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

Sarah talks with Tamika Fields, independent IT Services contract technician, about what she enjoys about being independent, what could make W2 roles more appealing to talent, and how companies can make their relationships with contract workers most effective to ensure positive CX.

Sarah Nicastro: Welcome to the Future of Field Service podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Nicastro. Today, we're going to be getting an inside look at the perspective of the field service contract workforce. I'm joined today by Tamika Fields, who is an independent IT contract technician. We're going to get a little bit of perspective from Tamika on what is in the hearts and minds of the contract workforce and relate that back to some of the things we talk about here on this podcast in terms of leveraging contract workers, making sure that doing so allows you to still provide that positive customer experience, et cetera. We will dig into all of that, but Tamika, welcome to the podcast, and thanks for joining me.

Tamika Fields: Thank you for having me. Hello, everyone.

Sarah Nicastro: Before we dig in, tell us a little bit about yourself and your journey to becoming an independent contract technician.

Tamika Fields: Well, my name is Tamika Fields. I'm an Alabama native, southern born and raised. Honorably separated from the Air Force. I'm an artist, a curious, creative, spiritual being on a very human journey. I'm just the student of information technology and communications. I started before the Air Force, but then I transitioned. And then after that, I went straight into my career working W-2 work, that's what we call it now, now that I'm a contractor. I transitioned into the full-time contracting subsequently as things didn't necessarily work out the way that I would've thought as a professional at that juncture.

Sarah Nicastro: Mm-hmm. Okay. So how long were you doing W-2 work and what were some of the reasons that going that route was appealing to you?

Tamika Fields: If we just start with my full-time career in communications and information technology January 1999 when I joined the Air Force. I just continued working obviously from that job to other jobs, subcontracts, but I was still a W-2 within the contract. The very first contract that I got, ironically, I got two months after getting out of the military, and it fell through. And then that was the first inkling that in my mind I'd just come from this military contract and everything really is a contract, but I was still in the tether of what I call the matrix of the illusion of what W-2 work is considered for most people.

And from there, just fast forward to January 2016. I pretty much did what I consider W-2 work, but they were consistent contracts, because most of the work was range contract. It wasn't the direct high private sector work for this school until towards the end. I took an independent temporary role that was supposed to be flexible, that was supposed to be, "You are a contractor. We're subbing you. This is temporary. At will at any time we may not need you. We call you in part-time." The role was part-time as part of their temporary services, and I was still being treated like a W-2 employee with the restrictions that come with that, without the flexibility to do what I knew how to do, to make things more efficient, to scale and streamline what they needed because they were trying to upgrade all of their devices.

They were breaching many security policies and had things on the network that shouldn't have been. I was trying to help with that, and I was being treated like a W-2 employee with these restrictions that wouldn't allow me to really get them to where they needed to be, and for all intents and purposes, that the IT manager hired me to do. That was the first time that I was just like, "Hey, January 2016, I think something needs to change here. I've been doing the same thing somewhat expecting a different result, hoping that people see what services I provide." And I'm just like, "I just need to take the leap because this is me treading water in a temporary role but not having the flexibility."

And that was it after that. That ended about a year later, so six months I took a hiatus to reassess if I really want to continue in IT, because I'd already taken a break briefly before starting that role. And by May of 2018, I was full on, "I'm an independent contractor."

Sarah Nicastro: Okay. From your perspective, what are the benefits of being an independent contractor versus being a full-time employee with one organization?

Tamika Fields: Off the top, flexibility, autonomy, greater sense of purpose, and self-branding to represent what services you provide and the quality and standards that you provide that apply to all business needs, in my opinion and experience.

Sarah Nicastro: Mm-hmm. Okay. If you look at the flip side of the equation, I mean, is there anything that would make you reconsider being independent at this point and taking a full-time position with one organization?

Tamika Fields: Realistically, probably not.

But just thinking from the standpoint of I am the sum of my experiences, and I know there are some things that are beneficial when you have W-2 employment, the only thing that really would make me reconsider a full time employment role would be if I was in a position where the organization allowed me to have the exact same growth opportunities, flexibility, autonomy to get the job done with an efficient manner in the standard of the white glove service that I provide irrespective of office politics, which is virtually impossible. I've really only had that as an independent contractor.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. So highly unlikely.

Tamika Fields: Highly unlikely, but eightball says anything's possible.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. Okay. Yeah, that's true. The reason I'm asking some of these questions is the organizations that listen to this podcast I think are really struggling with a couple fundamental questions of themselves, which is, number one, "We don't have enough talent, period, to do the volume of work we need to do. So whether that's looking at how we attract more people to the industry to hire as W-2 employees or whether we find sources of good 1099 or independent talent that we can leverage, it's a problem that needs to be solved."

I think companies tend to have different feelings about the use of contract workforce versus the idea of having a network of their own technicians. So I think it's interesting to look at this from the perspective of from the independent contractor perspective, what do people like about that role, whether it's understanding it so that you can build a good relationship and leverage talent like yours in a way that helps them deliver the brand experience they want to deliver. Or whether it's understanding what motivates you to be independent, to question themselves on are there things they can offer to make full-time employees make that role more attractive? To your point every time I've asked that question, you say flexibility. I always am urging organizations to think outside of the box in the sense of, yes, a lot of the industries we reach, service work, it needs done when it needs to be done. That leads people to believe, "We can't offer flexibility because we just need to service our customers when they need service." True, but that doesn't mean schedules need to be built the way they've always been built, right?

Tamika Fields: Correct.

Sarah Nicastro: If people are willing to get more creative and not just do what they've always done, then maybe you can do a rotation, maybe you can do a four-day workweek. I don't think any organization can hand you all of the benefits you have of being independent and poof. But I think we do need to ask ourselves more what are those things that are really drawing people to want to be independent and are there ways to adapt so that we're providing more of that, right.

Tamika Fields: True.

Sarah Nicastro: I just think this idea of, "Nope, it's this schedule, it's always been this schedule, it has to stay this schedule," I don't subscribe to that. I think if you really want to change the game and get more creative, then that's what you need to do. And if the problem becomes a big enough problem, people will be forced to start getting creative and thinking differently.

And so, that's where I think the perspective of you is helpful to really understand what are those motivators and either how do they begin to incorporate some of that into what their employee value proposition looks like or how do they consider those motivators so they can build relationships with someone like yourself that can help them be successful in their customer experience, right?

Tamika Fields: Absolutely.

Sarah Nicastro: So, if you think about that comment, are there aspects of your role as an independent contractor that you think it's possible for companies to provide more of to their full-time employees?

Tamika Fields: Absolutely. I don't think that cavern of absolutes in black and white separation exists personally. I think they make it exist because, like you said, they're dogmatically holding on to that. I don't think it has to be mutually inclusive. I feel like if full-time employment roles... For me, let's see, in terms of making it more appealing, what could be provided, I just feel like I find myself to be more proactive when I'm working 1099. I'm focused on the process and improvement. I do that anyway, but there's so many things that limit that because there's so many steps and approvals and people who don't see what's really happening and what really would change things and scale things to what they actually need. They see things on papers, it's abstracted, it's not tangible. They're not dealing with the forward-facing aspect of it, nor are they dealing with the actual infrastructure and what it is that they're doing or trying to do based on the industry that they're in.

And so, for me, that's all I'm focused on, efficiency. It's most challenging and rewarding for me to have that aspect that I always find in independent contract work. Ideally, that's the most nurturing environment. But I feel like just even with the very last W-2 role, the very last most longstanding W2 role that I had, I would say... I don't want to say a full-time temporary, but it was just the project based, but you're tethered to us. So even in that role as a W-2, "Yes, you're W-2, but you don't sit here 365 all days except for those holidays. You're here when we have these big projects. You're the first person we pull in. You might be the person that consults on this and also maybe you're the person that when it hits the fan, call that person first. Because if we know nothing else, we know based on the consistency with all these other projects, that they'll be able to put a fresh perspective set of eyes, give us some insight on what we can do to quickly to keep the ship from sinking and then give us time to go hire, say, the other person who would be the one that sits there and patches that hole when they go back to their respective independent corner."

But I know that's really creative, just even that thought and just that analogy to somebody in a corporate structured world. They'd be like, "What do you mean? You're just on retainer?" "In a way, but you don't have to pay me until I show up for work." So the retainer is the relationship.

Sarah Nicastro: And so, I want to get back to talking a little bit about the independent contract model, but I also think it's important to dig into this a little bit for the sake of people that listen and the way the industry is struggling with talent as a whole right now. There's a few things you said. You said flexibility. You said autonomy. And you don't like the corporate politics. Those are things that I think are representative of how the desires of the workforce are evolving. I don't think companies have a choice but to evolve with the workforce. I'm just bringing those points back up because I don't believe you are alone in desiring those things, and organizations have to start finding ways to deliver more of that.

Now, I also want to take it a layer deeper here, so bear with me. You said in the beginning you identify yourself as a creative. I think that's also part of what's happening here, is you have ideas and you want that autonomy to make suggestions and make changes and not be tied down by outdated policy and a very cumbersome process for introducing new concepts. I think it's a really important point because not everyone is like that, and that's fine. Everyone has different strengths. Some people are happy to just follow the rules and do what the process is, et cetera. But I think as we hear things in headlines of the importance of company culture and innovation and are we creating an environment where employees do feel that they can contribute to that innovation, what we really need to do is figure out how to make creatives like yourself feel more empowered and more involved in the process instead of a victim of whatever decisions are being made at the top.

I think that's a huge transformation underway, but again, I want to call out to the people listening that if they have talent within their ranks, like you, who is creative, who has ideas, who wants to problem solve, who wants to take issues and figure out what can change to make them go away, you really need to figure out how to harness that talent instead of having it get frustrated and leave that outdated dinosaur-like culture to just go-

Tamika Fields: Absolutely.

Sarah Nicastro: ... do their own thing.

That is not me saying, and I want to be clear, that is not me saying that folks like yourself shouldn't be independent contractors or companies should not leverage independent contractors. I'm just also stating that unless a company's strategy is to use all 1099 employees, these are some of the really hard questions they need to be asking themselves and grappling with. Because the realities are just that we know the frontline workforce, I say this all the time, holds so much power, because you are the person interacting with customers. You are ultimately the external arm of whatever brand or customer experience a company wants to provide.

You're also in a position where you see more challenge and more opportunity than many others in the organization. So if we're not listening and we're not involving and we're not leveraging that insight and perspective, we're doing ourselves a huge disservice while also making people that have the talents or the drive that you have feel that that environment is just not right for them. I'm really just urging people to hear what you're saying and think about how they start to make changes, however difficult that might be, to empower and encourage and involve and engage their workforce rather than just sticking to process/policy that has been around for a long, long time.

Tamika Fields: Absolutely.

Sarah Nicastro: Does that make sense?

Tamika Fields: It makes perfect sense, because we are the unintentional mascots for any organization. I've worked for hospitals, nonprofit schools, I mean, government agencies, contracts, subcontracts, security teams. You name it, I've done it. Yeah, you are the person they remember, you are the face, so whether you're the begrudged, curmudgeon stereotype or you're an open communicator who is adapted and emotionally, intellectually keen, you're still what they remember, irrespective of you showing up two minutes before because somebody got sick or you've been there for two years. You do have the insight that it's impossible for you to have if you're not on the ground. It's just impossible.

And not to get into war and politics, but the reason why people feel the way they feel about President Zelenskyy with regard to the Ukraine as the Ukrainian people, because he's there, he's in it, he's not like removed, he's not detached, he's right there putting everything on the line with everybody else. We're the conduit. We as the frontline IT people, whether we're there every day... Again because I've been W-2, and I did that for years with the same people, seeing the same people every day and navigating the politics. You don't want to just be the guy saying, "Where's my red stapler?" If you're saying, "Hey, this needs to be resolved, maybe we can work on this. I know you can't fix it in three months, but maybe we can start the action rolling so that in three months we can have tangible plans that are implemented by the end of six months."

Most IT people have a realistic background and understanding of that. But like you said, if we're screaming, "We are here, and this is what needs to be done, and you have creatives," I feel like it's actually more cost effective for you to leverage the person that's willing to stay that's already W-2. Like you, I'm not saying get rid of all 1099 contractors, don't have independent consultants. Absolutely both are needed. But if you have somebody who has the quality, the skill, the growth, and the expansive scalable mindset within your organization, you have brand loyalty by default. You don't have to train that, you don't have to adjust that, you don't have to have the little nuances that change when somebody's going from just having worked at a hospital to now working for DOD contractor to then working for some nonprofit art school. Because there are shifts that most people can't do, and that's why they always have the stereotype of the IT person, the flat asset, and this, that, and the other. But not to digress.

