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

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

Sarah Nicastro:

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

Caroline Häggström Marklund:

Thank you.

Sarah Nicastro:

Thank you for being here.

Caroline Häggström Marklund:

Thanks for having me.

Sarah Nicastro:

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

Caroline Häggström Marklund:

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

Sarah Nicastro:

Okay. Well I'm going to have to follow that. Okay. Yeah, great. Okay so what Caroline and I are going to talk about this morning is Vattenfall customer services prize winning people first strategy. Now, so the people first journey has led to a number of proud moments: so, Vattenfall won the Swedish Union's HBTQI award for most inclusive workplace, best service in the energy sector, and has earned its Great Place to Work certification.

Caroline Häggström Marklund:

Yeah.

Sarah Nicastro:

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

Caroline Häggström Marklund:

Especially in customer service, it is all about relationships. If your people aren't comfortable or safe in their environment, how are they going to be able to have an open dialogue with a customer and do what is needed to do, not what they are allowed to do on paper basically. So, we started the journey of people and then performance because I am a firm believer, and now I also have clear evidence, that if you as a leader focus on enabling your people, setting them up for success, then the performance will follow.

Sarah Nicastro:

Yeah.

Caroline Häggström Marklund:

You need to measure it obviously, but you don't have to be “there” if you're “here”. Include and trust in people, it will come much easier.

Sarah Nicastro:

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

Caroline Häggström Marklund:

Yeah. First of all, I think it's about common decency, treat people well overall and in general, in business and in society. I think that's just what you do.

Sarah Nicastro:

Mm-hmm.

Caroline Häggström Marklund:

But then I also think that we've been through a number of decades of automation and lean processes, and there are now, the tasks that are in our hands now are way more complex than what they used to be. And, in order to sort that out, people need to feel enabled and engaged. I think that also when work is more and more relationship focused, I mean it's about relationships with customers, with the clients, within the organization, with colleagues and all of that, no matter what AI, our job will always be to sort of maintain relationships, I think. If you're going to manoeuvre that world, I think you need to be given a lot of trust and freedom. It would be weird of me as a leader to say that I know what all of the 400 people here in this organization, I know exactly what you need to do, because I don't, but I need to trust them that they know what to do if I tell them what the final goal is. Think more complex environment, a more harsh overall climate in the world is leaning us towards this.

Sarah Nicastro:

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

Caroline Häggström Marklund:

Absolutely.

Sarah Nicastro:

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

Caroline Häggström Marklund:

Exactly.

Sarah Nicastro:

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

Caroline Häggström Marklund:

Right.

Sarah Nicastro:

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

Caroline Häggström Marklund:

Yeah.

Sarah Nicastro:

So, explain why that is such an important point.

Caroline Häggström Marklund:

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

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

Sarah Nicastro:

Right.

Caroline Häggström Marklund:

It's about authenticity in a way I think.

Sarah Nicastro:

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

Caroline Häggström Marklund:

Mm-hmm.

Sarah Nicastro:

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

Caroline Häggström Marklund:

Mm-hmm.

Sarah Nicastro:

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

Caroline Häggström Marklund:

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

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

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

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

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

Sarah Nicastro:

Mm-hmm.

Caroline Häggström Marklund:

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

Sarah Nicastro:

Yeah.

Caroline Häggström Marklund:

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

Sarah Nicastro:

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

Caroline Häggström Marklund:

Yeah.

Sarah Nicastro:

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

Caroline Häggström Marklund:

Yeah.

Sarah Nicastro:

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

Caroline Häggström Marklund:

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

That's when I introduced the no asshole policy. If you're an asshole, you will not be promoted. If you act in that way, you will not be seen as a high performer. You need to be both. That was quite effective I think.

Sarah Nicastro:

Yeah.

Caroline Häggström Marklund:

You need to then act on it.

Sarah Nicastro:

Right.

Caroline Häggström Marklund:

Yeah. That's not a thing or you'll stand behind what you say, then you need to have, when someone brings up that they have been harassed or have been in an incident or something, you need to dive into it quickly and deal with all the things that come your way then and not try to move past it.

Sarah Nicastro:

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

Caroline Häggström Marklund:

This was not easy. I mean it was a lot of discussion also in my management team when we did performance evaluation like, "But he's so great and then he does all of this." It was a shift. It was not easy.

Sarah Nicastro:

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

Caroline Häggström Marklund:

I think that I come back to relationships all the time, but be who you are and say who you are. I mean, don't try to be something that you aren't because you will never be able to fake it in people's mind. If you are something, you will act like that. I think that self-leadership and self-knowledge is super critical. I think that if you want to lead a people first culture or lead a team, whatever team, I think you need to make sure to know what kind of culture you are actually driving or developing just by being who you are. If it is what you want it to be, then that's fine. Then you can start to talk about it, maybe there to talk about it because you feel some comfort in it. If it's not the culture that you want, then you probably need to change your behavior first. Ownership of your own behavior I think is important.

Also, for me in a people first culture, I mean I want to know my organization and I don't want to know it by PowerPoints. I want to be able to greet people and recognize them. It's getting more and more difficult the more we get, but at least meet the people in their onboarding and talk a little bit and get a connection to lower the bar for people to come to me if there's something going on that I would need to know. Getting to know people, show that you actually care if you do, if you don't, don't fake it.

Sarah Nicastro:

Yeah.

Caroline Häggström Marklund:

Yeah, just be there.

Sarah Nicastro:

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

Caroline Häggström Marklund:

Yeah, I think this comes back to the sort of soft part of this as well, that you can't build a relationship based on facts. No, you don't do that. I reacted a little bit on what you talked about storytelling, how impactful it is. I think if you want to build a company culture, you need to create stories together and you need to create common memories and so on. We are back to relationships and if you want to build relationships, you need to build it on feelings. That doesn't mean that you have to be emotional in a sense that you're crying or raising your voice or whatever, not that kind of emotion, but just be aware that there are feelings all around. I mean I'm sure everybody in here has a feeling in their body at this point about something and just connect with people on that level. "You did a great job. How did you feel about it?"

Sarah Nicastro:

Mm-hmm.

Caroline Häggström Marklund:

Or, "I liked what you talked about, it made me feel like this." You really need to get to that level. I don't think that's soft. I mean it can be uncomfortable because you have to show who you are as well and what you are thinking or feeling about things, but you can never build a culture if you don't show who you are. You can, but it'll probably not be a positive one I think. It's just that, I mean it's not about being emotional, it is about connecting on a personal level with people's feelings, I think.

