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

By Sarah Nicastro, Creator, Future of Field Service

When we talk about technology here at Future of Field Service, we are usually looking forward. But a new book about old technology – The Barcode, by former IBM engineer Paul V. McEnroe – got me thinking about some important lessons from the past.

Primarily, the fact that you never know exactly what kind of response you are going to get when you deploy a new technology, even one that seems to have some pretty obvious benefits.

McEnroe was one of the engineers who developed the UPC retail barcode – the one we still use today at most checkout counters. Other types of barcodes existed in the early late 1960s and early 1970s when McEnroe and his team began their work, but the UPC was specifically created to help retailers improve efficiency at the checkout counter and for inventory. The retail industry worked closely with IBM and cash register manufacturers to create a laser scanner/register combo that could communicate with a server in the back of the store using the available networking technology of the day.

After years of development and several live tests, the team was ready for a full-scale launch at a Giants supermarket in Virginia in 1974. McEnroe waited to hear word from his technician on site to find out how the launch had gone, but when the phone rang his colleague told him that the store couldn’t open.

Anyone who has been involved on a big technology installation knows that things can go wrong. But in this case, the problem wasn't technical. The store couldn't open because there were demonstrators picketing the store and telling customers not to enter – because the prices were no longer marked on grocery items.

What happened with the UPC rollout was a common mistake – the engineers had not done a good enough job of letting actual users know why they were deploying the technology, and how it would help them. In fact, not only did retailers get pushback from customers, but retail unions also objected to the new barcodes because they feared more automation would eliminate jobs. There were safety concerns about the lasers in the scanners, as well.

Within the first year of the roll out, popular talk show host Phil Donahue had railed against barcodes on TV, and there were eventually Congressional hearings about customer concerns.

McEnroe and the team at IBM, as well as retailers, had to go on the defensive and educate employees and consumers that the lack of price marks was actually a good thing. For the checkers, they could do their jobs faster. Customers also now had an itemized receipt that not only showed them what they paid, but exactly what each item had cost. There were tests conducted to prove the lasers were safe.

Eventually, UPC codes made their way onto more goods, but the technology was not ubiquitous in retail until the late 1990s. One major retailer, Hobby Lobby, still doesn't use UPC codes at the register.

There are few lessons here for any big technology or digital transformation project:

Involve all the relevant stakeholders at the beginning of the project. The IBM team felt a bit sandbagged by the consumer backlash, because up until that point they had primarily been talking to retailers, packagers, and manufacturers about how to make the scanning system work. If they had involved customers and retail employees from the start, they would have been able to address those concerns earlier.

Communicate the why of the project. I have heard this from lots of guests on our podcast. Team members and customers want to know why you are deploying new technology, not just how it works. The UPC was meant to improve efficiency at the store, make life easier for staff, and improve service for customers. The developers should have been beating that drum from the start.

Be prepared to answer hard questions. Concerns about labor cuts were not entirely unfounded, and in the 1970s there was a lot of talk about replacing employees with what at the time seemed like sci-fi style machinery. Even if the IBM team could not anticipate that issue, the retailers involved should have seen it coming and had answers ready.

Like a lot of new technologies, the UPC had ramifications beyond its original application. Barcoding revolutionized inventory management, and with the introduction of other types of barcodes, those benefits eventually spread throughout the supply chain. Barcodes play a key role in product recall efforts. Customers can scan barcodes with their phones in the store or at home to compare pricing or look up product information.

The technology solutions that organizations are deploying in the field service space present those same types of opportunities – provided that companies communicate the benefits and address concerns for employees and customers alike.

In a session from the Future of Field Service Live Tour stop in Dusseldorf, Sarah talks with Jan Helge Bruemmer, Global Field Service Manager, Global Service Operations at Alfa Laval about striking the appropriate balance between investing in the future with what’s required for today’s (short-term) performance, especially when those two things seem to be at odds.

Sarah Nicastro: Okay. So, the real question of the day is, how do we balance today's needs with innovating and preparing for the future? This is the tightrope back to you all are walking. So, before we get into that, tell everyone a little bit about yourself, your role, Alfa Laval, and we'll go from there.

Jan Helge Bruemmer: Yeah. All right. So, Alfa Laval is a Swedish machine building company focusing on heat transfer, mechanical fluid separation, fluid handling. So, that's the traditional way of explaining that. That nowadays comes, of course, with a big focus on sustainability, energy consumption, water consumption, waste, heat recovery, and so on and so forth. So, that's that. I am then responsible for our global field service operations. My background is also a bit from the sales side. So, I've always been in service, but then also responsible for both the commercial side of things, but also the execution. Moved around a bit, lived in South America for five years, then in France for three years plus, sometime now in the new role. But working now centrally for our headquarters.

Sarah Nicastro: Excellent. So, I think everyone here to some degree has the challenge of balancing short-term business objectives, hitting the numbers, reaching the goals of today with thinking ahead what will service look like in two years, three years, five years. And I have a lot of respect for that balancing act, because it's a really, really tough one. What do you feel are the biggest barriers to striking that right balance? What do you find most challenging?

Jan Helge Bruemmer: I mean if you look at a company, a manufacturing company as a whole, I don't even think it is a challenge as such. I mean, we have senior managers everywhere that... I mean you have the macrotrends and so on, and you try to be in advance and I mean be on those sustainability trains, for example. I think the tricky thing with service then, and we talked earlier about service being its own business entity, profit center. Service as such is very profitable. It is then also very short term. I mean, the moment you start investing in service, you add service salespeople, you invest in service capabilities, as such, you have an immediate result. And that, of course, when we look on that as a business, I mean we also go into certain investments with that mindset, that they pay off quite fast. And that maybe sometimes makes us lose patience when it comes to the really long-term service related investments.

Sarah Nicastro: So, what are some of the things that you feel have a faster payoff versus some of the things that are more of a longer term objective?

Jan Helge Bruemmer: I mean, if we split a bit like the service, I mean we have all the spare parts business, like the traditional after sales. And we have maybe then the service execution part, and here we have this huge people aspect that goes into that. So, I think, again, focusing on service sales is normally an immediate payoff. I mean, I know from my times being responsible for commercial things, I mean you visit a customer, you talk about service and spare parts and maintenance and those more standard things. You always walk away with a bag full of opportunities. And I mean the conversion rate is pretty high, the hit ratio is pretty high. So, that's a very easy thing to do when it comes to investment.

I think then building up that backbone, because everything you sell at some point, of course, you have to execute. We talked a bit about spare parts inventory now, but it's also the pure execution. And for a company like Alfa Laval that does rather complex technical things, for us, that is a challenge to really build up that backbone that will then really support that front sales side of things. So, I mean, investing then in field service capabilities, investing in competences, investing in the right amount of people, that is the more long-term a thing that I feel sometimes gets a bit neglected, because we have this dollar sign in the eyes and think about the short term profitability.

Sarah Nicastro: So, what do you think then, how do you fight against that? I mean, what's the mindset companies need to have to make those investments that are more on the midterm, the longterm?

Jan Helge Bruemmer: Yeah. I think it is really about getting away from this services just about fixing stuff for customers to keep the business up and running, but really to make sure that we have the long-term view and that we invest in those capabilities with a much more long-term approach. And that, of course, because services then also to a certain extent, of course, reactive. I mean we have customers calling us and they have breakdowns and problems. So, that already puts quite a big workload on our organization. So, finding that time and those resources to think more long-term is I think what's key and it's probably easier said than done.

Sarah Nicastro: So, one of the aspects of that has to be recruiting and hiring new talent. We talked today about how that's really challenging. So, how do you think doing that needs to change to fit where the industry is headed?

Jan Helge Bruemmer: Specifically talking about field service, I mean I think we all agree. I mean field service undergoes a massive transformation. I mean the way field service used to work five, 10 years ago, doesn't have a lot to do with how we're going to work in the future. So, I think the first thing is being very clear about that in the recruitment phase. And that comes, of course, with a lot of opportunities for those people that you're going to recruit. But it also comes with that clarity that you don't, I mean, promise the ideal world going forward. I mean, field service is a tough working environment in many cases. So, I think it's very important to be clear about that.

That's I think an important factor. And then, also, we talk so much about attraction and being relevant for new talent, but of course, it is also a lot about retaining the people we already have, many of those with lots of experience and coming a bit from the old days. So, how do we take those people with us on the journey? Because I mean the labor market is tough, we mentioned that several times today. So, we cannot, even if we ran by when we recruit and we attract, if we have a leakage, then in the existing organization that's, of course, also something we really have to avoid.

Sarah Nicastro: So, from a retention standpoint, if you think about the technicians that have been at Alfa Laval for quite a while, what do you think you need to be doing in terms of, you mentioned competence building, so upskilling and preparing them for the more modern day service of tomorrow?

Jan Helge Bruemmer: I think also here, I mean there are parts of the organization that has the capabilities to develop further into new roles, into new functions that represent more the modern way of field service, and then there are others that are not. Then we also need to be aware that we will not fully transform a field service, at least in our case. I mean we will always have a certain percentage of jobs that we will do on site, and that's probably, I mean even on the very long term, more than half of what we're doing. So, then it is, of course, about identifying those that want to do more. It's about showing up the career path also for those people, showing them that they have a future in field service.

I mean, so far, you're a field service engineer, you either become the team manager or the team leader, or you go into a sales role. I mean, that's basically the career path for field service. But with all those new possibilities, I mean we've been talking a lot about remote service, we've been talking about also this more advisory role for our customers. Not just go onsite, fix the machine, leave, but also I mean discuss potential sales opportunities, upgrade opportunities. I mean that is a bit where we are trying to lean into and try to build up that competence accordingly.

Sarah Nicastro: I was going to mention earlier during Nina's session and we ran out of time, when we talk about remote service, I think like you just said, there will always be onsite work. And I think that's true for most organizations. So, I think there's this misperception that when we talk about remote service, we're thinking that we should do all service remote. And I had a podcast interview a few weeks ago with a gentleman from Mettler Toledo. And I found it particularly interesting, because he said the nature of the work they do, it's virtually impossible for them to get to a point of remote resolution. That's not their goal at all.

However, they have invested in remote capabilities, because until very recently, they've had almost every initial visit just as a triage visit. So, it was almost every initial truck role was the technician just going to see what was going on, then come back, get what they need, et cetera, et cetera. So, his point is just I think sometimes we think narrowly about the capabilities that exist and don't necessarily think instead about how to apply them to our own circumstances. So, in their situation, his goal is really not at all remote resolution, it's just to understand what they're getting into when they go on site.

And if you think about the vast majority of their visits being two, just to diagnose, then to go and repair, you're eliminating 50% of those, which is tremendous when you think about resource utilization, cost savings, all of those things. So, I think that's a really important distinction. And then when we think about what could become possible with the segmentation of work, what you're talking about, and we talked a bit in one of our breakouts of with more remote service, then you think about different roles and what that could look like. You think about the trusted advisor role.

Or I've had some conversations with folks that think that it's almost a redefined customer success manager type of role. At our event in Paris a few weeks ago, we had Ravichandra Kshirasagar from Schneider Electric. And we were talking about what the company envisions the role of the frontline worker to be in 2025, 2030 and beyond. And this is going to sound super simple and it is, but it really struck me. One of the things that he pointed out is that they've just recently changed the terminology they use from field technician to service technician. And the whole point of that is because they think that in fairly short order, the technicians are going to be doing some of that remote diagnostic type of work, probably from home or maybe from an office and only onsite part of the time.

So, there's so much to imagine in terms of what these changes can look like for any given organization. I mean, the idea of coming together here isn't that anyone's going to come up and be able to give an overall blueprint. But just to think about these things, talk about these things, and get you all thinking about what's coming and how to be thinking about it, preparing for it, et cetera. One of the things that I find most exciting about how service is evolving, and when we talk about the creation of new roles and how it will shift from being less break fix, less mechanical to more of these other things, it really gives us a lot of potential to bring more diversity into the workforce. Because the nature of the role is changing and it opens it up to people that maybe haven't been a part of it before. I don't know what your thoughts are on that.

Jan Helge Bruemmer: No. And I mean all this remote service has, of course, two aspects, two sides to it. I mean, we actually started thinking about that more from a customer perspective. And I mean, reducing cost of service, travel time, increased response time and all of that. I mean, eventually, uptime, of course, customer satisfaction, but it was really from a customer perspective. And I think the other side of things is actually nowadays, I don't know if I can say more relevant, but it has definitely a very strong impact now on our thinking about going forward with remote services. And that is actually what you say the role of the field service engineer and also how that will evolve even further.

I mean, if we look at our organizations and the people that leave field service, either to external companies or also inside the company. I mean if we look at the reasons for why they want to do something else, there is always the comp and ben issue. But the number one reason for that is actually work-life balance. And I mean, the guy that has been fighting for a weekend job 10 years ago or five years ago because of the extra hours and the overtimes, well, people don't want to do that anymore.

I mean, the younger generation that comes in, I mean this free time, the regular working schedule, again, field service will never be 100% like that. But going a bit from the total chaos, from the not knowing where you're going to work tomorrow, not knowing whether you have to work the weekend to something halfway there, halfway acceptable for everyone, that will already be a big step. And I think that's key also in this ongoing talent war.

Sarah Nicastro: I think it's also important in terms of change management to frame to employees the positive ways we can use technology that will benefit them. So, it isn't just about how we can reduce cost to serve or how we can increase efficiency. We should also be looking for the lens through which we can communicate the positives to them. We had our event in the UK about a month ago, and there was a gentleman there, Adam from Mighty, and they are using IFS's planning and scheduling optimization tool. So, very AI-based, self-learning scheduling tool. And I had never heard this and I absolutely loved it. He said that one of the things that they've done, because the tool self adapts to whatever changes are happening in the inputs.

So, they've allowed each technician to choose their start and end time for each day. Simple thing, but they were saying some people want to drop their kids off at school and they don't mind staying a little bit later in the day. Others want to come in really early, but maybe be done by the time their kids come home or whatever the circumstances are. And he talked about how much that simple thing has lifted the mental health and spirits of the staff. And it's a very practical way of giving them not all the flexibility in the world, not you can work from home every day. So, it's not necessarily on par with what someone's competing against in a different type of job.

But it's taking what we have, what constrictions we have from a customer service standpoint, but also what capabilities exist to make the equation work to everyone's advantage. And I thought that was a really, really good example of framing the technology change in a way that really has benefited them personally and helped with acceptance, but also helped the employee value proposition a bit. So, what about the role of leadership in all of this change?

Jan Helge Bruemmer: Yeah. I mean, of course, as in any change process, leadership is key. It starts there. I think when we look at our landscape and our leaders in service operations, and as I said before, it's very often its former technicians that grow into that leadership role, or at some point they were just the best technicians. And then, I mean, logically they become the manager, right or wrong. But what they're very good at, and this might bring us back a bit to the topic of the conversation, I mean they are really experts in handling the daily activities, all the emergency, all the chaos, everything that's happening. I mean, historically, they're problem solvers, they're firefighters, and that's what they're good at.

What they're sometimes lacking then is, of course, the long-term vision, again. And really, I mean the preparation of the future and looking ahead and try to get on the way those things that we need in order to still be competitive. And again, I mean that externally with customers, but also internally with our people. So, I think then going one level higher, maybe the senior management's responsibility in that sense is that we need to make sure that whatever leaders we have in service operations, in field service, actually can set aside some time and some resources to really reflect about what's needed for the future, instead of just being buried in daily activities.

And whether that's the same person or if we need to bring in other people, also with really an outside perspective, I like the idea to not only have people with a field service experience and a field service leader position, but why not bring people in from sales? Why not bring in people from marketing or whatever area? But we need to be aware that in order to prepare the future, it's not possible to do that in five minutes here and there. We really need to increase the focus on that long-term. And then also, I mean the acceptance that the long-term for field service is investment and mainly in people.

