joanna.darby@ifs.com, Author at Future of Field Service

By Sarah Nicastro, Creator, Future of Field Service

Many would argue that virtual reality (VR) is one of those technologies that has generated more discussion than actual adoption over the past decade, at least outside of gaming applications. However, its close cousins, augment reality (AR) and mixed reality (MR), have a steadily increased presence in field service and other industrial spaces. And we may be reaching a tipping point.

IDC, as part of its FutureScape: Worldwide Future of Operations 2023 Predictions, noted that: “By 2027, the use of extended reality technology, including AR/VR/MR tools, will increase by 40%, creating a new breed of digital worker and reducing operator/field worker errors by 30%.”

I have also seen growth estimates indicating a CAGR of as much as 30.6% for extended reality (XR) and up to 43.8% globally for AR. The potential expansion of AR will not only change the way frontline field service technicians work but I believe will eventually create new roles and new types of service experiences that will fundamentally evolve service delivery in a variety of ways.

When we talk about AR in field service, traditionally what that has looked like is a technician in the field, armed with a tablet or maybe a VR headset, using the technology to overlay schematics or other data over an image of an actual piece of equipment. In some cases, remote technicians are aided by more senior technicians or other SMEs off-site, using the technology to provide a better view of the problem and allow for the benefits of “hands on” guidance without the need for that senior worker to travel on site. Other companies have seen success in using AR and MR for training purposes, speeding the time to value of new workers. And yet others have begun using the technology directly with customers to provide remote service and speed time to resolution.

These examples of the use of AR/MR and sometimes VR offer some valuable potential benefits:

You can accelerate and improve training for new hires
You can better leverage the knowledge of senior technicians by allowing them to assist multiple less-experienced technicians from a central location
You can enable remote service/support applications by allowing technicians to help customers troubleshoot or diagnose problems
Technicians in the field will have access to better diagnostic and repair information (without the hassle of paper manuals), which can make them more effective and productive
Remote service can improve response times and reduce the cost of truck rolls
And more

We’ve Only Just Begun

What is perhaps most compelling here is that these benefits target some of the most acute problems facing the service industry – the difficulty in hiring and training new technicians, the looming retirement of large numbers of older technicians, rising costs, and the increased complexity of the equipment being serviced.

Focusing on the staffing and efficiency benefits misses part of the story, though, and does not address some of the potential for virtual technology to change service in other ways.

That's because there are other trends outside of service that are also pushing adoption of VR/AR/XR across different industries. As more firms adopt digital twin technology on the design and manufacturing side, for example, it will be easier to provide access to these virtual twins of equipment to service organizations. Potentially, that could provide a shared view of assets for both PLM and SLM solutions leveraging everything from CAD files to real-time equipment performance data.

Why is that important? There are already manufacturers leveraging that type of VR technology for everything from individual pieces of equipment to entire factories. At some point in the future, technicians could evaluate a virtual twin of a specific machine located hundreds or thousands of miles away, and then diagnose, recalibrate and potentially even (in some cases) repair the machine in an entirely virtual setting.

More immediate scenarios would enable customers and technicians to use AR as a link to enable better remote diagnostics and service as part of a remote-first strategy that can improve response times, fix rates, and technician efficiency.

While that will result in less on-site service and technical expertise, there will need to be a restructuring within service organizations to ensure that customers are getting effective remote service, that they can escalate to an on-site visit when necessary, and that the service organization can establish good customer relationships as they transition from a traditional break/fix to a more trusted advisor role.

In an environment where most companies are having trouble hiring enough technicians, wasting a truck roll when the problem could have been solved remotely by a technician or even by the customer themselves is no longer an acceptable cost of doing business. The real value of AR/VR in service is not the ability to peer into a machine from afar (although that is important), but in how the technology can help service organizations provide the right type of service as quickly as possible.

When I spoke with Tony Black, President of Service at Husky Injection Molding Systems, last summer, he talked about the role of AR and artificial intelligence in helping create better informed technicians that can work in smarter ways. It has also allowed the company to create new roles and opportunities for technicians within the company to enable remote service without losing the human touch needed to provide a good customer experience. Technicians play a critical role, even if they aren't going to the customer site. “The type of techs and the number of super techs you need, the mix is going to change, but they will always be needed,” Tony said. “And again, what we’re doing is we’re creating more informed technicians.”

I heard much the same when I spoke to Munters about how their remote services strategy changed before and after the height of the COVID-19 pandemic – their use of the technology was initially for business continuity, but has evolved into a more strategic play in allowing the company to focus on outcomes-based service. “When you want to reduce downtime, you cannot permit yourself to send a technician who goes on site, has to travel for two hours, does a diagnosis, comes back, orders a part, goes for a second time to fix it. You don’t have that luxury anymore. Remote Assistance can help reduce downtime, because that technician that did one visit during the day, using remote technology can maybe serve 20 customers that day,” says Roel Rentmeesters,

VP of Digital Transformation at Munters.

Husky and Munters are just two examples that illustrate how remote service is increasingly an important part of staying competitive and profitable – and how AR/MR/VR technologies are going to be increasingly important enablers as organizations make that transition.

Sarah introduces her husband, Eric, about whom she often receives questions.

Sarah Nicastro: Welcome to the Future of Field Service Podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Nicastro. Today is a very special and exciting episode because I am introducing you all to Mr. Future of Field Service. In other words, my husband, Eric. Hello Mr. Future of Field Service. Welcome to the podcast.

Eric Nicastro: Thank you for having me. This is new for us. I like it.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, it's interesting because we're actually across the hall from one another, but we don't have the proper equipment to record side-by-side. So we're doing it through Zoom, like the rest of them. So let's be transparent and say that the idea for this came early this morning when I woke up to an email of a guest that had to cancel last minute, and I thought, I don't have a good backup. Who could I have on? I thought, what about Eric? That would be great. And in retrospect, I feel like we should have done this a long time ago because I get so many questions about you when I travel and talk to different people. So I'm excited to let everyone get to know you a bit.

Eric Nicastro: I'm excited to be here.

Sarah Nicastro: Tell everybody a bit about yourself.

Eric Nicastro: So, we've been married for almost 10 years now. Been together for I think, 12, something like, yeah. Yeah, 12. I am an IT analyst with Erie Insurance, which is an insurance agency here, based here in Erie, Pennsylvania. But I believe we're in 13 different states in the US. But my job as an IT analyst is to write business requirements for the digital experience team for different products that we build and different services that we build. So I do have some experience in the tech space. I spent 10.5 years in marketing and communications before being an IT analyst. I felt it was time for a change, coming to the end of that, and this was something that kind of fell into my life. I've always done work with websites and digital analytics and digital marketing. So the IT analyst role with this company really kind of aligned very, very well. And I've enjoyed it. I've been there since June of 2022 and it's been a fun process.

Sarah Nicastro: You wanted to let your inner nerd out a little bit more?

Eric Nicastro: Oh yeah. Trust me, I get to geek out over a lot of technical stuff and it's a lot of fun because I'm starting to learn a little bit more about the data analyst space and data science. So this is kind of like, I'm like, okay, I like this stuff. I like to use Excel unlike some people.

Sarah Nicastro: We're not talking about that on this podcast. Okay. So tell everyone about your t-shirt. It's another love of yours.

Eric Nicastro: So, this says the Civic Arena. This was the previous home of the Pittsburgh Penguins down in Pittsburgh, PA. And I grew up a big diehard Penguins fan and diehard Steelers fan. And so Pacific Arena is long gone now, but it always holds a special place because I watched so many games there growing up as a little kid and into my teens. And when they built a new arena across the street, they had to tear the old one down. So this is a t-shirt that I wear in remembrance of that building because it was a special place.

Sarah Nicastro: Yes. He loves hockey.

Eric Nicastro: Love hockey.

Sarah Nicastro: Loves tech things, and also is a photographer and videographer, and has actually shot some photos and videos that a lot of you have probably seen on Future of Field Service.

Eric Nicastro: Yes, I have.

Sarah Nicastro: So, as you mentioned, this year will be 10 years that we've been married and a whole lot has changed in the last decade.

Eric Nicastro: Oh yeah.

Sarah Nicastro: For those of you that don't know, Eric and I have two sons, Evan, who's seven, and Ellis who's six. They're 16 months apart. When they were born and very young, I was in my former role with Field Technologies. Eric was in his former role and both of those employers were far less flexible than the ones we have now, which was super challenging. But we've always found a way to make it work.

Eric Nicastro: We've always made it work.

Sarah Nicastro: It's teamwork.

Eric Nicastro: Yeah. That's the way we work, we just work together on it. I mean, yeah, there were some moments that were stressful. I mean, you can't look over that. It's going to happen with any time when you have a spouse traveling and there's two kids, especially when they're really little. Now that they're a little older, I don't want to say they're self-sufficient but they can do a lot more stuff on their own now and they're a little easier to manage. It still can be tough at times, but yeah, back then, yeah, I mean, I'll be honest. Yeah, it was tough. But we worked as a team and we made sure going into it to when either ... Because I used to travel for my old job and now I don't travel anymore. My job is a home office position and I have no need to go to any of our branches because I work in IT. I don't work in the insurance sales part of it.

So I used to travel and you used to travel. I used to travel a lot, but even back then when we were traveling, we just made sure that we communicated with each other what was going on, what was happening. And FaceTime is a wonderful tool now that we have our ability to stay in touch and still be able to communicate, not just over a phone or a text, but actually see each other. And that was a big thing. And it helped the kids out a lot too, because they got to see mom and dad while we were traveling, and they always liked to see a tour of the hotel room, and the view outside the window, even if it looked into a parking lot most of the time. But it did help a lot. And just communication and planning well ahead is something that I think really helped us out.

Sarah Nicastro: When I was in Paris for the live tour last year, I had the opportunity because of the time difference. It was evening there, the boys were just getting out of school and I had the opportunity to FaceTime them from the Eiffel Tower, which was really cool for them to see that and have that experience remotely. I remember, thinking about teamwork, I remember when we were expecting Evan and we were at a gathering at your parents' house, and Eric's aunt said, "Well, so you're quitting your job" to me. And I said, "No."

"Well, you're not going to travel anymore are you?" And I said, "Well, yeah, eventually." And she said, "Well, what are you going to do with the baby?" And Eric said, "Hello."

Eric Nicastro: I'm here.

Sarah Nicastro: I'm going to take care of it. Yeah, and I mean, funny enough, it's years and years later, but I still get a lot of similar questions. So one thing people ask me a lot is, how does your husband feel about you traveling so much? So tell them.

Eric Nicastro: Honestly, I mean, I'm proud of you for what you've done and for what you're doing. I mean, this is a tough role to be able to balance being a mother and a wife and having a position at a company like this. And it's very tough to balance and I'm very proud of you for how you're doing it and you love what you do and it shows through all your work and everything, the way you talk to people. You truly love what you do and I want you to keep doing that. There's no reason to stop doing that. There's two of us. We'll make it work. I mean, we always do, and that's the most important part is you make it work and I'm happy to support you. And so you rise up the ranks and go across stages with 1,000 people in the audience.

I mean, it makes me feel like ... I like to brag about it a lot because everybody at my office, when I'm in the office, they're always asking, "What's your wife doing now? Where is she this time? Where is she this time?" And I get to say all these great locations. Yeah, I mean, I'll be honest, I'm a little jealous because I'd like to go to some of these European spots too, but I'm very proud of what you've done and what you've built because a lot of this is at your hands, the work that you put into it and the results, they speak for themselves. So I'm proud of you, babe.

Sarah Nicastro: Thank you. He knows I don't take compliments well, but I appreciate it. And he is not just saying this because he is on the podcast. When I was in London last year for the live tour, I had asked him to print some note cards for me and he snuck one in with a note that said, "I'm really proud of you." And he does little things like that all the time to support me in addition to the major things that you do to support me as well. Which leads me into another question that people often ask, which is, who's taking care of your kids?

Eric Nicastro: They're on their own now.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. Now I will say again, for those of you that haven't heard this story before, our seven-year-old son has type one diabetes. He was diagnosed when he was three, which obviously adds a significant layer of complexity, but he also has had a private duty nurse with him since three months after he was diagnosed, who has become like a part of our family. So she is around and she does help significantly, and she is a big reason that I feel comfortable traveling the way I do because he has someone with him at school all of the time when Eric is not personally with him, making sure that he's safe. So that's huge for me in being able to do what I do when I'm away and Eric is working. And your parents come up every so often, but not that frequently. So it is almost entirely you. So how do you do it?

Eric Nicastro: I mean, Sandy, she's been a huge help. She's allowed you to keep traveling the way you do. And honestly, for both of us to have a career because if it weren't for her, I'm sure one of us would have to stay home or we'd have to find a way to make it work. And the stress of trying to do that I think would be incredibly great. And Sandy has really just been that, she's kind of been that angel, that saving grace that's been there with us for so long. She's not just Evan's nurse, she's a member of our family. I mean, she'll come to the house a little early in the morning to help get the boys ready when it's just me, or she'll stay a little bit later when I have to work a little bit later. I have an appointment late in the day that I can't get home right at five o'clock, she's here with them.

And she's somebody that has been with us through so much in the past few years that it's weird to imagine what life would be like without her because she's been more than just a nurse and a caregiver. She's been a part of this family and we love her for it, and we're eternally grateful, trust me.

Sarah Nicastro: But all of that said, I mean, she does go home in the evening.