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

Sarah Nicastro:

Mm-hmm.

Caroline Häggström Marklund:

Yeah, that end.

Sarah Nicastro:

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

Caroline Häggström Marklund:

I want to make another point as well on the importance of being humble. If you want to build a culture, any culture, especially a people first culture, it's that my ambition is to have a people first culture, but that doesn't mean that I will always make the right choice, right? I'm only human and I can make mistakes and I can communicate things in a way so it doesn't make sense and it absolutely doesn't feel as a people first thing that I just did or whatever. Therefore, it is really important to me that people talk to me when they feel that. We want to get to a full on people first culture, but I don't claim to be perfect and there will be mistakes along the way.

The feedback culture, the feedback loop is so critical for us to move past obstacles that come our way and for me to learn and be better. It's not just about the organization developing and growing, I need to develop and grow as well. I think that is also important feedback and if you're not humble or willing to receive feedback, you will not get it. If you never get feedback, I think that's a red flag, why aren't you getting any feedback basically? I think that is also important and yeah, what would my advice be? Well try it and see what happens.

Sarah Nicastro:

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Caroline Häggström Marklund:

Support almost, I mean.

Sarah Nicastro:

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

Caroline Häggström Marklund:

Yeah.

Sarah Nicastro:

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

Caroline Häggström Marklund:

I would love to have a dialogue about this because I think we all have different experiences with good and bad people culture, good and bad leadership, and what have you. I think that is interesting. Happy to talk. I would say that I can give an advice, I mean if you wonder what kind of culture you are driving at the moment or impacting at the moment, go back to your core values. What are the things that are really important to you, that have basically always been important with you? You were taught this when you were a kid or by a role model at school or whatever. That is a process to get close to your core values.

If you don't really know or you aren't really sure, which is pretty common, then reflect over the things that makes you really, really mad. When something ticks you off to the end that you get really mad or frustrated about it, then you've probably met someone or something that shows the opposite of what your core value actually is. For me it's about ownership.

Sarah Nicastro:

Mm-hmm.

Caroline Häggström Marklund:

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

Sarah Nicastro:

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

Caroline Häggström Marklund:

Yeah. Very good.

Sarah Nicastro:

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

Caroline Häggström Marklund:

Thank you so much.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Event summaries:

211 – Field Service Palm Springs

214 – UK FoFS

215 – Paris FoFS

218 – Minneapolis FoFS

219 – Duseldorf FoFS

227 – Field Service Hilton Head

234 – Service Visionaries Top 100

235 – Stockholm FoFS

237 – Field Service Europe

240 – Field Service Connect

By Sarah Nicastro, Creator, Future of Field Service

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

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

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

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

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

The Pros of a Hybrid Approach

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sarah Nicastro: It takes time.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Roy Dockery: Yeah.

Sarah Nicastro: We did spend some time together.

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

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

Roy Dockery: No problem, thank you, Sarah.

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

By Sarah Nicastro, Creator, Future of Field Service

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sarah Nicastro: Okay, great.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kristoffer Brun: That's right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anna Mezzanotte: 32 degrees.

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

Sarah Nicastro: Yes, of course.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Peter Sandqvist: They knew what a mouse was but-

Anna Mezzanotte: The animal.

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

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

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

Sarah Nicastro: Very good.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anna Mezzanotte: Mm-hmm.

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

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

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

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

Sarah Nicastro: Yes.

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

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

Peter Sandqvist: Do you have something more I think-

Anna Mezzanotte: Do I?

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

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

Peter Sandqvist: Really.

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

Sarah Nicastro: Absolutely.

By Sarah Nicastro, Creator, Future of Field Service

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

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

So, some data from the research:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Balancing Always-On Service with Employee Satisfaction

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sarah welcomes back Linda Tucci, Senior Global Director, Technical Solutions Center, QuidelOrtho, for a vulnerable and inspiring conversation around how she’s navigated a breast cancer diagnosis while continuing to show up as a leader.

Sarah Nicastro: Welcome to the Future of Field Service podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Nicastro. I'm really excited for today's conversation. I think it's going to be an act of vulnerability in practice, and I have a lot of respect and admiration for my guest today, which is Linda Tucci, Senior Global Director of Technical Solutions at Ortho Clinical Diagnostics. Linda, welcome back to the Future of Field Service podcast.

Linda Tucci: Thanks so much. Happy to be here.

Sarah Nicastro: Happy to have you. Linda was on the podcast. I was looking back, Linda, it was actually episode 83 and we're in the 240s now.

Linda Tucci: Wow.

Sarah Nicastro: It's been a while. What's interesting is our topic in episode 83 was around the importance of mental health in leadership. Here we are, a while later, see kind of an aspect of that same topic, right? I am so glad to have you here and be talking with you today.

I want to let everyone know, Linda and I, I have the good fortune of interacting with a lot of wonderful people, but you meet these people that you just click with and you stay in touch with, maybe not frequently, but certainly over years and years. Linda and I caught up, not too long ago, just as friends. When I asked you about doing this podcast, I was sure to say, "Don't feel obligated."

I am not in any way trying to exploit your personal challenges for the benefit of the podcast, rather, you were commenting on all of the lessons you've learned through the journey that we're going to talk about today. I thought, not only might it be cathartic or empowering for you to share some of those, but I absolutely know that it will be beneficial for others to hear as well. Thank you for trusting me here and for sharing with us.

What we're going to talk about today is what Linda has learned about leadership through her breast cancer journey. There's a whole lot to talk about, and we're going to get into all of it, but before we get into the personal stuff, there's also been a lot of change in the professional side of your life and with ortho. Let's first just talk about that and give people the background of your leadership role, your history in that regard, and then we'll go through that.

Linda Tucci: Sure. Perfect. Thanks again for the platform, even preparing for today and thinking through in itself. Truly lessons learned was cathartic in itself, so look forward to always in our conversations. Just to give our listening audience background, I've started my career as a medical technologist and worked in multiple labs, and I really enjoyed being a med tech. I see them as unsung heroes within our medical landscape.

I moved over to the medical device industry for working for manufacturers of the instruments themselves. All of my roles, past 20 plus years have been in the service side, whether the contact center environment, field service. Now, I'm responsible here globally for remote technical support. We provide technical support to customers using our instrumentation, escalation support to field engineers. I've always enjoyed being in a service for all.