I mean, we're not buying any super machines, we're not investing in R&D, we're investing in people. And that's a number of people. But that's also the awareness that learning curves are long, at least in what we are doing. So, also making sure that we give those people the time to really be prepared, to really be comfortable when they go on site, when they're in the cold water, so to speak. And that is something, again, coming back to the barriers, I mean service, short-term profitability, it's sometimes a bit of an issue there, I think.

Sarah Nicastro: I think when we first talked about this session, what you said is very true and true for a lot of folks I talked to, which is a lot of times what we say we need to do and know we need to do is at odds with what we have to do today or what we end up doing. We know that it's important, but then you get caught back in the day to day or the short term, et cetera. And it can be hard. But I think Nina said it very well this morning, which is to some degree the business case is that if you don't do some of these things, you're just not going to be in business in a few years. So, it's also, I think reminding people of that and making sure that you're not being too shortsighted. It's a balancing act, but also you can't skew too far in either direction.

Jan Helge Bruemmer: And I think here it's really about setting the right structure. I mean, again, we need to take care of the short term, of the day-to-day in service. I mean, our customers, they have issues, they have problems. They need our help to fix that. And then it's more, again, as I said before, we need maybe an additional level, an additional part of the organization thinking then more about the longterm.

Sarah Nicastro: And I've seen companies handle that different ways. I've seen companies that do okay with having their leadership set time aside and not have it be cannibalized by whatever the day's fires are. That can work for some. I've seen organizations that have a parallel innovation function that works alongside the business leaders to take some of that pressure and weight off. I've seen companies that have a center of excellence or that idea where it's more of the thinking happening there and then being communicated out and people giving feedback.

So, I don't know that there's a right way to do it, but I absolutely agree that you can't just allow yourself to be so consumed by the day-to-day that you don't put the time and effort into thinking ahead for sure. Good. And that's it. So, thank you so much. We're going to have some drinks at the bar and networking for the next hour or so. So, feel free to stay and hang out if you can. And thank you again for having me.

By Sarah Nicastro, Creator, Future of Field Service

At this year’s Future of Field Service Live Tour stop in Minneapolis, I had a chance to feature the wisdom of Gyner Ozgul, President and COO of Smart Care Equipment Solutions, which specializes in commercial food service equipment repair.

Smart Care has been in a high-growth mode, acquiring other companies in the market and, in the process, tripling its business over five years. In our interview, Gyner talked a lot about some of the strategies that the company has employed to help manage that growth while maintaining high service levels for customers. That has included things like investing in a modern, sophisticated foundational service management solution, adopting the best practices of some of the companies they have acquired (rather than imposing their own processes in every case), and leveraging repair data to drive predictive maintenance efforts.

He also had a lot of interesting things to say about workforce development that I thought were worth repeating. Technicians make up the biggest part of the Smart Care workforce (two-thirds) and play a key role in maintaining customer relationships. Gyner says the company has taken some really beneficial approaches to training, employee development, and compensation that have helped improve technician retention and customer satisfaction.

Training: As the economy emerged from the COVID pandemic, Gyner says that Smart Care experienced growth that, if you put it on a chart, looked like a hockey stick – a huge increase after a relatively flat period. That meant they needed to hire a lot of new technicians to keep up, and managers were rushing to get those new technicians into the field. As it turned out, that was self-defeating.

“We had a lot of turnover on year-one technicians,” Gyner said. “They were leaving because our onboarding and training experience, frankly, wasn't very good, because it consisted of some qualitative view of some local manager or dispatcher saying this person is ready to go and run service calls.”

To fix this problem, the company adopted a system that relies on experienced technicians that serve as district field trainers. New hires are only released for active duty, so to speak, once that trainer says they are ready, even if managers are chomping at the bit to get them into a truck.

This not only provides buy-in among the other technicians (who are more confident in the abilities of new employees), but also gives the trainers the opportunity to recommend that those new hires work on specific types of equipment. The dispatch tool the company uses can restrict job assignments just to the skills those technicians have.

As a result, Gyner says the company has improved its retention rates on year-one technicians by a whopping 50% this year.

Compensation: Gyner’s views on pay are pretty straightforward – pay the technicians what they deserve to be paid and set expectations for them to enable their success.

“We all have this trepidation [about paying] people what they deserve to be paid,” he said. “I am not one for the carrot [approach] – I will give you $1,000 and I'll give you another $1,000 if you do something right. I'm more like, just give them the $2,000 and help them be successful. If they're not the right person, then they're probably not the right person at $1,000 or $2,000. I say, compensate them well because it's hard to overcome culture if the compensation is not right to begin with, because that person feels they're undervalued immediately.”

Workforce Development: Gyner said it was important to recognize that there are employees in the field that want to work their way up to higher positions, and others that are happy staying put.

For technicians that want to remain in their current positions, it's important to provide training to help them hone their skills and allow them to feel energized in their jobs.

For those that do want to advance, there are tracks available to help them become district field trainers, managers, or even sales representatives.

“We've been very clear to map out each one of those for our technicians, so they feel that this is an organization that no matter what path they take, they can feel supported and be successful,” he said.

But Gyner also pointed out that managers have to recognize which employees fall into which categories and identify team members that might have more to contribute (even if they may not recognize it themselves). Gyner calls these people his bright stars.

“I proactively like to reach out to them and just talk to them. Sometimes not about anything specific, just what's their experience like, what are we doing in the organization I should know about.”

Sometimes those conversations can lead to ideas for new product improvements or processes. “Then I take them, and I'll put them in a little bit of a discovery special project and empower them to go do that,” he said. “They may be or may not be in that work stream function, and that's less relevant to me. I just want to give them an opportunity to go do something and shine.”

You can listen to our full conversation here.

Sarah welcomes Dr. Josh Elmore, Principal Consultant at Court Street Consulting and Adjunct Professor at both Columbia University and the City University of New York, to discuss how concepts of industrial and social organizational psychology factor in to what’s demanded of today’s leaders in building strong teams and leading through change.

Sarah Nicastro: Welcome to the Future of Field Service podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Nicastro. Today we're going to be getting an organizational scientist's take on building effective teams and managing change. I'm excited to welcome to the podcast Dr. Josh Elmore, who is principal consultant at Court Street Consulting, also an adjunct professor at both Columbia University and the City University of New York. Josh, welcome to the Future of Field Service podcast.

Josh Elmore: Thanks so much for having me, Sarah. Excited to be here.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, thank you for being here. I appreciate it. So before we get into the thick of it all, tell everyone a little bit more about yourself.

Josh Elmore: Sure. So, my background is, as you mentioned, organization science and what that entails mostly is social and organizational psychology, which is the application of psychology to the world of work, how people work in corporate spaces, nonprofit spaces. In general, people coordinating their effort and trying to reach some goals together. So I tend to focus on things like group dynamics and performance and motivation and how do we get people moving in the same direction and that can scale from an individual looking to do their career pursuit, career coaching type of consultation, all the way up to a large scale organization change effort. So I finished my PhD in 2020 and I've been practicing since then. I've consulted prior to the PhD in 2018, I started with some faculty mentors of mine and it's been a really interesting trip learning about how organizations change and how they update the way that they work, and it's a constant effort. So I'm excited to chat about all things change management with you today.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, yeah, that's really interesting. So one thing I learned when you and I connected to prep for this session is that the social organizational psychology was born of industrial psychology. Okay. So how has the evolution from industrial psychology to more modern forms changed the way that organizations and leaders manage people within the business?

Josh Elmore: Yeah. So early days, early 20th century, there was a group of folks, and among them was Frederick Winslow Taylor. And he was applying psychological ideas or ways of coordinating people's efforts through things called time in motion. And so he would go onto factory floors and work with those folks in the factory and try to optimize how many motions they took to do a given task, maybe around assembling something or working on some larger scale production. And at the time that whole space was thinking around productivity and getting to reduce the amount of effort that had to go into any given task.

And over time what you had was different forms of psychology coming out of academia, out of basic research where things like social psychology grew up in the '50s and '60s and were then applied to the organization setting. And organizational psychology became something where you look at the whole system itself as opposed to just individuals. Today we have a field that's called industrial organizational psychology and we call it IO psychology for short. And we, and I say we, I mean my colleagues in organizational psychology world, they tend to use the I and think about the individual. And so when we say industrial, we're thinking about individuals, and organizational, we're thinking about systems. And so I'd say that industrial psychology began with a focus on individuals, how do you select the right person for the job? And that exists today where we look at selection or job analysis, but it's expanded into other domains.

Sarah Nicastro: Okay. Very interesting. Okay, so if we were to take a look then at what is the modern focus? So if you were to get people up to speed that are listening to the podcast on what is being taught today, I think about this, I got my MBA 13 years ago and it's like you don't always think about how much has changed, what the core focus areas are, what the best practices are, what new discoveries or topics or themes or teachings have been uncovered, et cetera. So when you think about the industrial organizational psychology realm today, what is the modern take or what's most important for people to be aware of when it comes to teams, systems, and groups in the workplace?

Josh Elmore: So I think speaking back to that evolution and the gradual drive towards our understanding, and it began in this psychology research, but it quickly became something that management was talking about and using, and folks from organizational psychology were coming and helping consult to organizations and apply. And you had things like for instance, like the Hawthorne studies, which was an experimental design where they tried to, some researchers went into a factory to learn what effect lighting had on the output of factory workers. So they would change the lighting. And what they found was actually the factory workers produced high output no matter what. And the researchers were confused, they were thinking why was there no change when we changed all the lights? And what actually mattered was the fact that these folks were being paid attention to. And so that's when we learned that attitudes matter.

And so over time when we go into these organizations and you learn that, oh wait, people have different motivations. They need to be given incentives, they need to be given opportunities to grow and stretch themselves, and these are more modern takes on, we use them a lot. You see them everywhere where folks are talking about learning and development and performance management. But these are relatively new ideas. And I'd say that those are the things that A, we take for granted. And B, are the indicators of the evolution of the field in the regular world where HR is an advanced people function. And I'd say people like Peter Drucker talking about management in the '50s, '60s, and throughout the 20th century, how he talked about knowledge workers and he talked about what we call the future of work. He was always talking about the future of work.

And I'd say there's pieces that are still held onto to this day that are very important for industrial psychology, social psychology, organizational psychology. But those speak to those three levels that you mentioned, right? Industrial psychology, thinking about people, individuals, how do you put them on the right track, social psychology, thinking about teams, how do these groups work together? And then organizational psychology, how does the system work and how does it interact with other systems? A lot of times you live in... We spoke about the field service industry where you have lots of different organizations that are interdependent and have to coordinate their efforts together. And so that is similar from an organizational psychology perspective because you need to coordinate your efforts. And so I'd say that in general the thinking around social psychology is an idea of scaling from the individual perspective to the team perspective to the organizational perspective. And we call that levels of analysis.

Sarah Nicastro: And they're obviously all very interconnected. So that makes sense. It's interesting because when you spoke about the roots of industrial psychology and talking about really a focus on maximizing productivity, which obviously is important, but I think I shared this with you, in our space in field service, if you go back 15 years ago when I started interviewing service leaders, that was really the focus. There was not a whole lot more to it beyond just managing costs, maximizing efficiency, maximizing productivity, et cetera. And obviously a lot has changed including, and maybe most importantly, the recognition of service as a potential profit center for businesses and as a integral piece of the customer experience.

And so with that happening, then a lot of other variables have become important and things that leaders and businesses have to weigh and prioritize. And that also brings about then different skills that the employees need to have if they're playing a role in a profit center versus just executing a task in a cost center and then different skills that leaders need to have to be able to draw that out of folks. So it's really, really interesting. Now taking the team piece of this, okay, so you mentioned a lot of the work that you do when you consult with organizations is on team facilitation. So can you just talk a little bit about when someone wants you to come in and do team facilitation, what does that mean? What does that look like? What are some of the common areas of focus? What are maybe some of the common pain points in making sure you have engaged and empowered teams? Can you talk a little bit about that part?

Josh Elmore: Yeah, I'd love to. And just briefly, I want to speak to that earlier point that you were making around this idea of the evolution of field service from cost center to profit center. And it's a really interesting idea around this idea of having to push down costs versus how do we develop new opportunities to build business. And when you're doing that, you can look to analogous industries that are seeking to grow and build. And tech is one very clear analogy of organizations being born and then evolving and growing and scaling. And in those cases, you look at the practices from a Google or any of the tech firms that are huge and numerous, not necessarily today because they're cutting back a lot, but in not so long ago they had all the tech perks, they had everything you could think of, never leave our campus, always be here on site.

We're going to do your laundry for you, we're going to feed you. And what does that give you? It gives you the ability to have your basic needs met, but then also it might give you the sense that this place caress about me, I'm going to care about it in turn. And so you can get a really rich dynamic between organization and the folks who are actually bringing the work to life for them when you leverage all of the psychological experiences that feed into self-actualization, right? If we think about Maslow's hierarchy of needs, basic needs are just at the very bottom, but self-actualization is at the top.

And so if you're thinking about how you want to get folks on board and moving in one direction towards some big large goal, how do you help them self actualize? Is it learning? Is it giving them the ability to test out stretch goals or making sure they don't burn out by giving them enough vacation time or checking in with them, giving them mentorship. So all of these holistic practices that you can use that are also speaking to the idea of more indicative, more modern human resources and people practices. Right. Makes sense. I just wanted to speak to that idea.

Sarah Nicastro: No. That's good.

Josh Elmore: And so from my team perspective, for me, I really love working with teams because we talked about that individual perspective, the team perspective, the organization perspective. And I like teams because when you work with a group of people, you can make high impact because working very closely with them, not one-on-one, but you're working closely enough with them to where you can have a pretty direct impact around how they're doing their work, helping them check in, helping them check in with their team. And when you do that with a group of 15, 20, 30 people, they go off and do that. If they learned something and enjoyed the work, they go off and do that with their teams. And so all of a sudden you have a huge intervention with a very quick or bite-sized engagement. So I like working with groups because water falls down and upward and it can permeate the system.

And so the way I frame those engagements right now is there's a lot of changes in the way that we're working today. Remote hybrid organizations are constantly having to reevaluate how they've arranged themselves, and that speaks to larger change management challenges. But it also speaks to on the ground, how are people dealing with the new policy of how we work? How does your team come together and do its work? Is it remotely? Is it hybrid? Is it full-time in person? And if so, how do you pursue your work given this new paradigm we're in? And so that's what I do with leaders and managers. I help them bring their people together and check in on how they're doing, how are they communicating, how are they making decisions? Are roles clear? Have they grown or changed shapes or maybe their mandate has changed?

And if so, have they talked about it? Does everyone know what's the plan? How does the team's goals align with the organization's goals? Right? Giving folks the ability to have space to talk about the things that are not necessarily every day work topics that get discussed over and over. Oftentimes that space needs to be intentionally developed, and that's what I'm focusing on right now is helping teams develop an intentional space to work on the more foundational challenges and opportunities.

Sarah Nicastro: Now, would you say that the need for that work typically surfaces due to a problem or simply because it's recognized as an opportunity?

Josh Elmore: I'd say it depends, right? I think lots of times folks that are managing a team have some level of view into what's going on with everyone, depending on the configuration, how are you working, how much contact do you have? Is everybody getting to do things on their own because maybe they're a bunch of experts and they don't really need to coordinate their effort very much. So oftentimes it might be around a lack of knowing what's going on and things may be popping up. Oftentimes I talk with leaders around symptoms, right? They'll tell me that there's conflict on the team, and conflict can come from a lot of different places. So sometimes it's like, okay, well let's understand where that's coming from and let's talk with folks and get on the same page. I call it building a shared understanding. Let's build a shared understanding of what's happening because everyone's realities are different.

