue and putting this sort of on the organization to solve.

Sarah Nicastro:

Mm-hmm.

Caroline Häggström Marklund:

Come first December, we increased our reach ability from 80 to 95% from 13th of November to 1st of December. No additional resourcing, same demand, nothing different. During December we stayed above target all month and our customer experience increased with 20% during the same month. That was sort of the start of building this culture. I think that was important. It gave us a head start because it showed what we could really do if we did it together and if everybody pitched in.

Sarah Nicastro:

Yeah.

Caroline Häggström Marklund:

That was pretty cool. Then we didn't drop in January. We sort of stayed on target then until the next crisis hit, which it always does. Yeah.

Sarah Nicastro:

Yeah. I know when we were chatting, I mean I'm going to paraphrase a little bit, so just correct me if I get anything wrong, but when we were chatting, you said that when you joined the company and you had this approach, that was sort of the first test of it, right? Until that point, it had been a lot of talk in people's minds. Now you meant it, but for them it was, "Uh-huh, yeah," and that test you saying, "I don't know what to do. You tell me what you need and how you want to do this," was the first proof point of your intent and the change you were making. It really was key in starting to build that trust because that was the moment where they thought, "Yeah, I think she means what she's saying." Then from there you were able to build upon that. Again, that's evidence of needing to be willing to do the work and then giving the time to build that trust because when people have been a part of a performance first culture, they might not just buy into it right away. They might have some hesitation.

Caroline Häggström Marklund:

Yeah.

Sarah Nicastro:

One of your other first actions was to create and enact a no assholes policy.

Caroline Häggström Marklund:

Yeah.

Sarah Nicastro:

Why was that an early move and what impact did that have?

Caroline Häggström Marklund:

It was coupled with another change that I did in the beginning. 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 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. 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.

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.

Sarah Nicastro:

Yeah.

Caroline Häggström Marklund:

You need to then act on it.

Sarah Nicastro:

Right.

Caroline Häggström Marklund:

Yeah. That's not a thing or you'll 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.

Sarah Nicastro:

Yeah. I think this is an area where a lot of excuses get made in historical culture. It's, "Yes, we want to be people first and it's important to us, but this one particular person, we need to sort of make an exception," because blah, blah, blah, right?

Caroline Häggström Marklund:

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.

Sarah Nicastro:

Yeah. Again, in terms of building that trust, if you come in with the aim to create this and then your actions are at odds with making that a reality, that's a problem. I want to go back to a couple of points that have been made. Trust obviously is something that we've talked about quite a bit. What have you learned about how best to build trust?

Caroline Häggström Marklund:

I think that I come back to relationships all the time, but be who you are and say who you are. I mean, don't try to be something that you aren't because you will never be able to fake it in people's mind. If you are something, you will act like that. I think that self-leadership and self-knowledge is super critical. I think that if you want to lead a people first culture or lead a team, whatever team, I think 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. Then you can start to talk about it, maybe there to talk about it because you feel some comfort in it. 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.

Also, for me in a people first culture, I mean 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 if you do, if you don't, don't fake it.

Sarah Nicastro:

Yeah.

Caroline Häggström Marklund:

Yeah, just be there.

Sarah Nicastro:

Now we also talked about one aspect of this that people can find uncomfortable is that this really requires leaders themselves to be a bit emotional, to sort of be a bit vulnerable and tap into that. Can you talk about why there's really no way around that and what's your advice for leaders on how to sort of step out of their comfort zones?

Caroline Häggström Marklund:

Yeah, I think this comes back to the sort of soft part of this as well, that you can't build a relationship based on facts. No, you don't do that. I reacted a little bit on what you talked about storytelling, how impactful it is. I think if you want to build a company culture, you need to create stories together and you need to create common memories and so on. We are back to relationships and if you want to build relationships, you need to build it on feelings. 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 mean I'm sure everybody in here has a feeling in their body at this point about something and just connect with people on that level. "You did a great job. How did you feel about it?"

Sarah Nicastro:

Mm-hmm.

Caroline Häggström Marklund:

Or, "I liked what you talked about, it made me feel like this." You really need to get to that level. I don't think that's soft. I mean 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. You can, but it'll probably not be a positive one I think. It's just that, I mean it's not about being emotional, it is about connecting on a personal level with people's feelings, I think.

That's been a journey for me personally as well, I have to say. I had a manager in Denmark a couple of years ago when I worked there and we never connected because he was a great person, but we always talked to each other about the results, about the facts and the figures, and I was uncomfortable sharing anything else because I thought that was not what you'd do in business. We never got a connection because I didn't do it and he didn't do it. Neither of us grew because of that.

Sarah Nicastro:

Mm-hmm.

Caroline Häggström Marklund:

Yeah, that end.

Sarah Nicastro:

Yeah. The other leadership element you mentioned earlier is being humble. Okay. I think this is another important one because again, I think it's representative of a shift from a more old school mentality of the leader needs to be the expert, the one that's telling people what to do, that has all of the answers, et cetera. I think in today's landscape, the likelihood that any one person can fill that role is incredibly slim, right? We just live in a world where it's a collection of a lot of different talents and areas of impact and the leader is in a lot of ways more a curator of that than the sole expert, right? You shared that example and it was impactful for your team the first time you said, "I don't know what to do, you guys tell me what you need," I think being humble in that way and admitting that can be tough. Do you have any advice on learning how to do that or any other examples where it's helped you?

Caroline Häggström Marklund:

I want to make another point as well on the importance of being humble. If you want to build a culture, any culture, especially a people first culture, it's that 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 so it doesn't make sense and it absolutely doesn't feel as a people first thing that I just did or whatever. 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.

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. I think that is also important feedback and 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, why aren't you getting any feedback basically? I think that is also important and yeah, what would my advice be? Well try it and see what happens.

Sarah Nicastro:

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Caroline Häggström Marklund:

Support almost, I mean.

Sarah Nicastro:

I mean, that's a good point though. A lot of these things that are maybe different for people, it is a matter of just push yourself to try something different and see how it goes. I also like the idea about being willing to own your mistakes goes a long way in showing your authenticity, that you genuinely are after the mission that you've set forth, and again, building that trust, right?

Caroline Häggström Marklund:

Yeah.

Sarah Nicastro:

Very good. Okay. If you were to share any additional points that we haven't touched on or any closing thoughts, what would they be?

Caroline Häggström Marklund:

I would love to have a dialogue about this because I think we all have different experiences with good and bad people culture, good and bad leadership, and what have you. I think that is interesting. Happy to talk. I would say that I can give an advice, I mean if you wonder what kind of culture you are driving at the moment or impacting 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 with you? 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.

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. For me it's about ownership.

Sarah Nicastro:

Mm-hmm.

Caroline Häggström Marklund:

It is one of them. If I talk to someone and I just hear excuses and, "He did that," or, "She did that," or, "I did not get the right things," that kind of whining, it really ticks me off because for me it's about not excusing your behaviors, but owning your behaviors and ownership is a core value that I have. You can turn that around and do some self-reflection. I think that is a good start in self-leadership and then driving culture.

Sarah Nicastro:

That's good advice. It reminds me of, I interviewed on the podcast a while back, this woman Cait Donovan, who's a burnout expert, and she has a whole keynote speech recorded on the tapping into the power of resentment. Her point is when you feel that, you need to look into what's that coming from because those are the things that ultimately will lead you to become burnout. It's same idea here, what do you find frustrating and then what does that say about the values that you hold?

Caroline Häggström Marklund:

Yeah. Very good.

Sarah Nicastro:

All right. Thank you for the questions. Caroline, I believe you are going to stay with us until later this afternoon. To the questions we didn't get to, you'll be around during the morning break and during lunch, but really appreciate you coming and sharing.

Caroline Häggström Marklund:

Thank you so much.

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December 27, 2023 | 1 Mins Read

Happy Holidays

December 27, 2023 | 1 Mins Read

Happy Holidays

Sarah and one of her little elves share a holiday message.

