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

By Tom Paquin

We spend a lot of our time here discussing servitizaiton: The act of repositioning traditionally product-oriented businesses with a more service-oriented mindset. It’s obvious why we do this: Servitization is a compelling trends, especially in manufacturing, but also in the ways in which industries like utilities, telecommunications, and others are embracing service.

We’ve centralized this conversation so much on the move towards product diversification that it’s easy to overlook the companies that have been there all along. Is there and equal, but opposite move in those organizations to “de-servitize”, thus creating internal product categories with which to service? From my experience, the answer is generally no—there’s a lot more of an incentive to become a service than to become a product provider.

But the move towards servitization does have an impact on pure service providers, of course. Suddenly, relationships with product categories, vendors, are fraught, as once allies in the battle for business could potentially become competitors.

These changes mean that pure service businesses need to make sure that their core offering—service—is of the highest possible quality. So from order scheduling, to routing, to parts, to follow-up, to customer retention, and everything in between, service companies need to go beyond optimization to make exceptional service a true value-add for their customers.

We’ve certainly been able to feature a lot of stories for how companies have done this well, but there are a few constants. Chief among them is making sure that their technical infrastructure is catered to the contours of their business specifically. This means choosing software that’s built with a service-first mindset, understands, broadly, your industry, and has tools that don’t just work for you in the abstract.

Below are links to some of my favorite pure service stories. While these three all service products in specific industries they each provide exceptional templates for making sure that the core of a service business is offered at a world-class level.

Smart Care

“We needed technology that would help us build a better customer experience. From an end user perspective, I call it the Amazon mentality or consumerization that’s happened so this whole expectation of service delivery and timing a service delivery and great communication and constant communication flow, but also things like information on the equipment you’re working on and work order management systems. Impacting the customer experience was first and foremost for us.”

Spencer Technologies

“In today’s always-on world, customers demand insight. We realized about 18 months ago that we weren’t giving them enough information – they wanted more from us, and we needed to better use our technology to deliver. Customers want to know, at a glance, how we’re performing against our SLA, how long the technicians have been on-site, the reason for any delays or re-visits. They want to check in continuously to get that status update and know everything is happening as planned.”

Park Place Technologies

“In light of this pandemic, digital capability is more important now than ever. It’s been instrumental in our ability to make sure that our customers can safely work remotely, but at the same time know that their data centers, for example, are running healthy and they can support their end users, and their customers, and their essential services.”

Brady Services

“Sometimes when you’ve been successful in doing things a certain way for a long time, it’s hard to understand why you’d need to do something a different way. We’ve really focused in the last several years on our culture and have been very intentional about how we wanted to preserve the good and evolve as we’ve needed to. It’s really come down to getting good leaders in place and having a culture that is very performance-based, very data-driven and very process-focused, and helping everybody understand that that’s not a bad thing. That’s a good thing and it’s going to help us continue to grow and continue to distinguish ourselves from our competitors in the marketplace. Sounds easy, but it’s a lot of work to take an organization in that direction.”