And so it could be what's perceived of as an issue. And oftentimes maybe a leader's been given a new business unit, maybe they have to bring something to life and drive a whole new direction, which is great. And it's an opportunity and it's hard. So having some support and having the ability to get folks together and start coordinating your effort and building that continuous practice of just checking in and making sure that everyone's on the right boat and you're all heading towards the same destination, and also creating space to where people can think creatively and bring up challenges as they come along so it doesn't build up.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, that makes sense. Now, obviously the work you would do in that process is quite individual to the organization you're working with, but that being said, I'm wondering are there any commonalities that typically arise in terms of the root of some of the conflict or the challenges or the best practices that you end up helping these teams create as they go forward?

Josh Elmore: Yeah. At the end of the day, it always comes down to the most fundamental features of a team. Are we coordinating our effort together? Are we communicating enough? Are we giving each other feedback? Are we making sure that I'm doing what we've agreed upon, that it is that I should be doing, that you are doing what we've agreed upon that you should be doing. And no one is feeling that too much work is landing on their back and things aren't distributed enough. And so it comes back to just team hygiene, really. In the same way that you build a relationship with a friend or a colleague and you have this rich, very healthy dynamic, if you can think about that dynamic that you've created with that person, how did you create it? Was it that you have frequent conversations? Is it that you're tuned in to the same challenges of maybe your industry?

And if so, how did you get there? Do they have the same education as you? Did they take a class that you've also taken? How did you get to a place where you're both on the same wavelength? And so you can think of these simple terms of same wavelength and use them as a barometer of, all right, are things going well or not? And if not, start to figure out, okay, look at good examples. To your point, there's a lot of uniqueness between everyone's challenges, but from the reason that there's a whole science of social psychology is because there are some rules. And so I'd say because we are all different individuals, the way that we have healthy relationships with people is different from anyone else.

How we build relationships with folks is different. So you need to look at examples of where you've been successful at building strong relationships and take those lessons and then apply them in other circumstances to more or less, and getting feedback from whoever you're working with as well. Because what works here may not work there, but there are general principles around just good hygiene, good communication, good checking in.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. Okay. So then if we think about change management or change leadership, which as you mentioned earlier, closely intertwined because one, obviously it impacts teams, but also it seems ongoing and constant at this point. So it's something that folks are always navigating. So when we talked about change management, you mentioned there's sort the model and the mindset. So can you talk a little bit about why both are important?

Josh Elmore: Yeah, and I think speaking to the idea that you mentioned at the outset of framing the question where you mentioned I change management or change leadership and change leadership and those, you can use those as similar analogies to the idea of change management, the model, change leadership, the mindset, and why would we make this dichotomous of view? I mean, definitely go hand in hand, but if we wanted to pull them apart and say, okay, I'm a leader. I've been handed this new business unit, we have a whole new mandate, I got to turn it around. We need to work towards some new set of goals and metrics and everything.

How do you do that? You have two, three, four or 500 people working for you or coordinating effort in the unit that you have. And it could even be just a small team, but at the end of the day, you need to have vision. But your vision should be rooted, not just in start with, what do you see? How did you get here? You're working with some other set of leaders, you've been given some authority to do some work, and you have context. So what's your context? What are you seeing? What needs to happen? And then how do you share that with everyone else and get their feedback on the current state of things so that you could build a shared vision? So change leadership is taking your context, taking your vision, knowing what needs to happen, turning and getting feedback from the system, from those folks that you're going to be relying on and saying, okay, how do you think we should go about this?

Start the conversation. If you go all the way down to the team, it's seemingly simple, right? Six, five people, 10 people. You can have everyone in the room and you can have a conversation. You could write notes and you can say, all right, this is generally what everyone's thinking. But at hundreds of people you need to build in the practice of continuous listening. That's like working with people analytics and feeding back. What are you saying? What are you hearing back? And that's the leadership piece. That's you projecting vision, but also listening and not only listening, but taking it to heart, integrating it, and then feeding it back to the system like, I heard you, this is what we're doing to address it. Actually, I might bring you in to help us address it. And as you start to do that, that's when you're getting into change management.

Some of those techniques that I was talking about are models of how you produce change, how leadership shows up and listens and gives folks the ability to feed back to them. That's part of change management. And it's iterative. The more you do it, you're managing this continuous shift, steering the ship in this new direction. And so that's why we call it organization development. I haven't mentioned that term yet, but the broader field that encompasses change management, change leadership is organization development. Why do we use the term development? It's because what do you do as an individual if you're learning, you develop. And so that's the same thing you have to do for your system. You need to develop it by helping it learn, understand, and get motivated by whatever it is it's heading towards. And that's by involving people and stepping forward together.

And leaders have to head that up, but in doing so, they're helping to manage a process which is change. And that's when you're building in mindset, you're building in this conversation, people are getting on the same page. Okay, what we're doing, we're engaging in this shared pursuit towards success. However you frame your change management initiative, you're always going to have pushback. And you need to do from a model perspective, stakeholder management, where are you going to have resistance? Where are you going to have folks that are on board and championing the change? And as you build out this apparatus, this scaffolding for the organization, which is out of your leadership in change, you can test ideas, what we call interventions.

You can intervene, you can hold an all hand meeting and get questions. How did that go? What did people say? What did they talk about? Where are people at right now? Let's not jump ahead 10 steps to the ending of this change engagement. Let's listen to where people are right now, meet them there and step forward together. So that's how change leadership manifests to produce managed change and can create a shared mindset of change. For those that are navigating very hard things, change is not easy.

Sarah Nicastro: So I have a couple follow up questions. One is in the mindset model relationship or surrounding it even, where do things typically falter? And I'll explain why I'm asking, right? I have been interviewing people in this space for 15 years, and when I say what went wrong, what would you do differently? 90 plus percent of the time, it is related to change management. So I always say it's one of my favorite and least favorite topics simultaneously because it just always baffles me that it comes up again and again and again and again as the sticking point. Yet it doesn't seem so far. Okay, I think we're getting there, but it doesn't really seem like people are getting it and getting ahead of it. So I'm just wondering if you were to generalize about companies that get it wrong, that don't get it right, where are the most common missteps? What is the missing piece?

Josh Elmore: So, we say changes the process, it starts and it proceeds. And if you think about entropy, the idea that everything, the whole universe is expanding all at once, and things become more chaotic as everything expands. We can say we feel that in the world of work, because it's a process, you have to examine where are things starting? How many components do you have involved in this network of support resistance in the organization? How complex is your organization? At the end of the day, if you think about change, I like to think about it as just one person. You're one person and you have one brain and you have connections in your brain and you make a decision and you can go off and do the action that you've decided on doing. It's very easy or it's easier than working between two groups of or multiple people.

So if we think about going between people, there's a lot that can get lost in understanding between a couple of different people, between functions, between whole systems, and you have to be continuously examining what you're doing, right? Edgar Schein, one of the early thinkers in the world of organization development, said everything is an intervention. So every single thing that you do is an intervention. Every email that gets sent off by leadership, every behavior that seems in contrast or not aligned with this new direction that an organization is heading, people see it. They think, oh, maybe I don't have to go that way. Maybe I don't need to work so hard. Or there can be feelings of not being included. A lot of times from a strategy perspective, you can go to an offsite with your leadership team and get together and make a whole bunch of decisions about what's going to happen in the organization and then just communicate it down and expect it all to happen, as opposed to having that offsite with the whole organization.

What does it look like for leaders to say, these are the broad directions we want to head? How do we get our people working in that direction? So I'd say that change management as a field has a lot of great practices to the extent that organizations put them to use in full force. It's a challenge, right? Because oftentimes when a consultant or a change management practitioner gets called in, it's halfway through the change exercise, they've planned some change, or they decided at a leadership offsite, we're going to do these things. They've sent out the memos, nothing's happening, or it's not going as planned. And okay, we need somebody to come help. And by the time a practitioner comes in and can help, you're halfway through and you got disenchanted folks in the organization. And so it's a process and it's always happening, and it's like a muscle.

It's like you have to use your change muscle. And that's the mindset. If we live in a time of constant change, Bill Pasmore, one of my mentors at Columbia wrote a book called Leading Continuous Change, and he uses the metaphor of a roller coaster. And so if you're always on the roller coaster, then you need to have the ability to think clearly in these very hard times, but also show people how to think clearly or to build a coherent narrative out of what's happening. And so there's a common refrain. I'm not sure how much, and I've looked this up to find how some solid research around it, but there's a common refrain in the organization change world that 70% of organization change efforts fail. And anecdotally, you, it seems like you're hearing that, and in a lot of ways it has to do with how easy is it for us to change as individuals?

It is pretty hard. Now think about doing that in a group and then in a whole organization. And so you have to be very thoughtful. You have to be very deliberate. If you want to pursue a new direction, you got to plan it out and you have to track it, and you have to deal with setbacks and then pivot in and of itself, that's where the leadership idea comes in. It is a full-time job. And oftentimes organizations, they'll find a consultant or two, or they'll have a small organization development function in their organization that work as internal consultants, which is great. Having some folks that can be there to help out and give some insight is wonderful, but you have to treat them as real partners and think of the way that you're going to change as something that doesn't just end.

You've already started it just by nearly thinking it started because you probably told somebody about it. And so especially if this is a subordinate of yours, it's on their mind because you mentioned it. And so what are they doing differently? And so very simply by mentioning something that needs to be different to a subordinate, you could check in a week later and ask them what their thoughts are on that. That's the very beginning of the intervention of trying to change. It's the same way that you reflect on if you got a new job, you would reflect on how's it going, right?

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. No, I think that makes sense. And I think it's the leadership piece or the mindset piece is where historically folks in this space at least have faltered because I think it's been viewed a lot as a checkbox. We know we need to do this, so let's make sure it's on the plan. Does somebody have it on the plan? Is it in the budget? Okay, wait, our budgets got cut, let's just cut the change management piece. Do you know what I mean? It's not a mindset, it's not a part of the leadership skillset, it's just something that is on a list because they know it should be on a list type of thing.

Okay, so the other question I had on, you've said a couple of times about the fact that it's continuous. I think another trap is and tied to the mindset of, okay, well, let's just get this over with. Let's do the change management and be on our way. And obviously, as you've mentioned a couple of times, as we know, change today is constant, right? We're in a state of continually evolving and innovating. So with that though, comes change fatigue. So how do we handle that?

Josh Elmore: Yeah, I've thought a lot about this idea, and sometimes I wonder to what extent we are poorly framing what it means to be at work. What does it mean to have a job? If you are at will in your employment, then technically your job is precarious because you can be fired at any time. And yet, we have benefits. We build entire lives around the fact that we have what we consider a stable job, but if there's any evidence that we don't live in, that paradigm is living in continuous layoffs. You look at the way that people who are at will find themselves without a job, they may be moved for that job. They built an entire life around it. And so in some ways, the way we frame how work looks is a little bit misleading. And because we're framing work as this very stable thing, which the evidence signals that it's not. In the past, in the 1950s, people could have a career at a single organization, and some people still do.

There's very large organizations that are embedded and massive, and you can go in and build your entire career there, right? GE, PepsiCo, very large systems. But in general, across most organizations, that's just not the case anymore. You can't build entire careers. And there's some conventional wisdom that says you should jump around to different jobs because that's how you get a raise, right? That's an idea because you move from one job to the other, you get experience, you get more opportunity, and maybe you get a little bit more responsibility. And so looking at the way that jobs work for individuals is an indicator of how organizations also are operating, and it's in a non-stable and evolving process at all times. If you just took a look at an organization and tracked it for a year or two and watched all the things that happened to it, and maybe read its quarterly reports, what did they do? They're constantly doing things. Why? Because they're seeking to make a profit, or if they're a nonprofit, they're trying to pursue some mission. And so they're super energetic.

Organizations in and of themselves, the term organization is a verb, right? It's energetic. And so I think by framing systems and jobs and everything that goes with it in a way that seeks to hold onto this idea of stability, it produces some misleading idea of what actually is happening. And so if we were to shift that back to the mindset that, and that's an idea, I don't have research to support it, but I think it doesn't necessarily make sense to frame things as stable if they're not, it makes more sense to frame things as being fluid and dynamic and agile. And if we do that, then we are coming to terms with it and we can lean into it. What happens when we frame things in a way that it's like we're constantly moving, right? Organizations, startups talk about this all the time, we're innovators.

And so if they're innovators, what does that mean? It means they're moving fast, they're breaking things, they're disrupting, and they can do that because they're small, and everyone has the mindset that things here are constantly changing. And if you don't, so we also have analogies in these nascent organizations, and we've talked about field services or field service, and that's coming out of an established industry, it's becoming something new, but it's embedded in something much more evolved and much more mature as an industry. But it needs to be given some space to have the ability to evolve and to do some change work just like a startup might, right? Especially if they're becoming a profit center. How do you inject some of that opportunity to become innovative and thereby changing, adapting, and infusing in everyone else that this place is making moves. Things are happening here, and it can be exciting. It could be a motivator as opposed to something you should be afraid of.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. No, that's a really good point. I've never really thought of it that way, how with your idea are almost fueling that sense of change fatigue or even resistance in a way, because it's seen to be at odds with what is, but is it really right? Is it really? Yeah, that's interesting. Okay, so you recently contributed to a book on data science in organizational change. Okay? Can you talk a little bit about what you covered there? How data is being leveraged to better understand the psychological behaviors, the impact of change, and how do you see the use of that growing or expanding in the future?

Josh Elmore: Yeah, it was great. It was really nice to be included in this handbook, which is generally a handbook of organization change research methods. And so I was part of a section on leveraging big data in organization change research, and a lot of my research when I was doing my doctoral work, I used advanced analytics like R to analyze larger data sets. So it'd be statistics, but it would also be just taking large amounts of data and examining some insight that could be drawn from, for instance, when I did my dissertation, it was on letters of recommendation, and I examined 1,200 letters of recommendation and did content analysis on them, but from a natural language processing perspective. And I was able to look at to what extent were men and women described differently in the letters of recommendation. I was able to find that men were described as researchers and scientists and women were described more as teachers and students.

And so you can really draw out huge insights from a lot of data by leveraging the tools of data science. And unfortunately, when I gave the topics that I found in the letters of recommendation to 250 faculty members in the geosciences who would've read these letters of recommendation and ask them to rate the topics in terms of how important they are for making a hiring decision, unsurprisingly, they rated researching and scientists as more important than being a student or teacher. And in such a way that they rated topics more expressed more frequently for men as more important for making a hiring decision. And what you get from that is not just one way by which you see the inequalities in an organization setting for the university in this perspective, but it gives you that big picture view into what's happening at the foundation of the way that we do our work, among all of the materials that we use to produce our output.

What are the trends? What are the deep insights that we can draw on and use to learn and update how we work? And so that's the idea of leveraging data science, which I believe is going to be a tool for every scientific field. Every scientific field in the future will figure out a way to leverage data science. It's the modern use of statistics. And so what I do in the chapter is I produce a framework for examining continuous change. So for instance, if you were to send, say you have an organization of a thousand people and in the chapter, I use this example of you are a brick and mortar store and you have stores in various locations, but you want to become an e-commerce store as well. No, excuse me. It's that you're an e-commerce store and you want to become a brick and mortar store.

And I got mixed up there because in general, the idea not so long ago was for brick and mortar to become e-commerce, Barnes and Nobles trying to catch up with Amazon. All of these different organizational changes going on Blockbuster trying to be Netflix and way too late. But if you are, say you're an e-commerce store and you say, I need to open up brick and mortar because I think brick and mortar is important. We're living in a new era where people like to go and experience things, not just on the internet post-COVID, they're going to the mall again. So we're going to open up our stores and malls across the country. How do you do that? Your entire organization are used to being e-commerce? How do you get them to shift to supporting a whole entirely new way of working, which is brick and mortar, that's retail and having real estate and leases and all of these different new things that you have to do.