Sarah Nicastro: It's a good point. No, I've talked on this podcast before about, I think as the nature of field service evolves, we need to start thinking about maybe part of getting more creative is not just about how do we offer flexibility and how do we offer more autonomy, et cetera, but also maybe we somehow segment roles differently than we have in the past. Because there are different talents, and they have different value.

Tamika Fields: Absolutely.

Sarah Nicastro: So maybe you have a very technical talent that can repair X, Y, Z, but they don't have an interest in the customer experience or the relationship building. It doesn't mean that talent isn't a talent, it just means-

Tamika Fields: Agreed.

Sarah Nicastro: ... there are other talents needed. I have some thoughts on how that might evolve, which is not the topic of this podcast, but I think it's another point for people to consider is you will have people that are willing to just show up and do the work, and then you will have people that have fresh ideas. They're both important. Don't stifle one and pander to another. Figure out how to harness both talents and skills.

Tamika Fields: You have to. It's practical.

Sarah Nicastro: Yep, for sure. I want to shift gears a little bit, Tamika, and talk about, as an independent contractor, so keeping in mind that our audience is companies that would potentially hire folks like you to either augment their full-time employee W-2 workforce or some companies are taking the strategy of using all independent technicians. I want to shift gears. We've talked a lot about what attracts you, what do you like and enjoy about being independent and thinking about that through the lens of how do we bring some of that to the full-time employee. I want to shift gears and talk about how do we take that into consideration for organizations to work successfully with contractors, okay?

Tamika Fields: Mm-hmm.

Sarah Nicastro: One of the biggest concerns, if not the biggest concern, that companies surface when they're unsure about how to leverage a contract workforce is that they fear that brand or customer experience will not be as strong as it will with someone who, like you said, is only working with customers in that sector, who understands the intricacies of that brand, et cetera. What are your thoughts on that concern and its validity? And then let's talk a little bit about what good relationships look like and how that can be offset a bit. Sorry, I always ask multiple questions at once, so first - what are your thoughts on that concern?

Tamika Fields: Well, okay, so it is a valid concern. I don't 100% disagree, but I largely disagree because I feel like, okay, if you have a professional who's adept and at a certain level in the industry, there's a level of embedded communication skills and decorum just by virtue of being in the industry at that level. So you have to think in terms of whoever the HR person is or whoever the temp employee services person is that are bringing these people on and onboarding them, you have to present to them what it is that's needed so that they source correctly for that role. If you do that, then that concern, it's mitigated just by working with your onboarding person or the HR person or the technical recruiter that's within your company or whether you outsource that. And so, as far as that, to me that resolves that.

But of course, nothing's cookie-cutter. The representation of an ideal vision of what a company would want to get the quick turnaround of the deliverables and have all the projects on task, perhaps someone who's not... You're worried about, I guess, people being complacent and just coming in there because the high dollar last hired consultant and they just come in and do the job. Again, even if it's hot tasking, we're behind, we're trying to catch up before we lose this contract, you still have 15 minutes to an hour to onboard somebody with the proper expectations of the contract. If you've got time for people to sign NDAs and to make sure that the routing number is correct, you've got time to have them sit down and even just have a meeting like this, like, "This is our company, this is our vision. We know this is a short project, short turnaround, but you represent us at all phases and this and this. These are our mission statements. This is what we bring to the table. Our customers are used to this expectation. This is our standard operating procedures."

If you don't have time to do that, then you're probably in bigger trouble. I kid you not, that's a 15 to 45 minute moment of communication. Bring everybody in, make space for that, lay it all out, have them repeat it back to you. If you've got nothing else but add another 30 minutes to role play, and then you're done. So what have you invested? 15 minutes to an hour and a half of somebody in HR and communications time to do that with a contractor. But most people don't think that way. So it's not even the fact that they don't have the skills and resources already available, they don't think about it. They're just like, "Well, we only want people who already know, who are already working here." You've got people working there 10, 15, 13, 5 years who don't even understand the vision and the brand of the company, who could care less. That's just a fact.

And then you have people who are just like, "Hey, I'm a chameleon. I'm here for you. You pay me for the service. Part of that service is me representing you in every aspect. And then you get all of the benefit of my years of experience from all of the other companies." But, of course, I'm pitching my identity, my experience because this is what I do.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, that's a really good point. Now, to take that a step further, okay, that's really good advice, are there relationships you have where you're getting feedback on performance and/or feeling appreciated or recognized when you are providing above-average performance as an independent contractor?

Tamika Fields: I do. I don't want to sound like hubristic, but every single job that I have taken since the one that I mentioned in January, they have within the first week, if not the first day, asked me to stay permanently.

Sarah Nicastro: I was going to say, "How many times are you... "

Tamika Fields: How do you say this without sounding arrogant? But I mean, I'm not…

Sarah Nicastro: No, no, honestly, I've thought that since the beginning of the conversation. Yeah, because that's the thing, and that's why naturally I started with thinking in my mind and talking about how do companies attract, bring on board, nurture, and retain talent like you, because it is what they all want. I mean, I can absolutely see how that would be the case. The challenge though is, what are you getting from the experience of not being tethered to a particular company, and what does that mean for the future of the workforce?

I also think there are aspects of this conversation, there's company or industries that have very seasonal work. There's industries that go through big ebbs and throughs, and they need to be able to scale up and scale down. It isn't all about just that they're not providing an experience that full-time employees necessarily want.

Tamika Fields: Absolutely.

Sarah Nicastro: There are a lot of aspects that can make the use of a contract workforce be a valid option. But, I was bringing some of those points up because I talked to so many business leaders and service leaders that are really struggling with talent, that I know it is part of the challenge. In terms of best practices though, so I'm thinking about advice you can give to companies who are looking to work with contractors, so investing the time, 15 minutes to an hour and a half to really set the stage and provide clear expectations sounds like something people would think to do anyway, but I'm not shocked that it doesn't always or often happen. What does the follow-up look like? Other than people trying to just hire you in full time, do you have any thoughts for companies on how would you like to see them deliver feedback and let you know either, "Hey, you did a great job." or "Hey, we set the stage for you, and you didn't really deliver what we were looking for." or "We'd like to not necessarily bring you in full time, but we want to continue to leverage your services and that sort of thing."

What I'm thinking about, Tamika, is I did a podcast quite a long time ago with company in Australia named Foxtel that only leverages contract technicians. What they've done is almost sort of Uberized their process. They have a scorecard... and it's a very simple scorecard. It's only four things so the stages set when people start. They work with a firm that helps them with this, but it's very clear to the contract worker, "Here's what we need you to execute on." They continually get ranked, and the people that are getting the highest scores in those clearly-defined areas get the best and most frequent jobs. It's essentially, the better work they do, the more they're able to stay independent but rely on that company for the best jobs and the highest volume of work to the degree they want to accept it. And then obviously at some threshold, the people that aren't doing a good job, they just go by the wayside.

Tamika Fields: Yeah, definitely sounds Darwinian, but yes, it works. I was going to allude to that, similar to what Field Nation uses and very, like you said, Uberized or Lyfted or if you want to use those brands to reference that. The scorecard system works so long as there is, of course, quality assurance and checks and balances in there, because we're human, we're dealing with human beings, and there's subjective biases that need to be addressed. But outside of that, to me that is the ideal way because you get immediate feedback, you have the clear and present expectation, and then you have the follow up. Like you stated, I have several companies that have worked with me last year, wanted to bring me back on for seasonal work. Some things they only need you seasonal to cover when their main IT people are out. Also asking me to come on board in a similar situation.

It's not always, like you said, just the fact that they don't want you or they don't have the model set up for that. But that company in Australia, what they're doing, I think if they could incorporate that within the model of the corporate umbrella, I think that would actually help. Because some people need, I wouldn't say daily, but some people need more immediate feedback and course correction. Even the people who like to just tunnel vision, "I'm in my cube, I'm doing my thing." And again, we need them. We need the analyzers, the data people, the people who are just going to sit there and, "This is the process. I follow the process. I came in at this time, I leave." There's a place for everybody because I'm inclusivity, not exclusivity. We need everybody. We need the people who don't want to lead, and we need the leaders. We need the visionaries, and we need the people who need everything to be painted out black and white, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.

So yeah, that definitely would be the way. Like I said, I have organizations that just straight up said, "Hey, we only need independent contractors right now, but in the future if a position opens up, please... " They're very direct. Or, "This company changed their mind. We were going to hire you for this, but please go back to our website and look." A lot of companies that are IT contracting firms, they just directly say that because they also know it has to be reciprocated, and they also know what they really can't offer. "Oh yeah, we definitely want you, but we don't have the role available. At contract fell through, we don't have that." or "We want you to come back next year, but we only need you next year, 10 months from now," that type of thing. And with the understanding that, "Well, you do realize I can't just tread water for 10 months."

Sarah Nicastro: Right. Right.

Tamika Fields: "So if I'm not available at that time, it is what it is." But the relationship doesn't have to be lost because I have literally won one company three times, but I was already doing something else. But it's the same company that contracted me last year. And then they wanted me again for the actual thing that they contracted me for, but now at this point I'm already doing something else. But every single time we engage, we're solidifying the relationship. I still want to work with them. If the moon is in the southern sky and Jupiter's on its right, I will be there. But if it doesn't align, we don't have to burn that bridge just because it's not working out.

For some people having space for that to keep in their database those names and numbers, you never know, even if it's like five people, "But we really haven't worked with them and this many time years. And every time we try it doesn't work out." "Hey, but if you keep them and if they're alive and they're working and they're building their skill sets, when it does hit, you'll have them." As opposed to every single time we clear the database and forget about it. So that's just one aspect in addition to what you mentioned about the Australian company, in addition to the way field things and many other ranking systems work, but of course with the quality assurance built into it for negating inherent biases of our humanity.

Sarah Nicastro: Mm-hmm. That makes sense. Are there any other thoughts you have, advice for companies listening to this, how to create a positive working relationship with the contract workforce? Do you feel like we covered it, or is there anything else you would-

Tamika Fields: We've been pretty thorough because we hyper threaded our questions and our answers. Sorry to talk over you, but let me see. I'm reflecting, I'm reflecting on what we've said so as not to be redundant, but...

Just continue to keep an open mind as far as diversity. Talent matters based on what talent can do, not what talent looks like. In many cases, not even necessarily what they sound like. Obviously, you want to have the base level of communication. In this country, our language is English, I get it, but a lot of times people lose sight of presentation. When you're dealing with a technical industry, yes, okay, so this isn't a allocution or a... What's it called?... a finishing school. It's IT. So you got to think, at the end of the day, can this person route this network most efficiently? Can this person run these cables? Can this person actually recover this data and bring this up? If they can do that, you need to already have in place an understanding of, "We can groom and work on everything else." Because if they're spot on, if they're coachable, if they're honest, if they're timely, if they're respectable, don't let the biases of presentation take you away from hiring good talent.

That's the only thing that I could suggest. They're obviously inherent biases, but they're changing, but they're still not changing as much, because if there's 11 or 10 people in the room, there are three people who identify as female or present as female, because it wasn't like I asked, but I'm just saying. And then if you further get into the diversity beyond that, it might be me or one other person who's of the African diaspora, maybe an Asian woman, maybe a South Asian woman. I actually have to be honest, I've never worked with someone who identifies as part of the Latinx community.

Sarah Nicastro: No, that's a really good point.

Tamika Fields: Female, I mean. Sorry, I've worked with men.

Sarah Nicastro: Right. Yeah. I think that point is a really good point as well around diversity. You brought up Field Nation, so just quickly, you use the Field Nation platform.

Tamika Fields: I do.

Sarah Nicastro: How do you feel technology like theirs impacts the life of an independent contractor?

Tamika Fields: I feel like it's a game changer for people who haven't used it. I remember when I first found out about it in May of 2018, I was just like, "Wait, what?" It would've just been so helpful to know about it five years before that because that's when I came back into the IT industry after leaving because of burnout, because of lack of opportunity, because of feeling unseen and unvalued and just feeling like there's no room for me to grow because I just basically spent 20 years doing the same thing. And even the fact that I could just leave and step right back in proved that, you know what I'm saying?

Sarah Nicastro: Mm-hmm.

Tamika Fields: Because it wasn't like I did some certification course or changed anything. I just stopped and I just started back. So for me, Field Nation, it opened the door for me to offer all the skill sets that I'd already had, all the ones that I'd learned doing augmenting and doing other things in the interim when I left the field briefly, that weren't being utilized in full-time employment because you get stuck in these niche roles. It just gave me greater pride in my work because I knew that I was like, "You're getting rated in real time. These are the expectations that you got to deliver." You don't have till the end of the week or those things where people like, I don't want to say fudge, but they hide in the gaps of the corporate workweek. I was just like, "You're paying me while I'm here to do the job. If I get the job done in two hours, but you're paying me for six, I'm going to tell you that I'm done in two hours." Some people don't do that.