Eric Nicastro: She does.

Sarah Nicastro: You are on your own and we don't have a live-in nanny.

Eric Nicastro: No, we don't.

Sarah Nicastro: We don't do anything like that. So it is very much Eric, dad, taking care of the kids when I'm away.

Eric Nicastro: I mean, it's fun. We have a good time. We play.

Sarah Nicastro: Mostly.

Eric Nicastro: Mostly. Yeah. I mean, there are some moments where trying to get two boys to get their baths and get ready for bed can be rather challenging most of the time. But I mean, we do it and we have a good time. I mean there are times where we get to just sit there and play Legos for 20 minutes, 30 minutes or an hour after dinner, before baths. And that is a very special time for me. I mean, that's fun for me to do that with them. And yes, we do eat out maybe a little more than we should, but it's special time that I look at, like okay, this is a special moment, so we'll get a pizza or something like that and have that for dinner instead of trying to make something here just because I know these boys, they love their pizza just like me.

Sarah Nicastro: All three. Yep. Yeah. And we do FaceTime. We try to FaceTime every day when one of us is away and I'm very hands-on when I'm home. I also was sharing recently with someone in 2022 because I did travel a lot, I also tried to take a good amount of time off. So luckily, like I said, having flexibility, we're able to make sure that I'm not thus far. I mean, knock on wood, we've been able to make sure that I'm not missing anything super significant like birthdays or kindergarten graduation. And I've tried as much as I can to be home when the boys are on break from school so that I can take a little extra time off to really spend dedicated to them. So I think we have struck a good balance. It isn't always seamless, so I don't want people to hear this and think it's perfect or effortless.

I think it takes a whole lot of work and you deserve a lot of credit. I always struggle when I'm traveling and someone says, "How does your husband feel about this? Or how does he do it?" Because women are asked that question and men are not. I don't hear anyone go up to a man at a conference and say, "How are you away from your kids so much? Or how does your wife handle it? How does she feel about you being gone?" You don't hear that. And so on one hand, when you think about equality in the workplace and getting rid of some of those biases, I don't want those questions to continue to be the norm. But at the same time, the only way we change stereotypes is by living that change. And I think in a lot of ways, that's what we are doing. And it is largely because you have the view you do about what marriage looks like, what a partnership looks like, what fatherhood looks like, and you do deserve credit for that.

Because until those stereotypes aren't stereotypes anymore, then we need to point out the work that goes into changing them. So that being said, we had a situation this weekend that made me reflect and think, boy, maybe we're going too far in the other direction. I was painting a banner for a celebration we're having this weekend, and the boys were both sitting at the table painting with me. And our youngest son said, "Wow, mommy, I just feel so bad for daddy." And I said, "Why?"

"He just does everything." And I said, "He does?"

"Yeah."

And I'm like, "Well, what do you think mommy does?"

"Well, I mean, you cuddle us, but he makes you coffee every morning" Which you do. And I am glad that he recognizes how much you are contributing. At the same time, there's a lot that goes on behind the scenes.

Eric Nicastro: You do lot more than you get credit for. You really do.

Sarah Nicastro: It's good to know that they are acknowledging the effort you put in and they appreciate you and I certainly appreciate you as well.

Eric Nicastro: Well, thank you, babe.

Sarah Nicastro: Thank you for all your support. And without you, I would not be able to serve the Future of Field Service community in the way that I have. So this is sort of the man behind the scenes that keeps everything going so…

Eric Nicastro: I mean, I'm happy to support you.

Sarah Nicastro: And you've all had the chance to meet him.

Eric Nicastro: Yeah, I'm happy to be here and support you and like I said, a lot of times I'm proud of you, what you do and for what you've built.

Sarah Nicastro: I appreciate it. And we're trying really hard to get Eric on a trip this year. So stay tuned. Hopefully you'll all see some selfies of us somewhere really fun and we'll make it happen. But I hope you all have enjoyed getting to meet Eric. He means a lot to all of us, so we wanted to share a little bit of him with you. So thank you, babe, for coming on and meeting everyone.

Eric Nicastro: Thank you for having me. I love you.

Sarah Nicastro: I love you too. All right, you can all find more by visiting us at futureoffieldservice.com. I want to make sure you know that we recently launched the Future of Field Service INSIDER, which is a great way for you to not only stay up to date on the latest content that we are publishing, but also receive exclusive content that you won't find anywhere else and exclusive invitations to community events. We have also recently announced the 2023 Live Tour schedule. The first event is in Sydney, Australia, March 9th. So you can find all of the information to subscribe to the Insider or to join us on the live tour by visiting us at futureoffieldservice.com. As always, The Future of Field Service Podcast is published in partnership with IFS. You can learn more at ifs.com. Thanks for listening.

By Sarah Nicastro, Creator, Future of Field Service

Air travel has gotten more frustrating every year, and 2022 was already on track to be one of the worst on record in terms of flight cancellations when a winter storm downed thousands of flights just before Christmas. Then as the weather cleared, Southwest Airlines continued canceling flights because of a failure in its scheduling system, leaving thousands more travelers stranded. Shortly after that, a damaged database file in a Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) system led to even more flights being grounded across the U.S.

Poor weather aside, the issues at the FAA and Southwest point to a bigger problem – technology has become a foundational element of every business, but far too many companies take a major gamble by relying on outdated, obsolete, and seemingly fragile systems to manage their operations.

You do not have to look far for similar examples in other industries. There was the clunky software that led to a half-billion-dollar mistake at Citigroup, and the rats nest of HR software mucking up how Amazon manages employee leave. A Ponemon Institute study estimates that nearly 60% of cyberattacks could have been prevented by installing available software patches. Companies large and small are not doing a very good job of keeping their IT infrastructure up to date, and in a business environment where the pace of innovation, new customer demands, and the need for greater flexibility are constantly increasing, that is simply unsustainable.

Service organizations – even those that were early adopters of key technologies – should take a lesson from these failures. Technology investment is not a one-and-done proposition; software and hardware infrastructure need to evolve right along with your business needs and the general IT environment. Like a garden, or a marriage, or your children – whatever metaphor you care to deploy – technology investments need tending to.

Sometimes, of course, a crisis can be the catalyst that shakes an organization out of its IT languor and prompts action. IDC published its annual Future of Digital Innovation predictions back in November, and the very first one was, “By 2024, the top 5 companies in each sector will be those that used technology to innovate their way out of a global crisis such as recession or supply chain disruption.”

A technology investment by itself is no panacea, though. Back in 2002, department store chain Kmart filed for bankruptcy, in part because of a botched supply chain management system deployment. In an effort to regain ground against Walmart, the company attempted a rapid rip-and-replace approach to its IT platforms. Nothing worked the way it was supposed to, and Kmart entered a decades-long downward spiral.

The Power of Proactiveness

A reactive approach to aging technology is always going to be more disruptive and costly than addressing the problem before a failure. What should service leaders take from all of this? The first step is to acknowledge if your reality is that critical technology investments or updates have been put off and then work to remedy that as quickly as possible.

Yes, that can be easier said than done. There are a lot of reasons that important upgrades are skipped – budgets may be tight, and your IT staff may be overloaded. The thought of training employees on a new system may seem daunting. There may be institutional roadblocks to change. A previous deployment may have not gone as well as you wanted. Or the old systems may be working just fine, trapping you in the warm embrace of complacency.

The problem is that many of these systems were designed for maximum efficiency and low costs, but without much in the way of resilience. And to be fair, the “if it's not broke, don’t fix it” attitude many companies had about their aging technology was enabled by a long period of (relative) peace, economic growth, and low interest rates. Unexpected disruptions (disease, war, unpredictable weather) can rapidly expose the faulty wiring underpinning these systems.

If your organization is coasting along on technology that hasn't been meaningfully revisited for five years or more, you may be setting yourself up for a costly business disruption. And it isn’t only about investing in new technology, but also making sure that existing solutions are properly maintained and upgraded. That does not simply mean applying regular security patches or version upgrades, but also evaluating these systems on a regular basis in the context of your business. Can your technology solutions keep up your current rate of growth? Can they handle an increase in business volume or a larger number of employees? Is there redundancy built into the system in the event of a crash or a cyber attack? How much support does the vendor provide (and does the vendor even still exist)? Are your hardware and software upgrades staying in sync? Do your solutions equally support your customers and your technicians?

The key is to ask those questions early and often, before a crisis occurs. Hindsight may be very clear, but it is also expensive (Southwest took an $800 million hit to its quarterly earnings in the aftermath of the holiday season). At many organizations, it takes an existential threat before leadership will even consider making a critical technology change. In field service – an industry where agility and continuous evolution are increasingly table stakes for competitiveness – no one can afford to wait that long.

Rudy Goedhart, Head of Digital Transformation at Spencer Technologies, talks with Sarah about the complexities that can derail organizations from seeing their digital visions realized.

Sarah Nicastro: Welcome to the Future of Field Service Podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Nicastro. Today, we're going to be talking about five common issues that sabotage digital transformation success. I'm excited to be joined today by Rudy Goedhart, who heads digital transformation for Spencer Technologies. Rudy, welcome back to the Future of Field Service Podcast.

Rudy Goedhart: Thank you for having me again.

Sarah Nicastro: Yes. So, Rudy was a guest on episode 18 of the podcast. So, we've come a long way, my friend. Here we are back, better than ever. Rudy has a new role compared to what he did in episode 18, which is related to digital transformation, the topic for today. If you're not familiar, Spencer Technologies, Rudy, you can correct me if I'm wrong, is responsible for installing infrastructure, and managing infrastructure in retail environments. So, across different sectors of retail, everything technology related in a store, your teams would go in, put in place, set up, if a store moves, they go, and move all of that technology over for them, et cetera. So, your customers are retail organizations.

Rudy Goedhart: Correct.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. Okay, good. All right. So, you're responsible for managing technology for your customers. And obviously to do that well, you have to have a good handle on how you're using technology, yourselves. So, Rudy, and I have had numerous, countless conversations about service transformation, digital transformation, all of those types of things. And I think the five issues we're going to talk about today are issues that not only has Rudy had to encounter, and overcome in his role heading digital transformation, but they are ones that I think almost all of you that are listening would agree that you have encountered as well. So, these are things that very commonly get in the way of digital transformation success. I've recited statistics before, I don't have them in front of me, but I know IDC for instance, there's some humongous percentage of digital transformation initiatives fail, and there's these common reasons why. And so today we're going to talk about some of those. So, up first we're going to talk about legacy thinking. So Rudy, what are your thoughts on how legacy thinking can get in the way of digital transformation success?

Rudy Goedhart: Yeah, so that's a good one, Sarah. The legacy thinking we've struggled with quite a bit both within our own organization as well as with others that we've partnered with. So, what we find, and whenever you talk about change management transformation, the very common things that come up very frequently are simple statements such as, "This is how we've always done it, this is how we did it before. Why do we need to change?" I've got a giant pile of cheese right next to my house. Why do I need to go find more cheese? Who moved my cheese reference there. But so legacy thinking is a big problem. Change is very important. Transformation's very important for an organization to stay relevant, and to become more relevant to grow the business. And one of the biggest challenges is communicating that across all of the stakeholders, making sure that everybody understands why we're changing, not just what we're doing, but why we're doing it.

And I'm pretty sure in the past, I've referenced it before, if you tell somebody to press a button, they're going to try to do a best effort to press that button anytime that you tell them to. But they're not going to keep it up. They're not going to stick with it simply because they don't understand the reason why. So legacy thinking has been quite the challenge, and it falls almost in the second category that you haven't initiated yet. But the alignment part, the organization does need to be aligned for change in order to get that legacy thinking problem to go away as well. If everybody knows where we're going, why we're going there, what we're looking for, what we're looking to become, you can get people to be part of that transformation culture that ultimately we're trying to get to. But it's nonetheless a challenge.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. I think this is such a emotional, psychological response, right? I mean, it's a very human thing of "No, no, no, I would rather stay in my comfort zone." Well no, this is working. Like we're doing fine. The company's doing fine, so why should we go mess that all up to do something different? There's this idea that if it ain't broke, don't fix it. And I think the way this presents itself in different businesses is super interesting, because when you have issues with legacy thinking among the frontline, you're really talking about change management. It's a leader's role to communicate the reason for the change to get them bought into the change. But what can be really, really challenging for organizations is when the legacy thinking sits at the very top of the business, because that prohibits a lot of forward motion.

If the people making decisions are the ones that are risk averse, that are complacent, that don't want to rock the boat, then it makes it really hard for anyone in the ranks to really have enough initiative to push that forward. So, I think people get there one way or another, but it's, I think, very frustrating for employees when there's kind of some outdated mentalities in top leadership. Because when you have anyone who is driven, or innovative, or creative, it really squanders that. So, yeah, I don't know what your thoughts are on that.

Rudy Goedhart: No, I think you're dead on that it comes top down. So, anything change definitely goes top down. So, last time we talked, I was just responsible for business intelligence, so it was really data analytical driven, and I said my pieces on that. Since then, rolling into digital transformation, which, so a little bit backstory there. So, we started in systems development, then went to business intelligence, then went to digital transformation. So, in the digital transformation world, I've gotten much more involvement with the people portion where systems development is super systems focused. I don't want to say it's easy, because nobody will say it's easy, but all you're responsible for is delivering the solution that people are asking for, and you deliver it, your portion is almost done with that. Business intelligence, you're responsible to making sense of all the data, looking at it, finding the problems.