I would say from a work perspective, in just last year about May, Quidel purchased Ortho Clinical Diagnostics, becoming QuidelOrtho. By nature of integration, there was a lot going on at work. It's interesting, if I rewind a bit leading up to that time period in 2020, we were all dealing with COVID, my mom passed, I had an emergency appendectomy, I bought a new house, I moved, and it was just when I felt things were getting, I'm going to say almost acclimated to the new normal, we started an integration and I get diagnosed with cancer and I was stopped in my tracks.

For me, not only as I started to educate myself, I would say the one thing I knew, and having already done some research on breast cancer, is that what I didn't want was triple negative breast cancer because it's trickier to treat. Of course, that's how things unfolded.

Now, we all react to news in a different way, but for me, as someone who leans towards, I would even say I am a self-confessed control freak, it was really hard because I had to accept I had no control. One of the things that was important for me to not only educate myself, but to say, what can I control? For me, that was what went in my body, on my body, how I move my body, and in just to ensure that I was nurturing the spiritual side of my mind and how I showed up in the world became more important than ever in my life. Does that make sense?

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, yeah. It definitely makes sense, but I mean, that's a tremendous amount of not only change, but objective stress all at once. It's interesting because we didn't prepare for this part of the conversation, we don't necessarily need to talk about all of this, but I think it's really interesting to me how glib sometimes people can be in the comments that they make. I can imagine you had people that say like, "Well, your health is the most important thing, just focus on you." Absolutely, but if you are many people, you're relying on your job for your health coverage.

People say these things, but it isn't quite so easy to separate them out into these buckets and to just say, "My body is in crisis right now and I need to just focus on fighting this one thing." You still have to handle all of those other layers, and it's a lot of compound things going on at once. I can imagine tremendously hard.

Also, I was kind of smiling to myself because I understand, I identify with being a control freak. When you and I caught up a while ago, I shared with you also that I went through a similar exercise in realizing how little we really do control when my son was diagnosed with type one diabetes, because I can't fix that, I can't change that, but I have a feeling you probably jumped right into, "Well, I can't control this thing, so what can I control?"

To your point, I'm going to start doing the research, I'm going to start learning everything I can, et cetera. I think I can only imagine what you've been through trying to juggle all of that, because like I said, it's easy for someone to say, well just focus on you, but in a lot of ways when you're an adult in the world, it's not quite that simple.

I guess, is there anything you could share about how you have balanced things? I'm sure it's been imperfectly, but knowing that a lot of people end up in situations where they do have to juggle these competing challenges, priorities, regardless of what they are, how have you tried to take care of yourself while still taking care of the things that you need to take care of?

Linda Tucci: That's a great question. I could answer in a lot of different ways. First, top of mind, I'll say, in making reference to what I could control and nurturing that spiritual side of me, I think there's two things, just thinking about would've really popped out by lessons learned in this journey. That's one, the importance of the present moment. Also, secondarily to me, is the value of suffering.

We could talk about mindfulness for hours in "Eckhart Tolle, The Power Of Now," and even my own, I'm going to say personal spiritual formation when I was young, really focused on the present moment, but I had the natural grace to embrace it in a very different way almost on steroids. Do you know what I mean? By practicing, being in the moment and doing what I could to be truly present, I'll be honest with you, it's now become so habitual for me to really say, how do I want to show up in this moment?

In this moment, nothing is more important than having this conversation with you and what a joy. I have found that by creating a habit of focusing on the present moment has not only reduced my tendency towards any anxiety, but also has just naturally enriched my sense of gratitude and that in itself, had a positive impact on my life.

I even say that when I look at this world today, there's so much that we could say, but I think we've lost sight of the value of suffering in itself. When you are hit with something such as a diagnosis of cancer, it causes our focus to look inward. There's many ways that you can react to that.

I am just saying for me and the way that I'm wired, I'm blessed because that became okay, how do I want to show up? How can I help others through this journey, because you can read Suffering Leads To Wisdom, while I can't say I've become wiser, I've learned lessons that have, I'm going to say, created a greater sense of wisdom in me. Do you know what I mean?

Sarah Nicastro: Mm-hmm.

Linda Tucci: I think I'm just beginning to really unpack how this has impacted me. I've going through this journey where there've been moments that have been very painful, but to come out to the other side and to see the degree of resilience, sense of humor that just naturally has even emerged more so. I'm not sure if I fully answered your question.

Sarah Nicastro: No, that makes sense. I have a couple things going through my head. When you were talking about focusing on the present moment, I was reflecting on how important that is in so many areas of our lives and how a lot of our angst can be self-inflicted by getting away from the right now. Do you know what I mean?

Linda Tucci: Yeah.

Sarah Nicastro: Whether that's personal life or professional life, I mean, for most people, I think they all blend together. It's oftentimes when you are the most anxious, it's because you're looking so many steps ahead instead of, so if you think about it, work-wise, what do I need to do right now? If I do the next right thing all the time, I'll look back and see that I was going on the right path.

That's not to say we don't need to strategize or be forward thinking in any way, but a lot of times, we're trying to jump through all of these moments of growth and learning to whatever the outcome is. I think same in our personal lives, it's when I feel the most overwhelmed, it's because I'm thinking about things that are really relevant to today or this moment.

I also was thinking of something I read or heard not too long ago, and unfortunately, I don't remember where, but I'm curious your thoughts, if you don't mind me just adding in a curve ball, which is, I remember the point, like I said, I don't remember who it was or if I heard it on a podcast or read it in a book, but it was talking about how oftentimes the hardest things we'll face in our lives, the anticipation is worse than the experience itself.

Not that the experience itself isn't so hard, but once you start going through it, to your point, you're kind of forced to do so moment by moment where the anticipation, you're thinking about the whole big thing. I just wondered if you feel there's any truth to that for you of in your experience, what that's felt like?

Linda Tucci: It totally resonates with me and those lessons of staying in the present, there are some aspects of just even my treatment between the chemo and other aspects of my surgery that were, if I knew what was going to happen to me, maybe well in advance, the anxiety can shoot up.

Now, what I'll say that the resilience that I've built in, even if I know and I do want to know things in advance, I'm not one of those people, "Don't tell me. I don't want it in my head." It doesn't bother me. I know how to control so that I don't allow my mind to spiral out of control, but I place it with the, "I know it's going to happen. It's going to happen at this timeframe. Let me go back into the present moment," because if I lose my joy in the present, there's all this good stuff you lose, and the worry is not going to add value.