I'm just like, "I'm done. Now, what else is it that you need me to do? If not, I'm leaving because I don't need the money that way. I want to be efficient. I want to get it done. I want to show you that, yes, if you hire the right people, this job that you keep paying people eight to 10 hours to do, it really only takes four to six." But have the expectation because Murphy's Law is real, and that is the God that I serve, but outside of that, stop spinning your wheels and wasting money. To be able to say that and not feel like you're going to get a low rating or get shunned in the coffee break room or just even that freedom to say, "Hey, quality assurance points, things that you can improve, ways that you can save money," and not feel like you're going to get some type of repercussion after, that was enough for me. But it just gave me a greater way that I could leverage my assets, not get stuck in each position more than anything, and that is what the platform offered me.

Sarah Nicastro: I'll link to Field Nation in the comments or the show notes for this. For people that aren't aware, it is IT specific, but it's a platform that allows companies to hire contract workers, allows contract workers to find open jobs, and then also to your point, Tamika, provides that real time feedback. Last question, what are your thoughts on how the talent space and the working environment will change over the next one to three years?

Tamika Fields: Well, if we don't get stuck laughing at all of what we call soft quitting individuals and the people who are just starting their own companies, I encourage more people to do that because it will just create what I call the catalyst for change that the industry's plural need. Because to me, IT is ubiquitous, and it's a part of all industries as a collective global market of companies and organizations. That was part of one of the reasons why I took it as a creative because people always talk about artists and creatives having the feast or famine or starving in order to exist. I'm just like, "Or I could do something that I'm already naturally inclined at doing because of my functional, obsessive engineering monk-like mind and have something that is permanent. I don't have an electrician degree because they also are always going to be here until the grid goes down or World War III, God forbid.

But I just hope to see continued diversity, inclusion regarding the challenges of the landscape. I feel like in a modern world, in a modern information technology field, tech work is the way, but also you can have onboarded W-2s longstanding relationships with field technicians that are part of your organization. I feel like the available independent contracting opportunities in addition to the full time employment opportunities, they're going to continue. As you say, the need is there. It's just that if we keep open dialogue with the diverse sums of experience that are being leveraged, it allows capable talent and intelligent technicians to just contribute in a way that's more sustainable in the long run. It just allows individual contributors like myself to make a greater impact. And now, I think that'll just make us all stronger than any one individual part of the whole.

And even that, it just makes everything run more efficiently because you have all these resources from the contractors, from the longstanding workers, from the people that are floating in seasonally. Whether they're using a platform or not, it just makes the information technology sector stronger. It makes us scale and evolve more exponentially to where all of the different organizations that uses this technology and uses these resources can apply it more broadly to what needs to be done and make those changes that you talk about from the archaic dinosaur model to the... If you want people to stop soft quitting, if you want the burnout to end, if you want people to stop phoning it in and telling you that they're busy, but they're never really doing anything or stringing out a project that they literally could have done over their lunch break just to get... like, "Hey, I need this." You know how it goes. That's how you resolve that, in one of the many ways. Because be open to change. Be open to growth. Keep the dialogue flowing.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, very good input. Thank you, Tamika. I appreciate you coming. I really enjoyed speaking with you. I think your perspective is one that is really helpful for folks to understand and think more about. Thank you for giving me some of your time.

Tamika Fields: Thank you so much, Sarah. Thank everyone for listening. All the companies or organizations, keep an open in mind to all the human beings who believe in technology, who believe in science, who believe in communication. Stay curious, be proactive, and just be representative of what you uniquely bring to the table in every collaboration.

Sarah Nicastro: I love it. You can find more by visiting us at futureoffieldservice.com. You can also find us on LinkedIn and Twitter, @thefutureoffs. 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

This week’s podcast is a really interesting one – I am talking firsthand with an IT service technician who is an independent contractor. There’s so much discussion and debate around what the service workforce should look like and how best to leverage W2 and/or 1099 workers to meet the needs of each company’s demands, but I’d never sat down with an independent contractor to ask some of the questions I believe our audience would want to understand:

What, if anything, would make you consider going back to a W2 role?
The #1 concern I hear about contract workers is protecting the employee experience – is this valid?
What steps do companies take in working with you that make your relationship with them most successful?

Tamika Fields, the independent contractor who specializes in IT services, happily answered those questions and more – giving her honest and thoughtful input. To hear all her answers and the deeper discussions we got into, you’ll have to tune in on Wednesday. But there are a few points that I want to discuss a bit here.

We Aren’t Giving Our W2 Workers What They Want

Recruiting and hiring full-time technicians is a major challenge across industries and geographies today. And while there are several reasons for this, it’s important to stay focused on how to control what you can to get the best results possible given all circumstances. With that said, I think the issue is that companies know the needs and desires of today’s workforce are different than those of the incumbent workers, but many (probably most) aren’t taking action to change to better deliver today’s wants.

I asked Tamika, is there anything that would entice you to go back to a W2 role?

She said, “I know there are some things that are beneficial when you have W2 employment, but the only thing that really would make me reconsider a full time employment role would be if I was in a position where the organization allowed me to have the exact same growth opportunities, flexibility, and autonomy to get the job done with an efficient manner in the standard of the white glove service that I provide irrespective of office politics, which is virtually impossible. I've only had that as an independent contractor.”

There are some key words here that stand out immediately to me, but I wanted to understand a bit better, so I asked Tamika about what some of those “office politics” feel like or prohibit.
She shares, “I find myself to be more proactive when I'm working 1099. I'm focused on the process and improvement. I do that anyway, but there's so many things that limit that in a W2 role because there's so many steps and approvals and people who don't see what's really happening and what really would change things and scale things to what they actually need. They see things on papers, it's abstracted, it's not tangible. They're not dealing with the forward-facing aspect of it, nor are they dealing with the actual infrastructure and what it is that they're doing or trying to do based on the industry that they're in.”

Tamika also identifies herself within our conversation as a creative (which I love). So, if we begin to break this down a bit, there are some core concepts that I believe many of today’s workers want that most of today’s service organizations aren’t finding ways to deliver:

Flexibility. Yes, I realize it can be challenging to provide flexibility in the sense we often think of it (work from home, flexible hours, etc.) given the need for service organizations to react adeptly to customer needs – especially so in some industries where SLAs are tight and responses urgent. However, I do believe that if companies were to force themselves to become more creative, they would find a way to delivery some flexibility.
Autonomy. Today’s workforce – OK, basically everyone – doesn’t want to be micromanaged. Sure, you are working hard to protect efficiency and to improve the CX, but you have to build trust with your employees that gives them some freedom to do what you need them to do in a way that feels right for them, because no one wants to feel they have no control over how they do their jobs.
Voice. When Tamika brings up how far away some decision makers are from what’s really happening on the frontlines, she’s emphasizing the incredible knowledge your field workers hold. By not giving them an opportunity to share what they are learning in their customer interactions – what problems or opportunities they see – or, even worse, giving them the voice to weigh in but then not listening, you are essentially saying you don’t respect the knowledge they have. Not only does this kill employee engagement, but it prohibits you from benefiting from really smart individuals who are having a higher volume of firsthand customer interactions that many others in your company (probably including you).
The ability to contribute to innovation. A creative like Tamika has keen observations, strong ideas, and a drive to implement improvements. But she doesn’t feel like in a W2 role, she’s able to contribute to change or innovation within the business because of all the “politics.” We need to work on creating a culture of creativity, collaboration, and innovation that allows those who incline toward these characteristics to have an outlet so that their ideas are channeled toward positive improvements instead of into frustration.
Empowerment. Tamika likes feeling she can take pride in what she refers to as her “white glove” service, and this is because she’s able to make it her own. When your employees feel empowered to be themselves, to bring their personality to what they do, to make (reasonable) decisions on their own, they give more of the CX you’re looking for them to give.
Growth. As Tamika says, she feels she has more growth opportunity as an independent contractor than she would in a W2 role. This is probably because most companies haven’t modernized the trajectory of their frontline roles to be in line with what many of today’s employees want – opportunity to progress. A worker who comes in with initiative and drive but is entering a system where they are expected to be at the same level of work for five, 10, 15 years likely won’t stay long. We need to evolve to providing growth opportunities within our own businesses rather than strong talent needing to go elsewhere to achieve their aspirations.

We Aren’t Giving Our 1099 Workers What They Need

Ok, so we can take from Tamika’s input some valuable perspective about why a worker who is often approached to take a full-time role after she provides contract service emphatically says, “No, thank you.” But what did Tamika share about what we can do better in working with independent contractors?

We discussed a few different points, but the one I’ll share here is around the #1 concern companies have when deciding to use contract technicians: that it will negatively impact CX. I asked Tamika her thoughts on whether this concern is valid.

“We are the unintentional mascots for any organization,” she says. “I've worked for hospitals, nonprofits, schools, government agencies, contracts, subcontracts, security teams. You name it, I've done it. And you are the person the customer remembers, you are the face, so yes, it is a valid concern.”

While she agrees it is a valid concern, she goes on to explain that it is one that really isn’t too hard to address – companies simply don’t often do the work. We aren’t investing the effort to set our contract workers up for success.

“If you have a professional who's adept and at a certain level in the industry, there's a level of embedded communication skills and decorum just by virtue of being in the industry at that level,” she explains. “So, then you have to think in terms of whoever the HR person is or whoever the temp employee services person is that are bringing these people on and onboarding them. Are you sharing the expectations? If you have time for people to sign NDAs, you have time to have them sit down and even just have a meeting, like, "This is our company, this is our vision. We know this is a short project, short turnaround, but you represent us at all phases, and these are our mission statements. This is what we bring to the table. Our customers are used to this expectation. This is our standard operating procedures."

It sounds simple, right? According to Tamika, it is a simple step often overlooked or skipped. “It’s a 15-to-45-minute moment of communication. Bring everybody in, make space for that, lay it all out, have them repeat it back to you. Maybe add another 30 minutes to role play, and then you're done,” she says. “So, what have you invested? Maybe an hour and a half of somebody in HR and communications time to do that with a contractor. But most people don't think that way. It's not even the fact that they don't have the skills and resources available, they don't think about it. They're just like, ‘Well, we only want people who already know, who are already working here.’ You've got people working there 10, 15, 13 years who don't even understand the vision and the brand of the company, who could care less. That's just a fact.”

In a session from the London Live Tour, Sarah talks with Mike Gosling, IT Service Platforms Manager at Cubic Transportation Systems about the company’s successful transition to outcomes-based service with the help of AI. Mike shares key aspects of the transformation, including the importance of change management, tips for success with AI-based tools, and the role of continuous improvement.

Sarah Nicastro: So next up, I'm excited to be joined by my friend Mike Gosling, who is the IT service platforms manager at Cubic Transportation Systems, and we're going to talk a bit about outcomes based service. So Mike is essentially offering a different perspective on the path to advanced services, and we're going to talk a little bit about what his journey has looked like, what some of the learnings are, what is coming next, etc. So before we dig in, Mike, tell folks a little bit about yourself and about Cubic.

Mike Gosling: Okay. So good morning, everyone. I started many years ago as an electronics engineer in a computing company working right down to mainframe PCBs and things like that. They did their forecasting in teacups, which meant that they collapsed and burned pretty quickly and I was made redundant. Joined Cubic, they weren't call Cubic then, and I was an engineer, working electronics engineer and they started introducing business systems into the company. One day I went into the manager of the IT team and said that I can do better than that because I thought they weren't doing very well. So I did, and he said, "Right, have a go."

Sarah Nicastro: I like that confidence.

Mike Gosling: Years of being rugby captains and things. Yeah, big personality sorry about that, guys. Anyway, joined the team and then very quickly because of my field service experience and things like that. And because I'd also been out in the field by the way, troubleshooting out in the field and things like that because they'd put me in charge of the full service systems. Now, very interesting discussions that we've had early on today. Very interesting. And we are now outcomes and I'll get to that, but I don't think we nec... Oh by the way, sorry. Cubic.

Who remembers a London prior to Oyster Card? Yeah, it was pretty rubbish wasn't it? Because we are the people that basically do Oyster Card. We are the people that do all of the transport for London and most of the UK travel infrastructure. We do it all over the world. We're world leaders. So if you go to Sydney, we are there. Manhattan, we're all over the world. We are the European hub, but we do influence the rest of the world. My little team punches quite highly in the business, so I'm proud of the team. Rob's here, oh just heard me say that now he's going to want to pay raise anyway.