But again, in the transformation world, it's the people that played the very biggest role because not only are you responsible for getting the technology to do what it needs to do to grow the business, and to make the people more efficient, and just overall increase the customer, and employee experience, you've got to roll that out, and sell it as well. So, I've taken much more of a sales position there, and I have encountered situations where seemingly everybody's on board, everybody's part of this change champion list, but then internally it goes something a like, "Hey, we got to change this system. It's not going to work, but let's give it our best effort anyways." So, even if everybody on the surface is on board, the message that gets relayed outside of the very controlled meetings is super important. So you don't just need the public, you need the actual buy-in.

You need to make sure people understand what they're doing, that they're excited about it. Legacy thinking is a fear of change. And you know mentioned it change is hard, and there's so many articles on it. Change is pain, change registers to the human brain as pain. You've got this valley of despair area in change management. There's so many references. Change is hard, change is difficult, change is pain, but change is exciting, too. And that's really something that I like to relate to people. Look, for whatever reason, we're doing things today, but if we can do this, here's what you get out of it. Here's what we can do with it. You start listing all these people, you start getting the people excited about the change, but that needs to come top down. And that is so important to get [inaudible 00:09:02] on board.

Sarah Nicastro: And I think, as someone leading digital transformation, bringing that enthusiasm to the table is a really important part of the role. But moving on to the next topic, so is alignment. I was saying when we were chatting, your role is a lot like herding cats, because there's all of the functions of the business. They have different opinions, different objectives, different needs for the technology, different visions of where they want to go. And somehow you have to figure out how to get everyone on the same page, and to take all of those silo functional visions within Spencer, and make them a Spencer vision, one vision, and then prioritize how that all happens. So, it sounds pretty easy. And how's that going?

Rudy Goedhart: Oh, man. So, alignment is absolutely the very biggest struggle that I've faced for probably the better part of a decade right now. And it's something that I'm not super excited about to talk about, because there's been some real struggles, and some real pains in this. So having sat in several areas of the organization in Spencer, we've always had a lot of things to do. Being in technology, providing organization where we support multi-site corporations such as recently onboarded Lego, super proud, and super excited for that.

Sarah Nicastro: My kids would love that.

Rudy Goedhart: I love it. I can't lie about that. So, someday I'll go to the headquarters, and that's kind of on my bucket list now. But anyways, so we are onboarding these technology companies. We're always moving. We cannot stand still. We cannot be stagnant in what we offer, or how we do because ultimately we're tying into all of our vendors' software systems. And with that comes the need for us to have a system that is super strong, and then be on top of that. So, the alignment to make sure that technology is important, that we have the right technology in place, that we have the right people in place, the right priorities has become very important. What we faced before is that all of these priorities, all of these needs got mangled where each officer in the organization had, for example, their priority one, two, three, four, five. To me, that translates as five priority ones, five priority twos, five priority threes, and all of the small asks that came on top of it.

As a result, we were not as effective as I wanted to be. And it really wasn't until we launched an operational excellence initiative within the organization, which we called Project Phoenix, because rise from the ashes kind of story, not that Spencer was in ashes, but we're really proud about this. We're really proud about rising. And the Phoenix is now proudly presented within our office on our templates, and sometimes an email signatures. It's a gorgeous image, and the messages just as well. We are aligned now. We went through this operational excellence initiative, and we started from a very customer-centric point of view. We had all of the functional leaders, and stakeholders of the organization in one room, and we asked one simple question per workflow.

We mapped out the whole organization's workflow that had to do with service delivery. We asked, "What do you think our customers want from us?" So, everybody put post-it notes on the board stating, "Well, here's what I believe during this step of our process, here's what the customers want from us, what they would like to receive, what would make them happy, happier." And then we went over all of these post-its by Workflow, and we said, "Okay, what needs to change within our organization to get to that point?" So, we've identified what do we think our customers want from us. Now, we're at this point, how do we get there? So, now we've got... It's hard not to swear for me, but now we've got a whole lot of sticky notes on the wall, and a whole lot of topics, and a whole lot of solutions. So, then we said, okay, "Everybody gets five points. Put them where you feel that change is best implemented within the organization."

So, we marked the right items, the ones that we believe are most impactful to our customers. And of those, we now separate them into sprints from an agile implementation strategy, let's mark out which ones we want. And there were some very clear winners. So, we can all agree that the company now agrees on what's most important to improve our service delivery, client delivery, to the clients. And with that comes that alignment. The whole company agrees, we need to work on, let's say reverse logistics. There's a pain point, because it gets complicated. And next time somebody comes to my office, and says, "Rudy, I really need to change this." My question becomes, "Okay, how does that fall into the alignment? How does that fall into the item that we deem most important for the organization to fix?" Which gives me sufficient fuel to really push back on initiatives that may help a couple people here and there.

But it's still hard, right? Alignment, stays hard. I'm very happy to announce that Spencer Technologies is aligned on where it feels that the change needs to happen to best the organization, and the customer experience with a focus on that. There's still the day to day, and that's where, personally, I struggle because it's hard to say no when you know something takes maybe an hour out of my day, somebody says, "Look, Rudy, this takes me eight hours every day. I know I can fix it in one." It's really hard to say no to that. But sticking to that alignment, making sure that you use your own resources, including your own time right to stick with that alignment is absolutely crucial.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, I think that's such good advice. And if I'm not mistaken, prior to you taking on the digital transformation role in Spencer, that wasn't a role before. It was handled by committee, or within other functions, but it wasn't a dedicated role in the organization. Is that accurate?

Rudy Goedhart: Yeah, it was a wild west. Quite frankly, it wasn't even that well controlled. It was literally the greasy wheel. The squeaky wheel gets the grease. Yeah, it was hard.

Sarah Nicastro: And that's the point I wanted to make is going back to the IDC research that I didn't even appropriately quote early on though, but the number one barrier to digital transformation success is silos within the organization. And that's exactly what we're talking about here. And I think it's why companies who have not put a specific function for digital transformation, or innovation, or however you want to word it in place, are really struggling because it's function battling function. It's silo battle, battling silo. It's squeaky wheel gets the grease. There isn't someone responsible for bringing that view together. And the second thing I wanted to comment on that is so, so important that you said, and kudos to you guys for getting this right, is the way you prioritized was based on customer desires, experience, and value, and that is the way it should be done.

So, you're absolutely right, it gives you that framework to go back to of we made these decisions together based on what has the biggest best impact for our customers. So, here's what we're sticking to. Not every company takes that outside in objective when they're looking at how to prioritize those different needs, wants, wishlist, vision, et cetera. So, I think that's really good advice as well.

Rudy Goedhart: Yeah. And it comes with a little tale too, because arguably customer experience is important, but I can, in all honesty say I've never had a good customer experience with an employee that wasn't happy. If somebody's miserable, grumpy, disgruntled, bitter, that's not going to give you the customer experience that you're looking for no matter what the situation is. So, employee experience plays into that, but that's why it's a tale, and not a segue completely. As an employee, everybody wants to do the right thing. I've learned that over a long time. Nobody wants to fail, nobody wants to do a bad job. So, if they know that they have the tools to deliver the best customer experience, that tend to play into their happiness as well.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, absolutely. So, the third area we're going to talk about is technology debt. And I know that compared to many organizations, Spencer is in a really good place as far as this goes. You have some scenarios where organizations have invested in a technology that just really is not serving them, but they struggle with when do you admit defeat, and start over, and just eat that cost knowing that it's not serving you. And that is really hard for sure, but luckily you're not in that position. But there is this other idea of even when you have a core system that's working really, really well for you, digital is ever changing, so you always have to be looking for ways to continually improve, ways to evolve your platform with the needs of the business, and the value that you need to provide. So, can you talk a little bit about how you handle that?

Rudy Goedhart: Yeah, and it's an interesting topic, and it's so logical, so simple, at the same time, it's so not easy. So, I consider the software, and especially when you're talking about an ERP, about the system of record to come, the software that runs your organization, or the packages that run your organization, consider that a foundation. If you have cracks in your foundation, are you going to build the rest of the house, or are you going to fix that first? And frankly, if you're a foundation, didn't have the right consistency to put it in construction terms, you stop, you break it out, and you start over. Technology is no different. It sucks to take the loss. And we've certainly been there in the past, and I've seen it with some of the organizations that we acquired before. They've tried for years to implement the solution and it didn't stick, it didn't grab it, didn't quite get to the right place.

And they push, and they push, and it really caused disgruntlement amongst the employees because it didn't do what it needed to do, yet they held onto it. Technology, I mean the same similarities exist across all aspects. Whether we're building something, whether we're talking about employees, sometimes, you do the best you can, and you do what's right, but if something isn't working, something isn't working, and not to make that human centric, because that could be negative, but you do need the right software. For Spencer, that has been a struggle, and probably will continue to be a topic of conversation, but not a struggle at the time.

IFS, as an example is funny in that we chose it when it was recently acquired by IFS when it was just metrics, but it was such a strong product. So, in the last six years, when we see you leading the Gartner charts for service solutions, we cheer, right? I've mentioned it before, we actually sell that to our clients. It's part of our deck to our clients because we not only want to be very proud of the solutions that we have, we also want our customers to believe that the infrastructure that we deliver our business with is stable, stays up with that. Now, on the service side, we don't have that problem of course, but financially we did struggle there. As Spencer has growing to become a global service provider, we were on a finance application, which I shall not name, but it looks like a visual basics application built in the nineties.

We've all meddled with it. And it couldn't do multi-currency, you can't have more than six characters in your place, there's all of these limitations to stop us, and we could invest a lot of money, we could try to get it right, get it to the latest version, but frankly we needed a better solution. So, we started out with an RFP for a better finance system, and we got a glimpse of modern technologies between IFS cloud, and some other organizations with finance solutions. And it actually blew us away. I let our accounts receivable, accounts payable, and our financial accounting analysts see the package, and they're so excited, because they're looking at the system, they go, "Oh, my gosh, I don't have to look up taxes every state's individual website anymore, every week? What?" Right? Stuff like that. So, you get the right technology and to really help grow your company, but if something doesn't work for you, cut your losses, move on. Identify that it can, or cannot meet the bill.

And that's okay. And you know, have talked about this before, I don't mind taking a step back. Failure is often perceived as a really bad thing. Failure's okay. It's okay to start over. We all do it in our daily lives left, and right. It doesn't always work the first time, and that's okay. Sucks that you have to present it to a board of directors, and you go, "Hey, yeah, that project that costed us a lot of money, it really isn't going where it needs to go", but it means lying to yourself, and lying to your investors, and your stakeholders, because you lose the buy-in back to that whole, making sure that the people are positive about things. Being true to yourself, being true to the people about the ability to succeed with the technology that you're picking, or have currently implemented in your organization is very important to that.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, it's unrealistic to think you're always going to get it right, but are you learning from those missteps I think is the most important thing. I think the other point I just wanted to close on as far as technology debt goes is the other thing I see companies do that's really unfortunate is they invest in a platform that may be working really well, but it goes back to that natural tendency to complacency. They invest, it's solving the need they have, it's working well, but there may be all of these other things they can do with that platform that they just don't take the time to learn, or explore, or incorporate, which is another factor of this idea of continual improvement. And if you're leading digital transformation, making sure that you're getting the most out of all of your technology investments, and you're leveraging them to their potential.

So, you mentioned earlier the employee experience and I think that's really important as well. And I know that you understand the importance of change management, but when we were chatting about this interview, we were talking about the fact that even when you acknowledge how important change management is, and you have the best laid plans, there are a lot of variables that will change. And sometimes all it takes is one change in variable to throw a company completely off course on its change management strategy, and then things kind of unravel. So, how have you handled change, keeping your eye on the prize as far as focusing on the employee experience, making sure you're bringing employees along on the journey?

Rudy Goedhart: Yeah. And that's as possibly the hardest question you're going to ask me today. Because people are people and nobody's the same. We're all one of a kind, in one way or another, we're all one of a kind. And how we perceive change, and how we get to the goal is very much part of that one of a kind thing. So, the hardest thing, so I'll start a little bit with that in what makes change management fail. Again, I've had too much experience with that, but probably not enough at the same time, because to your point earlier, from your failures, that's where you learn, and that's something that is that mindset when you fail, you can frown about it, and you can be unhappy about it, and that's okay, but take something away from it. Take something away, take a look at why you fail. Do that root cause analysis, find out what happens, and do better.

Do better is not always perceived as a positive statement, but nonetheless. So, some of the things that we've faced internally is lack of direction, very much to the alignment portion, lack of direction's a big deal. Too many critical needs. If everything is a high priority, frankly nothing's a high priority, and that's a hard message to relay because if everybody says that their priority is the highest, then nothing is. Can't all have the same priority. Lack of resources. If you're going to pursue change management transformation of your organization, make sure you have the right resources in place to do that. I alluded to that in a little cartoony fire pit video that I made not too long ago. If I am trying to build a fire, and I'm trying to keep that going, but I got to rush between different campfires all the time, then ultimately one will burn out because I'm either using up the sticks that I needed to keep it going, or I'm not paying attention to it.