Howard Bowland, VP Field Services Australia at Schneider Electric and Scott Weller, Partner at Mossrake Continue the discussion with Sarah about the company’s journey to as-a-service in talking about operationally what was required to bring this vision to life, how important agility is, lessons learned, and what they feel the future holds.   Click on the link for more information on Schneider Electric’s innovative aaS offer EcoStruxure Outcomes: Secure Power as a Service - <a href="http://www.se.com/au/outcomes">www.se.com/au/outcomes</a>   This is part two of a two-part podcast. If you missed part one, be sure to listen to it <a href="https://futureoffieldserviceref.ifs.com/2021/06/02/schneider-electrics-journey-to-as-a-service-part-1/">here</a>.   Sarah Nicastro: Can you tell us a little bit, Howard, about ... You just said the go to market is the biggest hurdle, right, so we've talked about that, but, even once you have that right, you're not home free, right? Let's talk a little bit about operationally what you needed to address to be able to bring the model to life.   Howard Bowland: Oh, okay. It's actually ... I say go to market is the most challenging item, and I know if I talked to my people building the operational side, they'd maybe have a difference point-of-view. The way I think about it a little bit is it's a little more well defined, the operational challenge. We've got a gap in our operational capability that we've got to fill. When you're talking about having to go to market, it's a little softer about exactly what's required and the skills, and how do you develop the people? How do you reach the right customer? It's a little less well defined. That's why I see the go to market as the bigger challenge. And you're talking about compensation or salespeople, and that's always complicated as well. Are you motivating the right behavior? It's one thing, as you pointed out, if everything was sold as a service, then that would be simple, but because we've got different offerings as well different business models.   Howard Bowland: On the operational side, what we're able to leverage is a lot of core building blocks of Schneider Electric service. The ability for field service, the organization itself, the digital connections into that infrastructure and the data lake that monitors that. We have connected service hubs around the globe that are able to roll a truck on the basis of some outage, for example. Putting together that ability to monitor the infrastructure and make sure it's running. We had to shift, also, the metering, the measuring, of what is the consumption that we're going to bill the customer for, so that required a bit of development and a bit discovery about who does what in Schneider. Some good building blocks, but then, as we try to connect, well, we need something different to fill in this piece, and it was quite a challenge navigating who is the person that can give approval to our person to get that piece of data?   Howard Bowland: There's quite a lot of navigating, finding the owners of different pieces of capability. I'm not saying connecting the capability was easy afterwards, but it was as significant piece to find, who owns what. We've got good service capability. We can make a call, go visit a customer, fix something, replace something, install something. All those basic capabilities are in place. It's about putting them in the right stack and connecting them now to a control tower that understands where everything is operating. A big shift for one of our first customers was getting thousands of alarms on new infrastructure that was running hot in places they didn't know, and so having us come and just simply take control of that and eliminate the alarms and identify the devices that are in danger of not working properly because they're environments were wrong was a really big, important improvement.   Howard Bowland: That capability to do that actually more or less exists. We've added that customer success management and a layer of advisory and evaluating pieces that. We've got some software or analytics developed with Mossrake to enable us to do metering, billing. Converting those readings into actual variable invoices for customers is itself a challenge, which we get done. So if I talk to my operations manager for this piece, she will say, "There's a lot of ... It won't really scale. We need a system-based solution," so we're ... Again, it's this agile method. We're making this thing work. The customer sees a good outcome. Inside, we've got people running around on treadmills, but we'll replace that with systems and automation and so on at the right times.   Howard Bowland: It's just keeping ahead of that curve. That makes it an affordable way to develop it. If we tried to develop all the capability and have it readied and put in place so that we could cut the ribbon it, it would be a much more challenging assignment to get the investment for it. That's a bit of a summary.   Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, and I almost wonder if, going back to some of the common challenges I hear of others struggling with, I wonder if there is more of the: Let's build it, then we'll develop the go to market, right? It's a delicate balance in the sense of you can't go out there selling outcomes you can't deliver on, right, so you have to be sure of that, but I think it's also nice in terms of how it can snowball your success, right? If we get the go to market right, find the right people, have the right conversations, and give them a good experience however that needs to happen, right, then we're getting success, and we build on that success, and then we build out the backend of everything. Yeah, that makes sense.   Howard Bowland: That's, again, why you have to have this ... It's really useful to have this passionate group of explorers, adventurers who are willing to do the painful thing on the inside to make this a success. Then we can develop the ... We can take that pain away internally over a bit longer period of time. But also talked earlier about the idea that we need to start with that MVP, the minimum product that can be useful, because building something that's ... If it took too long to build something that was more material, it may be we wouldn't get there. But, ultimately, the opportunity of ... Shifting this business model to other parts of the technology set is quite a logical extension, yeah.   Sarah Nicastro: Howard, you've talked about agile a lot and how important it was here to have the success you've had. How is it possible, though? What would you say are the keys to doing this in an agile manner?   Howard Bowland: Okay, I think you have to have a core group of competents, I guess. For us, that was mainly Mossrake and maybe a little bit internally. You could do it internally, but you'd probably have to stand up a few people that knew what they were doing. Then, getting people to enlist on the vision, the journey, and be ... You could simply assign agile people in an agile way to the team and say, "Your job is X or Y," but we really were defining a lot as we went, and so that wasn't itself even perhaps quite possible. Having people that are really excited about what we're trying to achieve and are willing to give that discretionary effort ... I had people, yes, I'd assigned, carving out some of their time, and other people who were willing to do it on top of their main job and nobody's giving them a relief from their main job.   Howard Bowland: They wanted to do that. Their desire to want to contribute and be part of it was really, really important. I think good clarity around not defining too much to do, some knowledge that gives us confidence that we know, generally, the direction, but we're going to go a piece at a time, and having people who are highly enthusiastic and agile and are invigorated by the vision I think are key ingredients to that. Then celebrating a bit of success, we obviously were making progress as we went through. That always helps the next sprint, if you've achieved something.   Howard Bowland: One other point I wanted to make: wouldn't underestimate how important it is, and I've talked about this, the importance of not taking no as the answer. So many times, Scott will attest to this, went out and said, "Can we access to that data? Can we do this?" "No." You've got to find the person that can say yes and get support. You could easily have stopped at various points because it looked like it wasn't going to be possible to do what we wanted to do. It was some incident contacts that I'd personally made when I traveled that turned out to be people that were critical, and it was just a little bit of luck that I'd bumped into them, and a bit of tenacity, as Scott points out, to make sure you can continue to look for the way.   Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, I'll tell you a funny story. My husband, one time, we were in the car, I don't know what made me ask this question. It's one of those questions a wife should never ask her husband, but I said, "Hey, babe, if you had to describe me in one word, what would it be?" Right? There's no right answer. You know that it's just ... It was a complete trap, but he said, "Tenacious."   Howard Bowland: I agree. Scott first coined this for me, I think, but tenacity, for me, is the balance between ... It's not stubbornness, which says, "I'm not going to shift from my position no matter what you say." It's actually about, "I've got a strong point-of-view about why this is my position, and I can be convinced when the facts bring that to bear," but getting through what can be a pretty challenging time, it's an important attribute, for sure, Sarah.   Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. I always say I don't mind if the answer isn't what I want it to be as long as I feel like I've fully stated my case or have been heard, right? That's ... Okay, so on the agile topic, Scott, what would you add in terms of for folks looking to do this in an agile way? Any other keys to that that you would add to what Howard mentioned?   Scott Weller: I think the software industry has now embraced agile for so many years that it's not seen as a random walk. Even in this case, applied to a different kind of problem, agile doesn't mean just winging it. You have to have a sense of where you're trying to get to. You have to have a fundamental vision and a belief, as Howard mentioned, and then that guides you. Even though, on any given day, you might be working on pricing, or you might be working on a revised channel program, which itself takes several steps to mature through, but you know where you're going. It's just a matter of accepting that you won't have a completely finished product on day one. You've already stated that. You've got a minimum product. That's going to be good enough to have a conversation with the customer about ... And even sell to them, in a pilot sense.   Scott Weller: And customers, just like you said you might want to come along as an adventurer next time Howard does this, there are customers who want to be part of that too. They're quite excited about being pilot customer number one or at least in a pilot program because they themselves are that kind of person, that kind of mindset. It is a bit of luck, finding the right people on your team, finding the right consulting partner, or finding the right first or second customer, but, really, those are the things that you can never count on. They do happen, but, really, having the strength of a great vision is so key to this, and then being willing to learn along the way. That, I would say, is the second secret to success.   Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, that makes sense. I think it's you know your objective. You just don't know every step you're going to take to get there, right?   Scott Weller: Right.   Sarah Nicastro: So I think, as a mindset, just in life, that concept prohibits so many people from moving in a direction, right? They want to see the whole map of not just where they're getting there, and then, if you don't have that, you just stay stuck, right? I think it makes sense to go about it that way, especially because, on these journeys, there's so much to learn, so the more up-front work you put into doing the way you think you need to do it, and then you start doing it and realize you weren't quite right, then you're out all of that time and effort, rather than, to some degree, learning as you go along.   Sarah Nicastro: That being said, I ... Sorry, Howard, we're you going to say something?   Howard Bowland: A little anecdote around enlisting people. I remember, as we're going through this process, here at Schneider, we have a very good intern and graduate program, so I was able to pick a few people. People, in fact, working in my organization wanted to be part of it. I was at a town hall. We have these town halls every quarter. Pre-COVID, of course, we're doing those face to face and had an audience of people. I was thanking people as we were making some progress on this journey, and I named a few people and thanked them. Even Ben, who's on the call here, was one of those.   Howard Bowland: Then, in the second row, there was this couple of interns there that I could see their faces drop because I hadn't mentioned their names, and they'd worked on the project a little bit. So this triggered in me, "Oh, yes, of course, there's also X and Y," and their faces lit up. It just triggered for me how excited they were about working on something innovative. They were interns and graduates that had just joined this company, and that kind of journey was really a big motivator for them.   Sarah Nicastro: Mm-hmm (affirmative)- Yeah. It's a good point, too, on acknowledging the progress and the hard work, right, especially, to your point, in the early phase of this when everyone's going above and beyond to chip into this new mission. You want to let know you appreciate that sacrifice and that extra time and all of those things.   Sarah Nicastro: Okay, we said this a little bit earlier, but this was done in a way within your region that it was almost like a pilot for Schneider Electric, right? It can be adopted by other regions, globally, et cetera. I think, though, I want to talk about that concept in the sense of why that approach may work better for other organizations than trying to do a global, wholesale shift.   Sarah Nicastro: Then I think it makes me think of the agile conversation in the sense of the criticality of documentation, right? I would think one of the things that makes the agile approach work is keeping such good track of: Here's what we did. Here's what we learned. We're going to incorporate this. Now here's what we did. Here's what we learned. Right, it's you're doing that for the purpose of being successful in your region, but you're also doing it with the intent of documenting this so that it's replicable across the business. Talk to me a little bit about the idea of doing this with it in mind that it can be done across Schneider, not just in a specific region.   Howard Bowland: I'll go first. Yeah, quite right. What was interesting ... First of all, I was able to secure some funding globally. As part of that, of course, I felt that it was important that this be repeatable and we document our journey, as well, as you say, to make ourselves successful. That with important to do. As we went on this journey as well, we, I'd say, strengthened our existing process documentation for just our regular bricks of service capability. We were able to leverage on some of that, but actually just discover that, in fact, that wasn't as probably robust as it should be as well, so able to add to that.   Howard Bowland: As part of this journey, there was a systematic approach to building out the blueprint for how to do this and document that, and that was a key part of what Mossrake brought to us, what our team worked on, and we've created that repository of documentation and learnings and insights, as well as what's in paper, it's actually in writing as well, which has been really useful to keep us on track and will be useful as other regions of Schneider, for example, might want to replicate what we're doing here.   Scott Weller: Yeah, as you say, one of the key deliverables from our work together, Howard, is this operational blueprint, which covers every aspect of the value chain, and then, on top of that, the operational description for actually how the run what's effectively an engagement with the customer. As a service ends up looking like a consulting engagement that just doesn't necessarily have an endpoint. All of that is what, in our conversations with other countries and regions within Schneider, that's the foundational element is that operational blueprint. By the way, when we talk with them, we never characterize this as, "Okay, it's a slam dunk. Now that Howard's done this in Pacific zone, you can do this anywhere. It's just a couple of weeks, and you can go start selling."   Sarah Nicastro: Sure.   Scott Weller: It's quite involved, and every company is different. Schneider tends to be a lot more, I would say, operationally independent. Of course, they share systems and so on, but the regions and the countries tend to have a lot more autonomy than we see in other multinationals, so that just means that there's a bit more work to land something like this because the nuances, the difference in processes, the different tools and so on that have to be integrated to make this work is a little bit of a restart. Certainly not a true restart, but there are the nuances that have to be accommodated.   Sarah Nicastro: Scott, is this approach of starting in a region and almost using that as a pilot for a multinational, is that a common approach? Is it a suggested approach? You, as the person that does this with other businesses, what is your take on that as others are listening?   Scott Weller: Well, it's certainly the way we did it back at HP, and we do it. We've done it with Howard, and we're working on a couple of other clients as well. There is ... I would say the beauty of this is being able to do this in a microcosm, where if, God forbid, it were to fail for some reason, the risk to company is small. The reputational risk, primarily, but even operationally, even financially, the risk is very small. It lets you learn, because inevitably you're going to learn. No two companies are the same. No two as-a-service offers are going to be the same, so you have to allow for that.   Scott Weller: Being able to de-risk it and particularly a lot of companies, when they think about moving to this model, they start thinking about, well, stakeholder perception. If you think about yourself as a dividends-value company, moving to a model like this may really upset stakeholder perception, so it gives you time to succeed, learn, and really be planful about how you want to pivot the company around something like this in a way that you can talk to your stakeholders about, you can talk to your employees about. It's really, we think, is really the right approach.   Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, that makes sense. Howard, what would you say is the biggest lesson you've learned in leading this transformation at Schneider?   