Sarah shares a synopsis of the topics discussed at the Future of Field Service Live Tour 2023 stop in Minneapolis on June 15th.

Sarah Nicastro: Welcome to the Future of Field Service podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Nicastro. I cannot promise you the highest quality podcast that you have ever watched or listened to. I am recording this at the United Club in Chicago and it is busy and loud, and I'm probably informing some people around me about field service and educating them on things they might not be aware of, but we're just going to make it work.

So I am on my way home from Minneapolis. Just a couple of hours ago, we wrapped the Future of Field Service Live Tour, Minneapolis edition, and wanted to do a recap of today's event. By the time you are hearing this or listening to this, we will actually be doing the Dusseldorf event the day that this will come out. And that is our last event for the spring/summer months. We have our Stockholm event in the fall.

So today's event in Minneapolis was another great event. I know I say that every time, but for me, one of the things I love about doing these events is every location has a unique lineup of speakers, which means even though the format is similar from city to city, the content is very different and that, obviously, as the person that's doing the interviews, keeps me interested and engaged and really just makes every event different and exciting. And I've said this before, but being able to bring people together to learn from one another, and it came up again at today's event, just to feel that folks are not alone in the challenges that they face is a great thing to be able to do. So grateful for that.

So today's speakers, we were joined by Dr. Elizabeth Moran, who spoke about the neuroscience of change management. And Dr. Moran was on the podcast. I'm going to see if I can find the episode. I should have looked it up before I started recording, but I didn't. But she was on the podcast talking about these five elements of neuroscience that factor into change leadership, and she was able to join us at the event, which was amazing. And obviously, change management, change leadership, is something that comes up in so many conversations that I have.

And so we talked about the five elements that she shared on the podcast, but she was able to also host two of our breakout sessions where the attendees got to talk to her a bit more and do some almost live coaching, really, talked through some different challenges and examples that they're having where she could really work with them on those specific things, give some suggestions, some feedback. So it was great that she was able to come, and it was really cool to be able to see some of those concepts that we had talked about on the podcast come to life in a way that was related to the people that were there and the things that they are up against.

So if you haven't listened to the podcast that she was on, that is episode 200, so certainly check that out and have a listen. I think the concepts that she covers are in her book, Forward, and that's a content that is well worth the time to have a look at. And so Elizabeth was our first speaker of the day, talking about that neuroscience of change management topic and then doing some breakout sessions with people and getting into some of the specifics. So that was great.

Our second speaker of the day was Jorge Mejia of Tetra Pak, and Jorge joined to... It was a great follow-up to Elizabeth's session because Jorge was talking about some of the lessons learned in digital transformation. So Tetra Pak is in the midst of a really significant, large, global service transformation that has some different phases, different aspects, that the company has various goals in place for leading up to 2030. And part of that is the implementation of IFS, so field service management planning and scheduling optimization, to create a global standard for service operations and to bring about a lot of positive change.

However, it's a significant change in the way Tetra Pak is asking its field teams to work and just service operations overall, really. And so Jorge spoke about this idea that when they kicked off the project initially, everyone looked at it, as I think people commonly do with digital transformation, as an IT project. And Jorge gave a lot of specifics around his really big learning, which is that it really shouldn't be approached as an IT project, but rather a people project with an IT component, so essentially picking up on a lot of the themes that came up in Elizabeth's first session around change and how people react to doing things differently and really sharing the experience that Tetra Pak had in taking this solution-centric approach and then realizing once they got going that they really needed to prioritize the people aspect and put people first.

Sorry, I know I am distracted, but as I mentioned, I'm at the United Club, and they have a Robbot bus machine that's going around to collect or move dirty dishes. I've just never seen that before, so apologies for my distraction.

Okay, so Jorge shared that and that was wonderful and really brought almost like a case study to some of the points that Elizabeth mentioned in the first session. And Jorge gave a lot of detail on how they recognized that the mentality they had about the project needed to shift and what they did to go back and put a lot more people centricity around the project that they have underway and how in a very significantly positive way that has changed the trajectory of their transformation. So that was great.

Next up, we had Robb Origer from Sleep Number, and Robb, before he joined Sleep Number, I think about three, three and a half years ago, he was at Dish for quite a few years, so he has really quite a well-rounded set of experiences in service. And what he spoke about is how the contrast between those two businesses in the sense of the maturity of their field service organizations and just how he is taking a lot of the experiences he had at Dish and things that he was able to do there and looking at the commonalities of how a company like Sleep Number might benefit from, not doing the same things because they're very different businesses, but bringing his knowledge in to really look at increasing differentiation through service, which traditionally, Sleep Number has been really focused on the differentiation they create through the retail experience, so how service can augment that. And we talked a bit about what that looks like in terms of focusing on customer experience, but also making sure that you're balancing that with the realities of the business and operational efficiency and all of those things. So great conversation, as well.

Next, we had Matt Ganus with Whirlpool, so also talking about service differentiation. Whirlpool, though, does that through exclusively independent service providers, so they do not have their own on staff field technicians. They work exclusively with independent service providers. And we had a really good conversation about how a lot of companies that have some hesitation about that should realize that that model does not need to mean, or shouldn't mean, hands off. And so Matt spoke about how they put time, money, effort, resource, thinking, into creating really mutually beneficial partnerships where the service providers are bringing regional expertise and customer loyalty and relationships to the table.

And Whirlpool is creating some really good training and enablement and soft-skills training and product expertise and resources and governance and things like that so that they can work together to achieve success. And Whirlpool has had a really good track record of doing that with this exclusively independent model without sacrificing the customer experience, the brand perception, any of those things. So Whirlpool was on the podcast speaking a bit about this topic previously. That's episode 207 if you want to go have a listen to that. But Matt also hosted some breakout sessions and answered a lot of questions people had about how to create those positive working relationships with independent providers and gave a lot of detail around what they're doing there. So that was great, as well.

And last but not least, we had Gyner Ozgul, who is the President and COO of Smart Care Equipment Solutions, talking about the tenants of scalable service success. So Gyner spoke at last year's U.S. Future of Field Service event about their service transformation and implementation of, again, IFS as their foundational system. Now that they have that underway and that transformation is, I don't want to say behind them because there's always a transformation, but they have that work done, he talked about how they're building upon that foundation. He talked about his focus on company culture and talent development and what that looks like in today's landscape. And finally, he talked a bit about how after the tumultuous times of the pandemic, now that Smart Care has reached a level of stability, what he does as a leader to really not get complacent and to continue to focus on continuous improvement, not only with their technology, but with their people and teams and culture, et cetera. So another great conversation.

We had some breakout discussions throughout the day, as well, and there was some really good points shared there related to everything from how do we make our frontline workers feel more respected and appreciated and acknowledged, to how do we make them feel more connected to their colleagues and their peers for those that are really quite isolated by the nature of not coming into an office, et cetera. We talked about how the frontline role could change over the next few years and what that might mean with the incorporation of more remote service, more automation, more artificial intelligence, and things like that. We also talked about recruiting, of course, and retention and those types of topics, as well. So it was a great day of discussions and connection and community, which is something you know is near and dear to me. So really appreciated the five amazing speakers that we had, as well as everyone that joined us. So thank you.

And if you missed it, go back and check out Elizabeth on podcast 200 and Whirlpool on podcast 207. Also keep an eye out here on the Future of Field Service platform as we release some of the sessions from our Live Tour events, and hopefully, you can join us for an event in the future.

So thank you for listening. You can learn more at futureoffieldservice.com. Be sure to sign up for the Future of Field Service Insider so you can stay up to date on all of the latest content. 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.