So yeah, Oyster card. So now Cubic, one of the couple of the things about Oyster, I'm sorry Cubic is that we have two mantras, we've got many strategies, but two mantras that are very important to us. Winning the customer obsession and innovation and our journey to outcome based. Those were the pillars that got us there. And by following those, we then fell into outcome based. And I'll explain how. When we first got the contract years ago, with Transport for London, who's our biggest customer. Transport for London, is an amazing customer to work for as well as the others. We've got other amazing customers in the rest of the UK. But Transport for London are amazing because London is an amazing city. It's the world leader and they want to be the best. Manhattan, Oh no, no, London's better. Sydney, no London's better. So they drove us to make sure that our technologies were up to date as good as possible for the infrastructure that they're in.

We wanted to innovate and win the customer. So as TFL were going on the journey of trying to be the best city and having things like the Olympics where their travel infrastructure was put under huge strain and stresses and the whole world and the Daily Mail was ready to write the horrible headlines, traffic congestion in London spores Olympics. It never happened. It never happened because the entire infrastructure was that TFL put into place was magnificent, and we paid a part of that innovation. Well okay, we want to start using smart cards or oyster cards. Okay, well how do you do that? Off you go Cubic, could you do that? We'd like to do it, you want to do it? Let's do it together. You plug readers in, you start taking data off readers. So you build the back office infrastructure. So you have back office IT services to manage those and then all of a sudden it's kind of like, hold on, we can now start taking that data as well and using it to log incidents because there's loads of information on that.

And then that day can be backfed into engineering because we can improve the product. Brilliant. So everything's connected and then they say now we want to go cards, card payments. Yeah, card payments. So we have to then again do better integration and better tokenization and go through PCI compliance and all this other stuff becoming more IT services, more back office services. And then we introduce, because now they've got cat cables and things like that, we can introduce better PCs and control boards and things inside them. We can also start monitoring. And so this innovation between ourselves and transportation for London and other companies, all of a sudden you go to bed one day quite proud of the Olympics going well and all this and you wake up next day and we're an IT services company.

We're no longer a company that sells machines; we supply IT services to Transport for London, and Transport for London in the last rebid recognized that and came back and said, "Okay guys, now that everything's in place, your contract is no longer, we want 20 gates here and break and fix" is now you are going to supply hours of retail and hours of validation at stations and on buses and you're going to supply hours of back office system support for your IT services and you're going to supply hours of retail support for the retail terminals. And how you do that is entirely up to you because that's it. The outcome is those hours and you're going to take all the risk of that and you'll take the revenue because we all want money. But you're going to have to do that. Now from my team, how are we innovating? Well, we'd already started to try and be more efficient in the way... By the way, if you want to ask a question at some point, just jump in. But

Sarah Nicastro: All right, I'll just…

Mike Gosling: You want to hear a story? I can tell a story. We wanted to be more efficient the way we operated. So we had all these engineers all over the place and we wanted to grow the business because to grow the business all over the UK, we didn't want to just throw engineers at it. And one of the dangers about outcome based is everyone talks about Rolls-Royce, you talk about Rolls-Royce, it's fantastic hours of air. Well it's same for us. If we wanted things to be working for 20 hours a day when the service is open or 24, let's just plant an engineer there all day long. And then the moment it fixes, press the button, it goes again. The moment it fixes tweak that it's back again. Well that's just totally inefficient. We'd been starting to use tools, dynamic scheduling tools to make sure that our engineers are more efficient the way they move around the business.

Huge change in the way they operated. They were no longer being governed by someone phoning up and saying, "Yeah, can you pop down to Waterloo? There's a couple of gates broken down there, do them in your own time and call us when you finish." And the guy's saying, "Oh actually there's a cafe at Seven Sisters. Do you mind if I can pop up there first?" "Oh yeah, actually there is a job there. Go there. Yeah, don't worry about the Waterloo." That's just totally inefficient. So we had dynamic scheduling tools come in. We had mobile comms come in because we were starting... If you are getting enriched data from your machines to engineering looking at. You want enriched data from your engineers to how they fix that data. And voice interface is the single worst thing in entire world. And if you ever go down mobile comms, which some of you always do, don't narrative, tiny bit of narrative because otherwise exploited and you'll get rubbish.

Anyway, we were building that to become more efficient. We were building that to become more the way that we operated. And it was a hard change. We can talk about that if want to later on, but there was a hard change. So all of a sudden we wake up one morning, our equipment's monitoring itself, we're getting all this data in. Our engineers are efficiently being scheduled around the system and we are using mobile comms and it's all fantastic. And then all of a sudden TFL said "Right now we're becoming outcome services." And literally go from the L contract starts tomorrow, you've got three months until the new contract starts and that's the way it is. Maybe we can crowbar some of the stages in organically in those four stages, but basically we were innovating to suit our own needs and then bang off you go and start exploiting.

And we did. We started exploiting and the transition to it was absolutely fantastic because it was almost like, "Oh that's what we... Yeah you're right. This makes more sense now." And there are certain things that you start to do. So when you think of a walkway now everyone says, "Oh you said a walkway." No, that triggers brooms. That walkway is just something that collects validation and as long as it does that for 20 hours a day, we're happy, and we can change every part of that if we need overnight to achieve our... And we make much more use of parts. I know Rolls-Royce do it. I have friends who work for the airports. They steal from Peter to feed Paul to keep that plane in the air. We do very much the same because it's about those hours. So we totally change the way that our food service operation works, our logistics operation and all this data coming in that we got as well we're able to back feed into our engineering and therefore improve the IT services.

They improve the outcome, they improve reliability. So our journey was kind of an organic win the customer and innovate. And then because everything was in place, the customer says, "Well we want..." Oh by the way, I want, sorry before we'll let you a second.

Sarah Nicastro: It's fine. No pressure. Take your time.

Mike Gosling: TFL, they had a mindset themselves few years ago and I apologize if this goes out and someone from TFL sees this, I hope they'll agree what I'm saying is true. Should be because I've spoken to the main people but they want to treat every single person as valued patrons of the service because people come from the whole world round here, fella, and they want the experience of integrating with the transport situation to be exactly the same for everyone.

And what that means is that if someone boards a bus out in Gravesend or someone gets trained in Waterloo or someone gets on Ongar or someone... The experience should be exactly the same. And that's why they wanted outcome. Because it wasn't just, if it was break fix to us, we weren't worry about Ongar. That doesn't care to us. We'd make sure Victoria's Waterloo is always working because there's a million people a day. No, they wanted exactly the same level of service for every patron because they wanted to be world class London. And that's important. And because of that, when we setting up our systems and our contracts, there is a temptation, an old mindset, it's an old engineering thing. Look, there's a million people going through Waterloo every day. Get yourself down there, get down there, get down there. Come on Ongar, don't worry about it.

Three people and the dog, don't worry about it. No actually the penalties are exactly the same for that station as they are for that station. If we lose hours on that, they are as punitive as they are at Waterloo. Final thing, that means that the outcome is, although the outcome's the same, we give 20 hours of retail per day per device or validation per device at some of the stations because of the strange dynamics of some of the stations, be it access, be it certification, be it all sorts of things. The field service underneath that is totally different. It's almost like the little legs go in because my name's Gosling called I'm called Goose. Everyone's called Goose. So the little legs on a goose. Anyway, everyone thinks that it's like standard service to maintain that we've utilized the scheduling tools and we utilize the dynamic, the tools, we've utilized those business rules to identify these unique circumstances to make sure that we do maintain that level of service and all that outcome different from others.

And the way we use our engineers, the way we use our logistics, the way we have our access and certification and tools and skills there are many differences involved in that. They're pretty much all automated. But the result is that TFL you are to supply X amount of hours of retail, X amount of hours of validation and X amount of hours of back office support. And if you actually look at our schedules now, they're called LU services, they're called rail services, back office services, service transport services and retail services. Because we are not selling gates anymore. So that was a long introduction, sorry about that.

Sarah Nicastro: It's okay. All right. So that's Mike, that's everyone. So there's a couple things I want to comment on. So again, going back to the aha moments we talked about earlier, that can kind of spark this journey for Cubic, it was very clear because Transport for London with their objective of providing a high level of consistent customer experience across their whole system came to Cubic and essentially demanded, if you are going to be our partner then we want X percent uptime across the board. So figure that out.

Mike Gosling: And by the way, it's up in the near a hundred percent by the way. Yeah, it's not 60; its way up there.

Sarah Nicastro: I was going to say 96 or something.

Mike Gosling: No, it's much higher than that.

Sarah Nicastro: And so that put Cubic in a position of sorting it out and sorting it out quite quickly. And Mike and I have had a relationship over the past number of years and so we've talked about their journey quite a few times and one of the things that we just talked about, recently, is the fact that it really lended itself to them needing to be quite agile because it had to happen fast. They needed to act quickly and learn on their feet and get accustomed to that way of operating and then go back and refine. So the idea of, can we provide outcomes? Can we guarantee uptime as a minimum viable product? We need to do it no matter what. Then can we go back and reflect on, here's how we're doing it, here's how we can refine how we're doing it these things. And so there's some different learnings that come through doing it that way.

Mike Gosling: My team that I had that manage these services, that manage these because I didn't say that by the way. My team is responsible for the moment an alert appears on any device, be it a reader, be it an LCP, be it the back office. That alert becomes my property because we monitor it. We're monitoring the hundreds of thousands of bits of kit in the system in real time.

We then transform that. We decide whether or not it's an incident that gets logged as a ticket, which becomes a dashboard, which becomes a service report, which automatically sends engineers the mobile comms to all that happens automatically. I own all of that and that team, we use scrum ban process, we're trying to go to deliver when ready. But at the moment we have... We're not really sprints anymore. We've sort of got rid of sprints. We use the pull method from the scrum ban and that means we're very agile, which means that we can literally, the customer can come to us and say, we want this new change made. And if the timing's right it can be delivered in a number of weeks, days even sort of thing. Sorry.

Sarah Nicastro: No, that's okay. All right. So what I want to do is go back and talk about some of the key aspects of this. And so one of the things you mentioned is the idea of delivering outcomes manually is just impossible. If not impossible, I would say impossible. But if not, certainly unrealistic. The cost to Cubic of trying to scale up on man manpower, even if it were feasible to do that is not going to work. So you had to really rely on some of the technological innovation you already had underway and then add to that.

Mike Gosling: We had to totally even them with the contract.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. So talk about the importance of automation and intelligence in being able to deliver outcomes and how that gives you the ability to, as you said, really be able to in real time react to whatever complexity comes up. Because to your point, no matter what happens circumstantially with the workforce, with the technology, with Transport for London things going down world events, etc., you still have to deliver that uptime. And so you have to be able to react adeptly to any sort of circumstance.

Mike Gosling: Yeah, this could be a long answer again, sorry. So first things first, a device fails, it comes all the way through our systems and it says no, this is not a false positive. It is actually an error. The field service management tool says no. We know empirically from our knowledge of learning because of knowledge, knowledge, knowledge that the only way that this can be resolved is sending in the field engineer. It becomes an incident, it becomes a work package that gets dropped into the dynamic scheduling PSO. PSO will automatically assign that to an engineer based on their skill, their location, their tools, their certification and the contract. That's key. We'll come back to that in a minute. The contract. That will appear automatically on the engineer's device, it'll just ping up. They'll say, "Oh we've got to go to Victoria again because I hate it."

But they've got to go anyway. They'll go, they'll do all the interaction on the device which is back feeding into the systems, which is by the way real time going onto customer dashboards. The customer can look at Victoria and drill on and say, "Oh is there an engineer on site and oh, what's he doing in that? So they can see all that in real time, which means that there's no need for loads of comms between the customer. They're almost embedded in our service room if you like. The engineer can resolve that issue, leave it, the dashboard's updated the job out done. The only human interaction with that entire job is engineer. No one else has touched it. That is where the strength comes in. 80% of the heavy lifting is done on those sort of simple jobs. The system set up those rules I said about are to manage those 80% of heavy lifting and to utilize the contract knowledge, the skill knowledge, the tool knowledge, etc, then you get accept management on top of it.

So we have exception managers who spot those things that go on and that might be different, there might be real world situations, there might be, let's horrible thing to say, but there might be a blue light situation that needs some things. They can then overrule it and then start moving jobs around that they need to with that real world situation. The next thing is you understand your contracts because it sounds like it's, as I said to you earlier, okay the outcome is just 20 hours of per device of retail scale that to a hundred gates, etc., etc. When actual fact, as I said you before every place has their different dynamics and certification and access and sending someone nine o'clock in the morning to fix a walkway at Victoria, you're going to get trashed by that. And also there are other little things.