Howard Bowland: Yeah, I think it's something we talked a bit about earlier. I think it's the change, the management of change. Don't underestimate how persistent you need to be, the importance of clarity in the vision on bringing people on that journey. Yes, there's particular challenges around the go-to-market or the sales process or quoting or operationally, but that management of change across the stakeholder group, across the people that you need to do something is really critical. Understanding ... It's not, as we know, it's not one-shot thing about explaining it one time or ... It's about making, particularly, when we're going through developing MVP, making smaller achievements over time, it's continuing to bring people on that journey of change and have a coherent program of work around that. That, for me, is the most critical thing to get right. It leads to identifying what I've said earlier about getting the right customers with the right sales conversation.   Howard Bowland: If I think about transferring this to, just to comment on that, another geography of Schneider, to me, actually, the operational capability is the most easily translatable. All the bricks that we've got here largely are elsewhere. In fact, I think you could almost run it out of a more central operation. We, for example, run here out of Sydney, and we have customer sites in New Zealand and all over Australia, or they could be in another country. Well, they are in another country, New Zealand, right? But the customer interface, the customer success management, the things that Scott talked about, about the advisory, the engagement with the customer, obviously the pre-sales and sales engagements are the really critical pieces that you've got to have localized.   Sarah Nicastro: Mm-hmm (affirmative)- Yeah, that makes sense, and I think part of that change management puzzle is the volunteers you had, right? As you have people from the business who are opting in and doing it because they think it's a great idea, a cool journey, a new challenge, whatever their personal reason is, then others see that, right, and then they see them excited about where you're going, and that builds. I think that those two things help each other out, right? You build some traction through the folks that are involved and engaged.   Howard Bowland: That's not to say that there aren't a few stakeholder groups or individuals which we haven't quite converted. What happens, of course, is you get the passive resistance or the undermining that you can't see. We talked about it earlier. If somebody is much more comfortable with positioning their traditional offer, they'll find every way they can to do that, even if the best thing for the customer and for us is actually a different engagement. Then the payoff for the company ... The payoff for the customer is clear, I think, although that's often more difficult to translate to them. The payoff, obviously, is that we know ... Instead of selling the customer some assets and getting 10 or 20% of that value in related services, you're talking about five- to 10-year engagement where the customer is probably going to pay 1.5 to 2X for that because they're getting the value out if it. Scott alluded to this a little bit, so at the beginning, it's a challenge, but the flywheel takes over as you scale, and it creates a lot of good things.   Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, it goes back to the point that's been made a few times about just being persistent and tenacious, right? Some of this is just people need to see it in action, and it takes time to convert the people most resistant to the task underway. You just have to keep at it and not be easily deterred from the mission. Okay, last question that I want to ask both of you, is ... Scott, I'm going to start with you. What do you think the future of outcome-based service holds?   Scott Weller: Well, in many ways, we're at the beginning. When you can only point to a few of the bigger companies doing this, as I mentioned at the beginning, that are well known, when so many products that are part of our everyday lives on the business side, as well as the consumer side, are still transactionally bought, transactionally dispose of, we're not really focused on the value that they create in our lives. We're focused on, okay, how do I get this thing? How do I take care of it? Even our phones require us to pay attention to updates and so on, but I think the world is going to move to this model, and you see it in the strangest places sometimes. But I think every technology-product company is going to eventually move to a model like this. It's just a matter of time.   Sarah Nicastro: What's a strange example?   Scott Weller: Well, I'm still surprised that people are willing to let their car leave their driveway and let somebody borrow it for a few hours for a fee. To my mind, that's very strange, but that was the last one I saw. Apparently, that company is doing very well.   Sarah Nicastro: Interesting. Okay, yeah, it is very interesting to see how it pops up and where it pops up. I agree that it is really the early stages. I think the fact that this is a topic of conversation among so many organizations in service right now is indicative of where we're headed, but, to your point, there are a lot of people on the journey. There are not a lot of people that have really crossed a finish line yet, right? I think there's a lot of learnings and a lot of growth to come.   Scott Weller: Yeah, that's right. I think that one of the biggest inhibitors is a question of identity. If you've grown up in a company that's product ... We call it product first or product leaning, your whole identity is about we make cool stuff. That is, I think, probably the biggest challenge, the biggest, let's say, inhibitor to moving to a model like this, where you've got, really super-smart engineers now feeling like they're part of the supply chain. They're not the forefront of the model anymore.   Sarah Nicastro: Right.   Scott Weller: But I think, somehow, we have to come to grips with that because the human element of all this, both on, as I said, on the supplier and the customer side, have to be addressed. We can't pretend it's not there. In any case, yeah, as you say, it's the future.   Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, it's interesting because it shifts from, "We make cool stuff," to, "We help people," right?   Scott Weller: Right.   Sarah Nicastro: Then, when you think about what that means in terms of all of these layers of change we've talked about today, but particularly in terms of skillset and those interpersonal skills and being able to interface with customers, being able to move upline in customer engagements, being able to nurture longstanding relationships. All of those things, it is interesting to see how you start to skew to those things becoming increasingly important, and then there was probably a whole other conversation of: How readily available are those skills compared to some of the traditional skills that we would be talking about having as a priority within either product manufacturers or even service organizations, right?   Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, it's a very interesting conversation. Okay, Howard, what do you think the future of outcome-based service holds?   Howard Bowland: As the demand grows, the focus on developing the technology will be focused around making it as-a-service capable already and less about color and shape and lights and customer user features. Making cool things that have got great features would be replaced by, well, it doesn't matter if it's a black brick in the corner if it's got all the attributes we need to make it scalable, for example, and accessible and so on. The product design and development that has good outcomes as its first thought would change the way they evolve. It would change the way you manufacture, potentially, and the costs of those things, the consumption of products, which is the second one, which I think is the sustainability push. While you're making products that perhaps are designed for as a service, they consume less on their input side because a lot of the smarts is maybe remote and so on, and you might have built them now to have a variable capacity that you didn't do before.   Howard Bowland: You also move to, "Actually, you don't have to worry about the life cycle, Mr. Customer." You're no longer over-provisioning it. You're going to get what you need just when you need it, and we're going to take care of it when the time is right, so cradle to cradle. We're certainly seeing, here in this zone, the very strong shift towards ... It's not just revenue growth, cost reduction, risk reduction, it's sustainability as well. I think it's going to help deliver on that sustainability promise for customer. That would be the two things.   Sarah Nicastro: Absolutely, good. Well, thank you, Howard and Scott, for being here with me and sharing the story. It's very interesting story, would love to have you back maybe in six months or so and hear what else you've learned because you guys are on that agile path, and you've learned a lot so far and are having great success, but I know you'll continue looking for those learnings and incorporating them into what you're doing. Thank you for being here and sharing, really appreciate it.   Scott Weller: Thank you.   Howard Bowland: Yeah, thanks for the opportunity.   Sarah Nicastro: You can learn more by visiting us at FutureofFieldService.com. You can also find us on LinkedIn as well as Twitter @TheFutureofFS. The Future of Field Service podcast is published in partnership with IFS. You can learn more by visiting IFS.com. As always, thank you for listening. </div> </div> </div> </div> <div class="col-12 col-lg-3"> <div class="form-wrapper"> <h2 class="form-tittle">Stay Connected</h2> <iframe src="https://info.ifs.com/GM-CP-CU-2012-12-FoFS-Newsletter_IFrame.html">