What I have found also, and I think you alluded to in the prior question, which I didn't fully answer, was balancing everything because I started really focusing on say, what matters most. Now, to your point, of course, practically work, I need my healthcare coverage, but I also get great joy from work. A lot of my best friends are at work.

There's the element of compartmentalizing, whereas now's the time for me and also lessons learned that I had to say goodbye to some unhealthy relationships I've had with work and that it's okay. I would say on this journey, I think it's not the natural tendency, because I mean, we could just read a newspaper, well, actually are there even newspapers today? We could listen to a YouTube, what's happening in the world, you could easily get overwhelmed.

What I see is the great beauty in the world and the amazing people that I'm surrounded by. I choose joy. I choose happiness. Regardless of how things have unfolded, like I mentioned to you, and I'm comfortable sharing, even though this is really getting transparent, my chemo didn't work. When I got that, I was expecting, "I'm going to do this. I'm going to do this. Check, check, check, and I'm going to get the big prize at the end." That didn't happen. I had a pause, which was almost overwhelming. I was like, "Well, wait a minute. I didn't think this was going to happen."

It was really interesting for me, and it actually took me a while to really dive into that and say, "Huh, are you really committed to the present moment? What have you learned?" I'll be honest with you, that moment of almost devastation, or I can't call it despair, I would call it depression, became a springboard for me.

Then, I realized, well, the reality is I've got this little thing hanging over my head with a high potential recurrence of cancer, but it has made me see the world differently with fresh eyes, with new eyes and I think that's made me a better person to be blunt.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. When we think about how these huge changes within yourself and these lessons you're learning really, and then you're doing it all in real time because you're still showing up every day, which is just incredible, but when you think about how those lessons have changed you as a leader in your professional life, what are the points you would say stand out to you the most of show you show up differently as a result of this journey?

Linda Tucci: It is interesting. It makes me think of a story or a moment in time, as I was preparing and looking at what I could control. I told the people at work that I think I needed to or who deserved to know before it became more publicly known.

One of the things that I knew is that I would lose my hair, which was not a problem for me. Some people have a hard time with that. I didn't at all. I just knew that I wanted to control it. As soon as I started losing my hair, I shaved my head proactively because to me, it was empowering. I think people around me freaked out because I was like, "Don't worry about it."

I went to a salon. They never saw me before. "Hey, can you shave my head? Don't worry about it. I got cancer. It's okay." Do you know what I mean? They wanted to be really solemn. I was like, "Hey, I got a conference call in half an hour. Let's move it."

Sarah Nicastro: Can you speed it up? No, seriously, you're just shaving it. I don't need a style, just zzzz let's go. Yup.

Linda Tucci: I had prepared and looked for a wig that looked like my hair because I wasn't ready to go out in public and have people know. I went to a wig specialist and they got me all these wigs that just didn't look like me. Well, the funny part of the story is that I found a wig called disco on a clearance frack that looked just like my messy hair. I started wearing that and people for six weeks until I really then publicly came out of the closet, so to speak, and they're like, "Wow, you lost your hair."

Some people started treating me differently. I was actually, "Isn't this interesting?" Even the ones that knew I had cancer, but something about visually. Now, thankfully, I have a beautiful scalp, by the way. I wasn't freaked out when I shaved my head, but I was the same person. For me, I talk a lot about meeting people where they are, and it really hit me. We don't all wear our wounds externally.

Now, clearly, I'm very comfortable speaking about my experience and not just how I process. I love sharing and hearing from others and learning from our respective journeys, but if I truly want to meet people where they are, I have to make sure that I ask good questions, that I don't jump to assumptions, that I am really looking at them holistically, especially in my roles at work. I would say it takes work. For me, compassion being a core value, it's more important than ever that are my words and actions aligned.

The leaders that I found most inspirational have been the ones that are the most relatable. They're able to share their stories so that connection's made, that what they say has meaning or relevance to me, and that I can count on them. They're trustworthy. For me, even more so, I really reflect on that. How am I showing up at work and am I validating with others? Is this how you're experiencing me?

I would say, what may have worked for me in the past, doesn't work in this virtual world we find ourselves in. I would say that we or those who want to be experienced as leaders have to put the work in. This journey for me has impacted everything because that reflection takes time, but I'm committed to it.

I would even say I'm giving more time to being reflective to say what in the work environment has the most value? Who can I fire from my life, so to speak, because it's a brain drain as opposed to a value add, what meetings and I've done, I continue to do a cleansing of sorts.

Sarah Nicastro: I like that. I shared a couple of days ago on a customer community group I was running that, I was at a conference a few weeks ago, and I was talking to this woman from Electrolux that I presented with, and we were just chatting about a lot of different things, but she was sharing that she had recently incorporated this practice where on a weekly basis, on Fridays, she writes about one thing that's given her energy throughout the week...

Linda Tucci: Nice.

Sarah Nicastro: ... and one thing that's taken her energy throughout the week. Then, she can reflect on those things and determine how to do more of one less of the other. I think that's a great sort of process, and going through something like what you're going through, just really emphasizes the importance of not wasting your energy on things that are just not valuable to you, not enjoyable to you and not necessary.

One of the things that I loved is when we chatted about this, you mentioned that pre all of this, you can correct me if I'm wrong, but I think even pre-COVID, which changed everything for a lot of people, you said that you would always conduct a practice of reframing your leadership every other year or so. Then, obviously, this experience and the collection of experiences over the last few years have led you to maybe do so more frequently.

I just think I love that idea. I think it's something that a lot of people could value from hearing more about, because quite frankly, I think there are leaders in place that haven't reframed their leadership ever, let alone at any regular interval. I'm just wondering if you could speak to one...

Linda Tucci: Sure.

Sarah Nicastro: ... the importance of that, but two, anything about what does that process look like for you?

Linda Tucci: Cool. Well, the genesis of that was 20 years ago, I had an opportunity. I applied to become this head of service at a small company I was at. I thought I was the obvious choice. Maybe I was a little cocky back then, and yes, guilty as charge, but thankfully, I knew enough to go around and start asking, "Why do you believe I'm not being selected? What could I be doing differently or why do people not see me in the role?"

I'm so grateful to that younger version of myself that I responded to the feedback. While the specifics don't matter, it was as simple as there was a critical initiative happening where I had an impact to. I took that feedback and I said, "You know what? I'm going to show up differently." Within a matter of 72 hours, I was promoted.

Sarah Nicastro: Wow.