And so leadership has to get together. They have to think about it, they have to bring people in, and they have to start talking about it. With data science, for instance, you could measure, for instance, say you built a dictionary of all of the words that were associated with the change that you were pursuing, like retail, clothes hangers, lease, right? All of the words that would be included in discussion around this new direction your business is heading. And you looked at a, maybe a department level, look at all of the emails being sent around. So the change starts and you start tracking what is the language that's being used across all of my different departments? Are people talking about this new change? And if they are, what other words are they using to describe it, positive or negative? And then you can start look at positive sentiment around the language people are using related to the changes that are going on.

And you can look at negative sentiment and you can say, okay, it looks like there's some challenges here at a high level. So how do we help this part of the business to manage the change? And what's the big challenge? Let's bring folks together, let's hear from them. So when you start to look at large aggregated data, you can start to see trends across your organization to say, okay, here's where we have some challenges, here's where things are going great. Maybe how do we get the folks that are doing really well based on the sentiment of the slack and email that is being sent around to meet with the folks that things are going poorly? How do they share practices? So the things that you probably would've done anyways can be rooted in evidence. They can be rooted in the actual real things that are happening on the ground.

And so that's what the chapter is about, is taking measurement and then updating it and continuously building what we would call a listening system, a way of gathering a sentiment, gathering taking what we call a pulse people. Analytics is a big element of this, but it's like if you have a people analytics team and they partner with the organization development team or organization change management team, and you bring their forces together and they can start to build a listening strategy around the change, and leadership has a dashboard to say, okay, this is how these things are going. Let's put together some all hands meeting where, because this moment, it feels critical, especially if it's real time. If you can get real time data about what's happening, next week, let's have an all hands meeting so things don't start to get stale, and people start to feel like we're not actually changing. This is not actually happening. Right?

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. Yeah. No, that's really interesting because you mentioned obviously it's evidence-based, but I think it's also being able to get ahead of the time it would take for those sentiments to surface without looking at that data. So if you have this pocket of negative sentiment here, if you're not utilizing those data streams and looking at that input, it might take a lot longer for that to surface and for you to have the opportunity then to go and address it. So very interesting. Okay.

Josh Elmore: Thanks.

Sarah Nicastro: Josh. What, if anything, we missed, I mean, I'm sure there's a lot we could dig more into, and probably some of these topics could be a podcast in and of themself, but anything else I guess for today that we should touch on in terms of team building and change management?

Josh Elmore: Yeah, I think you shared where the field service world is right now, and that it's going through lots of change and having to produce new outputs given new sets of goals and new mandates for how things should be going. And I'd say, I've already said this, but the more that you can involve the people that you rely on to do that work, they're out there in the world. They're putting the technology to use, they're deciding whether or not they're going to leverage the new practice that you're hoping will streamline efficiency, or they're just going to digit for some old ways of working because it doesn't necessarily make sense to them. Learn from your people what doesn't make sense to them? Why might they not necessarily adopt the new direction that you're heading? And the more that you can listen to them and bring them into the conversation, the more you're going to learn, do things in a way that is appropriate given the constraints, and it gives them the feeling that their input matter.

And that's going to build a lot of rapport with your people. So I just wanted to share that. I think being in that process of evolution is not easy. And if it's not easy for you, it's not easy for everyone else. And so if you're a leader, how do you make it easier for everyone else, or at least make them feel bought into the process?

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, no, that's really good advice. Where can folks get in touch with you?

Josh Elmore: So I spend a lot of time on LinkedIn. I think it's a great platform for sharing ideas. So you can find me on LinkedIn, just Dr. Josh Elmore. I have my website, courtstreetconsulting.net, and I am planning on doing a podcast pretty soon on team effectiveness.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah.

Josh Elmore: So if you're listening to this in 2024, then check out, look for the Team Effectiveness Podcast where I'll be talking about all things teams and yeah, always happy to chat about any challenges you're facing. It's my pleasure to learn from the challenges other folks are facing with this work, and I like being helpful.

Sarah Nicastro: Awesome. I love that. Well, thank you Josh, so much for coming and spending some time with us today. We'll have to chat too about podcasting, it's fun. I'm excited for you, but appreciate you being here. So, thank you for your time.

Josh Elmore: Yeah, totally. Thank you so much, Sarah. It's been great. I love talking about this stuff. So happy to be here. Thanks.

Sarah Nicastro: Awesome. You can find more by visiting us at futureoffieldservice.com. While you're there, be sure to sign up for the Future of Field Service Insider so you can stay up to date on all of the latest articles and podcasts. The Future of Field Service podcast is published in partnership with IFS. You can learn more at ifs.com. As always, thank you for listening.

By Sarah Nicastro, Creator, Future of Field Service

This has been a weird, volatile, and often frightening year for extreme weather – from massive floods in the northeast, wildfires in Canada, the western U.S. and Hawaii, to record-setting heat waves across the country. In late July, people were dying from extreme heat in Arizona, but skiing in California.

There was recently an article in the New York Times about the challenges that extreme heat poses for air conditioning repair companies, with a particular focus on José Guerrero, based in Phoenix, who has certainly been busy this summer. Guerrero runs a small company (most of the employees are his family) and has not only struggled to keep up with demand, but also finds himself working in attics where temperatures have exceeded 150 degrees. There are days and times when they simply cannot work, risking fainting or far worse.

With weather extremes increasing throughout almost every season, field service companies need to have technology that can help them take weather, alongside other considerations, into account for planning and scheduling optimization.

Extreme weather events are not just driving up the number of calls fielded by HVAC repair teams and utility companies; they are also making it difficult for technicians to get to job sites. In Vermont, flooding washed away massive chunks of major roadways. In the west, wildfires can make certain areas inaccessible. While weather forecasting has made predicting certain conditions – like big snowstorms or heavy rain – more foreseeable, conditions during and after these events can increase service demand while making customers much more difficult to reach.

These conditions can not only thwart routing and scheduling, but potentially put employees at risk. Planning and scheduling solutions must be nimble enough to reroute work, even when conditions on the ground (or the ground itself) are constantly changing.

There are a few ways weather can have a big impact on service delivery:

Demand: This is the obvious one. If there is a heat dome like the one that spread across the American west and south this summer, demand is going to go up for HVAC repair and electrical utility service calls; the same is true for frigid temperatures in the winter. Planning solutions must be able to rapidly ramp up to accommodate more volume, and companies have to be able to muster more technicians on fairly short notice.

Routing: This one is trickier. For really bad weather events (like that flooding in Vermont, or big wildfire) technicians that work for utilities may be dispatched right alongside first responders into the heart of a developing natural disaster. Your route may be blocked by traffic or an impassable road. Technicians should be able to communicate that information back to dispatch and have it incorporated into the routing technology, and then communicate with customers (and possibly emergency personnel) if there are delays. That requires agile mobile technology, and an intelligent routing solution.

Safety: This one is easy to overlook in an emergency, but it is important. Just because you can route a technician safely to a customer location, does not mean they should be working on an asphalt roof in 120-degree heat, or remain in the path of a fire or floodwaters. Technicians need plans and processes in place for hydration and frequent breaks, the right clothing for the job, and weather and safety gear. They also need to know that if they do not feel safe, they can communicate that to their customers and supervisors without worrying about recriminations.

Safety issues can go farther than that. On the Gulf Coast, a lot of companies keep provisions on hand in case workers are stranded during hurricane season (food, blankets, beds, life vests, you name it). For field service organizations that operate in the path of severe seasonal weather, that type of safety planning may become even more important as the weather gets wilder.

Planning and scheduling optimization tools use a lot of parameters to route technicians — experience, client requirements, drive times, traffic. Weather can be harder to predict, but as we experience more severe and dangerous conditions, field service companies and their software providers will need to do an even better job of incorporating weather information to make sure technicians can reach customers quickly and safely.

Have you had experience routing technicians during extreme weather events? I would love to hear what strategies and tools you used.

Sarah Nicastro: Welcome to the Future of Field Service podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Nicastro. I am here in Hilton Head, South Carolina at Field Service Hilton Head. I would say Sunny Hilton Head, but it's a little overcast at the moment. But here attending Field Service Hilton Head this week and wanted to share a little bit of a recap of what's going on here at the event. So I had the opportunity to open the conference with a kickoff session, which was a really interesting experience and a little bit of a practice in thinking on my toes. They somehow did not have my slides, so it was really uncomfortable for probably the first 45 or 60 seconds when I was trying to figure out if they were going to just pull them up. Once I realized that they truly didn't exist, it was a little bit better because I just accepted that reality and improved.

So that was interesting. That presentation was on five ways that I see companies working smarter to excel at service today, as well as prepare for the future. So I'm actually not going to share a recap of that session specifically here, because I think it would take too long to do that and also share some of the other highlights of the event. So I will save that for a future episode. So I had the opportunity to share that content. I also moderated a panel conversation yesterday on how centralizing and connecting your product can help your service organization maximize profitability. On that panel was Craig Bruns of Crown Equipment, Franklin Maxson with Socomec, and Dr. John Chrisentary, who was formerly with Medtronic. And we had a really good conversation. We spent some time talking about sort of the foundational elements and infrastructure of centralizing and connecting products to really be at a point where you can leverage them as part of your value proposition.

And within that, we also talked about the idea of centralizing strategy and sort of creating some standardization among locations, teams, regions across the globe, et cetera. So the idea of breaking down silos, creating that central and common strategy to make sure everyone's working toward the same vision, et cetera. But I think what was most interesting about that panel discussion was the aspects related to creating and communicating a new customer value proposition. So each person shared their own experiences of course, but we talked about the idea that when you're creating new service offerings, something that's focused on guaranteed uptime or as a service, not all of your customers are going to be ready straight away to just embrace and adopt the new way of working. So being selective about working with those who are a bit more open to doing things differently, some co-creation, co-innovation. And focus your efforts there first and get some wins that you can use to then not only refine your value proposition, but communicate it to customers that are in that next tier of readiness.

So I thought that was really good advice. With that, obviously we talked about changing the narrative and the dialogue. So when we start thinking about these advanced offerings, it's a different conversation. It's not transactional, it's value-based. So making sure that you are factoring in that narrative, making sure that sales teams understand what the focus is and how to articulate a new value proposition. Also, the reality that a lot of times the person within the customer base that you're going to be selling this new value proposition to, is most likely different than the contact that you sold the earlier value proposition to. So accepting that and preparing for that as well. We also talked about the idea that a lot of customers value this feel of customization, personalization. But how to offer that in a way that it feels customized, it feels personal but really you're working off of some standard set of parameters or offerings, because obviously customizing and personalizing everything for every relationship isn't scalable.

But if that feeling is important to your customer base, how do you provide that in a way that is scalable, that is standard enough but personal and custom feeling? We also talked a bit about determining what objections from customers are overcomeable, and what are maybe not worth prioritizing spending the time on. So there's somewhere it's just new, it's different. Those sorts of things I think are all things that you can work through if you put the effort in. Franklin specifically talked about how in their work with defense organizations, there are just some objections related to security and data exchange that right now are not really overcomeable or not worth the effort and time it would take to overcome. And so that's okay. They just segment that appropriately and focus on the areas that are possible to work on today. And know that things will continue to evolve in relation to security and those objections. So really good session. Dr. John Chrisentary who was on that panel then also did a solo session that I really enjoyed, talking about the differences between transactional and transformational leadership.

I thought it was a really, really good session and very timely in what folks here I think need to hear and be considering when we think about the talent landscape and also the way that the industry is evolving. So a really good talk. One of the things that he pointed out is sometimes this sense of control, really perceived control, keeps a leader in this transactional phase because it can feel when you move to a transformational leadership type that you're relinquishing control because you're distributing it more. But in reality, you are in a lot of ways maybe have more control or control isn't the right word and I don't think should be the goal. That's kind of an outdated objective, but I guess influence. When you're able to empower your teams to make decisions, to share in the journey of evolution and innovation, you're really in a lot of ways having much bigger impact than if you are maintaining this sense of control. I attended a workshop put on by David Bishops, who was formerly with Johnson Controls and now is doing some consulting with Twin Bishops, him and his twin brother which is interesting.

And that workshop was on the risk of shiny objects. So getting distracted by technologies that get a lot of buzz, obviously here it's certainly AI. And getting distracted from the real objectives at hand. That point was kind of reinforced in a conversation I had today at lunch where we were essentially talking about how AI is the biggest buzzword here for sure. But there isn't a lot of grounding of the concept in business value and real business use cases. And just talking about why that is and how sometimes the terminology itself creates the shiny object syndrome. So someone was sharing that the executive leadership had said to them, "We need ChatGPT, go do it." Without really understanding what they're talking about and what the intent might be. So really good point.

I think there are a lot of very practical applications for AI today, and certainly those will continue to expand and grow. But just making sure that you're looking at everything through the lens of how will this benefit our customers, serve a need for our customers or our company. And also keeping in mind the viewpoint of your employees is really important. I also attended a workshop put on by Roy Dockery of Flock Safety. I would say it was my favorite session of the week so far. The event isn't over yet, but it was talking about, is self-care in field service a myth or a reality? And really talking about this idea of burnout, mental health, making sure that employees and teams feel cared for and are taking care of themselves. And it was a really interesting and I think also very important conversation.

Now, there are some challenges that came up in the conversation that I think are incredibly valid. When you have a lack of talent, you're already struggling to hire and there's this amount of work and this need from customers that you have to respond to, it's really hard to create the space to introduce some of these concepts. So I don't want to make it seem as though there aren't some very tough realities that make the intent complex. But Roy, I think also does a really good job of pushing back on some historical thinking and preconceived notions and just default processes, systems, et cetera. So we talked about are people taking time off and if not, why? And as leaders, how do you do that and therefore promote mental health and wellbeing? We talked about different opportunities in service to transition employees.

So Roy talked about how when he was in his former role, he would transition employees sometimes from field service to tech support if they were really struggling with the demands of travel. Pointing out the fact that yes, they made more from a salary perspective than traditional tech support did but they also had much higher resolution rates. So again, thinking differently and challenging some of the historical norms. Another point that he brought up that I'm sure raised some eyebrows is in his former role, he changed the SLA from a two-hour SLA to an eight-hour SLA. And usually we think about that in going in the other direction. But his point was, in our industry two hours isn't the norm. It is a standard we've put upon ourselves that now we are beholden to in a way that is causing a lot of angst among our teams and putting a lot of stress on the field force.

It isn't something that is necessary. And so if we change that, yes, we have to communicate that change to customers. But it brings a lot of value in terms of the mental health and the self-care of the teams. So really good examples. Again, things that a lot of people might baulk at, but I think when you really start reflecting on your own circumstances and where can you push back in support of your people, it becomes really, really interesting. So it was a great session. It might be worth having Roy come back on the podcast and talk about some of the things that he's done historically and some of the considerations related to that topic. There was a guest keynote from Dave Delaney who talked about retention essentially. And really good points reinforcing the importance of really an employee's early experiences with an organization. So he shared some statistics that are concerning.

Some of those were it costs six to nine months of salary to replace someone who leaves. 20% of new hires leave within 45 days. 32% of new hires don't feel a sense of belonging at one year of employment, a fifth don't feel valued and two fifths don't feel appreciated. So he spent his time really sharing some insight and perspectives on how we can change that. Really good reminders of how important it is for employees to feel heard to even something so simple as be properly introduced within the organization, so that people know who they are and know that they've joined the company. He talked about the practice of writing weekly thank you cards to folks and the impact that that can have, again, something very simple that can easily be overlooked.

The importance of onboarding and he gave seven tips related to onboarding. Made me think of a session with Venkata from Bruker Nano when we were talking about that. He mentioned that, I can't remember the period of time if it was 30 days or something like that, but a certain period of each employee's onboarding when they first come on board it's really just an introduction. He called it a welcoming period. So there isn't this immediate expectation of learn, do, learn, do. It's welcoming them into the organization, getting to know them, having them get to know their teams and the people within the other functions. And just making it feel a bit more personal, which I think is really good advice.