You cannot be in three places at once, but you could hire three people to tend to three fires at the same time. But resources come back to the right number of resources, both from an employee point of view as well as from a monetary point of view, technology point of view, everywhere. Impatience. If somebody wants a type of change that simply, and they're pushing a deadline on you that is too aggressive, which I would like to reference. I've heard people purposely put an aggressive deadline on something with the explanation if I set the deadline too far forward, then you're more motivated to work really hard on it and sure, hopefully meet the actual deadline that could be met. Even though the expectation was never the original deadline. That's demotivating. If you know you're going to fail from the start, where's the drive to get there?

If you set a realistic deadline, you're actually more likely to get people on board, because everybody wants to be successful. But yeah, realistic deadlines, making sure that people understand change is not instant. One of my previous leaders once told me, right now doesn't exist. You can get it right, or you can get it now, but right now is not a thing. I'm teaching my kids that, too. At age three that's hard. But wrong conditions, even if you have all the resources, and all of the right intentions in place, sometimes the conditions aren't good. If I try to change something large in my organization when I'm in the middle of peak season, it's not going to happen. People don't have the right time for it. They don't have the right mindset for change at that time. They're too busy running the company. Change in leadership comes back to that change in vision, change in direction.

When leadership changes, sometimes we find that the old plan either doesn't get the right buy-in anymore, or the sponsorship support stops, and executive sponsors a heck of a lot more than a name in a field there. There's a lot more to that. Poor transitions. If you do change, and you don't transition right into the new thing, or you don't stick with it, that's a problem. And that's something I've actually learned the hard way in change management. Once you get people on board, everybody's happy, everybody wants to change, but then once you deliver it, you walk away, the chance of it actually being a successful change does not depend on your deployment success. Deploying change is relatively easy. Making sure that it sticks is really the hardest thing.

Making sure that people stick with it, they understand why they're doing it, making sure that it doesn't get lost in the daily shuffle and ultimately it undoes the change, but people change management and people, all of those things, and then so, so, so many more. It is by far the hardest topic, but I think that communication is key. Getting the right people motivated, getting them on board, keeping communication straights so that you don't get people wondering where you are on the status of things. Making sure you stick with us both throughout the development as well as post deployments, provide the right people, the right tools, and that may roll into our next topic, but you give people the right tools to be successful with the change processes.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, no, that makes sense. And I agree. It is the most complex of all of the challenges for sure. All right, so the fifth, and final one we're going to talk about today is companies that struggle to turn data into intelligence. So, everyone is on this digital journey, recognizes the importance of data, puts tools in place to gather data, gather data, gather data, gather data, and then sometimes organizations are just left saying, "Uh oh, now what?" Right? Now what do we do with all of this? And so this lends itself to what our first podcast discussion in episode 18 was all about, really, was this leveraging this powerful resource that is data. But for the sake of today's conversation, I guess, when you think about the ability to leverage data, internally, to help make intelligent decisions drive business performance, and then the ability to leverage data externally with your customers as a source of value, what are your thoughts on where companies struggle to really take the data, and convert it into intelligence? And how have you done that?

Rudy Goedhart: Those are two interesting questions. Yes. So, data is powerful, and especially in the earlier conversation that we had three years, or so ago, I've made a couple statements that I've since then regret making. But in general, data is very powerful. Data can protect you, and data can be weaponized at the same time. And sometimes it turns into this data war where you get all these reports being thrown back, and forth. It's this way, no, it's this way, no. Here's what it is. So, data is very important to get right. But since then, one of the things that is most important I think is the actionability of your reports, but not just the fact that a report has to be actionable, because I've also seen that term heavily weaponized. Again, "Rudy, your report's not actionable." Okay, well what do I do to make it actionable?

Well, I don't know, but it's not actionable the way it is. Okay, well what are you trying to do? And that really comes back to what are you trying to accomplish, or what are you using the data for? Whether we're talking internally, or to our customers, when you build a report, what function does it serve? If a report is a report to look at, or dashboard, if I have power BI dashboard that is nice to look at, and it always shows green, or red, or yellow, but nobody is using that to drive any type of actions, then why are we looking at it? If it doesn't have people looking at it and making decisions, then why are we looking at it? Sometimes data is simply for decision making. If I'm talking about profitability forecasting reports, there may not be direct actions, but indirectly there of course are, because my forecast report shows that I am growing the business much faster than I anticipated. If I'm expecting, I don't know, 15 million worth of work in March, then I should staff up for that. So, it becomes actionable.

I think that actually is one of the biggest things to our customers. And here's the statement that I used to regret. I'll start actually customer facing, and I'll talk more. With customer facing, I used to state, "Take control of the narrative. Create standard reports, canned reports, provide them to the customer." And the example I used back then is you don't ask your partner, what do you want for dinner when you go out? Because the answer will be, I don't know, what do you want? You come back into this whole war of where do we go to eat, ultimately. Whereas if I ask the partner, let's go to Olive Garden, what do you want from their menu? You're going to get a straight answer, or a direction in which the answer can be given such as, "Hey, but that has a Longhorn steak", and I forgot the name of the whole place, but a Longhorn Steakhouse next door, pick me up something there, because I know you're already in their parking lot.

So, it's set to control of the narrative. But the thing that I regret is you do want to listen to your customers. Having a standard set of reports is very nice, but listening to your customers need is important, too, because ultimately being selected as a vendor for them, they have an intention for that too. They have expectations, and you want to make sure that your standard reports meet that expectation, or you enhance your standard reports by listening to them. So, what are the problems they're trying to solve? How could we help them? We have the experience of supporting tons, and tons of vendors, and corporations in the field. We kind of know what they want, but there are intricacies to each organization, and listening to them trying to find out how we can help them is big. One of the examples is a very simple asset management survey. So, data being used properly. When we go to your store, we're going to service any technology that you ask us to service, but we weren't always necessary the ones to install it.

But whilst we're there, we may as well take a quick inventory, take a look, send some pictures, and record what assets you have in your store because now you know, a simple survey after, and it's very common. It's certainly not Spencer unique there, but having that data collection capability for the clients, and then being able to report back, "Hey, here's all the devices in your store", from a very selfish point of view, could then roll into more work for us, because, "Oh, they didn't know they still had those old registers there, would we upgrade them for them?" Right. Of course, we will. But yeah, intelligence in general, I mean, it's kind of in there. Intelligence isn't intelligence if you can't do anything with it, those are just useless facts, not intelligence, and useless facts are fun, but they're certainly not always useful, and unless you're trying to break the ice, but we don't have break the ice kind of meetings with our customers that often.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, it makes me honestly think of the process you spoke about when we talked about alignment, and how you took all of the different stakeholders, and had them prioritize based on impact to customers. It's similar in the sense of what are the objectives you're trying to drive, whether those are internal objectives, or external in terms of customer objectives that you can provide value around, and what data do you need to work toward those goals that you can measure, and then derive those actions from? So, in a lot of ways, it's almost like working backwards from what's the end goal? If you, as a business, want to grow X percent, improve productivity, Y percent, whatever it is, what sources of data do you have that are giving you insight on how you're performing that are related to that objective? And then what actions can you derive from there?

For a customer, if they want to know X, Y, and Z, then that's where you start, and you provide those insights, and you look for ways to your point to take the intelligence you have as a business that could be helpful to them and to you, and then put it into a format that makes sense to both parties. Yeah, I mean know it's one of your great loves data, but it's just an area I think a lot of companies really struggle to get a handle on in a way that is as bolted down as it needs to be.

Rudy Goedhart: Right. And as complicated as it gets, it's also not that complicated, because you're telling a story. I mean storytelling is it's another common buzzword these days, but buzzword haven't... Same with actionability, and business intelligence. They're all good buzzwords, but at the same time, there's a lot of power behind them when used properly. And that storytelling data is storytelling all day long. And when you're having a report that instead of a story, it's more like a phone book than make sure that that report is only used when people need to find a phone number for something, don't have it displayed on a big dashboard in your building because there's no point to it, there's no actionability to it. It's a tool for assistance, and that's what really strikes the difference between actionable reporting, and just tools. Intelligence tool.

I do have a decent example, recently, where the data intelligence, the really plays into your processes as well, and the meaning of it. So in really onboarding a lot of help desk organizations lately, the two terms that come up a lot are first call fix, and time to resolution, right? Because they're not the same, but often are considered the same. So with that comes a whole lot of explanation because if I'm a help desk agent, and I'm answering a call, but I was unable to resolve the issue, because the resolution doesn't reside in our organization, and let's say I need to ticket to Granite Telecommunications to get a new phone number activated, the first call fix applies because yes, we did do everything we needed to. There's nothing else for us to do, and we're closing out our request. At the same time, the time to resolution at that point wouldn't quite be accurate for me to say, that's the ticket time, because I did not right actually resolve the issue.

I just did everything that I needed to do, and hung up so that... We're working with our help desk leadership right now. Let's define time to resolution because it cannot be different for every client, because then how do agents know how to transact within the system. And then what's your purpose of it? Are you trying to figure out how long our team spent on each ticket, Spencer's responsibility? Or are you trying to measure how long the company, the customer of ours, is in which way affected by the problem? Those are two complete different timeframes. So, define what you're trying to solve. Once you define what you're trying to solve, the business intelligence portion will come with it. And sometimes you find that you have to update a process, update your technology to make sure that you can capture what you need to. But I mean, there's tools galore these days.

You can as much as measure every mouse click, and keystroke on your employees' laptop if you chose to do that. Until measuring performance, making sure that you measure every time that they're actively looking at a ticket. So, the technology these days really supports a lot of intelligence. Arguably too much.

Sarah Nicastro: That's what I was thinking.

Rudy Goedhart: So, yeah, keep it simple. Make sure that your goals align with the data that you're displaying, and make sure that if you have actionable dashboards, that action is actually taken on it. Because if you're looking at the same report every week just to show that you're still yellow, it needs to come with action items.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, that makes sense. All right. Very good points, Rudy. Thank you for sharing your experiences, and your knowledge with us. I greatly appreciate it.

Rudy Goedhart: Thank you for having me. It's an honor to be here two times.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, I look forward to the third. We'll see how things progress, and yes, but I appreciate it. I appreciate you. So thank you for being with me today.

Rudy Goedhart: Thank you.

Sarah Nicastro: If you would like to listen to Rudy's first episode, episode 18, you can find that, and much, much more by visiting us at futureoffieldservice.com. You can also find us on LinkedIn. The Future of Field Service Podcast is published in partnership with IFS. You can learn more@IFS.com. As always, thank you for listening.

By Sarah Nicastro, Creator, Future of Field Service

Change management is a huge challenge when it comes to business transformation initiatives, and one that can easily be glossed over by managers who are caught up in agenda setting, technology purchasing, financing, and the general logistics of these projects. To be successful, though, service leaders need to leverage their interpersonal relationship skills to ensure that every team member understands, supports, and contributes to these efforts. Change is disruptive, sometimes painful, and leaders need to display a degree of empathy, understanding, and openness, along with creativity and drive.

On this week’s podcast, I talk with Adam Gloss, VP and GM of Service at McKinstry, a facilities management company based in the Pacific Northwest. When you listen to our interview, one thing that you will immediately notice is Adam's enthusiasm for service innovation, for problem solving, and for the potential for business transformation in service, and what that can mean for customers and service organizations.

The shift from cost center to profit center has changed service delivery approaches, customer expectations, and expanded the role of technology up and down the service chain. The pace of this change is invigorating for some, but can be exhausting for others.

Adam’s enthusiasm is one of the reasons I wanted to talk to him about service transformation, and the role leaders play not just in initiating change, but also shepherding their team through the process, particularly since not every team member is going to be equally as happy about these projects.

Gloss says that managing perceptions around change is an important part of leading team members through it, helping them move past identifying a problem to seeing the potential impact in the solution. "And that's the exciting part to me, is seeing that impact that you're having on a client or customer on a segment of the market, on your own team members or employees, on the world around you,” he says. “Being able to wake up one day and look at something and go, ‘Wow, I helped do that.’ That's really exciting and engaging."

As facilities owners are faced with some steep belt tightening in the wake of the pandemic, changes in building usage, and economic turmoil, McKinstry has been focused on changing the mindset of customers and employees alike as it shifts to an outcomes/solutions-based service model. Both the company and its customers must adapt to a new reality in facilities management that will affect the sales process, procurement, service delivery, technology, contracting, and billing.

“If I'm really going to help a customer, I need to understand their problems,” Adam says. “But you take that a step further. If I'm really going to help them solve that problem, I can't look at old metrics or KPIs or ways of procuring and say, ‘Okay, this is how we're going to do it.’ I need to align my solution to that problem and I need my KPIs or my measurements to align to theirs.”

This can be difficult for an organization that is used to delivering service a certain way. Leaders not only have to be cheerleaders for these new concepts, but also have to acknowledge the frustration people experience as these changes occur, or they aren’t going to feel included or invested in the process. But you ultimately have to push past focusing on the problem and focus on the customer outcome you are trying to achieve, rather than your own internal discomfort. That changes the energy around the whole process, but it requires a more sympathetic approach to leadership.

“As a leader, you need to balance confidence and vulnerability,” Adam says. “I can talk to my people about something being hard and challenging and acknowledge the reality of it, but I still have to be incredibly positive about the outcome we're working towards.”

That balance is also critical because there are going to be people who will take longer to embrace change, and few who are completely resistant to it. It's too easy for leadership to get wrapped up in the excitement around change, to focus on logistics, and to try and push the entire organization across the finish line as quickly as possible to reach those outcomes.