Linda Tucci: I was like, "Wow." Now, I'm an adult well into my career at the time and thinking if I really ask for tough feedback and I commit to change, and I focus on leveraging my strengths and realizing some areas of weakness may never be able to be developed because I'm so lacking, how do I mitigate that gap, I can actually be more impactful in the world. I'm thinking like, "Well, I'm going to do this all the time."

What I started over time, is every year I redid my resume so that I was reflecting on how I show up on a piece of paper, but I would also ask others for feedback, and especially from people that I knew would tell me the truth, even if I didn't want to hear it. I would also talk to people who I know did not either, I'm going to say, appreciate my style or who I would have found myself in most conflict.

I think this exercise of just saying, "What strengths will I continue to shine or continue to build on?" There are some gaps in my skillset, I'm never going to be able to fill, nor do I need to, but what I found is little different tools and a couple of things.

One is DDI, the global consulting firm, I think back in 2010 at least, that's when I remember that coming across their global leadership forecast survey. I loved it, which is a global survey, and it really talks about leadership today and what is needed for the future.

Every time that survey comes out, since then, since 2020, I'm like, "Yay, I have to now stop and I have to pause," and I have to look and say, "Anything in my leadership arena that I need to work on," I actually, I could be a poster child for them. I should send them a note of thanks, because I actually believe it's been extremely impactful.

One year when they were talking about how we live in this world of VUCA, volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity, and just the skills that we needed five years earlier, are no longer those same priority. I reacted to that or even now, I love the fact that 2023 survey that came out March, I think end of Q1, talked about the importance of self-reflection because trust is being eroded in the workplace. Leaders have to look at how they're being experienced. I'm like, "I could have written this survey myself."

Now, the other thing too, and this comes from Bob Kelleher who has a employee engagement firm out of Boston, and we talked about always doing stay interviews. We always have these exit interviews, but we don't interview people while they stay. I would consciously say to myself, "Why am I staying here?" Do you know what I mean?

Going through that, I think has enriched my professional development and also allowed me to stop focusing on things that I just know are never going to improve. You know what? That's okay. It's about being self-aware enough to say because I have this gap, I need to plan to mitigate it.

Sarah Nicastro: Right and realizing that leadership today doesn't mean you're, I mean, I think there's this old school version of the leader as the controller of all things, the smartest person in the room, you have to know everything, et cetera. I mean, leadership today is you have to be a lot more humble. You need to accept the fact that you're probably not always the smartest person in the room, and that's okay. You don't have to know everything. You just have to be able to bring together talent and lead well.

I think that's really interesting, and I love that it's a combination, your reflection process of your own experiences, the people closest to you that you're working with, but also looking at these trends and analyzing what's going on in the rest of the world so that you're not staying too narrow in your own day to day. I love that.

The other thing we talked about, Linda, is needing to pull back on some of the things you were doing to conserve energy for this personal journey that you're on. I remember actually the first podcast we did together, we talked about when you went through your mom passing and you needed to get better, asking for what you need and saying what your truth is, and not being ashamed of that or feeling you need to apologize for it. I'm just curious how you did that through this journey. How did you continue to ask for what you need to look for the things that you could let go of too?

Linda Tucci: It is interesting because I just think especially being in a service role my entire career, it's so often that we default to, yes. I earlier mentioned looking at those relationships that I could remove from my professional life and actually even personal people that were not enriching me or my experience. Then, also saying, "Well, what can I provide to my organization," that a little bit more rigor around governance was something we identified. It's not perfect yet, but we've been working on it.

Then, also too, delegating in a way that I could be okay with allowing things to crumble and really not, it's my own ego that would want to go in with my mighty mouse move and save the day, but to let it go as long as there were lessons to be learned from that and that it was okay. For me, that was really a lesson to understand that the importance for me is to make sure the organization is sustainable, has a clear vision, and is resilient in the event of failure. I think I realized that in a new way that felt liberating and perfection is just unachievable. What is good enough?

Then, I would also say that there's the aspects that I think might've been unhealthy in my relationship to work. I do think that I can blame my parents for this, or I can thank my parents for this, as a child of immigrants, I just have a work ethic that's off the charts.

For me, it's acknowledging my own humanity that for me, my own mortality, I had no choice. I had to focus on myself, not only so that I could live and grow and be healthier, but also too that it was okay that I could let go because my team, I learned through this process that not only is my team great, they're exemplary. Do you know what I mean?

When given challenges, true characters forged through adversity, my team is just awesome. The days that I am the weakest link in the chain, they carry me. Do you know what I mean?

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. I think we talked about, I remember this being a big point in our conversation because we were talking about how today, empowerment is such an important leadership skill because we want talent not just to be doing what we say to do, but to be making those choices, taking ownership and learning how to do things in their own way and how this experience sort of, not that you don't, I think you already knew the importance of that, but there's a difference between knowing it's important and embracing it halfheartedly, but still being there to be like, "Okay, but blah, blah, blah."

Then, really knowing you have to let go because you just can't be as involved as you were before. Then, seeing like, "Oh my gosh, they might not have done it the way I would do it, but they did a fantastic job." That's empowering for them. It's freeing for you. I think it's a good point in the sense of taking the talent you have and leaning into them a bit more because it's a great growth opportunity for them. It's a good way for leaders to kind of refocus their efforts on things that require that energy instead of things that people are willing to lean on them for. That's interesting.

We also talked about the acute awareness of the need for empathy, vulnerability, authenticity, and kindness. These are traits that I would use to describe you always, but I know that they have become even more important to you and also helping bring them out in other people. I guess, what comments do you have on where do you think leadership is today in embracing those traits?

Linda Tucci: Interesting. I would say my own personal experience. I've always been told, and I think I'm just a naturally compassionate person, and I'm not afraid of being vulnerable, and I actually think it's one of my superpowers, to be honest with you. I'm a big Brene Brown fan, and she who highlights the value and vulnerability is courage.

Personally, my experience has been even when I thought maybe there's a line or does it make sense to share, I'm going to say, a personal flaw even, I've only had positive outcomes from that because then people, when you model that behavior and you create an environment that's safe, it triggers the courage and the others to act the same. I think when you talk about leadership in that space of compassion and authenticity, and it's more important, I believe than ever, it's always been important. It's more important than ever.

I've been reading, well, I think I'm reading five books at once, which is one of the problems that I have, but Gallup's Blind Spot: The Global Rise of Unhappiness and How Leaders Missed It or something like that. We have this epidemic, this hidden epidemic of unhappiness. We spend so much time at work, I think it becomes increasingly important as leaders, what's the environment that we want to create and how do we model that behavior?