By Sarah Nicastro, Creator, Future of Field Service

True innovation rarely happens in a bubble. The best ideas are born of creative freedom, collaboration, a fail-forward environment, and by seeking the perspective of others to fuel your inspiration, ideas, and plans. This resource, Future of Field Service, and the community group I run exist largely to serve the purpose of having a place to find peer insights and to glean lightbulb moments from tales of success, failure, and lessons learned.

But perhaps your company’s struggles to transform and innovate service demand more than what you can gain from listening to a podcast or even having a one-on-one chat with a peer. If this is the case, you might want to consider the value of bringing in some fresh perspective. I’ve noticed over the last couple of months more and more examples of how companies looking to advance service offerings are recognizing the need to embrace and leverage outside expertise.

This fresh perspective can take many different forms. In fact, we’ve seen several examples within some of our recent content – partnership with very hands-on consultants, bringing expertise in from another industry, and hiring proven transformative leadership to replicate past successes. Culturally, of course, there can be a tendency to want to own the path or claim the success of transformation. However, the amount of change happening in field service today is immense and letting go of ego to recognize the significant impact some outside expertise or fresh eyes could bring may be the key to your success.

Let’s examine what this can look like in practice based on some examples I’ve taken from recent Future of Field Service interviews:

Value Proposition & Selling. Last week we published the first half of a two-part podcast with Howard Bowland, VP Field Services Australia at Schneider Electric and Scott Weller, Partner at Mossrake. The two previously worked together at Hewlett-Packard and have teamed up to introduce the as-a-Service model into Schneider Electric. Howard is leading this initiative inside the company, and Mossrake is assisting as a consultant partner. In the podcast, Howard speaks at length about not only seeing the potential for as-a-Service within Schneider and advocating to bring that potential to life, but in the benefit of working alongside a partner who has real-world success in such a transformation. This benefit has been particularly true in the value Mossrake has added in helping to develop the go-to-market with Schneider Electric as well as taking a SWAT-team approach to introducing the value proposition to customers and helping to upskill and train the Schneider sales talent who is accustomed to selling in a completely different manner to often a totally different audience. When you think about how big of a shift advanced and outcomes-based service offerings are when it comes to creating, articulating, and influencing on the value proposition, you can see how leveraging new talent and/or an experienced partner to bring the value proposition to life and bring the teams up to speed could be immensely beneficial.
So, selling the new value proposition is one thing, but how do you grow awareness of the modern incarnation of your company and feed your funnel? Marketing. We recently had on the podcast Jennifer Deutsch, CMO of Park Place Technologies, who joined the company four years ago from outside the industry. Jennifer has 38 years of marketing experience and has worked for brands such as Marriott, Ritz-Carlton, and Nestle. The fresh perspective she’s brought into PPT has added a layer of punchiness, simplicity, and draw to the company’s marketing that, in my opinion, is very impactful. For example, the company’s tagline “Uptime All the Time” speaks to what matters most to customers in an attention-grabbing way. As the value of service evolves and expands, marketing is another area that perhaps could benefit from the innovative look of someone with experience outside the organization or even industry.
Operational Transformation. A little over a year ago, Karl Lowe joined Panasonic Heating and Cooling Solutions Europe as the Head of Panasonic European Service. On the podcast, Karl speaks of his experience over the last 10 years developing service organizations for OEMs. At Panasonic, he’s been tasked with determining how best the company can leverage service as a strategic differentiator. As a historically very product-centric business, the idea of brining in talent that has experience leading service in more service-centric organizations, or better yet, has a track record of helping organizations grow into more service centric businesses, can be a very smart move. The operational change needed in order to transform to advanced or outcomes-based service is no small feat, and someone who has learned some of the hard lessons of the journey firsthand can help navigate the choppy waters in a smoother way. Karl came into Panasonic with a clear mind and quickly got to work on assessing the current state of the operations, defining desired outcomes, and determining the path to success. This sort of objectivity can be hard to attain from those closest to present-day operations, so augmenting your current leadership who are masters of where you’ve been with someone who has experience from where you’d like to be is a good way to strike balance.
Modernization of IT. Pekka Nurmi, Director of Corporate IT at Cimcorp, was a management consultant before joining Cimcorp around five years ago. Now, he is taking a fresh approach to the company’s IT strategy that focuses more on leading and less on doing. In his podcast interview, Pekka discusses how he feels his consulting background gives him a good appreciation for the business side of things which helps him be a stronger IT leader. He is making some major changes at Cimcorp, focusing on how technology has and continues to rapidly evolve, to help the company keep pace with change and stay ahead of demand. I was struck by Pekka’s fresh take, objective observances, and clear goals and I think IT is another area of immense opportunity for brining in a new perspective.