That approach can be overwhelming for team members that may need to move at a slower pace or that need some convincing about the value of what you are doing. Adam says it's important to know when to dial it back a bit, actively listen to what team members are telling you, and empathize with their experiences – educate, inform, and give people an opportunity to feel like they had real input.

"So, there's a way I communicate with my leadership team. There's a way that we communicate down to managers. There's a way we communicate down to the frontline. And the messaging, it will change," he says. "Now for me, I can sometimes be frustrated that change doesn't happen fast enough or things were more challenging than I think that they should have been, or I didn't quite get the outcome or result that I wanted. And I have to again remind myself it's not about me. It's about us. It's about getting there together and it's about the outcome."

In other words, an effective service leader in this situation will focus on setting the right tone rather than setting a fast pace. You also have to celebrate small, incremental victories along the way to acknowledge the progress the team has made during what can be a very lengthy journey.

Listen to the full podcast to hear more about how Adam has harnessed both his enthusiasm and his vulnerability to help lead McKinstry through the changes and challenges during the past several years and to harness the potential he sees on the horizon.

Adam Gloss, VP and GM of Service at McKinstry, joins Sarah to discuss how he pushes beyond some of today’s biggest challenges to see and capture the opportunity – and how he motivates his teams to do the same.

Sarah Nicastro: Welcome to the Future of Field Service podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Nicastro. Today we're going to be talking about how in so much of service transformation, perception is reality. I'm excited to be joined today by Adam Gloss, who is the VP and GM for services at McKinstry. Adam, welcome to the Future of Field Service podcast.

Adam Gloss: Thank you, Sarah. Nice to be here.

Sarah Nicastro: Yes, thank you for being here. All right. Adam and I had the pleasure of meeting last fall, and when we connected to chat about doing a podcast together, I was really, really taken with your passion and excitement for not only what you do, but the potential that exists in services as a whole. I probably was taken with that because I am also very passionate and excited about the potential that exists. But we started sort of reflecting on how you perceive different things dictates so much of the path taken, the outcome, et cetera. So that's kind of what we're going to talk about today. But before we do that, tell our listeners a little bit more about yourself, your role, anything you would like to share.

Adam Gloss: Yeah, that sounds like a softball question, which is a great way to kick things off.

Sarah Nicastro: A warmup.

Adam Gloss: Yeah, yeah. My answer is probably a little complicated, but I think it will tell you a lot about me. So humor me. I'm the Vice President of Service for McKinstry and we work in the built environment. We are a national design, build, operate, and maintain company that specializes in critical and complex buildings and facilities for infrastructure. Ultimately, I'm tasked with leading our field service organization and developing solutions for the problems our customers face, and frankly, the society at large faces around the cost of the built environment and maintaining it, the wellbeing of its occupants, its energy and carbon impact, and the equity impacts all that exacerbates. So it's a small job.

Strangely, when you think about what I do, I actually started my career in advertising and marketing. Completely left field, right? And then spent 15 years in healthcare, first in sales and marketing and then in operations, and moved into field service about 17 years ago. When I talk to people about my background, those threads seem very disparate. They all look at me kind of like, what? And I have to explain to them. But I see a lot of congruity, a lot that ties those things together. Both of them are really focused on outcomes where helping others is critical and the work matters, and that's important to me. That gets me up and going every day. Both are environments that are talking about healthcare and thinking about facilities. Both are very dynamic. They're very fast paced. There's a lot of change, a lot of challenges. I think that gets back to attitude. I find joy in that, not frustration. And then both are very labor intensive. They're very people focused, and there's incredible challenges and opportunities around that. And I love the people aspect of that.

For me, what I do now kind of ties all of that together and it gives me an opportunity to make an impact in a very big way and to have a meeting in my work. And then I'm also really, really fortunate to work with some amazing people. That actually brings a lot of joy to me. And any success we have, I think is largely because of the quality of people in our organization, their dedication to the work that we do, and their excitement about the impact that we get to make. That excitement becomes contagious.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. That makes sense. And I think that's a really good way to say it. Excitement becomes contagious. So does negativity or boo hoo attitude as well. So we'll talk a little bit about that. You have been in field service, you said 17 years. I've been in this space about 15. I think maybe some of our excitement around what's going on in this space today is because of the entry point of time into it. I know for me, I've said this a lot on this podcast, when I started in this space, it was pretty segment in some ways. And it was a little bit, I say boring from the context of covering the space. All of the conversations were sort of centered around how do we maximize productivity, minimize cost. Service was a cost center. There wasn't a lot of super exciting technology advancements being adopted yet, et cetera.

I feel like what kept me interested over the last decade and a half is that I started to see that progression unfold. Those conversations started to shift and the recognition of service as a profit center on a differentiator happened and the way work is done and the way we focus on customer experience evolved largely due to digital transformation. So there's been a lot of things that have happened that have really, really flipped that impression of 15 years ago around. You've probably witnessed something similar. And here you are saying, "I love change. Everything that's going on in service is so exciting." And other people can find it daunting or exhausting or frustrating. So we're going to talk about some of the areas of change and your perception on them, but just related to change overall, what is it that you like about change? Why do you feel like you have the perspective that you do?

Adam Gloss: It's not change per se. For me, it really is about solving problems. I get a lot of satisfaction from making things work better or from finding novel solutions to a problem. And I really enjoy the creative process in that. The byproduct of that is change, but it's not looking at change for change's sake. It's, "Well hey, here's a problem, here's something that we could have an impact on. Is this worth doing? If it is, let's figure out how to do it." And that's the exciting part to me, is seeing that impact that you're having on a client or customer on a segment of the market, on your own team members or employees, on the world around you. Being able to wake up one day and look at something and go, "Wow, I helped do that." That's really exciting and engaging.

Sarah Nicastro: I want to unpack this a little bit only because I'm trying to think about the psychology of this a little bit because I understand what you just said, but what I heard is you saying, "What I really get excited about is having an impact." I think even more so than solving problems. The reason I say that is there are people that enjoy solving problems, but once they've figured out the solution, they wouldn't necessarily be energized by the thought of evolving that solution as the problem shifts. Maybe sometimes in minute ways. Do you know what I mean?

Adam Gloss: Yeah.

Sarah Nicastro: So I think you can like problem solving but still kind of be in a place where constantly having to reengage in that process can seem daunting. But I think what you're saying is what really drives you to embrace change is having an impact. And if you're focused on having an impact, what it takes to do that is going to continue to evolve.

Adam Gloss: It will.

Sarah Nicastro: Does that make sense?

Adam Gloss: It does. Yes. Yes. So you're right. And there are people who know me who will tell you that I get bored easily. I'm not a stagnant person. I have trouble with that. I know people who have been doing the same job for 20 or 30 years and God bless them. We need those people. I think even in those roles, you still though have incremental growth and change. You can think about somebody in my world, let's talk about a service plumber or mechanic or a refrigeration technician or a boiler technician or whatever they are. You can be a really, really good chiller mechanic. And it takes years, by the way, to become one. You're talking about a decade of work to really get competent and they will tell you that, well, the machinery changes on them or the customer change and they can't be stagnant either. I think to excel at anything that you do, you have to recognize there's going to be a need for growth or incremental change along the way.

I would struggle, frankly, with people who don't want to ever change what they are doing, who don't see that just to keep meeting the needs of society or customers or clients or to keep working on emerging technology or whatever, you have to be able to change and adapt. Now, I think there's fatigue that comes with that at some point, right? I can talk about how to manage that difference, that there are people who can become more tired of change more quickly than I do, and how do I recognize that and stay attuned to that and manage through that? That's a whole separate challenge. But I would say that anybody who is not willing to think about continuous improvement it’s a better way to talk about this. They're not going to be comfortable working on one of my teams. They're just not.

Sarah Nicastro: Right. Yeah.

Adam Gloss: But I think it gets back to that same thing you talked about earlier, which is about owning your attitude. Sayings around owning your attitude are overworn, but they are for a reason. You made the comment that if you are frustrated, that colors how you see the problem. You see it as a problem if you approach something. Because I'm already frustrated by this, it's terrible, it's horrible. Now I'm focused on the problem. If I can get myself past that and think, "Okay, this is what it is. How do I deal with it?" Now I can focus on an outcome, now I can focus on a solution. If you approach it with a different energy, that becomes self-fulfilling.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. So let's talk about a couple topic areas because I want to kind of illustrate for people what we're talking about when we're talking about perception. So we're talking really about challenge versus opportunity. So when you think of a topic that's relevant to service today, do you see challenge? Do you see opportunity? And what is that distinction? So we had talked about a couple examples when we were preparing for this, and maybe we'll just touch on a few, but one is the topic of labor. So maybe kind of summarize for folks your attitude and we can talk about how that may differ from someone who is focused on the challenge versus the opportunity.

Adam Gloss: Yeah, I think this is the perfect illustration. Labor is by far the biggest challenge that we face in my organization. And as I talk to people who lead field service organizations and other companies and other industries, it's single biggest challenge that they face. So it's universal. My own viewpoint is that it's especially acute in the skill trades. Because like I mentioned, it takes years to actually become competent at what it is you're doing. Most of our apprenticeships are four to five years before someone's actually able to work independently. I could get hung up and other people do get hung up and oh my gosh, there's not enough people in the skilled trades. All these baby boomers are getting ready to retire. We have this massive brain drain that's happening. There's not enough people going into trade schools or entering union apprenticeships. And you can get spun up on the crisis that this really is.

We are, some people say on the edge of the cliff, some people say going over the cliff. Either way it's bad. So you can get hung up on that and panic. We see people trying to buy their way out of that and offering insane sign-on bonuses or trying to steal other people's employees. "Well, I'll pay them more." Okay, where's that end? Right? Because they're going to make up a buck or two an hour more somewhere else until they go there. That's a panic mode response. If you approach it with that same attitude we were just talking about and think, "Okay, is there an opportunity in this?" This actually gets really exciting to me. So when I think about that gap in skilled trades people, and I think about the cost crisis that I mentioned at the outset, the cost to operate buildings is too high, and most of that frankly is driven by labor costs, which is supply and demand equation. Not enough people, too much demand. Wages are escalating much more quickly than they normally would.

The labor crisis you mentioned, and I mentioned the equity crisis, that there are people who are underrepresented in our labor pool. There are people who are shut out of those opportunities. There are people who are more directly impacted by the climate crisis, by the cost crisis, and they're suffering the most from this. I see a confluence. I see an opportunity to solve multiple problems in the same stroke, but I have to think about it a little bit differently and say, "Okay, if I thought about these." And said, "Okay, there are underserved populations, how do we get them into the trades? How do I maybe address the labor gap by being more inclusive, by bringing in underrepresented people?" So that's actually part of our solution. We are working on developing pathways to those marginalized or underrepresented groups to bring them into the trade, working with community partners and community organizations that work with women, people of color, veterans transitioning out of the military, people making mid-career changes or life changes like single mothers coming back into the workforce and talking to them about opportunities in field service.

Because the reality is that most of them have no exposure to it. They don't know it's an opportunity. Even if they did, they wouldn't know how to get into it. That becomes daunting. Then we're partnering with trade schools and with our local unions and talking about, "Okay, now let's create a pathway to get them the training." And then we can provide the employment on the back end and make sure that there are now living wage jobs for people with great career opportunities, that we are helping to increase that labor pool, which addresses that supply and demand balance. We manage cost escalations better as a result of that. That is not a panacea, it's not an overnight solution. It's going to be a long-term project.

But I'll tell you that between in the last two years in 2020 and 2022, we tripled the number of new hires into our field service organization and tripled the representation by women and people of color. And it was just because of thinking about that problem a little bit differently and all of a sudden we're solving two or three at the same time. So flipping that mindset and think, "Okay, I'm not going to get hung up in the problem and my frustration with it." Taking a step back, changing your energy a little bit and thinking about, "Okay, what are all these problems? How can I start to leverage this?" Now you may still have an immediate problem, you need to figure how to solve that a little bit differently, but that long-term perspective, thinking holistically, thinking constructively changes [inaudible 00:18:36].

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. That's what I was kind of thinking as you were walking through that. It made me want to clarify for listeners, when we talk about perception, it isn't about rose colored glasses. It isn't about ignoring the complexity or the difficulty that is in each of these different areas very real. It's more about pushing past that. I think that's what I'm thinking about is maybe the difference is people getting stuck there, getting stuck in the problem to not get past it mentally to see the potential. I was reflecting as you were speaking on, you mentioned that you view yourself as a creative person. And I wonder if that's also psychologically another distinguishing factor. Because people who are creative and want to have an outlet for that creativity are the people who may be more inclined to see the problem but then want to push through to, "Okay, this, this and this are fact. Let's remove the emotion. Now let's brainstorm what this means in terms of potential." And obviously we've already talked about the fact that in most cases, that means change.

So it's just interesting. I mean I'm probably getting too deep for some people, but it's interesting to me to dig into... I think a lot of people would say, "I like to solve problems," but that doesn't necessarily mean a lot of people are default to that more excited approach to it versus frustration. Then as you dig into a specific topic area, I think it would be foolish to say, "It's all about perception. You just need to see opportunities." That's not what you're saying. You're saying, "Yes, these are real challenges." And we can acknowledge that, but if you just get stuck in the difficulty, you can't push past that to see the opportunity. So it's perception. It's also kind of perseverance. Don't get mired down in the hard because that will prohibit you from being able to go on and make these changes.