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211 – Field Service Palm Springs

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December 20, 2023 | 2 Mins Read

Future of Field Service Top 10 of 2023

December 20, 2023 | 2 Mins Read

Future of Field Service Top 10 of 2023

Sarah shares her selections for the Top 10 Future of Field Service podcasts of 2023.

Episode 200: The Neuroscience of Leading Through Change with Dr. Elizabeth Moran

Episode 205: My Recipe for Success Using Service as a Competitive Advantage. Venkata Reddy Mukku, Vice President Worldwide Service & Support Organization at Bruker Nano Surfaces & Metrology, about the approach he finds impactful in achieving service excellence.

Episode 206: Busting the Biggest Burnout Myths with Cait Donovan, speaker, author and host of the Fried podcast.

Episode 207: How Whirlpool Creates Field Service Differentiation. Simone Silva, Senior Director of Consumer Services and Matt Ganus, Director of Home Services, both at Whirlpool join Sarah to discuss how they’ve taken a path to field service differentiation using independent service providers and how they’ve done so without sacrificing collaboration, customer experience, or service success.

Episode 217: Debunking the Myths that Impede Workplace Inclusion with Mita Mallick, who published her book, Reimagine Inclusion, this fall.

Episode 222: Breaking the Outdated Field Service Mold. Anthony Billups, North America Vice President of Sales and Market Development at Comfort Systems USA, for an open discussion on some of the historical thinking and practices that are holding field service industries back from success in today’s landscape and what needs to change in terms of a fresh approach.

Episode 226: How Can Service Leaders Nurture Empowerment? With co-authors of Once Upon a Leader, Christine Miners and Rick Lash.

Episode 231: Transformational Leadership in the AI Era with Dr. John Chrisentary, formerly of Medtronic.

Episode 232: Creating a Culture of Safety in Field Service with Franklin Maxon, VP Field Services, North America at Socomec.

Episode 241: What I’ve Learned About Leadership Through My Breast Cancer Journey with Linda Tucci, Senior Global Director, Technical Solutions Center, QuidelOrtho, for a vulnerable and inspiring conversation around how she’s navigated a breast cancer diagnosis while continuing to show up as a leader.

BONUS: Episode 243, The Takeover with Roy Dockery, VP Field Operations at Flock Safety

Event summaries:

214 – UK FoFS

215 – Paris FoFS

218 – Minneapolis FoFS

219 – Duseldorf FoFS

227 – Field Service Hilton Head

234 – Service Visionaries Top 100

235 – Stockholm FoFS

237 – Field Service Europe

240 – Field Service Connect

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December 13, 2023 | 29 Mins Read

2023 Retrospective Takeover

December 13, 2023 | 29 Mins Read

2023 Retrospective Takeover

The tables are turned in this episode as Roy Dockery, VP of Field Operations at Flock Safety, interviews Sarah about here 2023 predictions and how accurate she feels she was. The two also discuss some of the industry events they both attended and reflect on overall trends of the year.

Sarah Nicastro: Welcome to the Future of Field Service Podcast, I'm your host, kind of, Sarah Nicastro. Today the episode is going to be a little bit different, it's a takeover, some of you are probably already familiar with Roy Dockery, who is the Vice President of Field Operations at Flock Safety, as well as being a big voice in the industry. And so Roy is actually going to take the reins of the podcast today and interview me, so I'm going to hand it off.

Roy Dockery: Well, thank you Sarah for having me. And I know as one podcast host to another, sometimes we get tired of talking to ourselves or asking questions to others, so I figured we'd have some fun today. And since we're going to talk about your 2023 predictions, I interview you on some of the things and content that you've made this year, and then also we can discuss some of the things we've seen across the industry, different events, because you and I both frequent many field service in service conferences.

We'll jump right in, and I think the first thing that I want to talk about is the first prediction that you made, was that companies will selectively increase cost reduction measures, and that was across scheduling, optimization, asset management, things like customer service, remote service, knowledge management, you had a lot of bullet points in there where they were going to try to save on money. From what you've seen, even from a customer engagement perspective, but even in your road shows and things like that, did that hold true? Do you see companies really trying to push costs down?

Sarah Nicastro: Yes, I think so, but it took a bit of a different lens than the way that I framed it coming into this year. So first, I'll say I really struggle with the idea of predictions, I think none of us really know what's coming, and I also think in this space, people want this huge earth-shattering what's next when in reality we're talking about iterations of concepts, so it's tough. But I think overall, companies based on economic circumstance are certainly being more cost conscious this year and going into next year.

The way I frame that out is, the reason I said selective is because it's not to the extreme of needing to take measures that are going to negatively impact the customer experience. And I think companies are smart enough today to also focus on protecting the employee experience, but it's more so about figuring out how do we work smarter? How do we do more with what we have? How do we grow and expand without having to add costs, et cetera.

I think what is a bit different than the way I framed it is, I almost feel like the AI lens is the way that everyone talked about this topic this year. So what we're really talking about with AI is any of those categories that I bulleted out, we're talking about bringing more intelligence into each of those things in a way that allows us to work smarter. That's really what AI is doing, it's just that that is the buzzword of the year, so that's the lens everyone was looking at this through. But it is about what manual, menial, non-value add tasks can we remove from our operations to better utilize the resources we have, allow them to focus more on valuable initiatives and maintain or even improve our customer experience. So I think it was fair-ish.

Roy Dockery: Yeah, like you said, so in that vein, and like you said, the working smarter, not harder. So even on the advisory boards that I sit on, like you said, it's more of, how do we use ChatGPT, generative AI to do more work with the same number of technicians? Which is another way to frame smarter, not harder, like we need to get more work orders done, it's hard for us to onboard, it's hard for us to get new people. We've got folks retiring, so how can we get more work done with the same number of people? And then people are finding the challenges as a technician leaves, or if someone resigns, there's a lot of questions now around that backfill. So it's like how do we more effectively use what we have and then what do we do when we start losing people?

Because the question is, do we invest in technology, like you said, to eliminate the mundane, repetitive administrative task? The interesting thing is, we had all of this digital transformation that pushed a lot of non-technical work on technicians, now we have to have an AI revolution to remove all of that administrative work. So technicians can actually go back to just being technical because it's essential and there's a lot less of them, so we're trying valuing that time better. But I agree, like I said, we've heard that same thing in advisory boards and the challenge there, and like you said, it's not laying off or workforce reduction, it's like, "I need you to do 20% more work next year, but with the same number of people," so how are we going to accomplish it?

That's good, not very far off. Like you said, AI and ChatGPT came to buzzword for every event you attended in any aspect this year, even if you were dealing with education, I was at a legal event and they were talking about Gen AI. So on your second prediction, which I'm feeling some of this probably is still how much can we capitalize off the flexibility people gave us because of the pandemic? Your second prediction was, will we still see wider acceptance of remote service? Have you or your customers or people you interact with, do we see that trend going or are people starting to get back to being complacent with other people doing things for them and not being as open to remote service as we thought the industry would keep moving in that direction?

Sarah Nicastro: Mm-hmm. This is one where I think we need a little bit more definition behind what we're talking about when we think about remote service or what I was talking about. So in the vein, I was thinking of it, yes, I think we've seen more progress, but not as much as I expected and I'll give you a couple of examples. So on the podcast, Stephen Goulbourne from Mettler-Toledo came and talked about remote service, and I loved his take because what he was talking about is, in their industry specifically, the idea of remote resolution is nearly impossible. So they're not trying to accomplish that goal, what they're using remote service for is historically, they've done an on-site triage visit before they ever went to actually do any of the work. So his point is, there's technologies today that can allow us to do things remotely that we don't need to do any longer in person. We have the capability to not do those things in person.