These are just a couple of recent examples – when you think about how the necessary skillsets are expanding and evolving with the introduction of more advanced services, you can think of many other areas where outside viewpoints, skills, and help could be beneficial. For example, data is another major area of growth and opportunity. Another approach we’ve seen is the introduction of a centralized, functional role to drive the fresh perspective and innovation so that the leadership in place can continue to focus on current business and operations while the functional team works to leverage those leaders as subject matter experts to chart the path and drive the success for the future of the business.

However you look at it, or however you incorporate it, there’s always value in a more diverse set of opinions, in better vetting new ideas, and in incorporating various sets of expertise.

By Tom Paquin

Why is it that people never want to take preventative measures? I’m reminded of Y2K, when we were told that a catastrophic glitch in computer systems would lead to widespread outages, unexpected nuclear missile launches, and all other manner of nightmare. This prompted years of thoughtful preventative action from programmers, who meticulously re-coded systems and prepared our digital infrastructure. On January 1, 2000, when we woke up to an undisturbed world, the simple minded people of the world wondered why we took it all so seriously. “Nothing even happened,” they would say. Perhaps nothing happened because responsible people acknowledged and addressed the issue before it became a catastrophe.

This simpleminded philosophy of only having the mental capacity to address things as they’re happening is why people put off physician visits, why people don’t invest in health insurance, and why cybersecurity and continuity planning are so often shuffled to the side of the public discourse.

A recent series of high-profile cybersecurity incidents have, it would seem, opened the eyes of some of those simple-minded people, causing them to conclude that yes, this could even happen to them. Our lives are a lot more than simply enhanced by technology in 2021—for many of us, our ability to function is contingent upon technology.

In service, this is overwhelmingly the case. Imagine if you woke up tomorrow and lost access to schedules, customer lists, payroll, scheduling tools, your bank, or your vehicle.

Catastrophic, right? And the reality is that these threats come from different sources. Hopefully none of this is news to you, but let’s talk about some of these sources in plain terms.

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS)

For quite a while when a business was “hacked”, they were often actually the victim of a DDoS attack. These things still happen all the time. A distributed denial of service attack essentially weaponizes web traffic in order to cripple a site. A website is like a road, and the more cars you put on the road, the slower it’s going to go. If enough cars all converge on a single road, from different directions, then nobody can go anywhere. And this is what a DDoS attack does—sending web queries from thousands of IP addresses simultaneously until a service crashes, this “denying service”.

Imagine that your service firm has online scheduling, and that you’re the target of a DDoS attack. Hackers will initiate thousands of scheduling requests, thus crippling the queue and crashing the site. How are you prepared for this? Are you able to pull requests from the queue? Do you have a CAPTCHA set up to ensure that traffic is actually human? What is your continuity plan for when a webpage goes down? Each businesses understands implicitly its own service needs and urgency, here, and each will establish its own criteria, but this is yet another reminder of the importance of planning ahead.

Phishing

Phishing would be the other end of the “I was hacked” coin alongside DDoS, and I’m extremely hopeful that I’m not breaking new ground for anyone that’s reading this. We should all know what phishing is, and we should all be cognizant and suspicious of it in our day to day lives.

Phishing is when hackers attempt to capture credentialed information by sending out official-seeming emails and creating webpages that look like legitimate email or bank websites, in the hopes that you’ll put in your email address and password before you realize that you’ve made a mistake.

So yes, we should all be on the lookout for phishing in our day-to-day lives, but phishing is also the means by which many businesses install tracking software on computers. More maliciously, if a high-level service professional is the victim of phishing, then suddenly external forces may have access to sensitive information like location, total number of assets, asset performance, or even more maliciously, the ability to remotely interact with assets. We don’t want disconnected HVAC systems or unrestrained capital equipment.