If for example if we consume in hours and then we get more than a certain amount go out, not only are we losing downtime and we are not fulfilling the outcome, we're actually a degraded service. So we get penalized again. So our contract, there's 115 SLAs or something. So really, really, really understanding the contract, not just think, "Yeah, I know the contract," really understanding it and how each interacts with that one and how each bullies that one and how if you set it up to do that one, you're going to suffer on that one and all that. And because we've taken the risk on we, again, I might get told for saying this, we have a slightly different view of it maybe to the customer sometimes because they are engineers and there are people and there are concerns humans, every two engineers, different people and different concerns and different things.

So they have to be treated differently. So we then set the system up to suit those, the required skills, that required tools, that required knowledge, all those sort of things so that the 80% of the jobs can be dealt with that. There are a lot of challenges understanding the contracts. One of them, we really put a lot of effort in front end to understand the contracts to the nth degree and how that one bullied that one. And also, by the way, I forgot to mention these sound engineers work on other customers as well as TFL, so not bullying other customers as well. And they've got a different regime because some of them are still break fix, they're still buying a gate. We are truly outcoming our biggest customer. And so not being bullinosed. So that was one challenge. The other challenge is people, because when you've got a kind of a voice and the people like that, you build up friendships, you get this, "Oh can I leave early today?" "Yeah." "I don't want to go to Kings Cross. I hate going Kings Cross." "Okay I'll never send you there again." That sort of thing. So you have to work through those. You got to get those people problems to manage those people. And let's base it, we're all here because field service, we would be lost without the brilliant engineers out in the field. They are really the bread and butter. And it would be great if more of them came here actually. Maybe if customers could be more encouraged to people real world it here so that they could have an understanding of what we are trying to do. And then we could listen to them because we all think, "Hey, what they got to do is go and fix that gate and then it'll turn up," and say right. Two things about it. One, the station supervisor at that place is really strappy and won't let you warn at this time.

Two, there's a shelf that means it's really difficult to get your body in, three and these are the real world scenarios that we have to take into account. So learning that, learning that. And the final thing is the technology side of it, is the taking that data and making meaningful use of that data, understanding is that really a system? Is that really alert? We do something which I don't think I've ever heard anyone else do. We log self-resolve incidents. We actually, an alert might occur and clear itself, but we actually log it as a valid incident and it looks just a normal incident log. It's totally cleared itself.

Take full downtime for it. We aggregate them, we are so transparent to the customer, we can go to them and say, these are all your incidents including the ones that killed themselves and the downtime and what it was and everything like that. So understanding how your incidents relate to each other and how to failure them and all that. So it's a really interesting journey. But we'd already started doing that as I say. And then when the customer came it was like, now let’s proper naval gaze at those challenges and really understand the contract, the people. Yeah

Sarah Nicastro: All right, so the first thing I want to dig into a bit is talking about the technology a little bit further and here's how. So Cubic happens to be an IFS customer and uses both field service management, which is the solution that the ticketing would go through and that the technicians interface with as well as the dynamic scheduling, which is referred to as planning and scheduling optimization or PSO for short. Now PSO is an automated scheduling tool that uses AI and essentially is self-learning. And so one of the most impactful conversations I've had with Mike is around his and his team's learnings of what it really takes to make use of an automated tool of that type and meaning, it is powerful but only if you trust it to do its job. And so for Cubic, what that has meant is to your point, understanding first and foremost the contractual obligations for uptime to Transport for London and making sure that the system prioritizes those, but then also takes into account all of these other things, the technician skills, inventory, locations, events, other customer jobs, etc.

And so what Mike is saying is that through the work that they've done with PSO, 80% of their jobs are done in a completely automated fashion. Meaning the ticket comes in, the job is dispatched to the technician, completed by the technician, closed by the technician without anyone other than the technician interfacing at all. The other 20% are where he's saying the exception managers have to put some sort of manual effort into doing some of that work. Now that's a really impressive feat to be at that point, but what it took for you was setting your success criteria and sticking to them while you let the system do its learning without acting on the human instinct to intervene, right? Because that's what they were used to doing. So can you talk a little bit about that part?

Mike Gosling: Well, yeah, you probably noticed that I've got a fairly big personality and that I'm not easily swayed.

Sarah Nicastro: The thing I like about you.

Mike Gosling: So when we went live the first day with our turning the PSO on, we've talked about understanding the SLAs and the skills and the people and all that. I absolutely made sure that no one played with the system. We'd put a lot of effort into understanding how the jobs with the contracts were SLAs, they needed the skills, etc. And it was absolutely "Now guys, you have to leave it alone because it will only work 80% of the time if it's allowed to work 80% of the time." And if you start saying, "Oh I disagree with that," and moving, it will rearrange the whole world around it and you will not get a true figure. I'll come back to data later because data for me is, that's the next big thing is using machine learning to back feed into engineering and stuff. But anyway, so we were pretty strong and mandated on that.

We would put in these continuous improvement steps and we would have, the first one would be one week and then one week and then it would go to three and then two. And if anyone spots anything, save the plan, then write down very clearly in language that was not ambiguous, it had to be understood because it wasn't just me that needed to convincing, it was the steering group, which someone talked about earlier about the leaders, man over there, your leaders, service leaders are, sometimes they're in their ivory tower, they've climbed up and a lot of them are out of touch maybe. So, you got to convince those people as well. So you literally do it and they might will moan and they will complain and they will, "Oh no, look this, no, there's no way they'll do that job first before that one" and look okay, we've got it wrong, but let's leave it for now because maybe it's something else that's happening.

Take that data and then literally analyze its nth degree. Think about it, learn about it, learn from the data, understand how it is. Now we got the SLA wrong, the first week clearly there was one actually that we got completely wrong and it was sticking out like a sore thumb. We still resisted the temptation to mess around with it because we had, I couldn't change my own goal post. I said we were going to leave it one week, we had to, it was clearly obvious it was wrong, but no, it had to stay there the whole week. Then you model, then you implement, you go through everyone. Those continuous improvement, I'm not going to go through that process. After a while all of a sudden. "Any complaints today?" "No." "Any complaints today?" "No," actually it's quite like that and excuse me. Yeah, can I change that note? You can't change the words and all of a sudden it just literally fell off a cliff.

You know, had loads of noise, loads of noise, fell off a cliff. And then it was a similar story, with our starting to meet these service outcomes, we... Oh, I forgot to mention, when we introduce these tools, we collaborated with our customer to say, "by the way, we are going to introduce a tool that the long term's going to benefit you and us. You are going to love it as much as we are going to love it. But there might be a bit of a hit to start with." And of course they were, "Ah, you can't do that." Then when they realized there was a potential hit, fine, you work through it. And this is why working with a collaborative customer, it's fantastic. All customers, but I should say brilliant, we took that hit and then the same time as all the thing, it literally bang, it fell off and we started to see a huge improvements in our SLA, huge improvements where we were and enabled us to actually grow the business over a number of years without having to take any extra engineers on.

Because we had everyone that says when you introduce these tools, "Oh we don't have enough engineers, we need more engineers. Throw engineers at it." No, actually it turns out we had probably in less than we needed to start with and able to grow the business. Either don't have enough hours in the day, put the jobs into the schedule, what's all that there? That's all spare hours, it's all there. You can see it. So yeah, so it was quite interesting that being firm and I think that's partly why it was brought in very quickly by these senior managers as being a critical business tool and is now seen as a critical business tool. And in fact, again, I'm conscious, a couple of times I've given demonstrations on behalf of TFL to other transport authorities around the world because TFLs say, "Look at this, this is the sort of tools our people are using and it's wonderful how they use it."

So they're recognizing the value of it as well. So yeah, that was one of the things is hold your nerve. The three tips I will give is one understands your SLAs to the nth degree really go in and just don't think them know them and how they bully each other. Two is work with your resources, manage the resources. It's going to be horrible. There's going to be a lot of people that really are going to fight and complain and there are key influences. They might not necessarily be the best resources, but they're the ones that shout loudest in the pub in the corner at night when they're moaning, invite them into discussion. Let them have their say. If you get two gems out of them that you are able to implement, they'll recognize that and they'll sing them from the rooftops and they'll influence the staff.

I know it's a horrible thing to say, but sometimes this is how you win people over and if something they do suggest is not necessarily right, don't rubbish them. Give them the honest reason why it's not right and they'll go away hopefully respecting you and you'll have better respect from them and then take that advice. So understand your SLAs, understand the people and hold your nerve. Do not mess around with the system, it'll fight back.

Sarah Nicastro: So I think this is really important because at the end of the day to be able to deliver outcomes the way you are, you have to rely on technology. We've established that when we talked earlier...

Mike Gosling: And that's end to end. That is literally from... That is full IT services right the way up to the mobile comms. It all contributes to being able to do that.

Sarah Nicastro: And like we talked about earlier with James, ultimately when an organization can move to a Servitiization model, the more you can leverage tools like this to improve your efficiency, the greater your revenue is going to be, right? But time and time again, what we see is organizations who are hell bent on investing in automation but don't realize that they're not actually wanting to automate, they're wanting sophisticated technology but they still want to follow the old processes and have that manual interaction and you can't have both. So if you're going to try to leverage the power of an automated tool, you have to understand and be willing to commit to the process of getting it working the way it can.

Mike Gosling: And we are lucky that one of our key sponsors is on the board who absolutely, who lives by those two mantras winning the customer and innovate. And because he's on the board and he innovates and he's a very, very respected person and he's our assistant sponsor. He literally lives that and tells that. Rob will tell you, he's sitting at the back, we do have a couple of people still who've been at the company many years who still given the opportunity one Saturday morning when none of the managers there will start, "Yeah, I'll give you that job. No problem." And then you come in and go, "What the hell happened on Saturday?" But unfortunately this is the facts of life is that you can't... It's about managing those things. But yeah it is going to be committing to it and truly committing to it and living it and also plugging those continuous improvements in continuous to innovate.

I was saying about data, I'll come back to data because one of the things that I'm really keen to do now that we're getting all this data from stuff and is to really start, I was talking to someone earlier, we're starting to look at, I call it collision data, but basically if you look at say a device starts to fail, and I have done this in the past, I gave an example earlier; if you look at the ride device is failing, rather than fix the device, start looking at what's supporting that device.

And we found that certain things were happening at the same time, well hang on, 80% of the time that occurs that's failing, right? Well can you not engineeringly fix that rather than try to fix that, to cope with that and using that to make everything more efficient from an engineering point of view so that you are streamlining things so you're not building code on code on that to fix rubbish there. And that's something that we've started to do and we're really keen to explore it when we've got all this data because if you can do that, that's going to be in service longer, which means that we retain our targets, which we make more profit. So that's an area that I'm moving into.

Sarah Nicastro: And so going back to the topic of change management, it's a really important topic. I always say it's one of the topics I get most frustrated by because everyone talks about how important it is but then continually de-emphasizes, deprioritizes actually doing it. And that is such a big problem. You gave a couple examples of the very human side of this. So technicians used to be able to like, "Hey we have this thing at this station, can you go fix it?" "Yeah sure, I'll let you know when I'm done." They stop and grab a coffee, they do this or that.

And now they're far more structured, it's far more regimented and it's the right thing to do but that doesn't make it not challenging for them as individuals, right? And so I think it is an important aspect of these journeys. And so you mentioned, obviously, I like the point about looking for the biggest naysayers and try and get your arms around why are they frustrated, how are they frustrated and dealing with that head on. I think a lot of times we think if we ignore a problem long enough it will go away and that's usually not the case.

Mike Gosling: Invite them into the discussion.

Sarah Nicastro: Any other tips or advice when it comes to change management?

Mike Gosling: Well, it's other little things as well by the way, because you can sell the benefits of it because previously when it was all very much ad hoc, you'd end up with bizarre... When an exception would happen and the only resource available who's free, he may end up getting sent right across the other side of town at the end of his shift and then he'll moan about the fact that he's got, he's spending two hours of his own time traveling back to his home base. Well we set the system up to, it knows where they start and it knows where they end. So if they want to start at one place, maybe they end somewhere else, I don't know, maybe they've got a judo lesson or a mistress or something, I don't know, something like that. But wherever it is, the system doesn't care, we'll set them so that it will actually actively try to schedule them back to that place.