Adam Gloss: Yeah. We could do a whole separate conversation and a whole separate podcast about leadership, but I think that's a real aspect of leadership, right? That as a leader, you need to balance confidence and vulnerability. I can talk to my people about something being hard and challenging and acknowledge the reality of it, but I still have to be incredibly positive about the outcome we're working towards. Even when there's failures along the way, which there are. We never have an idea that works exactly the way that we thought it would by the time we get to the end. It's an iterative process back and forth. Sometimes it's one step forward and two steps back and sometimes it's two forward and one back. But getting yourself and your people through that to me is kind of the whole point of leadership. It is okay, as the leader, I need to be the one that carries the vision. I don't need to create the vision solely by myself.

That's the other thing that you mentioned. I do think of myself as a creative person that does give me energy, it does help. And then maybe people listening to this or watching this who don't think of themselves that way, but have other characteristics that make them very powerful leaders and who are leading service organizations. Great. Lean into your strengths. If your strength is around team building or it's around communication or it's around consensus building, leverage that. If you are a very strong organization, there are people in your organization who are creative and frankly the best ideas are almost never mine. They're a combination of lots of people's ideas and a lot of them come from the people closest to the work. So if you're not spending your time with the people doing the work, listening to the people doing the work, making sure that they feel heard and that they know that their voice is incorporated into what you're doing, it won't work either, right? So there's lots of things to unpack here and I'm spitting a lot out at once. I'm sorry.

Sarah Nicastro: No, it makes sense. When I was talking about creativity, I didn't mean that you own that, like you are the creative one. It's more that as a creative, you are energized by the process of pushing everyone to sort of the, "Okay, so here's the problem. Great. Let's set that aside. Let's problem solve." So it isn't about it being your ideas, it's just about finding the energy in that process to be able to motivate people to want to do that part. Yeah.

Adam Gloss: But if you work to your strengths, you'll find that energy in something else, right? Change is still going to happen and you have to kind of live with the idea that, okay, progress requires change to happen. And there are going to be people who get frustrated by that or upset by that. There are people who become resistant to it, but your job as a leader is to manage them through that to come out the other side with an outcome worth the pain of that change.

Sarah Nicastro: Yep. So if we look at just maybe one or two other examples, I think people understand the complexity or the difficulty, but let's just talk about the opportunity part, right? Okay. So let's talk about the market shift. So really talking about the evolution of services from more of a transaction to more of delivering outcomes. So it's a big evolution and it has different layers of complexity, but how do you view the opportunity in that?

Adam Gloss: It is one of the things that we are working most hard on at this point that we are doing in small incremental steps because it is such a massive undertaking and because there's so many components to it. There's market conditioning we need to do and shifting conversations with customers and how they talk and procure and understand. There's changes we need to do with our people in the field about how they deliver. There's technology changes that are required, contracting changes, billing changes there. There's nothing that we're not having to touch as part of this. And it is incredibly daunting. If you put the whole thing in, map it all out, you look at it, you could just throw your hands up and go, "Forget it. My customers are still willing to buy this way. We're just going to keep doing it until we don't have to."

But to me, it is incredibly exciting because of that idea of solving problems that I got back to earlier. If I'm really going to help a customer, I need to understand their problems. That's just selling all in one. But you take that a step further, if I'm really going to help them solve that problem, I can't look at old metrics or KPIs or ways of procuring and say, "Okay, this is how we're going to do it." I need to align my solution to that problem and I need my KPIs or my measurements to align to theirs. Because they're thinking about... I can go as high as you want, but let's talk about something really high level that actually we do get to impact. We can talk about carbon impact. There are hundreds or thousands of companies making carbon pledges at this point and environmental pledges that are very lofty. "We're going to be carbon free by 2030 or 2040 or 2050." And as an insider in the industry, I'll tell you that none of them have any idea about how they're going to do it. Just no idea.

That's where companies like ours come in. We can actually help guide them to solutions for this. But if I just went and approached them and said, "Okay, here's your time and material rates. Here's your markups, here's your cost for servicing this kind of equipment." That conversation does not move them towards reducing carbon impact. But instead of I say, "Okay, let's talk about how we would provide our services in a way that aligns with reducing energy consumption and carbon." Whether that's tail pipe the emissions or smokestack emissions or utility emissions or whatever it is, we can actually develop a plan to do that. That to me is really exciting. That's about solving a problem at the very, very highest level.

The challenges along the way are immense. So we're unpacking this one little thing at a time and we're celebrating small victories along the way and we have a roadmap that we're working that we can look at say, "Okay, here's generally where we're going and there's technologies we're testing that work great we're excited about and others that we think are going to that don't." There's customers who get excited about the idea and then they're up against pressures internally in their own organizations around cost, especially right now. "Well, we were going to do this, but can we put this off for another year?" I mean, you have all these things and you have to take the long view and you have to celebrate the small victories along the way and I think keep your people focused on that ultimate outcome and why it is worth doing. That why becomes the driver for everybody. I don't know if I gave you the answer you were looking for.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. No, for sure. Let's do one more only because I know it's a very important one right now, and you brought it up, which is the economy. Again, this is something that everyone realizes is in a very challenging spot, but what is your take on how you, again, work through the emotions to the problem itself to get to brainstorming around, "Okay, so this is the reality," but how do we shift that into what's the potential?

Adam Gloss: Yeah, so I think I have the benefit like you of having been in this industry for a few economic cycles now. It's not my first downturn, it's not my first rodeo. The solution for me every time has been the same approach. Not the same solution, but the same approach. And it really is about connection. So the marching orders that we give our account managers and our sales team is go get close to our clients. Talk to them about the view from where they live. You need to see their side of this. And then work to solve. Because the reality is that people cannot stop maintaining building infrastructure. Bad things happen when you do that.

But that doesn't mean there isn't a reality that they have to reduce costs. They may be under a mandate from their governance boards or their executives, "Okay, it's 10% cost reduction and that's what your budget is." I can't go to that customer and say, "Well, that's nice, but you can't stop servicing your chillers and boilers and your ventilation systems and your air filtration systems and your plumbing." If you stop servicing your water systems and your sewer systems, that becomes a real problem. You can't just tell them no. But we talk about, "What can we do?" And I think it's that same thing we talked about, that mindset or the attitude of understand what the problem is, detach yourself, it's not personal.

And if we focus on the long term, I'd rather keep that customer and have that customer know that we worked with them through their problem. And when we come out the other side of this, they see us as a partner and now we can talk about reinvestment and what do we need to do? And in some cases, there are solutions that come from this that are very different and very creative. We can talk about changing the service model. We can talk about moving to an as a service model and then thinking about how control or ownership of infrastructure may change. This can be taken very, very far, but in the simplest conversation sometimes it's just, "Hey, help me cut 10% for my budget for the year." At the end of the day, can we do that? Yeah, we can probably figure out how to do that.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. I was just thinking there's also an element of acceptance that I think maybe it's some of these different areas of change, there's fear associated with the problem that we have to push past and realizing that. So in this situation, I think the closeness with customers is important, but what you're also saying is there's certain realities to some of these big challenges that we just have to accept. Because the harder you try and fight the reality, the more time, energy, resource, money you waste on efforts that are really futile. So whether that means, in this example, you have to look at the long view and realize that if we accept the reality, we work with the client to reduce their investment over a period of time, but maintain the relationship. Then when things shift, we have the relationship to evolve. Or whether that's we accept the reality and then we work to create new-

Adam Gloss: A different solution.

Sarah Nicastro: Or different offerings to offset what may be going on in that arena. There could be multiple solutions. But if you stay in, "No, we're not doing that," you have to... It's really being focused on your own outcomes versus the customer's outcomes. You kind of get stuck in protecting, and that sometimes means ignoring or avoiding the reality, which prevents you from really getting to the brainstorming part.

Adam Gloss: The brainstorming part is critical, and you are absolutely right. Sometimes you actually come up with new offerings. If you think about that outcome-based solutions, we are piloting some of that now with clients where part of what their goal is cost reduction. Now, I don't need to think about... I'm getting a little in the weeds here. It may be that what they need to think about is an operating cost reduction, but there's also capital costs. When you start thinking about those two together, you can re-engineer or reimagine solutions in a very different way that you couldn't.

Sarah Nicastro: A mutually beneficial way.

Adam Gloss: Correct.

Sarah Nicastro: Right. I mean that's the thing about outcomes as a service. I mean, when it's done well, it benefits both parties. It just goes back to the whole topic of this discussion. It requires a significant amount of change. A company cannot shift to that model without really digging in and making some foundational changes. I always say when you talk about outcomes based service urbanization, that is not a service transformation, it's a business transformation. So you cannot do it within service as a function. It's a whole foundational shift in how a business operates and that's why it's complex. But there's also a ton of potential for those that are willing to take that on.

Adam Gloss: Let me give you one more example of this. It's very, very specific, but I think it's very illustrative. So we have that issue. Customers are coming to us, it's very real. "Hey, I need to cut 10%, 15% from my operating budget." We can have those conversations about capital and outcomes and things like that, but none of our customers are ready to have that conversation, none of our customers wants to have that conversation, none of our customers have the power to have that conversation. Part of what we did and are doing is going to our vendors and going, "Okay, what solutions are there? Here's where some of our cost centers are? Let's put the emotion aside. Let's analyze what our actual costs are, what our cost centers are providing this service."

One of our biggest ones is changing filters and air handling equipment. Same thing you do in a filter in your house. You got to change the air filter. Buildings need that, but you're not doing a filter. We have semi trucks filled with filters. There's a lot of them. The material and labor cost is incredibly high. And that filter is typically in there for three months. It's taken out and it goes in a landfill. For a large building, it could be tens of thousands of dollars every single time we do a filter change. We went to our filter vendor and said, "How do we solve this?" They came to us with an extended life filter that we can use for six to 12 months, depending on conditions. We go to our customers, "Okay, if you really want to reduce costs, here's a way to do it. We can eliminate an entire filter change. We can save you." Or we can eliminate two filter changes. We can do 25-30%. Not 10, not 15, we're saying 25 or 30."

Now people are listening and thinking, "Oh wait a minute, but you just cut your revenue dramatically." Well what you're forgetting is I have a labor crisis. If I can take that labor and apply it to better use now and service more customers and grow my market share because I'm not doing the lowest common denominator work that I was doing, it solves a big problem for me or helps solve a big problem for me. It's a win-win, right? But we're doing this every day, right? And it's not that those extended life filters are not available to other companies. We don't make them. We didn't design them. We don't have a patent on them. Any mechanical contractor can go and buy them. They just didn't think to ask the question. They just didn't rethink how they're approaching the problem.

And at the end of the day, the customer's still getting the same result that they were getting and they're saving 25% and they look like a hero to their boss and we have a much tighter relationship with that client because we are the ones that thought creatively about how approach that problem. Oh, and by the way, I just cut my labor need on that account by 25% and I can go sell another account and I can actually grow our business. When Covid hit, we grew our business 25% that year. Not for this solution, but because we thought about other things to do, just to your point.

Sarah Nicastro: Right. Yeah. No, that makes sense. Okay. I want to go back to one of the points we touched on, which is as a leader, the role you play in setting the tone around this is huge. And you are someone who has a probably better than average amount of enthusiasm around the potential that exists, how to be creative about overcoming problems to seize that potential, et cetera. But you have to balance that enthusiasm with empathy, for one, and that recognition that, as you said, sometimes people become a bit tired of change. I think the way I put this to you when we talked to prepare for this is I think it's really exciting that you love what you do so much. I can see how some people that don't feel so positive about change may find it annoying. You know what I mean?

So as a leader, you're playing to different people's emotions and strengths, so you're kind of figuring out the best ways to leverage your enthusiasm to motivate others. How do you strike that balance between sharing your enthusiasm with the people on your teams that feel similarly or are motivated by it versus switching to empathy a bit more with some of the people that are not as excited about change or a bit tired because it's just been a lot at once? How do you navigate that?

Adam Gloss: Carefully. It's a great question. I remind myself of a few things. The first is that I am in the role I am in because of who I am and how I am built, but not everybody and maybe very few people are like me. And I'm not saying that as an ego. I'm saying that just because if everyone was, everybody would be a leader. I told you earlier, thank God there's people that want to do the same job for 20 or 30 years. I'm not one of them. I know that they're not like me and I'm not like them. So recognizing that difference I think is the first thing. And recognizing that full strength Adam can be a little bit much sometimes. When I need to dial that back for people. And being audience appropriate. So there's a way I communicate with my leadership team. There's a way that we communicate down to managers. There's a way we communicate down to frontline. And the messaging, it will change.

The other thing is culture of this company. McKinstry, there's an African proverb that, "If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together." We didn't make it up. But it is spoken about regularly here and it is cultural here. Now for me, I can sometimes be frustrated that change doesn't happen fast enough or things were more challenging than I think that they should have been, or I didn't quite get the outcome or result that I wanted. And I have to again remind myself it's not about me. It's about us. It's about getting there together and it's about the outcome. So those two things I try and remind myself while keeping myself in check.

The next thing gets back to what I talked about earlier, and that's listening. It is incumbent on me to be connected to my frontline, not distanced from it. And to be out in the field with my people, to be walking around the office with my people, to be having really engaged conversations and checking mood and checking attitude and asking how people are doing and really listening and measuring my own pace against some of that sometimes. So that empathy that you talked about, that's kind of how I exercise that.