I think there's, when you give clarity and you set ground rules that you are modeling the behavior, I always say to my team, mutual respect is the price of admission to our team. If people are out of bounds, we call them out on, "By the way, I am human and I'm Italian, so I can say crazy stuff," but then you self-correct? I assume good intent, but I think if you want to be experienced as a leader, then you have to say, "How am I impacting the other?" You can either drain them or you can inspire them, and I choose the latter.

Sarah Nicastro: I think that's part of who you are. I think one of the things that's really interesting to me about these traits right now is empathy, vulnerability, they've almost become buzzwords to the extent of people know they're important, but I think authenticity to me is where there's a distinct difference between using empathy and vulnerability to your benefit versus being authentic in using them because it's part of who you are and because you care and because, you know what I mean? Not that there isn't also benefit, right?

Linda Tucci: Yeah. Yeah.

Sarah Nicastro: I guess, to your point, it comes from that intent. Are you trying to check a box on these things because you think it'll help you get a certain outcome or are you doing, are you leaning into these things because you know that they're important as human beings? Does that make sense?

Linda Tucci: Well, totally. I like the definition of leadership where we talk about influence, inspiring, helping others to achieve their goals, build their skillset. I think sometimes people try to act what they think authentic means, and then it's the opposite. Like, stop doing that. I've seen people maybe even, and I believe it's a compliment, try to maybe mimic my style.

Well, it's me. Do you, don't do me, because you have to be true to yourself and your core values, and it's an area too. I find it interesting when I ask people, "Well, what are your values? What are important?" They can't answer. I'm like, "How can you not answer?" Then, you don't know how to live authentically because that means being true to your core beliefs, et cetera.

When people say to me, "Well, I want to be a leader," and then you get down, you realize no, they want more money or they just want a title. When asked, I tell people, "I want to be experienced as a leader so that I can inspire people, influence them, bring them together around common purpose, marry a passion and purpose so that people feel valued." Did I help people bring their best self?

It reminds me of a book that really impacted me, Liz Wiseman, love her. She's so inspiring. Her book, The Multipliers, she says, "How the best leaders make everyone around them smart." Whereas, also too, you can be an accidental diminisher. You could diminish others. What do you choose to do? You already said it, right? We're not always the smartest person in the room. Sometimes, we may just think we are, but we're not, right?

Sarah Nicastro: Mm-hmm.

Linda Tucci: Do you multiply the smarts of the folks around you? That's something that resonated with me when I read that book and remains with me today, because sometimes, because I know this may shock you, I have many annoying habits, and because I process out loud, you know what I mean? I'll have to, it drives people crazy, but I know the form by which I'll say, "Hey, do you mind if I process out loud because that's," you know what I mean? To make sure that I don't derail unintentionally. Anyways, I went around in a circle. I'm not even sure if I answered the question.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, no, you did. I think the other point that you made is especially related to the world of service, is an important one to just think about, which is, are we promoting people into leadership roles as a reward for being a strong individual contributor, or because they want a promotion, or because they want more money, and that's the easiest path to give it to them, or because they have the capability and want to be leaders, because I think part of the problem with those who are not very effective, is they maybe weren't really built for that, and they were then put into these positions that they're not strong in because it was the next right path, not because it fit them as people.

We talked about how all of these reflections that you've had, and the course correcting your own leadership style has made you think about leadership as a whole and what it even really means today. I know nobody has all the answers, but would you mind sharing what your view is today?

Linda Tucci: Yeah, I think I'll just build on even what was just stated. One, I think when we do see or uncover folks that may have been promoted to a role not well suited, we need to move faster because we're dealing with people. I get frustrated when we move too slow in that arena, and I've been guilty of that myself, but sometimes more damage can happen.

At the end of the day, it's better for the person to be placed appropriately because if indeed, we want leaders to be able to inspire others and able to align so that you can execute on strategy that have to be effective, I think you have, I would say, at least in my circles and talking across the medical device community, we're all having similar struggles.

I think it's commonplace turnover. People reframing what their purpose is or what they see, passion and purpose post-COVID or what's important to me may have been different. Your leaders have to grow concurrent with the changing environment. I think that that just doesn't happen naturally.

Even if you were very effective in a time and place, if it doesn't happen naturally in your organization, which I actually think organizations are severely lacking in how they look at leadership development itself, that's why I highly encourage people to look inward at their own impact as a leader. I think that whole EQ piece in the equation is more important than ever before.

At the end of the day, we all have our different styles, but we need to show up and know what we're good at, what we're not good at, in order to be able to be effective and not play a, it's not an act. I'm in my leader role. Do you know what I mean? Show up and be who you are. By the way, if it's a jerk, please leave. You know what I mean?

I always tell people, you know what? Don't wait for the promotion. Don't wait for the title. Lead from where you are. Well, that doesn't mean, learn the skill of leading through influence. Learn the skill, really bringing people together, moving and helping. I always say, "Make your boss look good." Do you know what I mean? That's actually a good career move because that takes you out of yourself, but also brings you aligned to a common goal, and that can be healthy for the organization. It's a journey.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, for sure. Speaking of journeys, I know yours has been challenging and a lot of growth, a lot of learnings. We obviously wouldn't wish a cancer journey on anyone, but I guess, closing thought, what's anything we haven't touched on or anything you would just want to reinforce to people through this journey that you're on that you would want to impart if people are open to listening?

Linda Tucci: Sure, sure. Yeah. Maybe it's kind of like summation, the first thing that comes to mind when you say that is that first step for me is that if you haven't built a solid support system, you need to work on it. It doesn't mean your hundreds of acquaintances or friends about who are those people that are going to carry you? Who are those people are going to sustain you? Who are those people going to tell you the truth, even if you don't want to hear it? That's the number one thing that is necessary.

I say, secondarily, clearly, it's a theme in this conversation, the importance of self-awareness. I can say because of the good habits that I've established for years, and I'm still learning all the time, it's allowed me to see this experience as a learning journey and embrace it. There've been moments where I've fought a degree of depression and we talked about that, but they've been fleeting and I can honestly say, not one moment have I been bitter or really experienced despair, and I'm blessed by that.

You can't define yourself by work or an illness, it's just part of you as the whole. For me, there's the aspect of really get to know who you are, what's important, what you should be working on, what you should be letting go of. You know what I mean? I think that's important. I would ask a simple question, probably, do you complain more than you contribute? If you do, go back and get a support system that's going to tell you the truth so that you can go back and work on it.