It isn't an idea of ... the lens you're talking about when we were dealing with a pandemic, we got to a point where remote service in a lot of cases was the only way or the preferred way companies could service customers to the point of resolution. So I think there's layers to this topic of, is it remote service for information's sake from equipment to company? Is it remote service where you're using some of these capabilities to maybe have a older technician in the back office supporting younger greener technicians? Is it remote service where it is true self-service and it's done with the customer with the goal of remote resolution? I think those things are all progressing at a little bit of a different clip.

And I think this is another topic where AI blended into, and in some ways, I don't want to say overshadowed because there is overlap, like AI is one of the tools you can use to change what self-service looks like with your customers, et cetera. So it's kind of that buzzword took some of the steam away from zeroing in specifically on the remote service piece. And I do think there's still a lot of opportunity there, not only opportunity but importance for companies to really consider and clarify what the topic means for their organization. Because there's a lot of differences, and like I talked through, there's a lot of different use cases for the same set of technologies.

Roy Dockery: And I completely agree, and like you said, you've got those buckets, so you have remote triage, which is information gathering, and then you've got your remote diagnostics, which is some level of troubleshooting, and then there's remote repair. So a couple of years ago, we were all trying to get customers just to help us with triage, like just don't make me send someone there to read the alarm from the screen that I don't have remote access to. So this is the early adaption of help Lightning and Rescue lens like, take your phone and point it at the thing so I can see what's going on, and we don't have to roll a truck for that. And then like you said, during the pandemic, I think getting people who were non-technical or people who wouldn't typically assist you with diagnostics or repair did. But to your point, now a lot of remote services, how much AI can we feed to the customer to get them to do the triage, but then also try to walk them through the steps to get things done themselves?

And I think they all have progressed a little bit, and I would say, I think we did see a bigger adoption of the triage across industries, more people being willing to help you gather information than before. I come from a healthcare technology background, I used to have people tell me no to turning around and looking at an alarm directly behind them, we had to roll the truck, so I think the pandemic's helped that. But to your point, the adoption for the rest of it and where that's applicable depending on the complexity of the technology, safety concerns, customer comfort and all that stuff is moving along at a different one. But it is definitely another space where our friend, ChatGPT and Gen AI keeps getting thrown into that conversation.

Sarah Nicastro: And I think that's the real thing here, is now that these capabilities are as mature as they are, it's undoubtedly in my mind that we're going to continue to look for opportunities for why are we rolling a truck to do X when we could use this? Why are we interfacing with customers this way when we could do Y? So those questions are going to continue to be asked, I think companies need to be not falling back into, well, we don't need to worry about that because the pandemic's over and we can go back to the way it was before because then they're going to fall behind, you need to keep pressing and figuring out what it looks like for your organization.

Roy Dockery: Absolutely. Now to your third prediction, which was around my favorite topic, which is talent development and people development. So your prediction was that the talent focus would shift from new talent to nurturing talent. So I know you and I have talked about the differences between hunting and farming and building that, and we also both got to attend the Hot Topics Service Visionaries Top 100 event along with the CDO and Chief Technology Officer event in London as well.

And we shared before, we've also noticed this trend of a lot of discussion around leadership at field service events, which has been an interesting shift from before because there was a lot of technology, AI tools, processes, not a lot of focus on people and talent. So given the fact that, one, we've got people trying to recognize industry service leaders and visionaries at that level, but then also what else have you seen as a trend with organizations or industries focusing on that talent development versus just recruiting or trying to bring in new people constantly?

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, no, I think this is also my favorite area to talk about, and it might not always feel like progress is happening at the pace we want it to, but this is an area where I feel like if you reflect back on what did the conversation sound like this year versus last year, I think there's a distinct difference. And I think it stems from the idea of nurturing talent, employee engagement, employee retention, employee satisfaction, and an acknowledgement that it is imperative. We do not live in a world where talent is just going to stay put for 5, 10, 15, 20 years just because, that world doesn't exist anymore. So it's forcing companies and leaders to reframe their approach and what's important and what works and what doesn't work.

And I think if anyone isn't familiar with the event you referenced, Hot Topics, which is a content and community platform for C-suite executives that's based in London and IFS partnered to do the first ever Service Visionaries Top 100 recognition. And in those sessions, they've had this Top 100 for some of the other C-suite groups you mentioned, it's the first time they've recognized service leadership, and I think that's incredibly important, I was thrilled to be a part of it. But also, I can think of other examples, I think you were at Field Service, Palm, Springs, Christine Miner, and Rick Lash who wrote Once Upon a Leader, came and spoke about leadership story. And one of my favorite podcasts this year was with Venkata from Bruker Nano, and he talked very specifically about how he spends his time in percentage breakdown, I think it was 70, 20, 10 or whatever, 70% of his time is focused on his team, his people and why, and he talked about the payoff of that and what it all means.

And I think those conversations are invaluable because anything service organizations are trying to achieve when it comes to customer experience or growth or whatever it is, you can't do without your frontline workers. And what it took to have strong teams before is not the same as what it takes today, and so I love that there's this whole shift in focus on what leadership styles work, how do our people feel, what's important to them? How do we create a culture that people will want to be a part of? I think it's a really cool evolution to see in this industry and really needed.

Roy Dockery: And like you said, it's an imperative, I actually spoke at it at one of the field service events in September and I talked about the culture imperative. We want people to stay, we want to nurture talent, we want to diversify our organizations, but that requires the culture to change. My shirt says The Art of Leading, but people know, anyone who follows me know I talk about leadership a lot, but it's very interesting to see the shift in the priority because now you have so many generations in the workforce, even with field service right now, you've got Baby Boomers, Gen X, Millennials and Gen Z. So you've got four generations of people when you normally only used to have two roughly, a lot of people aren't retiring as early, people are coming into the industry earlier as well. So it is really imperative that people start to focus on, how do you manage that cross generational leadership? How do you have a culture that's inclusive to people who ideologically are very different?

But with regards to their work ethic, their passion around service is the same, and you know that's something that I've dealt with for years. And I say it all the time, I've never had a problem recruiting, but every company I go to, I change the way that they recruit because you have to look at a different dynamic of people, you can't just look at the people who are here, you have to look at the generations and the type of people that you need to attract to be sustainable in the future. But no, I like it, and like you said, it is been refreshing, it trickled in a little bit in 2022, seemed a little bit more prominent in 2023, and so hopefully we see it more in 2024 being in the forefront as well.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, I think another thing we need to be focusing on is the way leaders are developed in field service. So you came in and came up through the ranks and you happen to be a great leader, but there are some people who are put into leadership positions as an acknowledgement of being a strong individual contributor that really aren't good leaders naturally or haven't been given the opportunities to hone those skills.

And we know that leadership is under-invested in by organizations in general. So I think that as we acknowledge the importance of it, we also need to reflect on, are we promoting people who actually want and can do the job well with help that companies are willing to invest in? So that's the other part of nurturing, that is we think a lot about how do we bring in and then create a path for the frontline talent, but it needs to be looked at all the way through. Those are the next generation of leaders, so what are we doing to make sure that when they get those promotions, it's something that they can succeed at?

Roy Dockery: Yeah, because we focused a lot on employee training and we focused a lot on management training, but a lot of organizations don't focus on leadership training, which is somewhat different than managing the function, the people, the time sheets, the budgets. Like you said, it's how do people feel? How do people behave? How do you interact with people? How do you deal with conflict? How do you deal with personality types and ideological differences in all of those things, and it's important. And even for me, that's one of the things as well, even one of the reasons I thought about writing a book, because I'm like, none of these things seem to apply, especially when you're leading people who are older than you. Everyone talks about leading millennials, but what about when millennials have to lead baby boomers or Gen X or Gen Z? So being able to structure that is important. And so I hope there's more investment in that in 2024 and in moving forward, but that's good, but great topic there on talent.

Your other prediction was around sustainability, but for service centered sustainability strategies. So one, do we continue to see a movement for sustainability in general? Because then costs start getting tight and then some projects get set to the side, so first, you have feedback on sustainability, but then on services centered sustainability as well.