And another thing that Dave spoke about that was also a part of Venkata and I's conversation is fostering relationships and connection outside of just who you are and what you do at work. So looking for those opportunities, whether it's social interactions, whether it's team building type interactions. Or Dave today shared the example of using the Kiva platform, which is where you can support entrepreneurs in different global startups around the world, using that as a way to give teams the ability to pick together what they would like to support. So sort of a philanthropic thing, but something that teams can use to get to know one another a bit better and to do something positive together. So really good input as well. And Dave Delaney is with Futureforth. So those are just some of the sessions that have taken place here at Field Service Hilton Head this week.

It's been a good event so far, and hope that gives you a little bit of perspective on what is going on here. Plenty of AI talk as well, and I certainly haven't had an opportunity to attend every session but wanted to share some tidbits from those that I have. And hopefully some of these folks can come on to a future podcast to share a bit more detail. And I can also share a little bit more on the session that I gave as well. So that's all for now. Stay tuned to futureoffieldservice.com. For more, be sure to subscribe to the Future of Field Service Insider so you can stay up to date on all of the latest. 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

It appears we have passed through what economists were calling The Great Resignation and the job market upheaval that occurred during the pandemic. But labor markets are still tight and the field service sector was already struggling with staffing issues before COVID. We talk often about the fact that recruiting and retention remain a big challenge and how accommodating the decidedly different expectations of younger workers can sometimes flummox entrenched field service companies.

But not all of them. I recently had the pleasure of interviewing Anthony Billups, North America Vice President of Sales and Market Development at air conditioning pioneer Comfort Systems USA. And although he works in an industry with a very long history, Anthony has some pretty forward-looking ideas when it comes to attracting and managing younger and more diverse technicians.

We talked a lot about outdated thinking, and one area he highlighted was the way the industry talks about field service jobs. In the past, most companies talked about technician jobs exclusively in the context of technical skills required and the type of work done, but that has led to a bit of a branding problem. It's actually a bit challenging to describe field service work in a way that makes it both understandable and interesting to young people who may not know anything about it.

Consider other types of work that students or new graduates easily grasp – teacher, doctor, police officer, musician, truck driver. When people talk about those jobs, they don't just talk about specific tasks or skills. They talk about the work in its entirety. Police officers protect the public and help people. Doctors heal people.

“It's important as a leader to go back into your community and to talk about what it is that you do, right? Talk about … your day in the life, talk about the things that made you excited about the role,” Anthony said.

There are a lot of aspects of field service careers that many may find appealing that we don’t highlight enough. That could be talking about travel. It could be talking about the types of facilities you have access to and the people you meet, and what you can gain by working in the industry. It could be how the work you do enables a hospital to run or a pilot to fly, or any number of other very critical, often cool roles that seem to stay invisible.

In the case of air conditioning, Anthony emphasized that it's an industry that has been around for 100 years and is only becoming more important (and resilient) as people look for new ways to cool buildings. This means there is job security there, along with opportunity and healthy compensation – characteristics that deserve recognition.

The Value of Storytelling

The field service sector must do a better job of selling itself to potential employees and perhaps that starts with telling better stories about exactly what the market has to offer its employees. Anthony pointed out that in his job, he has worked with everyone from big tech companies in Silicon Valley to major sports facilities. Not everyone can score a nice job at Apple or play professional sports, but service technicians get a backstage pass of sorts to all of these facilities.

“So, what are some of the jobs that are cool? What do people want now? It's easier to get in through the mechanical room than it is through the front door, and I think that's when we want to change the narrative of the profession,” he said. “We need to start with the end in mind. We need to start where these individuals want to be a part of these industries.”

Anthony also cautions that field service organizations need to be more realistic about how younger workers view their careers. Most people are not going to stick with a job for years at a time, as was the historical norm. In many cases, people change jobs every two years or so. To retain those employees (who are expensive to recruit and train) within your organization, it is important to offer more than just a good salary. People want a real path for advancement, and schedules that allow them to have a rich personal life, too.

Manager-employee relationships are also critical, along with development conversations and making sure there is a career path in place. Managers need leadership training (something Anthony says Comfort Systems has made a regular part of its culture).

“The reason that we really focus a lot of attention on training is that we understand the value of our leaders, and if you can teach a leader to not be a manager, but to be a leader and to learn,” he said. Promoting someone to management without helping them with those leadership skills can put them at a disadvantage – and it can negatively impact the experience of employees, ultimately contributing to turnover.

Another area of our discussion was that focusing hiring on specific technical skills or experience is cutting field service off from a lot of qualified candidates that have other good qualities – reliability, leadership skills, customer service skills, etc. Non-traditional recruiting can help address technician shortages while also improving teams by adding members with new skill sets and different perspectives.

“It's about the qualities that the person is bringing, the experiences that the person is bringing, and not just where they worked before and the things that we’ve looked at historically when evaluating talent,” Anthony said.

Anthony had much more to share and his insights are well worth a listen. Check out the rest of the conversation here.

Christine Miners, Managing Director of Verity International and Rick Lash, President of Rick Lash Consulting, co-authors of Once Upon a Leader: Finding the Story at the Heart of Your Leadership, join Sarah to talk about some of the challenges today’s leaders face and provide some practical advice for avoiding common missteps and mindset traps that work against intended impact.

Sarah Nicastro: Welcome to the Future of Field Service podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Nicastro. Today we're going to be talking about how service leaders can nurture empowerment among their teams. I'm excited to welcome today to the podcast Christine Miners, who is the Managing Director of Verity International, and Rick Lash, President of Rick Lash Consulting, who are both co-authors of the book, Once Upon a Leader: Finding the Story at the Heart of Your Leadership. Welcome to the Future of Field Service podcast!

Christine Miners: Thank you, Sarah. Thanks for having us.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, I'm excited to have you both. So Christine and Rick gave a keynote presentation at Field Service Palm Springs this year, and unfortunately it was on day one and I was delayed coming in, so I missed it. But I heard rumblings of how great it was throughout the next few days, and so I reached out and said, Hey, I'm really sorry I missed your presentation. I heard it was great. Can we talk about some of these things on the podcast? So lucky for me and for you, they agreed to join us and we're going to have a great chat today. So before we get into everything, can each of you just tell everyone a little bit more about yourselves.

Rick Lash: Christine?

Christine Miners: Oh, sure. Gosh, what can I say? I'm a mother. How about that? I'll start with that. I'm a mother. I have two kids and a super busy life outside of work, I think as probably most people do, but work wise I started my career in the nineties. I actually started at Dell Computers working in the operation side of the business. So I was in sales for a number of years, got my feet wet in my first leadership job in my mid-twenties at Dell and learned a lot, definitely fly by the seat of your pants the role and opportunity. And since then I've really grown up in this field of leadership development and talent management. So I've worked in industry for a number of years and I've now been in professional services working with literally thousands of leaders over the last probably 10 or 12 years or so. So that's a bit about me.

Sarah Nicastro: Awesome. Thank you, Rick.

Rick Lash: So I'm also, I'm a father, so I have two lovely daughters in their twenties who are just starting off their careers, which is interesting to watch as a dad. And my background is I'm actually a psychologist by training, so I did my PhD here at the University of Toronto in educational and organizational psychology, and I've been a career consultant. So unlike Christine, I didn't grow up in a corporate environment, I grew up as a consultant. I've worked with Fortune 500 organizations both here in North America, but also globally. I've worked with large global consulting firms such as Korn Ferry and the Hay Group, and serving as a senior client partner. I ran the North American practice for Hay Group a number of years ago, and I'd also like to write in the field as well.

So prior to roping Christine into writing this book together, I've published in the Harvard Business Review and other mainline journals, and most of my work has really been around leadership development. I've always been interested in how leaders become leaders and how to accelerate their growth as they move into leadership positions. And I have lots of hobbies. I have my telescope behind me, so I've been a lifetime astronomer, and so just always intellectually curious about a whole bunch of things.

Sarah Nicastro: That's awesome. I love that you have the psychology background and the corporate background coming together to look at this topic. I think it's really interesting. My undergrad is actually in psychology, and I think that that has influenced the lens through which I look at a lot of what's happening in the field service space over, I've been doing this for 15 years. So a lot of the evolution and change that's taken place when you talk with service leaders about what are their biggest challenges, it's almost always related to somehow to the people. So that's where the psychology piece comes in hugely and plays a big role. And, of course, within leadership itself, we've seen so much evolution as well, and we'll talk about some of that.

So you both obviously engage and interact with leaders across a big variety of industries. And so I'm curious, when you were at Field Service Palm Springs and you gave that keynote and you had an opportunity to listen to some of the other sessions and connect with some of the people there, what stood out to both of you about the service leaders and the state of their mindsets or our industry as it is just given the perspective you both have?

Christine Miners: Yeah, I guess I can start, because I think we probably both have a perspective. Listen, that in truth, that was my first business trip since the pandemic. So we are still in this interesting time. And so spending three or four days with a group of literally hundreds of leaders almost felt foreign to me in a weird way. But I also craved it and truly enjoyed it. I think what stood out, number one, relationship completely rose to the surface. So not sure I expected that quite truthfully. I think I expected more strangers coming together for a conference. And what I experienced was far different, it was very clear that there were strong networks within this group, really strong relationship, a real desire and authenticity around connection and leveraging one another and learning from one another.

And that was incredibly refreshing to see. And as I sat through the sessions and listened to the speakers, one thing that comes to mind is innovation and just how innovative and creative leaders are in this sector in particular in resolving the challenges that they have. So those are the quick thoughts around what rose to the surface. Rick, what do you think?

Rick Lash: Yeah, I would completely agree. For me also, it was the first time really traveling from Canada to the US for business. But just being in a room full of hundreds of people took you a bit aback and you are rusty, just learning how to interact with people who in a large setting was exciting, but also, I wouldn't say anxiety provoking, it was just it was fresh and it was new. But the other thing that I was struck by, because prior to the pandemic, like all of us, we traveled and went to conferences and attended business meetings. I have to say that I was taken back just by the warmth and the welcoming nature of the people at this conference. Every conference has its different feel and every industry has its different feel. But I was really just struck by just how kind and generous people were and how very much, I think Christine used the word maybe you didn't, but down to earth and genuine and authentic people were, which I really appreciated.

To me, there's nothing worse than having to pretend that you're somebody else for three days and putting on that kind of business space, I didn't feel you had to do that at all. I felt everybody that we met with, there was this instant connection. You felt that you were connecting with people as individuals. And I just thought that it was lovely. I truly, I mean this quite genuinely, I truly enjoyed the three days that we were down there. It was just not that we made friends, but I felt that I just spent time with just really nice people.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, it's so interesting to hear that because when I try and explain to someone how I happened upon a career in this space, because it was never my intention. People on this podcast have heard the story before, but I happened into it with really not the intent to stay for a long time or certainly for my whole career, but fell in love with it. And so it's interesting to hear your perspective because that's a lot of why, that I got hooked and became very passionate about the opportunity in this space and the connections, the community, et cetera. I was also nodding with the points you were bringing about it being your first trip since COVID. I've been traveling now significantly for the last two years, but I distinctly remember the first event I went to after not traveling for a long time. And I remember walking into the room and thinking maybe I can't do this anymore, just because I loved it so much before, and it felt, like you said, so foreign and I did feel some anxiety.

I was just like, I don't know if I can do this anymore. And obviously I came around. But yeah, so I'm glad you had a good experience. Now, when we connected to prep for this podcast, I spoke with you about wanting to focus on the topic of empowerment because in field service, and I'm generalizing for the sake of our conversation, but we're coming from a period where the frontline workforce had very technical repeatable work, and they were generally speaking, folks that were happy to come to work, do the same job every day for 10, 20 years at a time, and leadership was aligned to that and very much management, if you will, versus leadership.

And now we're at a point where that frontline role is changing significantly to be one where we're expecting in different ways, but folks to engage a lot more with customers. And that brings about a lot of different needs and I think demands leadership versus management. Okay. So that's why I wanted to talk about that topic. But before we get into that specifically, I know that part of what you both spoke about at the Palm Springs event was the overall shift in leadership since or as a result of the pandemic. So can we talk a little bit about what you've seen and what you've shared?

Christine Miners: Yeah, I think Rick and I talk a lot about this. In many ways, the pressures and the demands on leaders I think are higher than ever before. So it's returning to old service levels, but with fewer resources, talent resources are narrow and hard to find. People are working in weird environments, hybrid environments that they've never had to work in before. I think it's complex. And I think one of the quick and easy observations that I would say is leaders seem to be back into the weeds as a result. And I think that's normal, and I think that's natural. I think what happens when we feel like we're in a crisis, kind of a, oh my gosh, how do I get out of this sort of an environment? And it is a normal leadership style. When we're in a short-term crisis, we tend to get a little more command control or we tend to get a little more directive in our leadership. We tend to get more involved and more engaged to keep our arms wrapped around things and to keep it moving forward.

I think the challenge right now is that environment has become almost a permanent state of operation. So where crisis used to come and go, and we could shift into that style and back out of it. Now it's just here and it's just here. And I think the word that we used when we were at the conference was permacrisis. We didn't invent that word, it's the Collins Dictionary 2022 word of the year. But it captures the state. I think the challenge for leaders is they've dipped back into these back in the weeds, short-term leadership styles and truth, it's just not sustainable. It's not sustainable for them, it's not scalable for a business. And then when you talk about the shift that's happening at the frontline, which to me when I hear you talk about the shift, what it says to me is frontline people need to be more empowered to draw on their capabilities and exercise sound judgment and make better decisions and connect and learn new skills. And I think if you've got managers that have gone into crisis mode, it's like this vicious circle.

So we're not able to bring people along and we're experiencing this sense of burnout all at the same time. I don't know, Rick, if you would add anything. You and I have this conversation constantly because we're constantly talking to leaders.

Rick Lash: Yeah, no, absolutely. And I think that as you pointed out, Christine, that one of the consequences of living in this permanent state of crisis is that people don't get the opportunity. There's a number of consequences. One obviously is burnout and exhaustion, but I think that prolonged periods of stress, from a psychological standpoint, prolonged periods of stress are just bad for you. They're bad for you physically, they're bad for you mentally. And I think that one of the things that we also see is that not only are people exhausted and feeling a sense of burnout, but they're feeling a disconnection from themselves. They show up every day, they go through what they need to do, but there's this incredible sense, I think, of people feeling just drained and disconnected from who they are and what it is that... Why it is that they do what they do. They're just always in this execution mode.

And I think that one of the challenges is that increasingly people, no matter where you are at an organization and no matter where you are in your life, at some level, you have to have a sense of purpose. This is funny, we just recently moved my mother into a retirement home. I know this is going to go off to the side, but this is actually an important learning point. And yesterday I was there for dinner and there's a woman there who I've met a couple of times before who is, she's 86 years old, she is just full of beans, full of so much energy, and she wanted to read to me a speech that she's going to be giving to a local synagogue on the power of resilience and the power of having a purpose.

She used to be a clown, that was her, part of her profession, which is quite amazing. And what was very clear to her is just the days to me just don't seem long enough. I have so much that I have to do. I feel there's so much that needs to be done, and I just love every day that I wake up and full of energy. And I thought this is the living embodiment of living with a sense of purpose. And I think that in the work environment, living in a sense of permacrisis is that it's corrosive on our sense of purpose and on our sense of ability not only to connect with ourselves, but to connect with others. And I do think that one of the things that we are seeing is that in this current state of permacrisis, people are just, they're starved for stuff that feeds their soul.

And as leaders, leaders play a critical role in creating the context of the environment whereby people feel that they can operate with a sense of purpose. And I think that that is the major shift, that shift. But I think the major challenge that this creates for leaders is on the one hand management, the word management has its roots in using your hands. Management is about task and it's about getting things done. But the roots of leadership is about a focus on the future. And no matter where you are in an organization, you got to manage the task, but you also have to focus on the future. There was one individual that, I can't remember his name, but he talked about his approach to working with his staff of instead of setting annual goals, what they do is that they establish resume building objectives.