Something that's just been part of this for me is that what would your thoughts be on your deathbed? Do you know what matters most to you? What your core values are? We've talked about what does living authentically really mean, but you have to do the work. You know what I mean? If not, go back and get a support system who will tell you the truth, right?

Sarah Nicastro: Mm-hmm.

Linda Tucci: Anyways.

Sarah Nicastro: I appreciate it so much. Linda, you're an inspiration today and back on episode 83 and every day to come. I am so thankful for you and honored that you would come here and have this discussion with me and with our audience. Thank you so much for sharing the lessons you've learned, sharing yourself authentically with us. It's an honor.

Linda Tucci: Thank you so much, and I want to thank you for this opportunity and also allowing me this forum to share my story. I would just say a final thought on those who may be listening, fighting the same battle, you're not alone. Have courage, and I can say that I'm praying for you every day.

Sarah Nicastro: Thank you so much, Linda. Really appreciate that. If you want to go back and listen to Linda and I's first conversation, it's episode 83. You can find it at futureoffieldservice.com. The Future of Field Service podcast is published in partnership with IFS. You can learn more at ifs.com. As always, thank you for listening.

Sarah gives a synopsis of what stood out to her most from the presentations and discussions at Field Service Connect in Denver, CO last week.

Welcome to the Future of Field Service podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Nicastro. This week was my last travel of 2023. If you can't tell, I'm pretty excited about that. Looking forward to being home for a bit and spending time with my family for the holidays. But I had the opportunity to head to Denver, Colorado for the WBR Field Service Connect event. And in today's podcast, just wanted to share some of the things that came up at the event that were things I took note of, things that stood out to me, things that I thought were good points.

I want to make the comment that having attended a lot of these events, not only this year, but over the last number of years, decades actually, sometimes what stands out to me might be a little bit more nuanced than what would stand out to someone else. I mean, obviously we all take different things away from these conversations, but what I mean is sometimes it's these little light bulb moments that stand out to me more because I've heard conversations quite frequently on similar topics, if that makes sense. So the notes that I took are in no particular order. I'm just going to go through some of them and share. So Mark Scherzer, who is the event coordinator of the Field Service Connect event, actually shared a story in between sessions of a billboard that he had seen. I can't remember the company, but the billboard said, "AI took my job... To the next level."

And this stood out to me because I think it came up in multiple conversations, panel discussions, workshops, et cetera, that obviously companies are all working toward optimizing their operations and looking for ways to automate certain tasks, looking for ways to better leverage remote service, self-service, AI, et cetera. And we know that there can be this fear among field technicians and other service employees, that those technologies or that technology will take their jobs.

The conversations I have are far different than that. The conversations I have are with leaders who are battling to find talent at all, certainly to find talent at the pace that folks are retiring and set to retire. And so they're really not striving for a world where they aren't doing field service at all, or they are trying to get rid of things. They're really just looking to work smarter. And so that wording I thought was really brilliant, in thinking about how we need to communicate the role of these technologies to our teams. And frame it just that way, that, listen, AI and these things are not here to take work from you. They're here to take you to the next level. So I really like that. Kind of an interesting little ad that Mark threw in that really stood out to me.

I led a session on Tuesday talking about the differences between change management and change leadership. I'm not going to get into that specifically on this episode because I think I could either do an episode dedicated to what I shared, or share that in an article or a different format here on Future of Field Service. But I led that session and had some good feedback on it. Obviously, we know change is a topic that comes up in every conversation, and I think it's just a way to sort of reframe our thinking around how we navigate that.

Haroon Abbu, who is with Bell and Howell, had a couple of great presentations. The one that I sat in on was Uncovering the KPIs and Metrics That Enhance the Performance of Your Service Operation. And this was a combination of Haroon sharing some of his thoughts, but also an interactive discussion among the audience. And what was interesting to me is that there was some things that came up that you would expect; first time fix, mean time to repair, but there was also some discussion around those more traditional metrics, and debate around do they represent everything we're trying to do? Do they tell the story of success in the way that they did historically? I thought that was interesting.

And then there was also some KPIs that came up in discussion that I think we really haven't heard much before. For instance, looking at how many hours of allotted vacation technicians took in the last year and thinking about that from the lens of their work-life balance and possible burnout, et cetera. And so I loved that those things are being incorporated, and I think that the conversation lended itself toward the need to take a more holistic view of how we define success and what aspects of performance we're really trying to enhance. So really liked that.

The same day I led a panel discussion on remote and self-service with Jeremy Scholl of Dish, Matthew Kohut from Lenovo, and Sequoia Murray from Baker Hughes. And we talked about where each of those organizations are in their use of remote and self-service. Obviously three different industries, three different types of use cases, but they shared a bit where they are and also where they see their organizations going. And then we just sort of talked about the landscape as a whole, what we expect to see over the next 12 to 18 months, et cetera.

So I think some of the things that came out of that discussion are, number one, the need to meet customers where they are. We talked about the fact that most companies that are serving the public have customers that range significantly in age and therefore typically preference of how they communicate and interact with these organizations. And so while we most likely want to strive to adopt more sophisticated technology and look for different ways to promote self-service and incorporate remote service, we have to be careful that we don't ostracize any of the customers that aren't ready for that or just won't embrace that.

Ensuring the experience is smooth, so this came up when we really talked about incorporating more AI into remote and self-service and the need to make sure that we are protecting the customer experience as we innovate using those technologies. We all know we've had experiences that are smooth and experiences that are not that are automated. We talked about, as I mentioned with the point Mark brought up from the billboard, mitigating technician anxiety or concerns, and really just how this use of remote and self-service is going to continue to evolve as AI is layered on and embraced, et cetera.

Stephen Goulbourne of Mettler Toledo, who has been on the podcast before, led a session on, it was A Candid Conversation on Assessing the Outcomes of Your Technology Investments. And I really liked that, number one, Steven was willing to get onstage and share honestly about his own experiences and some of the missteps and successes, but also folks in the audience contributed to that conversation as well. It was funny, because I actually had a chat at lunch earlier that same day with a company, a service leader at a company that is really struggling with what I would call their technology debt. So they have an older, incredibly customized solution that is just proving really, really difficult to get away from. And they know they need to, but they have so much time, money wrapped up in it, and making that decision to move forward, it can be really challenging. And so I think it's a really interesting topic to have some open discussion on.