Sarah Nicastro: This is probably one of the very few topics that we cover or that I talk about where there is pretty noticeable global differences. So the US definitely lags when it comes to an interest in or willingness to prioritize sustainability, especially when you get into any amount of cost consciousness and that sort of debate. There's certainly exceptions, I know you also know Adam Gloss of McKinstry and it's a core focus for his company, it's something that's important to him and to them, but it's not an overarching tenant, I don't think to be able to say universally in the US as a focus area. In Europe, it's a lot different and it's a lot different culturally, but it's also a lot different because of government regulations that force organizations to have to prioritize it differently. So it's a conversation that is very different.

I think what's interesting to me always is thinking about some of the reasons why it has to matter if you don't want to just acknowledge it has to matter for the future of our planet, and one is, listen, quite frankly, there's a lot of ways in service, it's directly tied in with efficiency. If we're just rolling trucks all the time to go see what's wrong somewhere, it's not only a complete waste of money, but it's also not environmentally friendly. So it's sometimes tied into benefits that maybe certain organizations do care more about. The other thing is customer preference, I think more and more in certain industries, it's going to become a area where customers make purchasing decisions based on whether companies care about it or don't and can show that.

And same with investment decisions, boards are starting to pay more attention to, is this an initiative? Is it something that you're putting effort into? So I think the US is still significantly behind where Europe is. It's also different because of the geography, like we've had some conversations that are really valid of, if you take electric cars for instance, this country is gigantic and the infrastructure doesn't necessarily exist to make the argument for doing that if a service organization is operating outside of a major metropolitan area. So there's some things that way that have to come along too, but I think looking at the areas of overlap is really interesting and I think it's something that's just going to take time to come into focus more here aligned with how it does in Europe.

Roy Dockery: That's good. And we'll touch on that a little bit more, we'll talk about some of the road shows and some of these differences between the US and Europe and the UK and things of that nature. But your last prediction for 2023 was around this outcomes base, we've been hearing this for years, interesting shift for me, I went from a time and material service contract world to an almost completely outcome based, we don't sell equipment at all, we're a subscription-based startup. So for me, I almost did like 180 degree flip and landed solely in uptime device health and evidence capture in my new world. So I'm all the way at the other end of the spectrum where we're completely almost outcomes-based, which is interesting, but across the rest of the industry for some of the traditional businesses that have been trying to move in this direction to continue to see that, have some people made a lot of progress or is it like a large ship that's hard to turn quickly?

Sarah Nicastro: No, I think there's been a lot of progress made, this is one that varies a lot industry to industry, but I think the overall premise, which is customers care less about what you do and really just about how it helps them is for sure true. We live in a world of complete and utter convenience and real-time information exchange, it just makes sense for customers to expect that level of streamlined experience from companies that they're working with. I think when it comes to differentiation, caring more about how what you do benefits your customers or their businesses versus just pitching what you do, it makes sense from that perspective as well. So I think across industries, you see a lot of progress here, there's obviously ones where when you start thinking about, well, what does it take to deliver outcomes? And you get into more of the IOT and data side of things, then yes, you have industries that are more resistant to that.

You mentioned some of the struggles in healthcare, I think some of those are slower moving than others to work through to get to a point where companies are positioned to deliver outcomes. But I think the other part of this ultimately moving toward that model is, it's a mutually beneficial value proposition for both the company and the customer. Because when you start talking about going back to 0.1 and 0.2, so technologies that allow you to improve productivity or reduce costs, and then things like remote service and AI, when you try to incorporate more of those things into a traditional break fix service model, you start having customers saying, "well, what am I paying you for? You're not here." And it's like, "no, but you have the uptime or you have X." And they're like, "right, but you didn't come do anything."

And so when you start shifting it to a value-based or outcomes-based narrative, that's when you can provide an outcome the customer values, but you can also look for those ways to leverage technologies to lower cost, to serve, to improve efficiency without having to figure out how you defend the price point or the revenue side of that. So I think we'll continue to march along that path.

Roy Dockery: No, that's good. And, like you said, from the industry perspective and being able to pivot, and a lot of it just comes to the way that we sell, like a lot of these industries have got five-year contracts for machines with ten-year life expectancy. So you're talking about a decade or half of a decade to migrate people to new ways to sell the equipment. And I've heard of some companies that have that in the pipeline, but that's from a replacement-

Sarah Nicastro: It takes time.

Roy Dockery: ... Strategy as we start selling technology as a service or focusing on the outcome, people always mention the food service companies that do like coffee by the cup, it's by the [inaudible 00:29:03] versus buying the equipment and having the maintenance. You basically buy the supplies and then you're paying by the poor as far as consuming and utilizing the equipment, which is pretty cool.

And we've gone through the predictions, my other question would be, outside of sustainability and that being a big difference, especially across Europe in the US, when you do your road shows where you go around the country and you talk to leaders in different segments, what are some big takeaways that you've seen or even some big differences you've seen around trends and focuses in the US versus some of the things that they're seeing in Europe? And then also, where are some of the similarities that we're facing regardless of what continent we sit on?

Sarah Nicastro: We did six events in 2023 on the Future of Field Service Live Tour, we started in Sydney, Australia, which was really cool. We had an event in Birmingham in the UK, Paris, Minneapolis, Dusseldorf and Stockholm, so a decent variety. And I would say with the exception of the sustainability topic, there is far more in common than there is different. When pretty much all of the other, how do we apply and leverage technology, the talent challenges, they may look a little bit different because of some of the region's structure, et cetera, but overall, very similar conversations, meeting exceeding customer expectations, looking at what is the next phase of our service value proposition or our growth.

All of those things are really pretty common, and I think that's one of the things I love about the tour and this platform, is bringing people together to share. One of my favorite pieces of feedback that I get at those events is, I feel so much less alone. And it's because everyone is in their day-to-day, and you're trying to solve these challenges or figure out how to realize these opportunities. And you don't have the perspective that people across industries and across the globe are in the same trenches, sometimes you might feel like, I don't have this all figured out, but I bet everyone else does or whatever. And I really like being able to have that camaraderie and also give people some reassurance that companies are at varying stages of figuring all of the stuff out, no one has it perfect. And it's about not only sharing information with one another, but being sources of inspiration and having that collective community vibe is really helpful.

I think sustainability is probably the biggest difference, I see, you get into more regional differences with the outcomes based or servitization concept as well in terms of the readiness for the full as a service version of that. But that's a whole sort of continuum, and I think for the most part, the idea of focusing more on the overall value you're providing to a customer versus a break/fix situation is pretty consistent. So it's interesting to go to different places, and the conversations are different, but they're coming from the same foundational principles, if that makes sense.

Roy Dockery: Yeah. So it's same challenges from different perspectives just given regional differences or some of the challenges. And I'm going to ask you another question, it'll be a hot topic here are on our own. So the one thing I've noticed, I had several advisory board meetings this week, and you've been more around the world, so you can answer it for me.

I have been one of the youngest people in Field Service Advisory Board meetings for the last eight years, and I turned 41 a week and a half ago, so to me, I'm not that young any more compared to when I was in my early thirties. Are there places where you are seeing a transition in leadership where we're actually seeing younger service executive leaders, because you've been able to go all over the world, or is the industry from a top leadership perspective still gradually aging and we're not really getting that new class of leadership in, at least at that executive level with the events that you do?

Sarah Nicastro: I think at the executive level, it's still aging out, if you will. Now, when we talked about the leadership piece, you can see more and more change coming up through the ranks, if you will, but I would say if we call this part of the opportunity to bring a lot more diversity into this space, I think that's consistent as well. Even at Field Service Europe, so WBRs, Palm, Springs event in Amsterdam, I think there's probably more diversity in the US event than there is at that event. And so there's still a lot of work to be done.