I think the last thing for me is vulnerability. And I mentioned that earlier, but it's really important to me to own my mistakes. And I think it's important for my people to see me do that. I promise them actually that I'll do that it's one of the few things I promise people. I will screw up, but when I do, I'll own it. I'll work to make it right. That develops a level of trust that I think is critical in this process.

Sarah Nicastro: It also shows them you will screw up and when you do, I will support you.

Adam Gloss: Oh, yes. It's mutual.

Sarah Nicastro: It normalizes that. Right. Like you said, you're not going to make the progress you want to make without failing. But there's a difference between a leader saying that and how people feel and a leader showing that by putting themself out there and going out on a limb and publicizing their own missteps in a way that makes people believe, okay, it really is for us to try things and not get it right the first time, and we know that because he's doing the same thing.

Adam Gloss: Yeah. And I think the last thing is celebrating with them success. And I'm actually really bad at this, by the way. I accomplish something and I'm immediately thinking about the next thing.

Sarah Nicastro: There's so much of what you're saying that I am laughing at because it reminds me so much of myself. And you said, "Sometimes change doesn't happen fast enough for me." And I'm like, "Uh-huh." And then that's the other one. I am really, really bad at it.

Adam Gloss: I know that's a weakness. I have people around me and people on my team who are better at it, and I rely heavily on them. You guys put the celebration together. Remind me that we need to pause and celebrate. "Adam, cool your jets for a couple days." Let us celebrate this and take a breath. Again, it's listening. It's listening to my leaders, my managers, my frontline people, but then also realize I can't be good at everything. I'm just not. Nobody is. So surrounding myself with people who compliment me is also really important.

Sarah Nicastro: For sure. Yeah. I think too, I mean a lot of what you're saying reminds me of you talking about closeness in relation to customers and also the long game view. You're working to have the same closeness you want your team to have with customers with them, because ultimately they are also internal customers. And I think you recognize kind of the investment you need to make in people for them to get good at this process of seeing potential and solving problems over time, which sometimes means applying more patience than you might want to, or understanding that they need to better understand the why or whatever that looks like. It's meeting them where they are instead of expecting them all to get on the Adam level. Yeah. That's really good.

Okay, so one more question, which is, in your 17 years of leadership within field service, what would you say is your biggest lesson learned?

Adam Gloss: It's to shut up and listen and really listen. Actively engaged listening. Again, I can't be an expert in everything. The people who are the most expert, the people who are closest to my customers, the people who are most expert in the work are on my front line. And if I'm not out with them, if I'm not rolling up my sleeves with them, if I'm not listening to what they tell me and taking that as expert opinion, I do that at my own peril. Early in my career, i let my own ego and love of my own ideas get in my way and they failed flamingly and spectacularly because I didn't do this. And once I learned this, things were much easier.

That doesn't mean that I'm not going to have people who are naysayers or people who can be Eeyores that you have to deal with. I think we talk about how we manage through that concept constructively. We talk about the why, if we educate, if we inform, if we give people an opportunity to feel that they would really listened to and they had input, then we all go together. And we might not agree along the way. There's going to be bumps in the road, but we all do get there together. So listening is the number one thing.

And if I had to have a caveat or a second thing, it really is about alignment, that people in our organization understand not just where we're going, but why we are going there and why it matters and why it's important and that they're invested in it. Everyone here cares deeply about what it is we are doing. And if they didn't, we couldn't be successful. The people who don't care deeply about it and who aren't invested, frankly, they don't last. They leave. They want to do something else, which is fine. But yeah, listening is number one.

Sarah Nicastro: Well, I give you kudos for, I guess, growing enough on your own to recognize... What did you refer to them as? Flaming failures.

Adam Gloss: Flaming, spectacular failures.

Sarah Nicastro: Because to be honest, I mean the reality is there are a whole lot of people in leadership positions today that have let their ego get in the way all along and never taken the time to reflect or change their path. So good for you for owning it.

Adam Gloss: I'm not saying it's still not a challenge.

Sarah Nicastro: And growing and evolving. Yeah. But the awareness is the most important thing in terms of owning it, right?

Adam Gloss: A work in progress.

Sarah Nicastro: Yes, always. All right, Adam, well thank you so much for coming on and sharing today. I really appreciate it.

Adam Gloss: Yeah. If I can just close with a thank you to you. I think what you are doing to share industry voices and ideas is really appreciated, it can be frustrating to look at the challenges we face every day, but it's comforting to know that everybody's facing the same ones and that together we can find solutions for them. I think you're building a community and a platform that helps to do that and helps shape the perception that problems are actually opportunities if we look at them right. And I'm excited about being a part of this with you and glad you're doing it.

Sarah Nicastro: Well, thank you so much. I really appreciate that. Like I said, when I started all those years ago, I didn't see myself building a career in field service. But here we are and I love the community and like you, I think I get so excited about the potential, but it's potential that is hard to see when you're in the day-to-day struggle. And if we can help inspire each other and brainstorm together, it makes everybody's journey a bit easier. I'm honored to do the work and thank you for the feedback. I appreciate it.

Adam Gloss: You're very welcome. Thank you.

Sarah Nicastro: You can find more by visiting us at futureoffieldservice.com. You can also find us on LinkedIn as well as Twitter. 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.

Sarah shares her thoughts on what she expects we’ll see unfold in service in 2023.

Sarah Nicastro: Welcome to the Future of Field Service Podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Nicastro. For those of you that tune in regularly, you may wonder why I'm doing yet another solo podcast. And I promise there are interviews coming soon, but I'm asked every year to share my predictions for the year around what will happen in the service space. I don't love the term predictions because I think it puts a lot of pressure on anticipating a future that none of us can really do, but in 2022, I did have the opportunity once again to travel and have a lot of different discussions with service leaders across industries and different geographies. And so, I'm happy to share my perspective on some of the things I think we will see an increased focus on this year based on what was going on last year, what's going on in our world, et cetera.

Prediction #1: So, in today's episode, I'm going to share those thoughts with you and you can do with them what you may. So the first prediction, for lack of a better term, is that I think we will see companies selectively increase cost reduction measures. So this prediction is interesting in the sense of when I started in this space, it was early 2008, and the way service and particularly field service was viewed within an organization was very, very different from how it is viewed today. Almost every conversation I had in my early days in this space was around cost cutting. Everything was really, really focused on squeezing every last ounce of productivity and efficiency, reducing cost in any way possible. And that was because at that point, service was primarily viewed as a cost center within the business. And that perception shifted. I think it's entirely shifted. And today, we recognize service not only as a profit center in most cases, but as a really important strategic area of growth and differentiation.

So I want to make that distinction because when I say selectively, what I mean is not that we will look to cut cost regardless of the impact or what it might affect. I think that at this point we know that service is critically important to the business, and we'll see organizations be a lot more careful about how and where they look to reduce costs. That being said, obviously, we're facing economic pressures and we do need to look at how we can be as efficient as possible and really work smarter.

And the good news is, I think that technologically there are a lot of opportunities for organizations to use existing technologies they have in place better and/or invest in new technologies that have a relatively low acquisition cost to be able to really make some cost reduction impact within the organization. So if you think about a couple of examples, one of the biggest is around better utilization of the workforce and making sure that you have technology in place that truly optimizes planning and scheduling of your workers so that they are not wasting time on traveling out of the way, which not only increases your labor costs, but also increases your fuel costs and make sure that they're not running into situations where you're having repeat visits, those sorts of things.

So that whole area of maximizing the utilization of your workforce, increasing first time fix rates, eliminating unnecessary travel, those are areas that I would say some companies have truly, truly optimized, but a lot have not. And so that's a very easy starting point to reduce some cost for the organization without really affecting the value that customers will receive or the experience of the employees, et cetera.

The same can be said in industries that are leveraging a lot of assets. The same argument for utilization can be said from those assets as well. So the same way you could look at how well are we leveraging our workforce? What is their utilization rate? Where is the unnecessary downtime or travel time? How often are we doing repeat visits? You can look at how to write size asset utilization as well. So that's another area to explore. When you think about workforce utilization and asset management, you also want to think about parts planning and management because you can have a system in place for truly optimizing the planning and scheduling of your workforce. But if you know the inventory they will need to do the work they need to do is not considered as well, that can be all for naught. And then a couple other really big areas I think are around looking at how do we increase self-service, and what that looks like in each particular business and what the customer's threshold is for participating in self-service.

That term really can have a lot of different definitions depending on the extent to which it applies in your business. So that could be looking at reducing call volume, it can be self-scheduling, it can be validating appointments. There's a lot of things outside of true self-service in terms of resolution, excuse me, that you can consider. Another area though, is around the use of remote assistance and remote service. Now, this can have an impact from the perspective of workforce utilization in the sense of being used within a company, from employee to employee, and giving your workforce access to expertise if they get stuck, if they need assistance to again, eliminate that repeat visit, increase first time fix rate. It can also allow you to bring on new talent and get them to a point of revenue recognition faster if they are supported in a "hands-on" way by an expert remotely.

But there is of course, an opportunity to use that technology with customers and either find some resolution remotely or make sure that you have a very detailed view of what is needed when onsite work is scheduled so that again, your technicians are showing up, knowing what they're going to run into, fully prepared for that first time resolution. So I think there's a lot of ways that technology can be leveraged to reduce cost within service delivery.

And finally, I think knowledge management is another big area to look at. So again, you can get the technician where he or she needs to be with the inventory they need, but do they have access to the insights that can really empower them to do whatever it is they come across on that job? So I think those are just a handful of areas that give some insight into what I mean when I say that I'm referring to selective cost reduction.

So not things that are going to detract from the customer experience and ideally not things that are going to detract from the employee experience as well, right? Because we've recognized how critically important it is to focus on the employee experience to achieve our customer satisfaction objectives. So we really want to look for ways that we can promote working smarter and reducing the unnecessary aspects that are incredibly time consuming that likely field technicians don't enjoy doing anyway, that ideally if resolved, not only don't detract from, but improve the customer experience. So that is my first prediction for what we will see in 2023.

Prediction #2: Tied to that, the second prediction is sort of zeroing in on one of the things I mentioned there, which is, I do believe we will see wider adoption and acceptance of remote service. I think there's far too much value to come from leveraging remote service or its use not to grow and expand. I know that there are challenges for sure. Change management is one that gets brought up a lot, adoption. I think really one of the conversations that companies struggle with the most when we talk about remote service in the sense of actually changing service delivery. By that I mean not use technician-to-technician to simply help one another, but really implementing a remote first service approach and using that as your first wave of resolution with customers.

I think really one of the biggest barriers is that companies who are still providing transactional service, are struggling with how to present remote service to their customers because those relationships are still based on those transactions rather than the conversation being value focused and value centered. So when we think about the overall transition away from transactional service to more outcomes based service, advanced services, that's the point where remote service makes a lot more sense because your customers are choosing to work with you based on the value you are providing to their organization, not based on the amount of time that you are spending on site.

So I really think that's one of the biggest barriers is where within that service evolution, an organization can realistically implement and adopt remote service as a service delivery approach. So I hope that makes sense. I do think that that evolution is continuing. We know that customers today are less interested in cool products and helpful services and more interested in the overall value that it brings to them and the outcomes that it allows them to achieve.

And so as we evolve further with that reality in mind, I think we will find greater opportunity to put remote service in place. It simply solves a lot of challenges for service organizations in the sense of not only improving efficiency and productivity and reducing unnecessary trips and wasted time, but offering customers faster resolution and giving companies far more options for how to navigate talent gaps and challenges. Allowing them to really better utilize internal expertise globally rather than flying people around. It's impact on the environment is significant when we can look at transitioning even a portion of service that is currently done on site to remote service. I think it also fits very well with how the role of the field technician is going to evolve. So that is my second prediction.

Prediction #3: Prediction number three is that the talent focus will shift from new talent to nurturing talent. Now, this is not to say that companies are going to stop thinking about how to recruit new technicians. That's not the case. I think though we've almost too narrowly focused on that new talent acquisition in the past couple of years and have maybe overlooked a bit the importance of really understanding and nurturing relationships with our existing talent and looking for ways for them to grow within our organizations to focus on retention, et cetera. So I think that we certainly need to continue to look for ways to not only find, but really farm that new talent.

And we've talked a whole lot about that in the past couple of years. We've shared stories of how organizations are really getting creative about different partnerships to educate people about the opportunities that are available in service, new ways and different places to find groups of people that maybe don't have experience but are very well positioned to succeed in field service roles. So we've done a lot of talking about the new talent, and I think this year we will do a bit more exploring of how we nurture talent. So including new talent that we bring on, what happens once we have found, attracted and hired them? What is their experience like? What is our company culture like? How well are we equipping our leadership to give those employees a positive experience? Do we understand what they need and want from an employer? And are we able to provide that?

Do they have a sense of purpose? Do we offer career pathing? Are we properly training and enabling them? Do they feel recognized and valued for their contributions? There's a lot of layers to that conversation, but I have seen over the course of my travels this year, a lot more thoughts popping up from service leaders about the importance of prioritizing our people and putting more effort into making sure that our employee experience is one that will help us to deliver the customer experience we're looking to deliver. So that's prediction number three.

And I think just going back to the point I made at the end of remote service, if you look at how that ties in with the talent conversation, I think when we talk about moving to a more outcomes-based service delivery model and we incorporate more remote service, I think we're going to need to see an evolution of that frontline role. There will still be technical work that needs to be done. However, I think we're also going to see more of a customer success type role that will either be incorporated into what that frontline worker does or work alongside the more technical skillset.