Adam Gloss gave a keynote on day three around hiring and retention, and this again is a topic that comes up at almost every conference. So what stood out to me could be different, but he talked about pathway building, and meaning, creating partnerships with different organizations to help funnel folks into the company's apprenticeship program. Now, the concept obviously isn't new. What was really interesting to me about the examples Adam shared is one, some of the level of detail, but also the level of commitment. And so I think this is sort of along the lines of, you get out of it what you put into it. So I think a lot of companies would say, oh yeah, we partner with tech schools or we recruit from the military, this or this.

I think what McKinstry is doing is really putting time and money into supporting these organizations and building not just cursory partnerships, but real relationships to help the organizations themselves, but influence the community on the potential that exists within service. So a couple of examples were they have a STEM Academy, which is an afterschool program for middle school students that they fund, and they actually send technicians there on a regular basis to engage with the children, to talk about their careers, and those technicians are on the clock to do that. They're paid to do that, and I think that's a really good tactical example of having an impact.

He also spoke about, I don't remember the specifics of the award that McKinstry won, but they had the opportunity to send someone, I think, to the White House to introduce Vice President Harris. And when they were considering who best to send, the CEO of the company asked Adam, "Who do we have as a field technician that's a woman that we could have go and speak? Because this seems like a really great opportunity to show girls and show the world that this isn't just what they might have a preconceived notion of." So they had, I think she's 23, a technician named Cameron Bowers go and speak. Adam mentioned that her comments are on YouTube, so I'm going to try and find those, and I'd like to look into this a little bit more, but I thought that was just such a smart moment of taking an opportunity to think about how to have an impact on people's perception of what a field technician is and that relatability.

Adam shared a lot about how McKinstry really struggled with employee engagement during COVID. They actually had 15% turnover. And since then, they took that as obviously a point to really dig into it and figure out what was going on, what they could do differently and do better. And they have reduced that to 1.5% and held there consistently for quite some time.

One of Adam's personal learnings that I don't think he would mind if I shared is that he realized that the field technicians during COVID felt very isolated. So most of McKinstry's staff was working from home, but obviously the field technicians are still in the field. They're at risk, and they felt really alone in their roles. And so Adam felt badly obviously, that he couldn't do a lot of the things he would typically do to engage with those workers. He couldn't do ride-alongs. He couldn't go and visit them. But he had a technician ask him, "Why didn't you just pick up the phone?" And he said it just was such a moment for him, because there is no reason. It's just he didn't think of it. And so thinking about how to be intentional in how you're connecting with your teams was a huge learning for them. Also, creating cross-functional groups to work on eliminating silos, increasing empathy among functions and among employees. So some really good points in there.

Adam was followed by Ty Parker, who was formerly with Pitney Bowes, and Ty talked a lot about, you can't have a positive employee experience, which he believes and I agree leads to a positive customer experience, without strong leadership. He talked about how leaders sometimes lose track of the importance of caring, and he talked about the need to ensure we're focused on that and also focused on having fun, and he talked about putting fun back into the business.

A couple specific points he gave that I thought were really good were, he said as a rule, he always started every single business review with people discussions first, because he said number one, it illustrates the importance of it. And number two, it ensures that if it isn't the last thing on the agenda, you're protecting that it doesn't get rushed through or missed entirely. Pitney Bowes did a thing he shared called Cultural Conversations, where they had different leaders get together with different folks and talk about, really call attention to cultural differences, particularly in communication, so that leaders understood that when they're looking to connect with their teams, they know they can't do that with everyone in the exact same way, and they understood some of the things that from one culture to another would be the norm or would be things that maybe could be misinterpreted, or approaches that would work particularly well, et cetera. So really just increasing that insight into those differences.

And the other thing he talked about that I loved is he said, when you think about employee experience, make sure you're also thinking about the experiences you're creating for your employees' families. Okay? So the example he gave is that they actually created a call center and field technician incentive trip, where the employees that met those goals and their families were taken on a trip. Obviously I love this because we talked about this, I've mentioned this before. You see this with sales leaders. You don't see this with service teams. And so if we're looking to reinforce the impact they have on the business, why wouldn't we do this? So I love that. But I think there's also the point of thinking about those experiences if they're not positive, right? If you have employees that are stressed and they don't feel appreciated and they don't feel valued, they're taking that home with them. So making sure that you really think about what the experience is you're creating, not only for your employee while they're on the clock, but for them and their families when they're not. I love that point.

There was a panel after that on hiring and retention that was moderated by Adam of McKinstry and also featured Brian Craft of Alcon, Brenda Kahl of Illumina, and Cathy Klein of Sensormatic. There was quite a few things that came up in this discussion that I would expect to come up. The importance of employee engagement surveys and following up on feedback, the importance of having career paths and career ladders, the importance of course of communication.

One of the things that really stood out to me is Brenda shared that at her company, Illumina, they have reached 35% female technicians, which is, I have no idea what the average would be, but I know that anecdotally from the conversations I have, that's really high. And one of the ways that they've done that is she said they made the decision to phone screen every single female applicant no matter what qualifications they do or do not meet on their application, because it's proven that women often under represent themselves. I just thought that was such a really smart thing to do and really good point, and it's a way to take something we know is true and combat that with action. They did unconscious bias training. They've created Lean-in support groups for their female employees and also sponsors and supporters of those female employees. And she said they also focused on making sure they were having one-on-one discussions with people who were negative toward or resistant of these efforts. Adam also shared that at McKinstry, every single employee of the organization has a diversity goal as part of their annual review. It's a goal they set themselves because obviously some of those employees have teams, some don't, et cetera. But it's a way to ensure that everyone across the business is focused on having a positive impact, which I really liked.

So I know that was a little bit all over the place, but those are some of the things that came up that stood out to me. I was actually only able to be in sessions at the conference for part of the time, so I certainly didn't catch everything, but enjoyed what I did. I chatted with some folks that commented that coming to events like these help them feel connected, less isolated, reassured that they aren't alone in the challenges they face, which is input I've shared that we've received at the Future of Field Service live tour events as well, and I think it's really a big part of the benefit of coming together like this is not only to share information, but to have that sense of community and connection.

So that was Field Service Connect. So that will be, I think, the last event recap of the year, but we have some exciting end of year and look ahead at 2024 content coming for you all. We'll also have information soon on the 2024 live tour, so stay tuned for all that and more at FutureofFieldService.com. The Future of Field Service podcast is published in partnership with IFS. You can learn more at IFS.com. As always, thanks for listening.

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A Service Transformation Deep Dive with Electrolux

A Service Transformation Deep Dive with Electrolux

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