So what people are working on is, is it's not just about the tasks that you have to accomplish for the organization, it's about seeing how these tasks that you're accomplishing fit into the broader purpose of your life and what it is that you're trying to achieve and how engaging and energizing that is for people. So I think helping leaders to shift from, it's not just about the hands, it's not about managing the task because that in and of itself isn't going to get you what you need in the long term in terms of engaging people and driving productivity forward.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, there are so many points you made there that really resonated. So one thing I just thought of though is just recently I recorded a podcast with a gentleman named Anthony Billups who is with Comfort Systems. And we were talking about some of these things and just really we were reflecting on some of the outdated thinking that can exist in our industry around talent, around leadership, around what customers want, a variety of things. And when we were talking about leadership, I just love the way he put this is what we need to realize is leaders shouldn't care about their people eight hours a day. They should care about the 24-hour person.

So this idea that... And what you're saying with what made me think of that with the resume building versus goal setting is it's not about what you can do for the company, it's about how can we make you better and more of what you want to be more fulfilled, et cetera, and trusting that if leaders do that, it will also help the company. So looking at it less from the context of just their own agenda and more from the genuine place of care. So I think the other thing I loved that you said is about the idea of people want more of what feeds their soul. And I think one of the learnings that I hope people take from this episode and other content that we're creating is in service, there's so many opportunities to give people that, it's just not the context through which we've historically looked at what our goals are or how we're interacting with our teams.

It's because it has been very transactional or very, we had people that were happy to just go fix this, great, come back, go to the next job. But today we have people that want more purpose, they want more fulfillment. And service is a world where there's so many opportunities to give them that, we just need to look at things a bit differently. So I love those points. There's two other themes that came up in your presentation that I want to make sure we touch upon and maybe we can split them up and one of you can take each, those are personal clarity and mindset traps. So can we talk about how you define those things and what it means to the work that you both do?

Christine Miners: Yeah. Rick, do you want to talk about personal clarity? I have some thoughts that I might add, but I know that's a topic of passion for you.

Rick Lash: Yeah. So the idea about personal clarity that we spoke to is that all of the research from the last probably 60, 70 years into what drives successful performance is that we talk about this notion of organizational climate. Climate is the feel of the place, and there's tons and tons of research on the dimensions of organizational climate and how creating the right climate as a leader helps to drive performance within a team, however you measure that performance. And one of the key dimensions of climate is this dimension of clarity. And clarity really is about two things. It's about, first of all, do people have clarity on where they fit in the bigger picture? So how does my daily contribution align with the goals of our team and the goals of the organization, and how does that contribute to society at large?

So having clarity and having that line of sight is important. But equally important too is having clarity on lines of authority. Who do I go to? Who are the key decision makers? How do I get things done? And clarity is the most important dimension of climate. If you're lacking clarity in a team, nothing else matters because you've got just people who are showing up every day but are operating in a vacuum. The old adage of, I just feel like I'm a cog in a wheel, that's really what it is. That's what lack of clarity gets you. And so-

Sarah Nicastro: I think also that ambiguity creates anxiety for people.

Rick Lash: Yeah.

Sarah Nicastro: So then when you layer that we are in this permacrisis landscape, it's creating, it's fueling this sense of anxiousness.

Rick Lash: Yep, because you can't predict what's going to happen next. Christine talked about the word that we used around permacrisis is, is that you're constantly, it's the old psychology experiments of putting a dog in a cage and then shocking the bottom of the cage, and eventually the dog just lies down and just waits for the next shot to come because they can't do anything to control their environment. But the important aspect of clarity is, is that as a leader, your number one task is, is to create the context, to create that clarity for people. Sometimes even in the absence of having clarity yourself, just not having clarity because your boss isn't giving it to you, doesn't excuse you from not creating clarity in your own team. And that's why leaders get paid what they get paid, because your job is to create clarity for your team.

But before you can create clarity in your team, you as a leader have to have clarity yourself. It's the old adage, you're putting on the oxygen mask for yourself before you put it on for other people. So as a leader, you got to know, you've got to be able to answer the question of who am I as a person and why do I choose to lead? And what is the impact that I choose to have through my leadership? If you can't answer those questions, you can't hope to create clarity for others.

Sarah Nicastro: Okay. So I have a follow-up question, and I'm trying not to come up with too many of these because I don't want to get us off track on time and everything. So relating this back to the topic of empowerment. Okay, so first of all, I absolutely agree with what you're saying. Like I said, I think a lack of clarity just fuels this discomfort in people or anxiety in people. But what I'm curious about specifically when we're thinking about empowerment is knowing that, like you said, the number one objective needs to be creating this clarity. How do we make room within that clarity for creativity? Because I'm just thinking another aspect of empowerment is that we aren't so rigid in our expectation or our defined clarity for people to not have that sense of ownership, to be themselves, to weigh in to the extent that it's feasible and realistic to solve problems on their own, to do things in what feels like their own way. So I'm just curious, when we talk about the importance of creating clarity, how do we also as leaders, leave room for and even encourage creativity?

Christine Miners: I have a thought on that, and I feel like Rick, we've talked about this before, but I think there's a difference between big picture clarity that creates parameters for people and guiding principles for how we make decisions and helps people understand in a clear way the context in which we operate and what's important to us and what value we're trying to create for our stakeholders, usually our customers. That's clarity to me. I think sometimes though, in a leadership capacity, we confuse that with creating task clarity for people, which is much more directive and much more prescriptive.

And I think when we confuse that and we start to think that creating clarity for people is really about creating task clarity and being directive in that way, then we start to drive empowerment, innovation, creativity, being nimble, agile, having people who know how to think and make decisions, that starts to go away because we teach people that if you wait long enough, I'll tell you exactly how to translate this big picture clarity into actions. I think it's important we set expectations for people that people have clarity around what good looks like in their role and what functionally they're accountable for and what's important in their role. But I think we can't cross the line and invest all of our time in task clarity. That's where we get in trouble.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. So maybe part of it is that leaders can get confused or blur the line between parameters and prescriptiveness. That makes sense.

Christine Miners: And I think Sarah, it's a challenge in this industry in particular because I think in this industry, not to say I hate generalizations, and not to say this is true for everyone, but I think many folks in this industry have risen through the ranks into leadership roles. And the challenge with that is for most leaders in this sector, they're already expert at the jobs of their people. And so it's very easy then to fall into this is how it needs to be done, and into that task clarity is they actually know how to do the jobs, they've done the job. And so I think it's an extra big challenge and an extra big self-management opportunity for leaders in this sector to stay up and stay up in the purpose clarity as opposed to task.

Sarah Nicastro: I think that's a really good point, and I think it's a totally different conversation, maybe one we can have you back to talk through, but I know many leaders in this space who have risen through the ranks that are phenomenal leaders, phenomenal. But we also, I think as an industry and really just in general across the board, have to be very careful of the go-to way to acknowledge someone's excellence as an individual contributor is to make them a manager and a leader. And not everyone is built for that.

So I think when we're talking about a landscape where leadership is equally important or in some ways maybe more important than management, we need to make sure that we're not promoting just anyone to those roles. And also that we're putting the time, effort, and money into training and ongoing development of our leaders because we acknowledge how critical that role is. But it's a really good point that when they know the job intimately, they might be more inclined to say and do this, this and this.

Christine Miners: Yeah.

Sarah Nicastro: Okay. Rick, can you talk a little bit, or wait, who was going to talk about mindset traps? Sorry, I got us off track.

Rick Lash: It's Christine.

Christine Miners: Yeah, no, it's okay. I can talk to mindset traps. I feel like it's my favorite topic of conversation probably because I get caught in them too. But you know what? There's some common ones that really stand out and I know Rick and I, we work with leaders in all capacities. So whether it's one-on-one coaching, we do Intacct team coaching for executive leaders, and then we do leadership development programming. And it doesn't matter in what context we work, there's some mindset or thinking traps that tend to rise to the surface that I think are problematic. One of them is actually just that very simple mindset of I'm only adding value when I'm getting stuff done. And I think that, that is problematic, because if I'm only adding value when I'm getting stuff done, that's management at the most, but it's certainly not leadership.

Leadership is, yes, it's about driving results, but it's not about checking things off a list and bringing things to completion. And I think where that gets leaders in trouble is when they've got capacity to actually sit and think and reflect and do the kind of thinking that would allow them to create clarity and empower people in their environment. They have this feeling often of guilt or not knowing what to do with that time, because it feels like I'm not creating value for the organizations. That's one that rises to the surface. One of the other ones that rises to the surface, and it's funny because I just had a conversation with a CEO yesterday about this in a different sector, but it's this notion of I get something from my people. It's not really the way I wanted it or it doesn't quite meet my expectations.

And it's this mindset trap of, well, I give feedback. It's just faster if I do it myself, and surely they ought to know, after I've done it myself and shown them what it was supposed to look like. Surely they ought to know how to do it the next time. And surely I've created clarity around what my expectations are, and I think that is, it's flawed thinking. I think it's a common mindset trap, and I think it gets us into this place where people start to take shortcuts in their work because they become dependent on their leader to fix it and bring it to completion. And it's problematic for a bunch of reasons, not the least of which it erodes role clarity. So people at the front line start to believe that my role is to bring it 70% of the way there and my leader will bring it the other 30%, and it continues to pull leaders back down into the weeds. It feels good-

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, I was also thinking about empowerment again, that could create resentment in the sense of, okay, well you want me to do this, then you step in and do it, so just do it anyway. Do you know what I mean? It's like you said, you trusted me, but so rather than a teaching moment of let's try this or have you thought about this or whatever, it's when you just step in and finish it or redo it or do it yourself. It's working against the idea of empowering people to improve and have that sense of ownership.

Christine Miners: Yeah. And I think we leave a lot to implied. If I think of the CEO that I was speaking with yesterday, the individual said to me, actually gave me an example and said, I have this stuff that somehow ends up on my desk and I'm at eight o'clock at night after dinner with my family I'm like, I'm editing it. And I said, well, why do you do that? I can't imagine as the CEO of a large organization that you are creating value for the organization by actually editing grammar and spelling and how things are written at eight o'clock at night. And the individual said, well, I'm not, but it comes to me with all these mistakes. I said, well, have you ever actually pushed it back to people to say, I expect by the time it lands on my desk, it's 98% of the way there that I'm not editing. The only value I'm creating is more around point of view and her response-

Sarah Nicastro: I think too... Sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt you.

Christine Miners: No, her response was, well, I send it back to them. Surely they ought to know. That's where the mindset trap is. It's in this implicit feedback that we're giving as opposed to explicit. And explicit resetting expectations around what you're accountable for, what right looks like as opposed to just taking what feels like the faster road to getting the result we want, which usually the faster road is, I'll just fix it myself-

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, that's exactly what I was going to say. It's not only a mindset trap, but it's also just habit because it's like-

Christine Miners: Totally.

Sarah Nicastro: ... it is faster and easier a lot of times to fix something yourself or do something yourself than it is to teach, enable and empower people to do it. But yeah. Yeah.

Christine Miners: And I think these thinking traps do create habit. These thinking traps become deeply ingrained. We believe they're true. We never challenge whether they're true or not, and they just ingrain habits and almost belief systems of what's true as opposed to challenging it, really challenging, putting the mirror back on ourselves and saying, if I'm not getting what I need here, what aspect of how I'm showing up and what I'm reinforcing or not reinforcing is getting in the way of bringing people along. And oftentimes I think if you just told people what you needed from them, I think most people are experiences, they rise to the occasion or they at least try. People don't wake up in the morning and think, how can I mess up my job today? So, those are the big ones for me. I don't know, Rick, if you'd add anything to that.

Rick Lash: Yeah, the only other thing that I would say is that there's a very big emotional component to all of this that tends to drive behavior that we tend not to pay attention to. And I think, as you said earlier, Christine, that many folks in field services did rise through the ranks and they rose through the ranks because they were good at getting stuff done. In our language, we say that they're very achievement driven. They get a lot of satisfaction out of being able to set goals and solve complex problems and then to be able to get things done through their own efforts. And that's deeply satisfying.

The challenge is that when you move into these leadership positions, is that you have to draw upon a different well of emotion, which isn't so much driven out of a need for achievement. It's more driven out of what we would call a need for power and influence. So it's not so much that I get satisfaction out of getting things done myself. I get satisfaction out of being able to elevate others to get things done. And that's actually, that draws from a very different motive. And it's hard for leaders often to make, not just make the intellectual shift, but make that emotional shift. Because part of it is, is that habits are fueled because they feel good. We keep feeding them because it's satisfying just to roll up our sleeves and get things done.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. We don't have time to get into this. So I'm going to say this question, but we're not actually answering it. But then I think about what you just said, Rick, and power and influence sounds, especially power, sounds very risky to me because then I think you go in the other direction equally risky for empowerment of ego. So then it becomes not taking satisfaction in achieving, but taking satisfaction in telling people what to do, but also not empowering them or really leading, which seems like it would be also a big problem. Again, we'll have to come back to that because... Christine's like, no, we'll not.

Christine Miners: I know. I'm like, no, we won't. We got to come back to it now in 20 seconds or less, just because I don't want to leave you hanging on the word power because I think Rick, you did the short version. The slightly longer version is there's two different kinds of power. One is socialize, the other is personal. So when we talk personalized power, that's a little bit more, I think what you were talking about, Sarah, around ego and status and where do I stand in the system? Socialized power is different. Socialized power is that desire to create positive impact for others because it empowers them to be more capable and creates more. That when Rick talks about power and influence, that's the version of power that he's really talking about, is drawing on that component of ourselves.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, no, that makes perfect sense. But it just reinforces the importance of people having the education and the coaching because if you just say, well, you need to exercise more power, and that's left to interpretation. Some people, even when the intent is good, can think of that as, okay, I need to be more directive versus I need to build better teams and et cetera. Okay, there's two more questions, at least we'll say two. Well, two more questions I want to make sure we get to. The first is thinking about empowerment, we already talked about why that's important for a lot of leaders in our space. So empowerment, nurturing, a sense of ownership among teams, what works?

Christine Miners: Okay. I don't know. I have a strong perspective on this one in terms of what I think leaders can do, and it's going to sound like a little trite, but I think if you're going to empower people, so we talked about a bunch of things like clarity and big picture and make people understand the context and what's important. I think the other missing ingredient that we haven't really talked about is leaders need to have an incredibly strong learning and growth orientation and mindset around that, and that has to be part of the impact they seek to create in terms of the climate and the environment they create for their people. Because I think what happens is most of us are wired, it's like instant gratification. So you assign me a task, I got my task done, great, and now I'm moving on to the next one.

And so people bounce back and forth, check this one off the list, I'm going to move to my next task. I'm going to check that one off the list. I'm going to move to the next one. And that is the opposite of a learning and a growth mindset. And when we lead in a fast-paced environment and we're driving for performance and results, that can sometimes be really attractive. I've got people who get stuff done and they move on. Where leaders I think can be stronger on empowerment is being more patient around learning and creating, I think you actually have to actively create the learning environment. Do you know what I mean? So it's almost like, I hate to use the word imposing, but it's still early in the morning and I can't think of a different word right now, but you've got to impose reflection on people.

And there's some real simple questions. It's quite systematic, it's reflect back on the experience, what worked, what didn't work, what can we do better next time? That's not rocket science. We're not reinventing the wheel. It's just leaders when we don't do that, our people don't naturally do it on their own either, and so they don't get smarter and more capable and they're not improving their judgment and decision-making skills. And then how can you be empowered if you don't have those skills?