So the result is if they allow the system to do the 80%, they're going to end up fairly close to where they are going, which is a massive benefit to a lot of them. The other thing about it is also what was happening before is that when you were just ad hoc exception managers, there'd be a number of engineers that got lumped with all the rubbish jobs and all the do that and they're going, "Oh why is always me that's doing this?" This system's agnostic to that. As long as they've got the skills so they get a better variety of jobs, they get a better profile of jobs, they have more life, more work enjoyment and that sort of stuff because they're not the ones that are always dumped on to do the stuff because they're the ones that complain, "Can you go and do that job?" "No, I don't want to do that." "Oh sorry I know it's you again." So they get a better scope of jobs, they get a better things. And the final thing is that when, one of the frustrating thing, engineers actually like to do a really good job. I know that sounds strange but they actually do. That doesn't sound strange. What I'm saying is that we always, some people think of engineers like want to leave early and do that and I've portrayed them, they're brilliant. They are the bread and butter and when you give them a system where it's just go and do this job and do it and you're getting jobs, they're more empowered actually to do a what's the... They know that they're not going to have another phone call saying do this, where are you? What you doing? There's no kind of external pressure put on the mini board. They are literally just empowered to go and do a great job. Does that make sense? They got tools to do it.

Sarah Nicastro: I think it's a really good clarification which is if you are investing in the right technology and you're doing it in the right way, it should be something that is helpful to them. If you're hearing a lot of complaining, it's probably, it could be partially because something is not working the way you intended it to, right?

Mike Gosling: Right. Yeah, exactly. So they no longer get the continual, "Where are you? Are you going to be finishing the next? There's a job at so and so." It's literally, I mean we tried to introduce something into the system to give them an awareness that it was busy whereby we sort of changed the hue on the colors so that they were aware that things, it never really worked. Because in actual fact they just chug through the jobs and they get and do a great job. So you sold them a number of benefits about lifestyle, being back at home, being more able to do a variety of work and stuff like that. And also if you want a better variety of jobs, get an extra skill because the system does it by skill, bang the skill and then away it goes, it'll just automatically the next day you might get one of those jobs.

So there were that, that's some of the methods we used as well as introducing some of the people in and stuff like that. Yeah. Oh another thing is that learn, there are certain things that I said to you earlier, two assets, the same thing. They've both got to be up the exact same amount of time. As I said the outcome is so many hours, so many hours. But the way that they're environmental conditions, one of them might be strategically important for us for reasons that I can't go into, others might be rubbish, but we don't know some of those, the engineers know some of those. So we learn from the engineers those things and because we then bolt them automatically into the processes and the rules and the business rules in their FSM and in PSO the engineers don't have to suffer the pain that they were suffering because just get there. The system now takes those into account and kind of works around them.

Sarah Nicastro: Democratizing some of the knowledge that prior was only in a certain technician's brain.

Mike Gosling: Yes, yes, yes. Thank you. I'm going to remember that. Democratizing the knowledge.

Sarah Nicastro: So one more thing I just want to talk about real quickly Mike, and this is another thing I like about you is you know mentioned earlier that your team and this tool are well regarded within the business and with good reason. But you could've gone through the initial pain and adjustment and got it working well and then just kicked back and put your feet up and you are of the mind not to do that. You're very focused on continual improvement and ongoing innovation and I think that's a very important mentality for leaders to have today because the pace of change isn't slowing down, you don't want to rest on your laurels. So talk about what that looks like for you.

Mike Gosling: What it looks like for me is in my team I'm scrum band, I'm the product owner and I'm with other things but I have pillars they fall into. Number one is our customers, external customers, winning the customer. I said that winning the customer. So that's the main pillar. So when they request something it drops into that pillar of work. Number two is our internal customers. Because if you're going to win external customers, you might as well win your internal customers. In fact, it's probably more important to win those so that you can win the external ones. So it's external customers, internal customers, then you've got your business as usual making. So checking the logs, checking the sus, this size, this thing, that sort of stuff you know are making sure that the infrastructure's working. Three then these are the two fun ones. Innovation, ideas, innovation, innovation.

I've had an idea, drop it in there, let's go that. And then the final one is continuous improvement driven innovation. And they are two very different things because continuous improvement is very often because you're looking at an issue that's occurred and then you're back feeding into. Innovation is dropping pure innovation into that cycle. There's a sixth one which is heart to mind and that's a sort of an overlay one where we want to be a wonderful team that everyone thinks is fantastic and it's just a reminder of the fact that sometimes changing the color of something has no discernible need to anything other than just the heart of minds of something. Does that make sense? And these tiny intangibles can add up to a massive thing. So if someone comes to us and says, I've always been fed up that it's red, can we change it to blue?

Sure, let's do that. So they're the pillars and we drop our work into those and when we go to the customer and say, you know, are paying us and all that, we actually say to them, I'd like a few of my releases a year to be innovation. And you might not necessarily get the full benefit of that because some of it might be to do with the way that our processes work. It might be a process innovation, it might be a sort of an internal technology innovation. But because we are more efficient, you will ultimately see it. And they very often come back said Yeah but we are paying you to deliver... Yeah. And then what happens is because you have good discussions with them, sure you can have that whole releases for your innovation, off you go, do it wherever you like. So they're the pillars and they're be dropping and that's the way we work.

Sarah Nicastro: I like it. Does anyone have a question for Mike?

Guest: Hi Mike. When Cubic changed to the hours were up time in quite a rush really?

Mike Gosling: It was, yeah.

Guest: You talked about really meticulously understanding the new contract with on your customer side. Did that change necessitate a contractual change with your engineers?

Mike Gosling: I've asked that question and I think it probably did, but I was so deep in the systems working that I've never, I could have taken that away. I don't You are probably right. It probably did. It probably did I've got your details. I think I can I take that away and get back to you? Yeah, certainly because of the recording of information, we had to go down the GDPR route and understand the PII and that may have meant that there was contractual changes to allow certain PII to be recorded and stuff like that.

But yeah, can I come back to that? Because it did totally change the way that they're working. One classic example was is that the very first day I was in the office, an engineer literally got allocated a job and the phone rang and he phoned up to complain his exact words were, "I hadn't been to F-ing Kings Cross in 10 years and I don't intend going today," because the system had, because he'd built that personal relationship with the FRC. So they had totally changed their way of working. But yeah, I'll have to find that out for you.

Guest: Nothing perhaps more of an observation than a question then what I saw were you saying is that when you put in the sort of looking after those devices at scale with the automation, what you're actually doing is taking away all the manual time that Cubic were investing in sort of booking jobs and dispatching them to using the information you learn from the field to try and engineer in improvements so they didn't fail in the first place.

Mike Gosling: I've got this, Rob was going to get really well because I say this all the time, I've invented this, it's my term I think there's no one called toast, but knocking the corners of spheres. My team hate that. What it is we've designed, there is a service or machine that creates perfect spheres and then one day it starts dropping cubes out. So a whole team jump in to knock the corners off that and turn them back into spheres. And then the end result is that we've got spheres coming out of it. I'm always saying, hold on a second, why are we knocking the corners off spheres? Why are we not fixing it up upfront? Why are we not going back to the original process? And whenever we have our innovation it's like okay guys, are we just knocking the corners of spheres here?

And they all go, oh he said it again. But it's kind of a little mantra that says no actually let's go back to why is that? Is that actually failing because that is the thing or is it because something prior to its causing. You are always here, every system, oh there's a new back office release happening tomorrow. New back office release, new back office release, new DGC release, new back office release. Back office releases nine times out of 10 will actually be, if you've got integrated solutions and your IT services and readers and things, something's going to have an impact on that, whether you like it or not. And it might be that a transaction that's coming up there to pass a payment transaction is now colliding with a new clock in the back office that's doing this. Now they've never tested it in the real world expanse.

They did limited testing because we all know testing's very expensive. So you'll do workshop testing for one week 2000 jobs, bang real world, one week 2 million jobs fails, fails, fails. And that's where I'm really keen to look at that data and that's why I call it collisions because you look at it and say let's actually look at what's happening, what alerts are happening, what time is happening. Oh look that P1 is occurring because you'll get that file transfer the exact moment it's trying to do a reboot act or something like that. Oh hang on. What about if you separated those and that sort of thing? So apps, this is the thing I'm really engaged in now is that back engineering and I'm annoying quite a few people by doing that. It's difficult because it's difficult because once you've got something working really well and everyone's profits are up and everyone's applauding it and everyone's off having big cigars in race meetings and things because all think they're fantastic, upsetting the apple cart, it's like, oh and this is where innovation is.

It's like do we really want to do that? So we are looking at tools to have machine learning and stuff like that. But the other thing is by the way, you've got to have a story. You can't just look at data for the sake of it. You've got to be solving a specific problem. For example, that reader has a P1 that occurs 20% readers four times a period. That is, and then when you are looking at the data stop, you must not stray out of that. You must not go off and start getting, oh I've noticed this, hang on. Is it having a direct responsibility of that? If not part that for something else and come back to it actually that. Because that's the thing with data, you fall into this ocean of it, everyone calls it the ocean of data and you end up swimming in a massive sea of it. So make sure you really define your story and your success criteria. The success is that you'll no longer have P1s 20% of the thing.

Guest: Yeah, it sounds a really healthy thing to do. You're actually, service organizations are good at being busy and sorting out the here and now, but you sort of looping it back and preventing a lot of it is sounds a really good thing to do.

Mike Gosling: Let's stop knocking the corners off spheres. I think there's number one called toast, isn't it? Toaster comes out burnt and everyone scrapes the burnt off to turn it back into toast. It's same sort of thing, isn't it? Yeah.

Guest: Okay. Thanks Mike.

Sarah Nicastro: Yep. All right. So guys, we're going to break now for lunch. We are going to have 45 minutes for lunch. Okay. So everything is on the back bar, it's help yourself. So please go ahead and do that. And one favor that I will ask if you can each take just a couple of minutes on this back wall in this networking area, there's a board of what's your biggest challenge. If you can write something on there, I would greatly appreciate it. Okay, so that's your homework for lunchtime, we're going to have lunch and then we'll be back for three more sessions. So we'll see you back here around 1:30. Thank you, Mike.

By Sarah Nicastro, Creator, Future of Field Service

At IFS UNLEASED in Miami a couple of weeks ago, I had the opportunity to hear from the most successful and most decorated Olympian of all time with a total of 28 medals, Michael Phelps. While I’m not a swimmer and have never followed the sport, I was very interested to hear from a household name like Michael and understand more about the person behind the achievements. His session did not disappoint!

I’ve talked often about how much I value authenticity. It’s a trait that I always aim for and appreciate when others do the same – it’s also a trait I believe is in high demand from leaders today. Michael oozed authenticity – he showed up with no false pretenses, no ego, no need to be anything but 100% himself. I respected and enjoyed that so much and believe the entire audience benefited from his willingness to be open and transparent.

As he shared stories from the span of his career, he retold experiences through a lens of self-reflection that not only illustrated how much he’s grown and evolved as a person but also made his journey relatable even for those of us who will never take part in an Olympics.

I wanted to share with you all a few of the points from Michael’s session that really resonated with me and reflect on how they relate to some of the topics that are top of mind within service today:

Whether you fail or succeed, keep right on going. Michael said, “The day after I set the World Record, I got right back in the water to train.” He didn’t take time off, whether he was working to improve or working to maintain success. This is the idea of continuous improvement, and with the pace of change in service today, we must keep on swimming – whether we have far to go or are working to maintain a competitive pace.
You get the results you deserve. “I got the results I deserved every single Olympics,” Michael said. Facing nerves at his first Olympics, he took it as a learning experience to help prepare for the next race. He discussed how you cannot expect to get the results you want if you are not willing to do what is needed to prepare – and I think this parallels the concept I wrote about here that some companies claim to want the benefits of transformation but aren’t willing to do the work it takes to achieve those benefits. Your results are reflective of your effort.
The small things matter. Michael shared a couple of stories about how much the details come into play in races as close as an Olympic swim. In one story, he discussed how his goggles filled with water during a race which made it impossible for him to see. If he’d have taken even the briefest pause to clear his goggles, he’d have lost – but with the amount of preparation he’d put in and the level of detail he included in that preparation, he knew exactly how many strokes it took him to get from one end of the pool to the next. So, without being able to see, he was able to win by counting his strokes. “The small things matter, and they show up in the most pressured situations when they matter the very most,” Michael said. “I’d spent six straight years of every single day in the pool, so I had more feel for the water than anyone and relied on that when I needed.” This is a great example of the power of details and a great reminder that sometimes the smallest things can present the biggest challenges – make sure as you plan for change or growth, you consider what small things will play a big role.
We must break the stigma around mental health. Michael asked for a show of hands from the audience of who had struggled with feelings of loneliness during the pandemic, and a sea of hands raised with mumbles of appreciation for such an honest question. He shared a personal story of being a young child struggling with ADHD who was told by a teacher he’d never amount to anything because he couldn’t sit still, and of battling thoughts of ending his life after his DUI. Michael had the strength to ask for help and to learn how to live with his ADHD, depression, an anxiety and urges others to do the same. He began the Michael Phelps Foundation to help children avoid some of the struggles he faced. “I feel lucky every day waking up to make a difference in people’s mental health,” he says. “Communication is the key to breaking the stigma around mental health.” We know that better addressing mental health in the workplace is a huge area of concern and focus – it was great to see someone with the fame of Michael speaking about the topic so openly on stage.
The importance of communication can’t be overemphasized. Michael talked about how since his career started in childhood and was maintained into adulthood, communication with his coach was imperative – what he needed at the beginning of their relationship was far different than what he needed later in his life. In any form of change, we need to remember the critical importance communication plays – it is one of those seemingly “small” things that can truly make or break the relationship you have with your employees (or customers) and their engagement and satisfaction.
Goals motivate people. “What are you directed towards? Goals motivate me,” said Phelps. “If you’re not challenging yourself, you’re cheating yourself.” It’s hard for most people to harness motivation if they don’t have something specific to direct it toward. This is important to remember in terms of considering how you motivate the different personality and skill types within your workforce – the goals they have will be different, but no one thrives in ambiguity and having something specific and agreed to work toward will help your teams achieve more.
The great do things the good won’t. “No one feels 100% every day, some days you have to fight through that,” acknowledged Michael. “But if your goal matters to you, you get up and go. The different between being great and good is that great do things the good won’t – they’re ok getting uncomfortable.” While you can’t expect all your talent to fall into the “great” category, this point does beg the question of how you will work to acknowledge, appreciate, and reward those who are willing to go above and beyond.