And that's one of the things that I think will be exciting to see how these productions or trends or themes continue to unfold as we have new leaders with fresh perspectives and different thoughts and ideas on what works come in and be able to take really a huge set of possibilities that exist that aren't really being fully tapped because you still have a lot of leaders in place that are perfectly happy with the way it's always been, right? And just to see how things will continue to change, I think it's going to be really exciting.

Roy Dockery: No, I think that's awesome. And like you said, and I think, again, talking to a lot of other executives in the industry, it's actually those that are heading towards retirement that are pushing some of this focus. They know there's another generation that needs to come up and we need to get them in and nurture that talent before we leave because they do have a lot of expertise and a lot of knowledge to pass on. But it's like that step in the ladder wrong, because of a lack of development. I don't know if there's a lot of people in the middle that you can pull all the way to that level, and I think that's why we see a lot of investment and leadership and a lot of discussions around it. Because a lot of the core people that I've seen for years, like this year, several people were like, "these are my last conference," and that's what I'm thinking about as well and the size of their organizations.

And it's almost like everybody's focusing, and I know people who are focusing internally on building that bit. And so I'm sure you'll see some shifting around, we're going to see some executives move from one company to another company, but I think it's creating, and we used the word several times that imperative, that like, we are at the point to where, as leaders, we're transitioning, not the different companies, we're transitioning to retirement. And so it'll be interesting to see how the industry changes in the next five years because a lot of the people who have led in the industry, a lot of the voices that have been prominent, they're retiring and they're handing that over to just a different set of people who may have a different background, who may come from different departments or who just may have a different perspective in general, so I think that'll be interesting to see. And so in the next few years, it'll get very, very unique at some of these events.

Sarah Nicastro: I think it's interesting too, what you said about on the leadership piece, some of the oldest by age, but even by tenure experience, etc, leaders, have the most modern mindsets, and I love seeing that. I love seeing like, you can't assume that just because someone's X age or looks like this or has been here for this long, that they have this outdated mentality. There's some leaders that have been in place for quite a long time that are working really hard to drive a lot of this positive change, and I think that's awesome. I don't know if you saw, just last week, I shared a podcast with Linda Tucci of Ortho Clinical Diagnostics, I think it's QuidelOrtho now, but I love Linda and she came on to talk about the breast cancer journey that she is fighting right now and I love that she is very willing to be vulnerable and I have so much respect for that.

But one of the things we talked about, because we were talking about what it's taught her in how she leads, but she was saying even before that, even before the pandemic, she always had a practice in place, it didn't used to be quite as frequent, but it was really where she would sort of reflect and take stock on her own leadership style. She mentioned some resources she used to look at overall trends and things like that, but she would also ask for some feedback, she would do some self-reflection, but she would really look for ways to actually implement change to continue to make sure that she was being as impactful as she wants to be.

And I just thought, that's such a great practice that I'm sure not enough people do, do you know what I mean? For so many reasons, they don't want to self-reflect, they're too busy, etcetera. But it's like we live in this world where things are changing so frequently, so to do what it takes to be as impactful as we want to be. So I love that idea of people that have been doing it for a long time that have the opportunity to continually reinvent themselves. And just because you know things a certain way doesn't mean you have to stick with it, you can know better and do better.

Roy Dockery: Yeah, and it's funny you mentioned Linda, we attended the same event in Chicago, so I actually had dinner with Linda and her and I talked about a few of those things as well. And I think that reflection and that constant evaluation of our leadership style and the way that we lead is like ... because a lot of it is like, when do we need to transition? When do we need to change? When are we creating a block or for the people who are coming up underneath her?

And I talked about like, that's why I left my last company because I was actually the ceiling for the development of everybody else who worked for me. Because the next step was for them to take my job, and as long as I'm here, they can't do it. Which is one of the other things I talk about in my book, is that transition. So it's that always reflecting, am I having the most impact? Am I adding the most value? And as long as you're doing that, if your team is changing, if your company is changing, you will change. And you're right, there are some people who worked at companies for 20, 25 years, and I've seen them evolve in a lot of different ways, whether it's on AI or outcome or digital transformation over the last 10 years that I've been in the industry.

It's not just about the experience or the gray in the hair, it's just people who are willing to adapt new ideas, who are willing to take on new challenges, and then people who are just done and now they're ready to go transition to new challenges, just different things in life other than being in that role at a particular company, which is cool. But no, this has been great conversation, I've enjoyed interviewing you. I'll end with, do you have a question for me? If you had one question for me about 2024, what would it be?

Sarah Nicastro: I think it would be, what do you feel is the most valuable lesson you've learned this year?

Roy Dockery: I would say the most valuable lesson I've learned this year is that everyone isn't going to move at the same speed, and you have to be patient with other people's pace, so I think that's the main. I work at a startup, so some people move really, really fast, legal needs to move slower, finance needs to move a little bit slower, engineering can move quickly, and I think that it's very easy to get frustrated when it feels like we're not moving at the same speed, but that's when alignment is important. So if we're aligned and we're going in the same direction, you can go faster than me because you need to keep going in that direction. But if there's other things that I need to be doing to make sure that we're operating safely, to make sure that we're hitting requirements and things of that nature, you can go ahead of me, even though we're going in the same direction.

My current boss loves hiking, so you think about the people that go up Mount Everest for you, they've gone above you, they've secured things, you got a path that's drawn out ahead of you. But I was used to a larger company where we all moved at the same pace because we were already big, we were already established. So I think that's been the most important thing for me coming into my second year at being at a startup, is being comfortable, like those people are always going to run at 90 miles an hour, and I'm fine with that, but we're going to run at this speed and we will catch up to you because you're going to get done with that, you're going to drop it off, and then you're going to move on to the next thing in front of you and we'll be there.

But yeah, not getting frustrated or losing patience with people who move faster or slower than you. Because then on the other side, you have some people that don't move as quickly as you want them to, but you need all of that to be balanced within an organization, but the alignment is what's important, not the speed.

Sarah Nicastro: No, that's a good lesson, I struggle with patience myself.

Roy Dockery: I'm going to ask your question back to you, what is your main takeaway from 2023 outside of predictions and things that you thought, but just for you personally coming out of this year?

Sarah Nicastro: Honestly, it is really similar, and I'm not trying to steal yours, but it's interesting because in November, we had the last, not the last, we had a review of the year session in the customer. So I run three global customer groups, and we talked about this too, what's your biggest lesson learned? And that's what I shared is, I think for me, I have to temper the passion that I have with patience, and I'm not good at the patience part, but I have to focus on what I can control, and I need to also appreciate progress and not just want to race, race, it all counts, and I have to accept that you can't step over hard work, you have to just take it one step at a time. So balancing passion with patience is mine.

Roy Dockery: I like that. You and I share passions definitely, so that's awesome. Well, no, it was great, thank you for having me on the show here and being able to do your year in recap. It's been good seeing you a couple of times this year and spending some time with you in London. Sarah's a great photographer for Instagram, so she got my Tower of London photo, it was really nice.

Sarah Nicastro: Yes, you got to meet my brother.

Roy Dockery: Yeah.

Sarah Nicastro: We did spend some time together.

Roy Dockery: Touring the Tower of London learning interesting things about castles and fortresses. But no, it was awesome, it was good seeing you, thank you for even the nomination. We didn't mention it, but I was one of the people that was recognized as one of those Top 100, and so that was a great thing to have this year, it's on the shelf over there, it is in the office. But thank you for IFS and Hot Topics doing that and elevating those voices and those individuals as well on the service side of the business. So I appreciate that.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, it was very well deserved, you and the other 99, and also all of those nominated, it was a great initiative, I hope they do it again next year. It was great to spend some time with you as well, and I hope in 2024 we get to do it again. And thanks for interviewing me, it's been fun.

Roy Dockery: No problem, thank you, Sarah.

Sarah Nicastro: You can find more by visiting us at futureoffieldservice.com. The Future of Field Service podcast is published in partnership with IFS, you can learn more @ifs.com. As always, thank you for listening.