I think there's going to be a lot of considerations for how best to segment and tackle that work. And that may be something that ends up helping organizations navigate some of the changes in the talent pool if they can find skills that fit different bits rather than looking for an all-in-one approach. So that's on talent.

Prediction #4: And okay, not lastly. Prediction number four is that I think we will see more service centered sustainability strategies take shape. So sustainability again is a topic that I see coming up more and more at industry events. There's more conversation about not only the regulatory pressures, but customer expectations and investment decisions, all of those types of things.

Service is really a unique function of the business in terms of how it intersects with an organization, sustainability initiatives, because a lot of the things we talked about in the beginning related to reducing costs also have an impact on the environment. So if we can look at ways to minimize travel, whether that's through better utilization or whether that's through a remote first service approach that has an impact on the environment in a very positive way. There's also a whole conversation to be had around how the move towards servitization and offering things as a service ties very well with sustainability and really can honestly change the game in terms of how companies providing assets design and manufacture, service those assets in a way that provides the customer with the outcome they need, but does so in a sense that makes prioritizing environmental impact a lot easier to do.

So I think we will see a lot more discussion about sustainability in 2023. I don't know that we'll get incredibly far or to the other side of the conversation. When I was at Field Service Connect in Austin in November, I led a round table on sustainability. And at least in the United States, there's some very practical questions that need to be sorted through and answered before significant strides will be able to be made. So if you take electric vehicles, for instance, yes, there's interest, but is the inventory available of electric vehicles that are of the requirements that a field service organization would need?

And even if so, do they support the mileage that different service organizations technicians drive on a day-to-day basis? Are there enough charging stations available for use? Et cetera. So there's questions like that I think maybe won't be completely solved in 2023, but I think we'll make some progress. I think we'll have a lot more of those conversations. And it's going to be very interesting to see not only how the regulatory implications evolve, but also how customer demands shape organization strategies and how some of that infrastructure comes along in a way that making these changes a lot more practical.

Prediction #5: And the last prediction is one that I've already alluded to, which is the march toward outcomes will continue. The journey from delivering transactional service to delivering outcomes is a really significant change. It's really an identity shift for most businesses. It impacts far more than just service. We often think of that topic as service transformation, but really it's a business transformation. And so yes, we've been talking about outcomes-based service, servitization, advanced services for quite a while, and we will continue to do so. There are companies who are truly leading the charge that have really made that change and are not only embracing, but succeeding at delivering outcomes, but there are a lot more companies that are working hard to get to that point. And so it's a conversation that will continue, a progression that companies will work through to sort out what the idea of delivering outcomes looks like for their customer base, for their company, what those layers of change are that need to take place for them to be able to work through the continuum to reach that goal.

So I think what's very clear is that today's customers expect a whole lot more than just product and services. And I think that's a reality that is pretty widely understood. And we see organizations at varying degrees of the continuum toward really incrementally improving the transactional service that they provide and working toward that world of really delivering outcomes to their customers. So we'll continue to see progress there, and I think that is a really exciting opportunity for organizations, but certainly one that isn't recognized without a lot of hard work. So we're here to support you on that journey on all of these journeys, and we are happy to be able to do that.

So if you have other thoughts on things that you expect to see more of this year or topics that you would like to see content on, please know that you can always reach out to me. I am happy to listen, to take feedback, ideas, and I'm here to really give insight and resources that our community needs. So if you have thoughts on that, please get in touch. Otherwise, you can find more by visiting us at futureoffieldservice.com. You can also find us on LinkedIn as well as Twitter. 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.

By Sarah Nicastro, Creator, Future of Field Service

Attracting, attaining, and retaining talent has been one of (if not the) top challenges for service organizations for a couple of years running and there’s no end in sight. The talent problem isn’t a simple one to solve and I think organizations have accepted that it isn’t an issue that will blow over or be addressed with a few simple tweaks, but a significant shift that requires far more creativity and far broader change.

What I wonder is if the current focus is inhibiting some of the success companies could see in achieving better success in not only their talent acquisition but also talent retention goals. We’ve thus far focused the conversations – and actions – quite heavily on the frontline workforce, and within that mostly on the quest for new talent. While continuing to look for new sources of talent (and further evolving a company’s ability to farm ability into experience rather than expecting to find experienced new hires) is important, I believe our focus on finding new frontline workers is too narrow to adequately address the talent problem we have.

There are a few reasons why. First, the challenge to find talent is compounded by the significant change that most service organizations are in the midst of in terms of what their service offerings are and how service is delivered. As such, the role of the frontline is evolving in parallel with the company’s need to find more workers – it’s a moving target in some ways. Second, focusing only on talent acquisition, even when successful, is like putting a band-aid on the bigger problem. If you can bring new people in, great – but then what happens? We need to put better attention on understanding what employees want and evaluating the reality of the employee experience so that we can make changes that will allow both the new hires and existing employees to be fulfilled and want to stay.

Are Your Managers Engaged, Enthusiastic, and Effective?

These factors should call attention to how important managers our in your talent strategy. Are they capable? Do they feel engaged and invested? Are they able to articulate your company’s vision and strategy to the frontline in a way that conveys enthusiasm and inspires motivation? Or are they confused on where the company is headed? Are they frustrated? Are they part of the “old guard” that thinks a focus on company culture and employee experience is silly? When you start asking these questions, you can begin to envision how critically important management is in whether you are able to deliver what’s needed to today’s talent.

In this HBR article by Erica Keswin, To Retain Your Best Employees, Focus on Your Best Managers, we’re reminded that employees don’t leave jobs, they leave managers. The author illustrates the importance of a focus on managers, saying, “Managers are really having a moment. Between the Great Resignation, a lingering pandemic, employees demanding flexibility, skyrocketing mental health challenges, a looming recession, and general uncertainty, more and more employees are turning to their direct supervisors for direction and support.”

She goes on to point out, though, that ample focus on the management level is a missing link in many organizations. “Unfortunately, managers aren’t always prepared to meet their moment because they’re woefully under-trained and overworked while tasked with leading their teams during heightened turbulence. In fact, new research by Future Forum found a record 43% of managers say they’re burned out — the highest of any job level,” Keswin writes. The article suggests three ways to invest in the development of your managers that are worth a read, but I’d like to make my own suggestions as well.

Measure manager performance. It’s important to find ways to gain an objective view of the impact your current managers are having and to understand the reality that you cannot measure success simply on their ability to meet financial KPIs. While these measures can provide some of the picture, a way to gather input from the frontline on the effectiveness of their managers is important in overall assessment. When BD invested in eNPS, the company gleaned incredibly valuable insight that helped address issues and make changes that significantly improved employee engagement.
Be willing to have the hard conversations. If you are truly committed to improving company culture and employee experience, you must be willing to content with leaders in place that aren’t helping achieve those objectives. Sometimes there are managers who have some great qualities, but as leaders are not capable of promoting a positive working environment and adeptly uplifting and supporting others. Allowing these leaders to stay in place because it is a tough situation to handle only harms culture, causes employees impacted by this leader’s negative qualities to become frustrated and even leave, and sets a bad example for what you are willing to tolerate.
Accept that tenure doesn’t indicate ability. Many organizations promote employees to manager positions based on their success as an individual contributor or their time in a role. However, tenure alone doesn’t indicate leadership ability. You can take this into consideration, but you should also be ensuring you are taking steps to validate competence. And don’t forget interest! You want managers who feel called to lead and find fulfillment in doing so, not managers who are taking a role simply because they see it as the only way to grow their paycheck. It’s important to seek the desire, but also to invest in the development. Investment in manager education, training, and continuing development is far too low and this needs to change.
Ask for feedback. It’s so important to learn how your managers feel about your company, their roles, and your leadership! If there isn’t open communication or they don’t feel comfortable speaking up, they can have frustrations or desires that they bottle up and let build into leaving the company or, maybe worse, becoming a negative energy to everyone around them. If you recognize the importance of your managers, you need to be willing to understand their wants, goals, and feedback and put actions in place to help them feel appreciated, supported, and empowered.
Prioritize 1-1 communication. There are many ways to ask for feedback from managers and employees, but when it comes to your employees at all levels feeling the company is invested in their success, it’s important to invest in 1-1 communication to really build relationships and human centricity. Managers should have this outlet, and they should provide it for their direct reports. This is an important part of getting to know employees as people, making them feel they are important to you and to the company, and understanding their goals so that you can retain talent over a long period of time by giving them the opportunities they want to evolve, grow, and progress in their careers.

What would you add to the list? Does your organization do a good job of focusing on managers or not? I’d love to hear from you and share your insights.

Sarah starts the New Year by sharing an early look at some exciting news from Future of Field Service.

Happy New Year!

2022 was an exciting year for Future of Field Service, and 2023 promises to be as well. I am going to share with you today a few sneak peeks of what we’ve been up to and what fun, new things you’ll see from us in the near term.

But first, in case you missed any of our end of year coverage there are some things that are worth revisiting –

Top 10 of the Podcast (podcast 193 on December 14th)
YIR – key points:

Not only did 2022 bring our first-ever global Live Tour, but When we weren’t traveling, we kept the content flowing with more than 50 articles and 51 new podcasts. Here are some really cool stats according to Spotify’s “Wrapped” review for the Future of Field Service podcast:

1,503 minutes of new content
40% more listeners and 28% more followers in 2022
Listeners across 37 countries with the top five being the United States, Sweden, the Philippines, Germany, and Spain
Among the top 15% most followed podcasts
Among the top 15% most shared podcasts globally

This month is the fourth anniversary of the Future of Field Service platform – and it makes me really happy to reflect on how we’ve grown. I remember curating the content for the site launch, and we began with just ten pieces! We’ve since added the podcast, in person events, and so much more.

As a result, one of the exciting things we have coming is a new website – one that better fits the increased volume of content we have and will allow our users to more easily peruse all that’s there. This is a project that has taken more work than I realized it would and the efforts of an entire team. I appreciate all of the hard work that’s gone into the new site and look forward to your feedback when it launches.

Another project in the works is what we’re calling the Future of Field Service INSIDER – a newsletter-plus, if you will. The INSIDER will be bi-weekly and will not only ensure subscribers stay up to speed on the content we’re publishing, but will also provide access to exclusive content and community connections. You’ll be able to subscribe to the INSIDER very soon, so stay tuned for more!

And finally, we’ve already been hard at work on the 2023 Future of Field Service Live Tour! Yes, we’re at it again this year. We received very positive feedback on the 2022 tour and for this year we are working hard to outdo ourselves. We have some plans for how to evolve the content approach that we think our community will really like and we are also visiting not only some new cities but a new CONTINENT! I’m so excited to meet even more of you in person this year and to see again how this community can bring people together across the globe to build collective knowledge that will truly transform service. The 2023 Tour schedule will be announced soon with registration to follow – so keep your eyes peeled and make it a point to join us! You won’t regret it.

As we begin a fresh year, I want to thank you all for being a part of the Future of Field Service community – I appreciate you. Let’s head into 2023 with intention, renewed energy, and the knowing that we can all help one another along the way.

By Sarah Nicastro, Creator, Future of Field Service

I’m still reconciling the reality that 2022 is drawing to a close, but here I am writing a Year in Review summary. This year has been a whirlwind with a flurry of activity that, after years of Covid-induced slow down, brought both overwhelm at times and immense fulfillment. When I reflect on the year I feel immense gratitude for the opportunity to reconnect and re-engage with so many of you in so many different ways. My interactions throughout 2022 have shown me how the challenges we’ve faced the last couple of years have only drawn the service community closer together.

To summarize some of the highlights, I must begin with the first-ever Future of Field Service Global Live Tour! When Future of Field Service was first created, I had dreams of evolving the content platform into a basis for connection and community, and this year those visions came to life. In our first tour, we visited five wonderful countries and in each location were joined by industry-leading expert speakers and highly engaged attendees. The events featured podcast-style interviews and a lot of interactive discussions, and the feedback was overwhelmingly positive – it reinforced for me the value that exists in coming together across industries to discuss common challenges, trends, and share not only information but inspiration. Across the five cities we had 20 speakers and more than 150 attendees. If you weren’t able to join this year’s Live Tour, you can find summary insights here – and stay tuned for exciting information to come soon on the 2023 Tour!

In-Person, Audio, Online and Everything In Between

In addition to hosting our own events, Future of Field Service had a presence at many other industry events including Field Service Palm Springs, Field Service Hilton Head, The Service Council Symposium, IFS UNLEASHED, Field Service Connect Austin, and Field Service Europe. The ability to spend time with so many people within our community, in person, this year was really a joy – and I think that feeling was shared among those who attended these events. While there are still challenges to face, the overall energy among attendees at these events was positive and there is much shared excitement about the potential that exists in service.

When we weren’t traveling, we kept the content flowing with more than 50 articles and 51 new podcasts. Here are some really cool stats according to Spotify’s “Wrapped” review for the Future of Field Service podcast:

1,503 minutes of new content
40% more listeners and 28% more followers in 2022
Listeners across 37 countries with the top five being the United States, Sweden, the Philippines, Germany, and Spain
Among the top 15% most followed podcasts
Among the top 15% most shared podcasts globally

Last week I shared my Top 10 Episodes of 2022, which is always a challenge because there are so many great interviews to choose from. If you missed that recap, it’s worth having a look – the topics featured vary from leadership and sustainability to labor and predictive service. You can find the list here.

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