Sarah Nicastro: I think it's prioritize and protect, because it's prioritizing it because we know it's important, it's protecting it because everyone's busy. And so it's really easy to let those opportunities slide and just get consumed with moving on to the next thing. But when you brought this topic up, Christine, what it makes me think of is we talked about permacrisis, which for better or worse makes me think it's dynamic, it's constantly changing. So when we as leaders or with our teams allow ourselves to become static in a dynamic environment where we're not evolving along with the continually evolving landscape and circumstances, it's a problem.

And so I think it's a really good point that leaders need to be taking that time for themselves, as you mentioned earlier, and not feeling guilty for it or frozen with what the heck do I do with this white space I put on my calendar? And then making sure they do the same with their teams. So Rick, anything else you want to add? Or also the other question is looking at what are the common missteps that leaders make when they're aiming for empowerment, but then what happens when they're maybe falling short? So you can weigh in on either of those or both?

Rick Lash: Yeah, well, maybe a little bit of both. I think that the point around creating an environment for learning is absolutely critical. And I would say that as leaders, one of your roles is to push people out of their comfort zone because if you are not, people aren't developing new capacity and you're not increasing capacity within your team. So I think some of the best practices that we've seen are leaders who actively are thinking about what are the stretch opportunities that they can provide for their people, but also providing a safety net so that people can learn from their mistakes. And I think that in permacrisis environments, leaders are more and more reluctant to do that. But in fact, you have to do it if you ever want to increase capacity in your team, but you have to do it for yourself as well.

So learning how to be uncomfortable, if you're not uncomfortable, you're not learning. And I think that creating that as a value within a team is important. So I would say that for leaders to think about how they can create an environment whereby people can feel supported in their own growth and development, I think is key. And I would say in terms of missteps, one of the biggest missteps is first of all for leaders not to be pushing themselves to be growing and learning and experiencing new things, but also not encouraging an environment where people can use failure as an opportunity for growth.

Sarah Nicastro: Absolutely. Yeah. And I think when we think about the changes in talent, and again, it's hard to do that without generalizing, but I think going back to Rick, some of the points you made earlier about a sense of purpose and experiences that fuel someone's soul, for a lot of today's workforce that is tied to those opportunities for growth and learning and not feeling that they're stuck or staying still. So in a lot of ways, when we can figure out how to get it right, it's mutually beneficial because it's good leadership, it's serving a purpose for the organization, but it's also helping those people ideally be more satisfied in their roles and hopefully stay part of the team longer because they're getting those opportunities with your organization versus feeling complacent or bored and wanting to go seek them somewhere else.

So on the flip side, some of the more long-term workers where you might be pushing them a little bit more, you might also have team members who are very welcoming of that, and you have to strike that balance. Okay. So in terms of missteps or best practices or really anything else, any final points or thoughts before we close?

Christine Miners: For me, I guess my final thought is overcorrecting, that's a misstep. So sometimes we make a decision, we want to change our leadership in a certain way, and it's almost we overcorrect, we swing the pendulum from one side to the other and it's too drastic, it's not sustainable, it's hard. I think it's leadership comes from these small new actions and habits and really taking the time to embed those new habits and understand their impact and iterate them as we go, as opposed to making these broad reaching massive goals in our leadership that are just hard for us to swing to that other side.

Rick Lash: Yeah. And I would say that the building on that is a big misstep is not creating the spare capacity for yourself and for others because learning and growth can't come when you're a 120% over capacity. And so it's a bit of a red herring to say we simply don't have the time. You never have enough time, but you have to be, I think, intentional and deliberate about creating that space where you can take the time to breathe, you can take the time to push people to learn and to grow and take the time for yourself for that important self-reflection to help you to continue grow and develop as an individual and as a leader.

Sarah Nicastro: I think what might make for a really interesting follow-up discussion if you guys were willing to come back is this idea of, Christine, you mentioned overcorrecting, and I think also sometimes people think it's one or the other. So to put it simply, I'm going to say management or leadership. We talked about those things being distinct or directive or empowering, however we want to define it, but having a conversation around the fluidity between those things and knowing the appropriate times to transition or switch or what that can look like for different leaders, I think that would be really interesting. But I could go on forever. I've already taken more of your time today than I was supposed to, so really appreciate that. Can you tell our listeners where they can find the book and also connect with you if they would like to?

Christine Miners: Yeah, so it's super easy. The website is just onceuponaleader.com. So onceuponaleader.com and you've got information about the book and it's also a way of reaching out to me or Rick. And then, of course, the obvious one would also be LinkedIn to reach out to us directly.

Sarah Nicastro: Excellent. I'll make sure to link the website in the show notes and everyone, please go have a look and get the book, have a read, and then would love to have you both back again in the future if we can. So thank you so much for your time and for the great conversation.

Rick Lash: Thanks Sarah.

Christine Miners: Thanks Sarah. We'd love to come back, so we look-

Sarah Nicastro: Thank you.

Christine Miners: ... forward to that.

Sarah Nicastro: That sounds good. You can learn more by visiting us at futureoffieldservice.com. While you're there, be sure to register for the Future of Field Service Insiders so you can stay up to date on our latest content. We also have one more Future of Field Service live tour event left for 2023 in Stockholm on October 10th. So if you're in or near that area and would like to join us, please register for that. The Future of Field Service podcast is published in partnership with IFS. You can learn more at ifs.com. As always, thank you for listening.

By Sarah Nicastro, Creator, Future of Field Service

While field service remains an in-person business in many ways, digital experiences make up a huge part of the overall service lifecycle – from appointment scheduling and online help desks to chatbots and full-blown remote service, as well delivery of service or consumption-related data and post-service surveys. The flow of digital and physical touchpoints must be seamless, the experiences smooth, and the information exchange easy, accurate, and always available.

Easy-peasy, right? We know it isn’t, but it is the tall order of customer expectations. I recently posed some questions to author and consultant Alfonso de la Nuez about how to avoid missteps that can lead to customer defections before you even get a chance to impress them with your excellent in-person service. Alfonso is the Chief Visionary Officer at UserTesting, advising on improving customer experiences. He also wrote the book The Digital Experience Company: Winning In The Digital Economy With Experience Insights. Let’s hear how his digital experience expertise translates to the field service environment.

What are some of the key factors that drive a successful digital experience, from a customer perspective?

The first thing sounds simple or maybe trivial, but it's understanding your customers and what situations they are going to be in when they are interacting with the brand. I know in your industry, these companies are actually going to have to interact with a service manager or someone face-to-face, but if you can understand what the customer is going to need or would like to do independent of the moment when the product is getting fixed, that is key.

For a customer to have a great experience, it is all about expectations. Understand what the customer needs and what is convenient to them, and what they may do with your products. That is what we are looking for here, convenience vs. a revolutionary technology that is going to change everything. Can you relate and engage with customers throughout the customer journey? Do you understand what the customer journey is like? Are they going to contact you through a website? Are you optimized for Google searches, and is the website going to tell the story of what the customer needs?

Your website should be designed in such a way that will anticipate the needs of those users and those customers. I would also argue you have to design the site with a professional look and feel as well. The first thing we are looking for is convenience, content, ease of use, making sure the information is there for people to easily make decisions. But the next thing is to make it look professional, because that does make a difference projecting trustworthiness and affects the customer decision. A great website also needs to be mobile friendly, since a lot of customers are using their phones to browse.

In field service, the digital experience includes a number of facets -- customer self-service, online scheduling, diagnostics chats, and much more -- that often lead into an in-person experience (having a technician arrive at your location to fix something). What are some ways that organizations can ensure their digital and in-person exchanges are both mutually satisfying for the customer and also consistent?

We always talk about online experiences, but the customer experience is a combination of online and offline interactions. The real art and science here is in combining the two and making sure they are not isolated. Maybe on the website you have an account where you can login and or provide feedback on the experience. Their data may be there along with the phone number for your representative. That should be present in a customer portal. You should be able to sign documents and pay bills and be invoiced automatically.

In person, knowing that customer is also important. I like how the cable company Xfinity does it. They have an iPad and they can see the customer account, greet them and have access to that online information about them.

Going back to that customer journey, you have to understand that many times things start with a search. They find you online. Can you use technology to schedule and confirm the appointment, and create convenience for the customer by providing them with another confirmation the day before? You can mix online and offline and offer a lot of convenience to customers that way.

What are some of the biggest mistakes companies make when designing their digital interface and experiences?

I think the biggest mistake by far is when companies design interfaces for themselves instead of their customers. It is very typical to look at the design and content from the perspective of the owners of the website. What you have to do is dumb it down completely and make it so a grandma can understand it.

I often see two issues. One is there is so much technical information it is hard to understand unless you are actually a technician. The other is just finding information on the site. A lot of times, the content is not well laid out. Content needs to be organized, and there should be a search function on the site. You need to keep the menu options limited and focus on the customer journey, prioritizing the content we know they will need.

Another mistake is not prioritizing the digital channel, or not worrying enough about the website. If you just throw a website out there, customers can tell and it will come back to bite you. You should invest in a professional looking and easy-to-use website.

How can companies make sure their digital experiences are NOT creating friction or frustration for customers, and how can they ensure there is a process in place so that there is a timely intervention when a customer needs to interact directly with someone who can help them?

This goes back to my point about the digital channel not being a priority. If you hire on the cheap, or just offer a chatbot for customer support, if it is not really working that is counterproductive. It produces a bad brand experience.

I would highly recommend if you don't have a real proper bot that is working well with a team of people behind it that can provide support, just take it out. Make people send an email or contact you by phone. If you try the bot just to try to avoid costs and it doesn't work, it will be worse. People are sick and tired of talking to robots.

The good news is that with artificial intelligence (AI). This is about to change big time, because new AI technology is going to take bots to another level. To me it is really one of the things that many of these brands can do to support people in a proper way without turning them off by making it obvious that this is a chatbot. AI will provide much better bots.

Having said that, there is an art and science to building chatbots. Usually, you want to set it up to support the main three to five things people want to do on your website. If what they need is not on that list, there should be a button for them to click that says Other. You don't want them to feel left out of the support picture. You want to channel them through those options to see if they need to talk to an agent. Well, the agent will need to see what information they provided before they speak to them.

Brands must acknowledge that delivering great experiences is not easy. It is hard. Even completely digital companies have a hard time with this and invest millions to do it properly. It takes time and expertise. Maybe you need to outsource it, but you have to start by understanding that is not easy to do. It is a big cultural challenge for many of these companies.

In a session from the Future of Field Service Live Tour stop in Minneapolis, Sarah talks with Gyner Ozgul, President and COO of Smart Care Equipment Solutions about the company’s approach creating scalable success, particularly in a highly acquisitive business. From customer experience and digital transformation to company culture and talent development, Gyner talks about the factors that Smart Care prioritizes in creating growth that meets the needs of the business, its customers, and its employees – not only today but into the future.

Sarah Nicastro: Come on up. Hello, welcome, welcome.

Gyner Ozgul: How are you?

Sarah Nicastro: Thanks for being here.

Gyner Ozgul: Thank you.

Sarah Nicastro: Last but certainly not least, my friend Gyner Ozgul, President and COO of Smart Care Equipment Solutions. We've been talking a lot today about service differentiation, innovation, transformation. We've talked about some of the challenges the pandemic brought, some of the now growth and new initiatives that have come out of the recovery from that, et cetera. We're going to talk about the tenets of scalable service success. Before we get into that, tell everyone a little bit about you.

Gyner Ozgul: Gyner Ozgul, as you mentioned, President and Chief Operating Officer of Smart Care Equipment Solutions. We are the commercial side of kitchen repair. You had Matt up here earlier talking Whirlpool, that's residential. We do similar on the commercial side. We service commercial kitchen establishments. Typically, people equate those to restaurants, so there's a green check mark there.

But our bigger end markets are actually non-commercial food service spaces. If you think about hospitals and universities and educational facilities, those are much larger end markets for us than the restaurants we all think about. We certainly service them, but the commercial food space is much bigger than just the restaurants.

Sarah Nicastro: Good. We have talked quite a bit over the last few years about the journey that Smart Care has been on, highly acquisitive organization, rapid growth, and working to keep pace with customer expectations and demands and also keeping pace with digital sophistication, et cetera.

A lot of things you've been at the helm of. What I want to talk about today is you're very focused on scalable service success. As you grow, how do you scale the customer experience? How do you achieve repeatable success in what you're doing? Obviously customer experience is a huge factor in that, but what goes into that for you? What are those foundational elements?

Gyner Ozgul: We start with the customer need assessment, and each customer's a little different. Each of these end markets has different needs. If we think about quick service restaurants, so your McDonald's of the world, that customer's needs is speed, because they're serving a lot of customers and they're moving through it, so any equipment down or outage impacts their ability to produce product. Speed is really important to them.

Whereas in an educational facility, harsher procedures around food safety and temperature checks and things like that on their menu are paramount because they can't afford anyone to get sick, especially when one of the school district service does 40,000 meals a day. That's more important than the speed, is I have to make sure that all the food that I'm putting in these children's mouths is safe to eat. We start with the customer, and then we build our processes back against that, and then we use our systems to support that.

If I take the McDonald's example again, we'll build a SLA or a service level agreement with the end customer based on their pieces of equipment that they want to see repaired within not only response time, but also how long it takes to actually fix the piece of equipment. We build that into our process and then put that into our system. What we try to do from a scalability standpoint, and we partnered with IFS back in 2019, was we wanted a system that as much as we could take our process and systematize it so that we could get scale out of it.

We take essentially the air of human interaction of whether or not the SLA should be met or not be met away and let the system drive the expectation because what the process is we should be doing.

Sarah Nicastro: Jorge, you spoke this morning about the work you're doing to set that foundation. That's really the work that you did in 2019 essentially, right?

Gyner Ozgul: That's right.

Sarah Nicastro: We talked at one point about the fact that step one is setting the foundation, getting everyone on a platform from which everyone has access to the same insights. You're taking some of that non-automated friction out of the process. And then talk a little bit about what you see going forward in terms of now that you've done the foundational piece, what will come next in terms of better leveraging now the pool of data that you have and what you can do from that point on?

Gyner Ozgul: There is thousands of service providers in our space across the country. Not many of scale, but many service providers. The differentiation of service itself... I give our technicians a lot of credit and I like to say we are as good or better than our competitors in terms of delivering that last mile of service. But the points of differentiation when you get really good become harder to delineate between yourself and the competitor. So then for us it's how do we take that next step? Well, the next step for us is data. At our scale, we have tripled the business in five years in terms of revenue and customers.

We continue to do that year-on-year. What that enables for us is roughly half a million to three quarters of a million work orders completed a year. That type of data aggregation and helping customers who this is a major capital investment for them, they are spending somewhere between 25 and $200,000 for a piece of equipment. It's really expensive. We can use that data then to help guide them in their buying process and repair, replace decisions on predictive or prescriptive maintenance versus reactive maintenance. Data enables and unlocks a lot of that to happen. I always get to ask the question, well, that all sounds good, but it can be snake oil and vaporware and is this all real and does it work?

The answer is yes. We did a pilot of a couple of markets two years ago. Took all our data and said, if we put it into an AI or machine learning environment, what would it tell us about predictive or prescriptive breakage? We used ice machines in our case study, because everybody has an ice machine. All ice machines need to be cleaned. It's something that was consistent across all market segments and customers. We didn't clean any of the data, so we didn't do any of the scrubbing or the governance. We just said, we're going to put it all in and see what this machine does.

Over three months in two states, Texas and Florida, because we wanted to pick states where the ice machine breakage was high because the usage is high, it accurately predicted seven out of 10 ice machines being broke the next month in the location. And within the seven out of 10, five out of 10, it actually produced part failure as well. And that's, again, without cleaning and scrubbing and actually building process around it. It's a long way to answer your question to say we really feel that there's a lot of power in data differentiation. That's just one use case. The second use case besides the... There's three use cases.