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A Service Transformation Deep Dive with Electrolux

December 6, 2023 | 24 Mins Read

A Service Transformation Deep Dive with Electrolux

In a session from the Future of Field Service Live Tour event in Stockholm, Sarah talks with Kristoffer Brun, Services & Repair Transformation Manager; Anna Mezzanotte, Service Operations Product Domain Expert; and Peter Sandkvist, Transformation Manager, Electrolux for an inside look at lessons learned and wins celebrated from its current global service transformation.

Sarah Nicastro: Okay, so next up is our service transformation deep dive with the Electrolux team. So, I'm going to let each of you introduce yourself, if you don't mind. Anna, let's start with you. Ladies first.

Anna Mezzanotte: Thanks for having me, first of all. Thanks, Sarah, for inviting. My name is Anna. I work for Electrolux for over two years now and I serve as a product domain expert in service operation. But during the project that we're going to tell soon about you, I was the glue or the translator, as I like to call myself, between the IT and business specifically for service operation domain. So, yeah, hope to tell you more today about some lesson learned, some valuable insights about the project in Denmark.

Peter Sandqvist: Yes. Hello, my name is Peter Sandqvist. I'm a transformation manager at Electrolux. So, I have a small project team that is working with digitalization, transformation, change management projects for our contact center and field service operation teams in the Nordics. And in the project we'll talk about today, I was the project manager from business side. Yes.

Sarah Nicastro: Okay, great.

Kristoffer Brun: All right. And Kristoffer. My background is actually in sales initially, so from an end user perspective using a CRM, but I moved to the other side of the CRM. Before joining this role five years ago, was working with rollouts of field service management tools. Thank you very much. And me and my team, we were sitting in an ivory tower in the global headquarters guessing how our software should be used and creating visions around it, and I will come back to that one.

Sarah Nicastro: I'm sure no one here can identify. Okay. All right. So, in this session we're going to hear each perspective on Electrolux's ongoing service transformation. So, Kristoffer, start by just giving a bit of history, context, background and we'll go from there.

Kristoffer Brun: All right. A long time ago, 2018, in a country far, far away, Belgium, we went live with a pilot CRM and FSM tool combined. And just after a few weeks, it turned out actually we saw more and more signs actually that the FSM solution didn't work properly. Fit for purpose. And honestly, if we are to look inwards as well, I don't think we created the business requirements well enough from our side. So, one part was the vendor. One part was definitely our side as well. And just a few weeks before go-live, the vendor announced that they acquired another FSM company, which they said that they would go for long-term. So, it was anyway just a few weeks before go-live. We would anyway have to switch one day. So, the Belgium business suffered quite dramatically at the time and it was decided to replace the FSM side of it.

But this 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 should be part of even selecting the vendor, selecting the tool." So, we took a completely new approach to all of that. And before we even sat down to write down the first business requirement, we actually had the first step was to invite all the potential vendors, six of them at the time, for a day each to present the future of the field service, as we called it. So, what could field service look like in Electrolux or in general in the future? Because what we wanted to avoid was to basically just write down how we are working today, leave that over to a vendor, and just have a new interface of the current processes. That was the end game. They all came. They all presented and we basically flew everyone in all countries into Stockholm.

We locked ourselves in a room for weeks, more or less. And we wrote the business requirements word by word on a big screen like this together. And was it time efficient? Definitely not. But was it a glue to have all the stakeholders aligned to do this together, even to fight over simple words or simple sentences of how we should write things? Definitely. I would say that it paid off multiple times in that sense. And we had very tough discussions also with the local stakeholders. One big discussion I remember was, for example, can we even trust an optimization engine? Can we even trust a route system doing routes for us? We manually planned our routes for forever. We cannot trust the system. Or mobile. The technicians will never go mobile. They have their laptops. Discussions like that in front of every business stakeholder. It was tough there and then, but I think we came out of there stronger, basically.

Peter Sandqvist: It tells a little bit of where we came from also.

Kristoffer Brun: Definitely, definitely. We created the requirements together. It could also serve as a vision, more or less. Because we combined also a little bit with the to-be. So, we also grouped it in ways that you can actually see where we will go in short-term, but also a little bit where we aim to go in the future with the predicted spare parts, as an example. We gave it to the vendors. We discussed back and forth, of course. And then we actually went for a couple of reference visits to go and meet the actual customers already using the software a little bit via Gemba Walk. We could interview them. We can actually see the system in place. I don't know, Peter, do you have anything to add on that one?

Peter Sandqvist: No, but first I can add on the requirement parts. I think we made it clear to us that yes, we wanted to see what the different vendors were offering and how their roadmap looked like and we draw a lot of inspiration from that, which was then included in our requirements. But we also knew that we wanted to have a vendor that we could work with, where they could inspire us continuously as well. And now coming to the customer reference meetings, I think it was very important, and we will touch upon this later in another segment, but to me, remembering that time, it's been a couple of years, but remembering that time, I think it was very important for us to see the solution live and to also talk with the people using them, asking them what is working, et cetera. Also without having the vendors standing behind their shoulder. Now, Marcus said he was standing behind there. But yeah, no, it was really great. Yes, yes, I remember it well. It was also a hectic period.

Kristoffer Brun: Yes. So, what we did in the end was basically to, actually together, also with the business, to create the evaluation criteria. So, not us centrally guessing evaluation criteria. We did them together, and every country had the same weight and we calculated the averages from there. Of course, we also involved architects or IT, even vendor management or the contractual side of it, but it was all transparent and every voice was equally heard, so to say. And we took our decision and we also focused already then, before even having started to build something, for what's in it for me. What's in it for me as an end user? What's in it for me as a technician? What's in it for me as a resource planner? So, we also try to, a little bit, to group our vision or our business requirements into already then to say, what's in it for our technicians, as an example.

Sarah Nicastro: So, essentially starting the change management project from the very beginning.

Kristoffer Brun: That's right.

Sarah Nicastro: Because you're thinking about how to personalize the value of the project to each individual function.

Kristoffer Brun: Exactly. So, what we did, we replaced the system in Belgium then finally, and then we basically moved on to Denmark, which we are here to deep dive a little bit into.

Sarah Nicastro: Okay. All right. So, Peter, get us up to speed on Denmark and then we're going to talk about some of the biggest lessons learned.

Peter Sandqvist: First I will just shortly introduce then. So, what me and Anna will talk about now and present and share some details on is a project that we basically came out from this summer, and we will try to follow the timeline also of the project. So, the goal was this summer and the project was roughly one year. And yes, to set the stage also, I think it's important to a little bit present what our Danish service organization was. So, we had a very stable service organization. We have the highest average age of technicians in Europe as well. A lot of people that has been working for a long time in the company. Everyone is experts.

It's almost like a small family company where we visited. And they're working on a 40-year-old tool, field service management tool, they have been using for 40 years. So, the IT landscape is also an old one. So, this is just to set the stage of the challenge that was ahead of us, which you can imagine, a lot of it was related to change management. And one of the first things that we did was the mobilization. So, we had to set up a team of people there in Denmark that will support to roll out the project in our Danish sales company. And this is even before the project really starts. And one thing that we decided to do there was to take someone from outside of the service organization.

So, you already know that I have people that has a lot of process knowledge. They've been working for a long time. They know everything. Yet we decided to put a person from outside of the service organization in a very important leading role. And the idea behind this is, he was a change driver, a change ambassador. To a certain degree having all that old process knowledge, that's like having heavy luggage on your back. And he did not have that. So, he could work with a free mindset and it allowed him to also move very fast. And today, this is fun, today he has an important role in our service organization, both supporting Denmark but also on a Nordic level.

Sarah Nicastro: It's good to know he survived.

Peter Sandqvist: He survived. He did. He did.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. I'm glad he is still around. Yeah, he made it through. He's still around.