Preventing phishing tends to be, primarily, an awareness campaign for businesses, and while it’s useful to have a training when an employee joins the organization, it’s arguably more important to create mandatory re-training benchmarks for employees. Look—we all have been guilty of skimming an official looking email and clicking on a link when we’re in the middle of three different things. We just need to be mindful of what we’re doing, and that is where smart training is key.

Ransomware

Ransomware, like the others, is nothing new. Often, it’s initiated by a phishing attempt, or alternatively by remotely accessing someone’s computer (often through a bogus tech support phone call), visiting a malicious website that downloads the software in the background, or via physical media like a USB stick.

What ransomware does is it encrypts everything on a user’s computer (or ideally their network), and holds your machine for ransom. Typically, the only message on the screen will be directions, or a bitcoin account, and a threat to release public information, or to continue to restrict access to computers. Obviously, even minutes without access to integral systems could spell doom for a digital organization. For that reason, the ransoms are often paid, and the perpetrators, perhaps surprisingly true to their word, typically restore access to the website.

Because it can originate from many places, ransomware is hard to prevent, but in service, it’s doubly important to protect field equipment from meddling. Technicians should have equipment best practices with respect to mobile and rugged devices, ensuring that they’re in their possession at all times, or locked in a vehicle.

Unfortunately, like anything, there’s no 100% safe way to tackle all of this, and one could look at this article and question our digital transformation strategy as moving too fast, or relying too much on automation, but the fact of the matter is that the digital good outweighs the digital bad. Companies looking to succeed in business, therefore, owe it to themselves to have a solid contingency plan in place for cybersecurity. Planning ahead now will position you to avoid catastrophe down the road.