One is the customer that I just described. The second is really driving efficiency back to the business. We've talked a lot about efficiency today, so very aligned with that. The third is using the data to help drive back that knowledge to your technicians. How do you create knowledge based tools that add scale? Your senior technicians have their little nope notepad here in their pocket and it's 20 years of knowledge that they've written down. How do you get it from here to somewhere in a centralized database that you can share with the technician that just got released out of training two months ago? We're really focused on that.

Sarah Nicastro: Now, with the acquisitions you do, you're kind of multiplying or compounding change management. Because you introduced a new system a few years ago, you got everyone on the same page and you're good, but then you're bringing new people on, bringing new people on. How do you handle that on an ongoing basis so that it isn't too disruptive to the business or to them?

Gyner Ozgul: We have a dedicated integration team, which helps because you have resources assigned to a specific task. But on that specifically, we put a lot of work and effort into understanding the businesses that we acquire before we integrate them into our process in our system. We begin with process first. The reason is is some of these businesses actually have best practices that are better than our own. We set aside the we're better than everyone that we buy approach.

What we say is, hey, if they're doing something that we should be doing, let's take that on, build it into our process, and then ultimately put that into the system as we integrate them. And then we get immediate buy-in, right? Because now we've centralized their process. One of the first businesses we bought was in Birmingham, Alabama back in early 2018. They had a really good defined dispatch process, even better than our platform businesses. We have taken probably half of their best practices and incorporated them in the last couple of years into our process just because it's so good.

They're a larger entity, so we haven't put them on our system yet, but they are scheduled for mid next year to go onto our system. We feel really good that because we've been on this recognizing their best practices and bringing them into our system, the cutover of bringing them into our system should be smoother because now they have immediate buy-in that we've recognized and respected their culture and what makes it special.

Sarah Nicastro: No, I think that's really good and looking at it from the perspective of having the ability to learn from these businesses, not just automatically put them into. When we talk about scalability, another huge topic has to be talent and talent development and a lot of the themes that come up there. What does that look like for Smart Care? What are some of the trends that you're seeing, challenges you're working through, et cetera?

Gyner Ozgul: Our biggest workforce at Smart Care is our technicians. They make up two-thirds of our entire workforce because they're what we're putting in front of our end customers every day. I'll speak to them and then the general. For the technicians, our biggest challenge has been the onboarding and training process, I was talking about this a little earlier with somebody, especially in that year one. Because as we were coming out of COVID, we had this hockey stick that happened.

Everyone thought it'd be a gradual recovery, and then actually promotes commercial businesses, hockey stick. Our managers were rushing to get technicians in the field to accommodate the volume pickup. We had a lot of turnover on year one technicians. They were leaving because our onboarding and training experience, frankly, wasn't very good, because it consisted of some qualitative view of some local manager or dispatcher saying this person is ready to go and run service calls. We've walked our way...

Sarah Nicastro: Because we really need them today.

Gyner Ozgul: Because we really need them right now. Last year we spent a lot of time and energy building and onboarding and training process and pulling in the technicians for that. Each of our markets has what we call district field trainer, which is a seasoned technician. That technician is the buddy of that new hire. But more importantly, they're the one that's going to release them to be able to do work or not, not the manager, not the dispatcher, not anyone else, not even myself in the organization. That technician is driving the accountability of that.

We get the buy-in then from the technician group that this person's ready and the specificity of the feedback the technician can also give, like they can only work in these three pieces of equipment and do it well. We follow that and our technology tools help us enforce that, because we assign skill competencies within our dispatch tool, within PSO. We can actually only assign the skills that they have and they can't be dispatched to anything else. It creates a little bit of a good blocker. We have improved our technician retention rate of year one technicians by almost 50% this year.

It's astounding, even to me. I'm very skeptical. Our CPO and I have one-on-ones and I always say, we should double check that number because I'm a little worried that it's a little overstated. And with the general population, it's been pay them what they deserve to be paid. We all have this trepidation to pay people what they deserve to be paid. Pay them what they deserve to be paid and set the expectations very clearly for them for success and enable their success. If they don't deliver on the pay that you paid them, then that's a separate conversation of accountability.

I am not one for the carrot. I will give you $1,000 and I'll give you another $1,000 if you do something right. I'm more like just give them the $2,000 and help them be successful. If they're not the right person, then they're probably not the right person at $1,000 or $2,000. They're just not the right person. I say compensate them well because it's hard to overcome culture if the compensation is right to begin with because that person feels they're undervalued immediately. That's something really important for me. For the rest of our group, we really focus on that.

I drive a fair amount of push of intercommunication of those groups. One of the first questions I always ask when something comes to me, whether it be a steering committee meeting or a process improvement meeting, is I'll say, well, did you communicate with finance, or did you communicate with supply chain and get their input on this or sign off on this if it's applicable?

If the answer's no, I say, well, then I don't really have a lot to add because if your coworkers aren't aligned with you, then my alignment is irrelevant. My alignment is the team is aligned, this is a solution, and I support that and help them be successful.

Sarah Nicastro: The other thing we talked a bit about, the onboarding and training, which is obviously having a huge impact that you are wanting to double check. But the other thing we talked about is the idea of career progression in service and how that might be evolving going forward. I fully agree with you on pay people what they're worth.

At the same time, we know that for today's talent, it isn't just about dollars the way it once was, there's these other elements and one of those is some want the ability to progress, they want to know what that progression could look like, et cetera. What are you doing to keep pace with what things look like today, but also start mapping out the evolution of what the role is looking like going forward and what those progression steps may be?

Gyner Ozgul: For our technician base, the way I think about it is the progression for them is two buckets. One is the bucket of technicians that are happy in their current roles and they really don't want to do something else, but you can't forego them either. You have to think about what the answer is for them. And then there's the progression for the technicians who want to be more in the organization. For the first bucket, what we do with them is, hey, what is a training path to help them hone their skills and feel energized every single year?

We work with their managers on a development that's customized that we track in our LMS systems for that first bucket of technicians that every year we're improving their skills, because they want that, right? They're like, just because I only want to be a technician, and I correct them when they say only, I'm very clear with them to say we need to still train them and make them the best technician possible in the business and make them feel good about coming to work every day. With the other technicians, we've created a number of different career paths.

You can obviously grow in your technician career all the way to this district field trainer that I talked about. You start as an apprentice and you can grow to district field trainer. We also have a training group primarily made up of former technicians that does classroom and field training specifically with technicians. They feel good that they have this training path they can join. We have allowed technicians to become district field sales representatives. I mean, they know the product, they know the customer.

We teach them the sales skills that they need to know and how to present them well. And then finally, there's a subset of technicians that just want to go into field service operations. They can start off as a service manager and then work their way up in the operations group. We've been very clear to map out each one of those for our technicians, so they feel that this is an organization that no matter what path they take, they can feel supported and get successful.

Sarah Nicastro: And they have choice.

Gyner Ozgul: And they have choice.

Sarah Nicastro: Which is important now. When Matt was up, he was talking about how they work to nurture that entrepreneurial spirit that the independent service providers have. It made me think of a conversation you and I had about how you look for and figure out what to do with talent that you or others think has very high potential. People that are maybe more innovative, maybe higher drive, et cetera. What should leaders look for in recognizing that? And then how do you maybe put them on a different path or fast track them in some way or make sure that they don't get bored or that sort of thing?

Gyner Ozgul: Yeah, it's fun, there's this group of individuals in the organization that I like to keep my eye on with my direct reports. Al is my VP of IT standing over there and he knows that... We talk about this with my direct reports. Who are the bright star, I call them in the organization, or who are the ones I should be on the lookout for? And then I proactively like to reach out to them and just talk to them. Sometimes not about anything specific, like just what's their experience like, what are we doing in the organization I should know about.

And then sometimes in those conversations they give you something, a little spark. We should go improve parts this way. And then you say, well, tell me more about that. And then you have a little more conversation on it and you're like, they have a pretty interesting idea. Then I take them and I'll put them in a little bit of a discovery special project and empower them to go do that. They may be or may not be in that work stream function and that's less relevant to me. I just want to give them an opportunity to go do something and shine.

If it works out, it could evolve to something a little more permanent for them. If it doesn't work out, I just like the fact that I'm giving them an opportunity to show us what they have, a competency of creative thinking that they have, and bring it more broadly to the organization. I do keep track of those. I mean, we had a very young talented woman who left because her husband moved to Iowa because he got a job out there a couple years ago. She recently moved back to the Twin Cities and now she's working for the Alan's team again.

I kept my eye on her, and it was a fun conversation. Because as soon as I learned she had moved back, I sent Al a note and I said, "Hey, you should reach out to Kathleen. She's got a lot of potential. She left the organization on good terms. She had to move. I'd really like her back in the organization because she was one of those sparks that we had." Of course, Alan interviewed her and calls me the next day and says, "Wow, yeah, we're bringing her on board." I feel really good about those folks.

I mean, they need an opportunity. One of our VPs of service on the specialty side, which handles coffee for us, I hired him as a materials planner in supply chain 10 years ago, and now he's running all of service on our specialty division. It's really cool to find them in there and work with them.

Sarah Nicastro: It's also a fun part of rapidly growing. There's a lot of opportunities for you to watch for those shining stars and help them progress. How would you describe the importance of culture in scalable success?

Gyner Ozgul: Very important. You said we do acquisitions. We spun out of a company here in the Twin Cities called Ecolab back in 2017. We were part of a corporate environment for roughly 20 years or so. We spun out to be independent, and we immediately started doing acquisitions to scale our business up. Of course, the culture we had was a culture that was very Ecolab, and there's nothing wrong with it, but it wasn't our culture. It was an Ecolab culture. What we learned in our first few acquisitions was our culture will always be evolving.

As long as we continue to do acquisitions, our culture can never be stagnant. The scalability of our culture has to be, here's what our culture is today. We just bought these two or three organizations. What does that do to our existing culture? How does that move now as we bring these organizations into our own? It's an ongoing resolve to revisit that culture and that statement for us.

But there are tenets within that, things like safety that we're very resolute on, integrity we're very resolute on, quality of service is something we have a lot of passionate on. There are tenets within that, but we allow ourselves the flexibility to evolve our culture as we buy more and more businesses.

Sarah Nicastro: You mentioned really just in passing one of the things that I know you value a lot, which is not only communication but listening. I think that's really important because the leaders that are doing the most to stay in tune with, here's not what I want our culture to be, so let me just assume that's what it is, right? But we have these objectives.

How do people really feel? What is it? Is it hitting the mark? What could we be doing better? The people that are having those conversations have the most opportunity to get the transparency, make the people you're talking to feel valued, but also course correct and continually improve.

Gyner Ozgul: Yeah, lots of questions. I have to watch it a little bit of my blind spot too. In one of our breakout groups I mentioned that. That sometimes if you're the leader that asks a lot of questions, it can intimidate people in the room. I have be a little careful. But a lot of times I ask questions because I want to learn a lot about the organization because that really drives the decision making process for myself. What you said is right, for me, that's really important, really utmost important. Listen to the teams and hear what they're saying.

Oftentimes you might think you're hearing them, but you're not. I do a lot of playbacks for myself. Here's what you said and here's what I heard. I'll even say it like that just to make sure the person's acknowledging that that's correct or not correct. You said we do a really bad job of stocking parts. What I heard is we need to probably think about what our planning parameters should be, because you're giving me the output and I'm giving you the upstream of where we should go work.

If they agree, then I feel like I have good direction. If they disagree, it's good because then I can get to what they're really trying to say. I like to get them there so that they feel like I'm hearing them.

Sarah Nicastro: And so you know what the real deal is. We talked recently about the fact that like everyone, you had your challenges during the pandemic, and now you're at a point of stability, which probably feels pretty good. But also you mentioned that puts you in a position where you need to be looking at organizational structures, the quality of the people you have in each of those structures, and making sure that with that stability you're not getting complacent and that you are continually improving. What does that look like for you and for Smart Care?

Gyner Ozgul: Yeah, I'll give you an example. Last summer, right about this time, we had gotten to a scale in the recovery, where my old operational leadership structure was showing some fractures. The fractures were showing up in lapses in customer communication and service delivery and some of the culture and turnover I talked about earlier. Those to me were all outputs and indicative of a scale problem we had. Not necessarily that the leaders I had in the organization were bad.

Some of them had some opportunities, to be quite frank, but more so that I hadn't stepped back to the organization and say, okay, this is an organization that now has twice the volume that it did at the onset of COVID, and yet it still retains the organizational structure of what it did during COVID. I stepped back and reorganized the service teams and really add two objectives in doing that, which is how do we personalize our connection with the technician and how do we personalize our connection with the local customer?

I wanted to bring local field back to the organization because we had the stretch during COVID. We redesigned the organizational structure in the fall, brought on two new VPs of service externally. I needed some talent, some new talent in with some ideas and some thought process. I also aligned the acquisitions to the service leaders. In the past, they were aligned to either an integration manager or myself.

I didn't feel like I was giving those acquisitions the time they needed to feel like they were part of the culture. I align them to a service leader who could be more observant, give them the time, meet with them, help them understand their needs, and bring them into the organization in the right way.

Sarah Nicastro: I'm thinking about the fact that after a period of time where there was so much change that we weren't choosing, now that things are a bit more stable, we run the risk of avoiding change because we're tired of it, which could be detrimental to forward progress.

Gyner Ozgul: I agree.

Sarah Nicastro: How do you navigate that yourself?

Gyner Ozgul: In recent months specifically, I have taken an approach when there's what I'll call a really big problem usually shows, we all call them that and we know what they are because they suck up a lot of our energy. If you start seeing lots of conference calls and phone calls on something, it usually means the process itself is strained for whatever reason. I've taken the approach for myself to step back. When I start getting pulled into a lot of meetings on something, now I might pause at some point.

As opposed to just going to all those meetings and doing the firefighting, I'll step back and say, okay, can we get the right people in the room and have a more holistic discussion about this? Because all these meetings are telling me there's some other problem in this, whether that be scale or culture, and we're not stepping our way back to go solve that problem. And that has been with intent. I've been asking the team to do that a lot. Look, I'll just give you an example. I showed up in one of our product sprints.

Our finance team had been trying to accommodate a work in progress accrual problem we've been having for almost a year. I don't know, we've done six sprints on it, and I just felt like we kept putting the fire out on this thing. And finally, I called our CFO and I called our leader of finance and I said, I'm putting the brakes on this. The team needs to come together and understand what is the solution they want, what is the output they're looking for, build those requirements, and then come back to the technical team so we can solve this.

Because otherwise, doing it iteratively with failure in perpetuity never really gets you the solution, but it also frustrates everybody with the time it takes. I mean, that's something I have a lot of conviction around recently, like that continuous improvement.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, that's good. Going back to the first thing we talked about with the data, you're also at the early stages of not only having that, but looking at all of the ways you can leverage that. That frontline role is really shifting not just to be a mechanical or a hands-on role, but a knowledge worker role where they're going to consult with the restaurants on maybe it's usage scenarios, maybe it's peak times and how to better... There's a lot more to it that fits that experience story than just the machine itself and is it or isn't it working.

Gyner Ozgul: Yes. We've seen in the data, as an example, some customers have undersized the equipment that they purchase. They know that they need a lot of ice because they're a bar and they've gone and bought the smallest ice machine and they're always constantly running out of ice.

Sarah Nicastro: Go get a bucket of ice. Go get a bucket of ice. I worked in the restaurant industry for a long time.

Gyner Ozgul: More importantly, the ice machine is running so hard that the breakage happens more often. If you teach them the buying behavior of, hey, what do you expect a business volume for you to be? I expect it to be this. Okay, you should buy an ice machine that fits that. Not go to a dealer and say, well, that's $1,000 less than the step up. Literally you save on the front end on the capital purchase itself, you're more than going to pay for on the repair because you've undersized. We like the fact that we can help them provide value for that.

Sarah Nicastro: You can report to your same stations as the morning in four minutes. Okay, thank you so much.

Gyner Ozgul: You're welcome.

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