Peter Sandqvist: And now he has an important role, yes, to continue to support our service organization. Yes. Also, this could be inspiration or something to think about if anyone here is in a project where you are about to set up a team. Who do you put in that project team to lead this change? Especially now when I mentioned the background of Denmark and all the change management that was needed. And so this was before the project started. Then we decided one thing. And before we even had the kickoff, we decided that we wanted to go all of us together, so me, Anna, the Danish team, also the central business team, to go down to Belgium to see each other face-to-face. Now today, post-COVID, we know that we can do these type of projects over Teams and we can do it online. And I have done another project like this completely online because it happened to be during the COVID period.

But I would like to stress the importance of actually being able to see each other face-to-face. It's something that we should not underestimate this. And let's see here. Yes. So, we went there and one very important thing here is this was the opportunity for my team then, the Danish team, to be able also to see the solution working and to talk with the people who are using it today. So, we got to talk with the technicians, with the resource planners, the parts planners, the back office team, and ask any questions we wanted. They presented to us. And this specifically built confidence in the Danish team that lasted a full year. They knew that the solution was working for them, so then it should work for us. And that I saw hands-on. That actually built confidence for the full year.

Here I have another funny story. We had a team building activity also in Belgium. And I asked my counterpart in Belgium, because the service operation manager in Denmark, he really wanted to have Belgium fries. He had heard about the Belgium fries. So, we talked to her and she said, "Okay, you have to go to this place." We went there in the afternoon. It was closed. Okay, ah, we go somewhere else. And then the next day we told her it was closed. "Okay, but go to this place." We went there in the afternoon. It was also closed. So, I called her up. I said, "What can we do?" Because now we have really hyped up the Belgium fries. So, the next day we actually had a chef that came there and we together got to do the Belgium fries. And already there, as a team building activity, we split it up in different groups. So, one person got to cut the fries, someone else... You got to fry them. We had to go out in the parking lot to fry them.

Anna Mezzanotte: 32 degrees.

Peter Sandqvist: 32 degrees in the parking lot, frying it. And another guy from the team salted them. And I had the most important role. That was to taste him.

Sarah Nicastro: Yes, of course.

Peter Sandqvist: So, that again, I think I want to stress that importance now, especially in the post-COVID period, to actually see each other face-to-face. And do not underestimate that. Anna, how was this experience for you?

Anna Mezzanotte: I absolutely agree with you, Peter. I think that visiting Belgium was useful not only for a meeting face-to-face and for boosting confidence, but also from an IT perspective because it was really the first time for our business stakeholders to get acquainted with the new solution. And also here it's, as Peter already mentioned, it was the time in which our Belgium colleagues proved to be very good ambassador for this new technology. And we all know that a positive review from a satisfied customer is definitely more convincing than just me talking about how cool these new functionalities are. And in this context of the visiting Belgium, it was time for officially kicking off the project. And I think you said it, Sarah and Caroline, you repeated once again, and I will say it one more time just to reiterate the message, I really want to emphasize the importance of storytelling.

Because we really need to make sure to explain all our business user why we're doing this change, of course, but also the consequence of not embracing this change. So, basically what's the opportunity cost at stake? And also maybe another important thing would be, for example, to explain our business colleagues not only the value of these all new software implementation that we will be doing in terms of generic company gains, like cutting costs for instance, but also take some time to explain the values of this new service transformation project in terms of tangible benefits. So, make sure that you explain to all these agents that will work with the solution what's in there for them. So, how will these new tools make their life easier and better? I don't know, for example, you can say how these new tools will reduce really the amount of time they have been doing just repetitive and boring tasks.

So, once we have finalized the kickoff and we really got the buy-in from all the people involved in the project, it was time for move forward for the next phase of the project, which is the discovery phase. And here again, we're trying to follow the timeline of the project so that we can really make you feel, hear our story. But the discovery phase, what's there? What's the meaning? So, the objective is really to understand all the users need and design of the project requirements accordingly. And of course, the outcome of this analysis is to make sure that we understand the project scope and also its limitation. So, both from the business side, so Peter's side, also from my side, the, let's say, more IT side.

And before asking Peter more about his experience on the discovery phase or if you want, Sarah, to kick in some question, I just would like to reiterate what we have been doing in Denmark the past year. What we have been doing is a kickoff, I want to say a rollout project. And with that rollout project, we mean that we have a standard blueprint solution and then we simply transitioned this solution to many different countries. And this was the case of Denmark of course, but at the same time we really need to make sure that we are in line with all the business processes, but also we are compliant with local regulation. Easy, right?

Well, it was obviously challenging and I would like to remind once again what Peter very quickly was setting up the stage and talking about the context, users in Denmark have been working with the same system for over 40 years. So, they really were able to work with it blindly. And I really want to picture it for you. So, imagine you have this back office guy sitting in Frederica in the office in Denmark, and they were able to plan the technician route for the entire week while simultaneously picking up the phones, answering some emails, and also drinking a cup of coffee. Yeah. So, now what's next? Well, we kick in and of course it was quite a service transformation project. And I'll try to speed up, but what I want to say is just to bring up one practical example of what could happen during discovery phase. So, users and our local counterparts in Denmark have been used to navigate the screen with simple keyboards commands. So, they basically didn't even know what a mouse is.

Peter Sandqvist: They knew what a mouse was but-

Anna Mezzanotte: The animal.

Peter Sandqvist: They knew what a mouse was. But you are right, it was-

Anna Mezzanotte: What I want to say is that instead, our solution was then definitely point-and-click. So, it was really mouse-based. And this shift from keyboard to mouse, that was a detail that was absolutely overlooked by our IT teams. Actually, it became a source of concern for our business. So, here I really want to give you this example to make you think that what could be some red flags that could arose from legacy system and legacy thinking. So, yeah, I think that was it from the discovery phase.

But before handing over, I would like to mention one success factor that I can really recommend. We implement what we call the plug-and-play session, which is basically some session in which we grant to all the users the access to the system so they could play with it. And these happen well before our technical team even initiated the system configuration. So, it was really a good occasion for stimulating early feedback between IT and the business counterparts. And also, yeah, so for the business to get the first hands-on experience.

Sarah Nicastro: Very good.

Peter Sandqvist: Yes. And to build on that, I think it was something great that we did because you get to see a lot of PowerPoints and you have process discussions and you might see some demo or some video, but to already start to be able to play around, it makes the training much easier later on when you have to. So, I think that was a good addition to how we did this project. You mentioned discovery where we learned about each other. So, you learned about the Danish team and we learned about the new processes. After this, IT was starting with the build and the configurations for everything that was captured in Denmark. And while that happened, we had a period called change impact assessment period in the project for the business.

What do we do there? Well, we were planning. Doing a lot of planning both on who should do what and when, but also on how we should do communication. Who should we communicate to? How should we communicate? Also in training. So, how should we do the training? Is it face-to-face? Is it one of our training tools? We tried to look at all different areas within our service organization and see what needs were needed there. It can also be that roles can change now. So, someone who was sitting there tapping and using the F buttons, now there might be something else that needs to be added or removed in that kind of role. So, this is what we did. And here that leads me to preparation and planning.

So, you need to have a Plan A and you need to have a Plan B when you do these things, and you need to plan carefully. But while doing all this planning, you also need to make sure that you are prepared for the unknown. And how do you do that? Well, you have to make sure that you are resilient and that you can also build resilience within your team. So, planning is key, yes, but there will happen things that you did not plan for and then you don't want to freak out. Then you want to have a team around you that can, you fall down, okay, we pick ourselves up again fast and we just tackle it. And one example of this, it'll make Anna start sweating. You'd probably try to forget it.

But two days before the go-live, one of our processes, we realized, or my colleagues in It realized, it will not work. So, what we have trained people in in that process, it will simply not work. We have to figure out another way to do that. And then by having everything planned accordingly and everything else running, we had space to actually deal with that. So, make sure that while doing all the planning, also spread resilience within your team so that when the unknown happens, you can deal with it. So, we did this planning, planning, planning. IT was doing the build. Do you have anything to share from the build phase?