Bob Feiner, Senior VP of Dell Technologies Services, joins Sarah for a discussion around how the company has evolved its services approach and execution to improve the customer experience.

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 Dell has eliminated silos for an end-to-end service approach.

I'm excited to be joined today by Bob Feiner, who is the Senior VP of Dell Technologies Services. Bob, welcome to the Future of Field Service podcast.

Bob Feiner: Hey Sarah. It's great to be here. Looking forward to talking to you.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, thanks for coming on.

So I had the pleasure of seeing Bob and one of his colleagues do a presentation at the Service Council Symposium in Chicago in September. And I was struck by it for a number of reasons. I mean, first of all, you both did an excellent job presenting.

Bob Feiner: Thanks.

Sarah Nicastro: But secondly, I think the work that you've done is such a shared challenge for organizations that are really needing to better orient themselves around the customer and eliminate some of those longstanding and traditional silos. So I just felt it was so, so, so relevant to our audience, and I'm thankful that you were willing to come on and talk about that journey with our audience as well.

So the conversation starts really with trying to restructure or reorient around a common goal. So before we talk about how, can we talk about the why that is so, so important to do? Can you talk a little bit about, for you and for Dell, why was this reorganization, this restructuring so, so important?

Bob Feiner: Yeah, that's a good question. I would tell you the why is because customers don't care about our work structure. They just don't. What they care is that the outcome that they need, it happens and happens quickly and is done right the first time.

And there can be a tendency when, particularly if you look at an organization like us, we're in almost every country in the world. We support over 200 million active devices around the globe. I do millions and millions of contacts and dispatches every year. So there's a lot of complexity. And what can tend to happen is that you want to make sure that you're minimizing that complexity as much as possible. So your parts team optimizes what they do. Your field team optimizes what they do. Your contact center teams optimize what they do because they're just trying to make sure with all the complexity, they're taking any noise out of their systems.

But our customers don't care about what happens in those different pieces. They care about the outcome. And I think we just came to a realization, and some of it was triggered by things that we saw, even during the pandemic, that enabled that. And I think the response has been pretty solid. There's still always work to do because, even with the customer experience levels that we have today, considering the amount of transactions we do, we still have a lot of excursions, and we've got to minimize those as much as possible.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, I mean it's interesting, you bring up the word complexity, and it's so true. But what the customers want is seamlessness. They want the same seamless experience they can get when they, and I know this is an overused analogy, but when they request an Uber or when they order a package from Amazon. There's a reason that those examples are overused though, because that is the standard that has been set in experiences that have bled over into what customers expect in all industries and from all of their providers. And I think it's a really good point that you can't necessarily eliminate that complexity, but you do need to manage it, and you need to focus on making it as invisible as possible to the customer. And that-

Bob Feiner: That's right.

Sarah Nicastro: ... is the most important point. They want the experience, the outcome, the seamlessness. They don't, like you said, care about any of the hard work that goes into them getting that. Now, can you tell us a little bit about the historical structure and some of the ways that that prevented Dell from achieving the type of customer centricity that ultimately you want to achieve?

Bob Feiner: Yeah, I mean, I think it's no different than most organizations, particularly as you grow up into a larger entity. I think probably startup companies probably don't necessarily have the same experience because leadership in those companies are, they're wearing multiple hats. But as you become bigger, you look at, okay, how do I do my logistics better? How do I better manage my field teams, whether it's outsourcing or insourcing? How do I manage my contact centers? And I think there's just a natural tendency to structure things, okay, here's the field service team, here's the contact center team, here's the parts and logistics and parts planning teams. And that brings expertise into how to make those things better. And you kind of build all the infrastructure around how the field operates or how parts and logistics operates or how the contact centers operate.

And quite frankly, that's what we did for a long time. And there's a lot of success involved in that. But I think, again, back to the point, particularly in a world that's becoming even more and more digital every single day, and we're used to doing things on our, ordering food and our groceries and transportation and you name it on your cell phone, that digital experience is what customers expect. And they don't care about who the picker is in the grocery store, and they don't care about who the driver is. They just care that, okay, all my stuff was delivered, and it was delivered at the time you said it was going to be delivered. And I think that that's the experience that we realize we need customers to have. So that led us to, there are things you can do without necessarily a structural change, including a business management system, but I think we realize having a structural change helps enable that even more so.

Sarah Nicastro: And I think there's a couple points this makes me think of, which is an intelligent consumer, so if I think about myself, and by intelligent I just mean knowledgeable about what goes on behind the scenes. So because I host this podcast, and I have a lot of discussions about what it takes to deliver service, that's what I mean by intelligent. I may understand in the instance of a poor experience that it isn't that picker's fault or isn't this part's fault or what have you. But there's still a frustration then with the company at large of saying, come on, I mean it's 2022. You need to do better. And that's kind of where every... Or some people don't maybe have that context, and so then they're rude or frustrated with the frontline worker, and ultimately they're just doing their best to do their job.

I think the other thing it makes me think about is when we're really talking about silos, you can have immense success within a silo, but ultimately fail in delivering the customer experience you want to fill. But that can make the people in that individual function feel very defensive because they have achieved success in their view.

Now, this kind of brings me to my next point, and I love this analogy. So you talked at the event about everyone needs to win, but we need to stop focusing on winning trophies and start focusing on winning rings. And this is really the crux of the point here. So tell us a little bit about what you mean there and how that hit home.

Bob Feiner: Yeah. That's kind of become my mantra. So rings, not trophies. And I'm kind of a big sports guy-

Sarah Nicastro: I can tell.

Bob Feiner: ... in particularly team sports. So I mean, you name it, team sports especially. And when you think about any team sports, it doesn't matter what the sport is, when somebody has a great year, and they win the MVP, or if they're in baseball, they win the Cy Young or whatever it may be, they get a trophy for that. They did a great thing individually. They had a great year.

But when you win a World Championship, no matter what the sport is, the Super Bowl or the World Series or Stanley Cup, whatever it is, every member of that team gets a ring. And because they played together, and to win that championship, and you're going to have all stars on that team, you may have an MVP or two, you may have brand new players or rookies, you may have folks who quite frankly didn't make it through the season, and you had to move them into another position or another role or even outside the organization.

And I just think about leading teams that way. And what I often tell my teams are, we're actually playing for a World Championship every day. There is no... Our Super Bowl is every day. Our World Series final is every day. Our World Cup final is every day. So that's the mindset we need to have. And if you do that, then I think people look at it from a team perspective and not just, okay, I got this great trophy that I can put on my desk somewhere, or a badge I can put virtually. It's really about getting that ring and continuing to get those rings. And if you look at folks who were great, even individual athletes, what they care most about are rings. They don't care about the trophies. And they'll say that time and time again.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. And it makes me think it isn't even about just the individual players looking at the rings, but the functions as well, right?

Bob Feiner: That's right.

Sarah Nicastro: So the ring is not, let's win as a team at being the best in call center. It's let's win the ring for customer experience and-

Bob Feiner: Exactly.

Sarah Nicastro: ... customer satisfaction, right?

Bob Feiner: That's right.

Sarah Nicastro: I think it is a really good lens to put it through, because again, it goes back to the point I made, which is if you're trying to motivate everyone to win those rings, you don't want to make their trophies that they've already won feel unimportant or irrelevant. So the success they've achieved, you want to honor that and then motivate them to look at winning a ring rather than saying, hey, it's great that you've totally optimized this function, but it doesn't matter because we're not achieving X. It's hey, you've done a great job, but now we need to shift gears and look at this whole thing.

So I think, to your point, it gives people another way to connect in and view it through the lens of working together without discrediting the really hard work they've done and success they've had that just doesn't fit the business today and where you need to expand and grow into. So that's sort of the mindset side of it.

Now when we look at moving toward end-to-end service, and really the goal here is aligning everyone around that customer journey. And this means less silos and individual success plans and a bigger picture view of strategy, processes, technology, and measures of success. So tell us a little bit about the different components of what you looked at to really achieve this end-to-end approach, and we'll go from there.

Bob Feiner: Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of it really starts with your business management system. I talked about this a little bit earlier, but you've got to look at your measures and how you're measuring the experience that customers are having with your service end-to-end and what those outcomes are. And like you said, look, it's absolutely fine to have, you're going have to have measures within each of the functions because they still have to operate well, because that's how you get the great end-to-end performance. You still got to have players that know their position and play them well.

And I think starting with the business management system and really looking at and questioning, okay, are the measures that you have truly what customers are experiencing or care about? I think it starts with that. And then you build backwards from there and say, okay, if it's an NPS or a customer set or whatever measures you think are important for your customers, and then you build from there. What are the things that get you to those experiences, and what are the things that are most important?

So we really started with that as kind of the measurement system. What do the measures need to look like? And then we start, and then we added onto that a governance program. And literally, every week we have a weekly meeting end-to-end that looks at those measures. Some of them are functional, but most of them are end-to-end, whether it's backlog or customer experience or whatever it may be, how many defects we have, and talk about, okay, what are we going to do to solve that and prevent a similar issue if we have one happening end-to-end? And it may be that, hey, the logistics team may need to spend a little more money to help out the field ,,or vice versa, or the contact center needs to do some other work to ensure that the field's getting the right information which may impact their individual metrics, but helps the end-to-end. So I think it starts with that and then the governance of that.

And then also you need to constantly thinking about the long term. And so in addition to a weekly view that we have on our management system, we also have a weekly end-to-end view on how we are modernizing what we do. And that could be technology. That could be having an outside end view where we bring in a third party to say, here's what we're seeing in the cross industries. That could be other functions that we have to tie into. So I think you need to be looking at both, both how you're operating today and then also what you're building for the future.

And then that leads to what's the technology roadmap look like? And how that technology roadmap incorporates that experience that you want the customer to have end-to-end and seamlessly and digital just like we all do in our personal lives, or that we all expect in our personal lives. And the technology piece is probably the toughest piece because, again, historically I think folks have looked at, okay, I'm going to put technology in that optimizes my part of the business, but then how do you do that end-to-end from what the customer's experiencing? And it's kind of like a jigsaw puzzle to make sure that the different pieces come together so that the customer can experience what that great response is going to be.

And then honestly, I think the last piece is org structure. So I think you put those other things in place, it's kind of just a natural movement to, okay, well, maybe there's some structural things we can do to even more enhance the alignment from an end-to-end perspective. And I think you put those other pieces in place first,` and that just enables that.

Sarah Nicastro: Now from an org perspective, what did change?

Bob Feiner: So we actually combined our contact centers and our field teams, and from a dotted line perspective, our parts and logistics altogether. So they all sit on my staff. They're all part of my organization. They're all in those meetings together. I have a peer who runs all of our parts and logistics across all of our products. And just because in some cases a motherboard doesn't distinguish whether it's a client product, or a hard drive, I should say, doesn't distinguish whether it's a client product or server or storage product? It doesn't really make sense today to split that up. But so structurally, that's what we put in place.