Anna Mezzanotte: I do. I'll be quicker this time, promise. I think from one of the most challenges that we have faced during the build phase is how to strike the balance between standardization and customization. So, here it's really important to remember that we have been doing rollout projects. So, what does it mean? Again, we want to achieve the maximum amount of standardization while allowing for just some process deviation. But of course, during the course of the project, we came to a realization that our template solution could not fully address all the business requirements.

So, it was obviously a challenge. So, here my suggestion and lesson learned is striving to find the middle ground. So, of course, and here I would like to talk especially to my IT colleagues sitting in the room here, is don't just focus on the one-size-fits-all approach because it will not work, but also don't over-promise crazy customization that we all know that we are going to regret it because then we have to maintain it. So, find the middle ground and do some compromise. Up to you.

Peter Sandqvist: Up to me. Now we're getting closer to the go-live and it is time now for Anna and the IT team and the central business team to actually train my team. So, the project team to train them so that they later on can train our end users, contact center agents and technicians. And it's also time for us to do the testing. So, functionality built specifically for Denmark also needs to be tested. And we choose to call this period Train and Test. And yeah, it's really about making sure that my team has the knowledge to be able to create the material and train all the agents, back office and everything so that we can be ready. Here we have a learning to share something that we ran into, which I think you can talk a little bit more about.

Anna Mezzanotte: I do. It's what I refer to as Lost in Translation. So, we all know that the IT and business, we don't speak the same language. Not at all. And here I'm not referring to that teacher talk Swedish, our local counterpart speaks Danish and our developers talk Python or Java. No, what I mean is that we really need to make sure, do not leave any space for annoying misunderstanding. So, make sure that all the communication is crystal clear. So, for example, if your company is following the Agile methodologies, make sure that you spend some time with this business and you really explain what is a sprint planning, what is a Scrum Master, and what's actually the process of reporting back in Jira. So, yeah, don't give for granted that we can understand each other.

Peter Sandqvist: Oh, good. After that we went live and it worked. Not everything as well as we would've wanted, but we managed to repair our consumer's broken appliances at the time that we had promised them. We were lifting all of the jobs from the old tools, all the promises into the new tools, and we managed to do that. So, in that sense it was a success. When you're in these projects, and I've been in a few ones, I lost count, but you need to take some time to stop and reflect. What could we have done better?

You need to reflect on, what could I have done better? What learnings do I take with me? And when you're on this journey and you're in a small team and you work together, it can be tough sometimes. And you're working towards deadlines all the time and you have that goal in front of you. I think it is important to remember to yourself to stop once in a while, also with the team and everyone involved, and work a little bit on the storytelling to remind each other and yourself, why are we doing this? This is the greatest transformation project that Electrolux probably is doing, that we are in here. And as I said, we're replacing a 40-year-old field service management tool. That is not easy.

And in that sense, we're writing a bit of history here while doing this. So, what I'm trying to say is that you also in this need to then stop and also make sure that you have a bit of fun. And this also comes from experience, but a laugh here and there along the way, it can really be the difference between you taking a step forward or staying where you are. So, remember to have fun if you're in one of these projects. That is important. And that wraps up. We managed to talk about the full project timeline here and share some learnings.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. I think the last point is a really good one in the sense of, I spoke this morning about change leadership versus change management and the idea that we're today in a constant state of change, continual improvement, continual innovation. And I think without pausing to celebrate the wins and have some fun and allow that to energize you for the next phase, that's where that change fatigue comes in. You need to make sure that you acknowledge the hard work that's happened, you celebrate the successes you've had, and then regroup and push forward.

Peter Sandqvist: And also, if you don't do that, if you don't do that, then you can also end up feeling that you haven't done anything or accomplished anything, while you actually have. So, yes.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. All right. Excellent. Well, I say job well done to you both. And Kristoffer, what happens next? What does the future hold?

Kristoffer Brun: A lot of things. No, I don't have one answer on that one. There are so many things to look at and to investigate and to analyze that I don't really know where to start. But one could. I heard a word called AI somewhere, and apparently that's going to be a big thing. And just imagine how that would change our entire business model, actually, I think. So, we have a chatbot today. You wouldn't really need that because you would go to your AI assistant, so to say. So, we're actually taking that contact away from Electrolux, moving into the AI assistant. Whether that is in the phone or sitting on our shoulders, I don't know.

And the same thing really with contact center. Why even call a contact center agent when you can ask your AI assistant to book directly or troubleshoot and, if necessary, book a technician. And what does that mean? And also as a next step for our service technicians, likely I would say that they go out to less jobs since the consumer would solve more by their own, because it's cheaper, either by solving it without spares or even sending them a spare that the AI assistants also can explain how they would even mount it.

But I also expect our service technicians to do more than just repairing white goods, actually. If you think about it, the app is an extension now of our refrigerator. So, they need to be able to also repair the app if needed. And also, of course, if the WiFi at home is not working properly, he will also get a question around that. It's usually he, by the way, as of now at least.

Why not have the flexibility in our routes and in our schedules and in also our technician's knowledge, of course with the help of their AI assistant, so to say, to repair other things, and just today the refrigerator, while you're anyway in someone else's home. So, I can also see us broadening that in the future. When this will come. I have no idea. Though I think we will redefine what an Electrolux refrigerator technician will be doing in just five years with all of this. I'm quite sure.

Peter Sandqvist: And what is the tool of tomorrow? Are you maybe having it right now? So, the main tool today, it's the app. What is it tomorrow?

Kristoffer Brun: Exactly. And we're moving away. And who would even answer a question? So, say that the AI assistant is advising wrongly about our appliances. We don't even own that conversation and the technician will likely, once he arrives, likely get questions around that as well, right?

Anna Mezzanotte: Mm-hmm.

Kristoffer Brun: So, I think we're expanding the scope of a technician dramatically going forward.

Sarah Nicastro: I think going back to what I said this morning about the chat I had over lunch at the event a few weeks ago, the questions you're asking yourself about what does the future hold are the same questions a lot of companies are asking themselves right now, which is, "Okay, what does this mean to our business? Yes, what does the future hold, but what are the next steps as well?"

And I think one of the points here is that whatever those steps look like, it would've been impossible to accomplish on a 40-year-old service management system. So, I think that the phase you all are in is the phase a lot of folks are in, which is modernizing your foundational technologies in a way that allows you to be ready to continually innovate from that point forward and figure that out as you go along and as things become clear. Go ahead.

Peter Sandqvist: That's on the technology side, but now we also have... Now the people is also more ready for it.

Sarah Nicastro: Yes.

Peter Sandqvist: So, now the people is more ready for the changes and fast changes. So, we have the foundation now, for sure.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. Yeah. And you've built trust, going through that process. You mentioned, Kristoffer, at the beginning, the failed pilot and the learning you had, taking that as an opportunity to do things completely differently, to involve the right people from the beginning, to build that trust with them. You mentioned Denmark, the region with the highest average age of technician, the most experienced, with a 40-year-old system. That's daunting. And they have made it through and they're adjusting, and that means that you did a great job of helping them through that transition. But going through all of that together builds trust for the next layer of change. So, yeah, very good.

Peter Sandqvist: Do you have something more I think-

Anna Mezzanotte: Do I?

Peter Sandqvist: ... to... can share? No, but when we talk about technology and people.

Anna Mezzanotte: If I have to pick up one of the most important lesson learned, I would say that, and again, I'm referring a lot to my IT colleagues here, remember that it's, at the end, it's not an IT project. It's a people project. So, whenever, especially just before go-live, when everybody turns crazy and tense, we all rushes to make sure that we are setting up the landscape to make sure that it's ready for production. But of course, most of the time technology is rushing ahead of people-

Peter Sandqvist: Really.

Anna Mezzanotte: ... and we don't really realize that our user community is lagging behind. So, yeah, always just pause for a little.

Sarah Nicastro: Absolutely.

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