And then on my team is it doesn't matter whether it's consumer or a commercial customer, whether they're a contact center or a field or parts and logistics, we all work, we all talk together, we go through the same meetings, we all talk in unison, whether it's financials or operationals, with one voice. And that works really well from the standpoint... The other thing that works well from that standpoint is if somebody's not in for the day or takes vacation or whatever, since we're all talking in the same voice, you can have multiple people talking to the leadership team about what's happening or what's going on. And it really helps enable that collaboration because everyone's on the same page.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, well oftentimes, I think those silos exist not because anyone is intentionally creating them, but because there isn't that cross functional collaboration and that level of group communication that keeps everyone on the same page. I mean, that is so, so important in reducing that because a lot of times it's just nothing more than I'm staying in my lane, I'm doing what I need to do, and it's just not having the awareness. And so that's no one's fault. It just wasn't the way that it was structured to exist.

One of the things that I think is really important about what you just said is the balance of the tactical sessions and the strategic sessions. Because that's tough to balance.

Bob Feiner: Absolutely.

Sarah Nicastro: I think it's really tough, and this is what I want to ask you is how do you protect the time and effort for the strategic sessions? And what I mean by that is, in my experience talking with folks, what all too often happens is that people have very good intention. They know innovation is important. They know they need to be strategic, but they get so caught up in the day-to-day aspects of the business, particularly when there are challenges, customer challenges, etc., that it gets pushed, and it gets pushed, and it gets pushed, and then it's just not a priority. So how do you protect that and make sure that you are having those conversations, knowing that they're very important for the future of the business?

Bob Feiner: So actually, what we do is, I think I said this, I spend, every week we do our business management review, and that has a set agenda where there's going to be some topics that happen every single week. But then there's other things where we may want to drill down into a functional area that we have a rotation of topics. And that agenda is set usually a month or so in advance. And so everyone sees, here's coming up.

We do a similar thing on the strategy side. We call it a modernize meeting where, okay, what are we doing to modernize what we're doing? Or digitizing? And a similar type cadence where we set an agenda, a rolling four-week, four to five weeks in advance that says, okay, here's the topics we're going to go through for this session. It's going to be what are we doing that's unique from a field technology last mile? What are we doing to think about an outside in and bringing a third party in? What are we doing around our social media engagement? And where do we have to take all those things in the future? So I think what's really important is setting that cadence and setting that cadence to the point where when you're doing your business management reviews on a weekly basis, you're also setting a cadence around, at least I've got some time blocked out every week where I'm talking about what I'm doing from a modernized or strategic perspective.

Now also in addition to a couple times a year, we'll just have essentially brainstorming sessions, particularly for the next planning year on what do we want to go do? What do we want to think about from the future? I tend to look at those as, okay, let's make that a five year plan, and this is year one of that five year plan, and what do we want? And that five year plan should be what do we want the customer to experience, and not what do we want to go optimize, but what do we want the customer experience to be? And what do we think it's going to be based off of all the technological innovations that we're seeing in the market in our industry and others? So you need to do that as well, but you absolutely need to set that cadence every week just like you do with your business management.

And you've got to hold yourself accountable that you're not going to let go of that because it can be real easy to let go of that. And particularly, in times like today, where there's a lot of challenges going on in the marketplace, you can lean into, okay, what am I going to do just to get through the day? But if you don't think about the future, you're never going to get to that future vision, and your competitors will pass you by. So it's really important, even more so in a challenging environment we're going through, to do that ongoing thinking through what does the future look like.

Sarah Nicastro: Absolutely. I agree. And I think it's great that you have it structured that way.

So this is a lot of change with a large team. And we talked a little bit about some of the emotions that may come up in this type of shift in approach because people may think, well, I've been doing great, so what needs to change? Why? I'm crushing it in my area? So what's the big deal? And a variety of other things, I'm sure. So what have some of the challenges been in working through this that you would kind of caution others on? Because I think what you're doing is so important for companies to do if they have not. If you're delivering service, and you are not orienting yourself to the customer journey, I mean, they should be. I think one of the barriers is that change management. It's really hard to dig in and shift things around when there's a lot of legacy process and legacy mindset. So what were some of the challenges that came up?

Bob Feiner: Well, I think the key thing is, ultimately, as a service organization, what we're providing is people. And you've got to get your people to change that mindset. And look, we still have some folks that are very focused on their function. Not sure that they'll last through this transformation that we've gone through.

But when I look at folks in leadership roles, I look at, okay, I may have a role today that's open to go run my field service, and I may go look at somebody who can go fill that role. But I'm also thinking about, okay, if something comes up, and somebody from one of the contact centers takes on another great role, can I move that field service person into the contact center? Because I'm looking for do they have the leadership skills to think end-to-end, think about the team and not the individual, think about rings and not trophies, a and have the general business skills to move and motivate teams and think about the future and what customers are doing, rather than that they are just a functional expert. And it's okay to have functional experts, but I think when you look at your leadership team at your more senior levels, you need to be thinking about players that can play a variety of positions and that can be successful in those different positions.

So that, I think, is key. Talent is extremely important. And the mindset of that talent, thinking about what the customer outcome is, and not just what their outcome is, is crucial. And I think we've had some people go through that mind shift. We've had people who haven't, and they've left the organization. So like any team, it's the talent that you surround yourself with. You got to be looking for talent that can replace you. You've got to be looking for talent that can bring other talent in, just like you would expect from a winning team.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. That makes sense. Can you share you yourself, as a leader, what is the biggest lesson you've learned throughout this process?

Bob Feiner: So that's a good question. I think for me, the biggest thing is, again, it's you've got to just put the customer at the core of everything that you do and realize that, hey, for example, I may have an impact on my financial metric. I'm held accountable to a certain cost number or P&L number. I may take an impact to that, but if I'm doing the right thing for the customer, I think that gets excused as long as there's a balance in that. And I think having that perspective of it's okay for an individual to have a challenge accomplishing something, as long as the outcome is the right thing for the customer. I think that's a perspective that all of us have taken to heart and have really learned from. And I think that's enabling the success that we have today.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. It's a greater success to be challenged achieving the right outcome than to be successful achieving complacency.

Bob Feiner: Yeah, exactly. I mean, it's-

Sarah Nicastro: And an outcome that your customers don't value, right?

Bob Feiner: Yeah. It's we, not me, right?

Sarah Nicastro: It's growth. It's growth. I mean, it's not going to be, you wave a magic wand, and all of a sudden things are transformed, and everything is sunshine and rainbows. There's going to be bumps and fits and starts and lessons, and that's the hard work of it. But it's commendable hard work. So I think that's a really good point.

I know you said you still, you're in the midst of all of this, and there will always be improvements to make. What progress, benefits, wins have you seen so far since you've started the journey?

Bob Feiner: Well, I can tell you a great example is earlier this year, obviously, we have a supply chain that's global, but we do have a lot of things that come through Shanghai. Shanghai's the largest port in the world. Even if things aren't manufactured necessarily there, there's a lot of product that comes through there, components. And earlier this year, Shanghai went through a pretty significant shutdown from a Covid perspective and really impacted supply chains and you name the product around the world.

And I think prior to having this structure in place, once Shanghai reopened, we probably would've optimized, okay, the parts are going to ship parts out. We may not coordinate that with the field. The field will get a big backlog of parts. What are they going to do? How are they going to go manage that? Contact centers will get a flood of calls coming in, trying to find out how to get their problem solved.

And I think with having the structure in place, what we actually did is we were able to be much more thoughtful end-to-end about, okay, once products are able or components are able to come out of Shanghai, how do we solve problems for customers end-to-end? And we put a plan in place. We thought, okay, we are going to have a spike in backlog, because when you can't get parts, you just can't get parts. And we built out what our plans were going to be to go solve our customer problems. And actually, we were one month ahead of schedule by having this end-to-end in place because everyone was working in sync. Everyone, the contact centers were planning, okay, what kind of calls are going to come in? And where are they going to be? The parts teams were coordinating with, okay, these components, these specific components are going to be released. They're on a ship, and here's where they're going to be delivered. So then the field knows when that's going to show up, and they can go deliver for customers that need that component or that product.

And I think having that better end-to-end view from the business management system to the teams working together to the communications that we have on a weekly basis helped us to get a month ahead of what our original plan was, and which is a huge boon to customers, particularly folks who are waiting on particular things to do their jobs. So I think that's a great example of where we looked at it as a team and not as individuals to really go solve customer problems.

Sarah Nicastro: Right. And instead of scrambling to react when that happened-

Bob Feiner: Absolutely.

Sarah Nicastro: ... you were able to come together proactively in advance and think through, okay, we know this is coming. How do we work together to get ahead of it? And yeah, that's really good.

I think this is great, Bob. I'm really glad you came on and talked through this with me and with our audience. Like I said, it's commendable, hard work. It's hard work that I think a lot of folks are in the midst of as well, and can commiserate with some of the challenges. And others, hopefully, are taking notes and thinking about what they need to be doing. Any final thoughts or words of wisdom for folks?

No. I mean, I think it just all goes back to kind of the mantra around rings, not trophies. I mean, if you think about it from a customer view, that's what you've got to do. And I think you got to think about it from what do you experience? What's the great experiences that you have every day? And what are the ones you don't because we all have the ones that aren't happen. Do you want your customers going through that as well? And I think if you take that mindset of. What I do in my personal life is also what I've got to think about for the service that my company's performing, I think that helps you along that road of truly being a customer-centric organization.

Sarah Nicastro: Absolutely. Well, thank you so much for being here and sharing with us. I appreciate it.

Bob Feiner: No, it's awesome. It's great to talk to you.

Sarah Nicastro: Yep. You can find more on service transformation, business transformation, customer-centricity, all of those things by visiting us at futureoffieldservice.com. You can also find us on LinkedIn, as well as Twitter @thefutureoffs. 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

When I talk with leaders about what stands in the way of achieving success with their service transformation, their business transformation, or their digital transformation, one very common response is organizational siloes. When it comes to providing standout service, these siloes are detrimental to the customer experience. Customers seek seamlessness, ease, and outcomes – the disjointedness that even very individually successful but disconnected functions causes in the customer journey simply does not meet today’s expectations.

On this week’s podcast, I talk with Bob Feiner, SVP of DELL Technologies Services about how the company’s service organization has overhauled its strategy, structure, communications, and technology use to be more customer centric by creating an end-to-end approach. There’s a lot to glean from the conversation, because what Bob and the DELL team have undertaken is a lot of hard work – but work that in my opinion is very necessary to achieve the level of customer centricity they’re aiming for.

One of the points that Bob made that stands out in my mind most is how he’s articulated the shift in mindset that is required to undertake such a significant change. “My mantra has become, ‘Focus on winning rings, not trophies,’” he says. “I'm a big sports guy, in particular team sports. When you think about team sports, if somebody has a great year and they win the MVP or whatever it may be, they receive a trophy. But when you win a World Championship, no matter what the sport is, the Super Bowl or the World Series or Stanley Cup, every member of that team gets a ring. Because they played together to win that championship, to achieve the common goal.”

Motivating Teams Toward a Shared Goal

In many ways, this analogy has served as a guiding philosophy as Bob has led his teams through a significant reorientation toward the customer experience. “I just think about leading teams that way. What I often tell my teams are, we're actually playing for a World Championship every day. Our Super Bowl is every day. Our World Series final is every day. Our World Cup final is every day,” he says. “That's the mindset we need to have. I think this has helped people look at it from a team perspective and not just, okay, I got this great trophy that I can put on my desk somewhere, or a badge I can show virtually. It's really about getting that ring and continuing to get those rings, as a team. And if you look at folks who were great, even individual athletes, what they care most about are rings. They don't care about the trophies. And they'll say that time and time again.”

If you’ve managed through change, you know that often the mindset – overcoming the human inclination toward what’s comfortable and known – is the hardest part. This is why Bob’s analogy and how he’s used it to reinforce the principle of why DELL needs to evolve its approach stands out to me – it’s a concept teams can understand and get behind.

Sometimes we rush past explaining the “why” and right on to tackling the how, and this can leave workers feeling confused and frustrated which is never a great basis for acceptance of change. Not only has Bob prioritized starting with the “why,” but he’s found a way to articulate that why that is relatable and a theme he can keep revisiting to reinforce the teamwork and cohesiveness that is crucial to DELL achieving its overall objectives of creating an end-to-end approach.

Stay tuned to hear more from Bob this Wednesday on the podcast about how he built off of this mindset shift and has made great progress in eliminating siloes within DELL to improve the customer experience.

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We Aren’t Giving Our W2 Workers What They Want

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