Howard Bowland, VP Field Services Australia at Schneider Electric and Scott Weller, Partner at Mossrake, talk with Sarah about how various industries are adopting as-a-service models, Schneider’s introduction of its as-a-service value proposition, and how critical your go-to-market is in this journey.   Click on the link for more information on Schneider Electric’s innovative aaS offer EcoStruxure Outcomes: Secure Power as a Service - <a href="http://www.se.com/au/outcomes">www.se.com/au/outcomes</a>   Sarah Nicastro: Welcome to the Future of Field Service podcast. I'm your host Sarah Nicastro. Today, I'm talking with Schneider Electric, and talking to them about their journey to delivering outcomes. I'm joined today by Howard Bowland, vice president of field services Australia for Schneider Electric, and Scott Weller, who is a Mossrake partner. Howard and Scott, welcome to the Future of Field Service podcast.   Scott Weller: Thanks, Sarah.   Sarah Nicastro: Thank you for joining me. We have a really cool story to talk through today and share some insights on how Schneider in Australia has really not only embraced but made some significant strides in the journey to outcomes-based service. Before we dig into the topic at hand, let's just start with some introductions. Tell us a little bit about yourselves, your backgrounds, current roles. Howard, I'm going to start with you.   Howard Bowland: I’m Howard Bowland, running the field services business here in what we call the Pacific zone, actually, which is a slightly romantic name for Australia plus New Zealand, I think because it includes some of the Pacific islands. I mention that because some of our customers for this offering now actually have offices across international boundaries, and this actually is an interesting solution for them as well.   Howard Bowland: My history is almost three years with Schneider Electric now, having joined from the IT industry. About 20 years in the IT industry, working for Hewlett-Packard in its various forms, and most recently with Hewlett-Packard Enterprise before joining Schneider.   Sarah Nicastro: Excellent. All right, great, and Scott, can you tell us about yourself?   Scott Weller: Sure, Scott Weller. I'm a partner with Mossrake Group, and we focus on technology-product companies that are looking to grow through services. These days, a lot of the conversations do go to as-a-service models and consumption and so on. Previously, I ran the global support services business in Hewlett-Packard Enterprise. During that time, I built a multi-billion-dollar IT as a service business that's now known as GreenLake.   Sarah Nicastro: Okay, excellent. Well, thank you both for being here. I'm excited to talk about what you're working on at Schneider. It's interesting to me you both have experience at HP, and this is a theme that comes up a lot in the conversations I'm having with service leaders across a wide variety of industries is looking to the IT space for inspiration in how to adopt some of these ways of thinking, mindset, culture, model, delivery, et cetera. What are your thoughts on that? What do you feel like you brought from those experiences, or how do you see that parallel? Howard, I'll start with you again.   Howard Bowland: Sure, it's interesting. I think there's a strong probably view that the as-a-service model was born out of cloud economics and cloud computing and so on in the IT industry. Lots of good innovation came from there, and it's very widely known, the big cloud providers, Google and Amazon and so on. But, really, it didn't really start there, but that speed of change in the IT industry, those innovations around software, and the impetus to really have the change the business model there because of commoditization probably accelerated the shift towards as a service and servitization in that industry. Really, it comes from much earlier than that, I think. Although, my first exposure was really working with Scott in HP around that. Scott, I think that's how I came to get really deeply involved in it.   Sarah Nicastro: Scott, what are your thoughts on what different industries are learning from the experiences that the IT space has had?   Scott Weller: The idea isn't really new. If you look at Otis, the elevator company, almost since their inception, you couldn't buy an elevator. You would only pay for it by the passenger car move or lift. Caterpillar, their largest earth-movers, you can't buy them. You pay by the load. Nowadays, like Rolls Royce, jet engines, you can acquire them, air quotes, acquire them through paying by propulsion hour. Xerox, HP have had print pay by the page for a long time. So really not a new idea. What I think is that any time you have a long-lived asset that may require specialty skills to maintain, it's a perfect setup for pay-as-you-go pricing. Then, if you think about a business that thinks of these assets as critical but not core, it's not the business they're in. It's not a core competency. It's very clear that this is a perfect setup for as-a-service models and really a shift to a focus to outcomes.   Sarah Nicastro: Yes, and we're going to talk a little bit about the difference there, right? We'll get into that, but that makes sense. I'm curious, Howard, if you can talk a little bit about ... So the program within Schneider is called EcoStruxure, okay, so tell us a little bit about the premise of EcoStruxure and how the idea to bring this concept to Schneider originated. How did it go over initially?   Howard Bowland: So EcoStruxure in Schneider is really the framework for a lot of the digital enablement of the kind of infrastructure that Schneider Electric provides to customers and assist them in getting value. The evolution of that was offering EcoStruxured outcomes, which is about using that technology to provide the customer an outcome-based service contract rather than the traditional approach to it.   Howard Bowland: Coming into this company, a slightly different segment from the IT industry, I was coming from having worked with the IT industry in developing that cloud economics for IT assets and for really operationalizing that in the Asian Pacific theater. But as I came into Schneider Electric, again, it's a technology company, much like other technology companies, like HP, has software and services. But there really wasn't anything currently in place around providing customer greater value over and above the traditional asset-ownership model. It first started with the thought of, "Could we do this? Why couldn't we do this with the kind of assets that the customers are acquiring from Schneider Electric?"   Howard Bowland: Floated that idea here locally. Started talking to Scott about it, and we felt that there was a really big opportunity to start with the secure power technology. Talked to a few people inside Schneider, and, as usually happens when you start talking about outcomes and as a service, people confuse, really, the kind of offering that you're making. It's not ... There's a place for subscription, and there's a place for leasing. There's a place for asset ownership, but they're not the same thing. I remember talking to a few people, go, "Oh, yes, we've tried that. That doesn't really work," or, "You'll never get anyone to sign a lease," and all sorts of interesting comments about what perhaps had been tried in the past.   Howard Bowland: I think a couple of things were happening at this point for me and for the company. Schneider Electric is on a journey of transformation itself and the way it's creating value for customers, so the time was right for the company to be considering innovation as well. I arrived at a time when proposing the idea again, perhaps, or in a slightly different way was actually well received by senior folks in the company, and I was able to get some investment to pilot the idea here locally and to develop the offer.   Howard Bowland: It was interesting. I do recall talking to a couple of people, really being told that, A, you couldn't. We've tried it, and, B, anyway, you won't get people to agree to what you want to do. But, actually, it's not been the case, not been my experience. It's been well supported and not without its challenges, but that was the experience bringing the idea forward here.   Sarah Nicastro: Okay, and Scott, tell us a little bit about Mossrake's role in this project and servitizing the assets at Schneider.   Scott Weller: Well, we came into this opportunity with Howard having all that experience back at HPE, so we knew, certainly lived through, the trenches of trying to introduce a new business model like this into a large, multinational company. Of course, we started with a look at the market but then quickly turned to an internal view: the culture, the appetite for innovation, the process for innovation, looking at the full value chain from sales channel, delivery operations. Came to the conclusion, as Howard mentioned, that there's a huge opportunity for the company. Really, as far as we can tell even now, no one is doing this but Schneider Electric. So we built a plan, and the plan was really based on the premise of agile development, so minimum viable product to find, looking at how could we pilot this and learn as we go.   Scott Weller: Of course, over about 18 months, we got through that process and got it to general availability, but it was ... There's a piece of this is accepting that you don't know everything at the beginning. Howard and team were great to work with and had the same vision and the same attitude toward the process. Yeah, I think it's been a great success.   Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, it's interesting to me. We're interviewing people on this podcast all the time that are working toward the goals of servitizing and delivering more outcomes, and what exactly does that mean? What are all of the outcomes you could work to deliver to your customers, et cetera? I think the ... I wouldn't say that I don't know of anyone that's had help from a consulting firm or outside expertise. I would say it hasn't been regularly discussed, and it's just making me think of the value that would exist in bringing an outside perspective into the organization.   Sarah Nicastro: I know, in this situation, you knew each other and had worked together previously, but one of the very common challenges that I pick up on in these conversations is just how difficult it can be to see the big picture when you're really in the day to day. It's just interesting to me, the role Mossrake has played in terms of just bringing a fresh perspective. You obviously have experience doing this, but also coming into a business and maybe seeing things or uncovering opportunities that it would be difficult to do when you're on the inside, if that makes sense. Okay.   Scott Weller: I could add I have to give a lot of credit to Howard. It takes a lot of stamina, tenacity, to really navigate this into a big company, especially if you're sitting in a region. You're not at worldwide, where a lot of the innovation is expected to come from. Yeah, and I was say, not to give ourselves too much credit, but I would say there are a lot of consultancies in the world, and the big names are there. It's really difficult to find a company, even among the majors, that have actually done this. They can talk about it. They're smart people. Taking nothing away from them, but finding a group of people who've actually done this across industry is very difficult, so I would say that's a key success factor in having this work.   Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, so you bring up a really good point, Scott. Howard, I'm just curious. That tenacity that Scott mentioned, it's a really good point. I've had a number of conversations with folks. We often talk about the fact that, to really embrace servitization, it needs to be a company-wide objective, right? It is very, very difficult to be in service and be the one evangelizing the value of servitization. I've had conversations with a number of people that are in that position that have ... I don't want to say given up, but they're incredibly frustrated, and I think ... I'm sure there's many, many elements here, right? Obviously, the willingness of leadership to listen, to hear out ideas, et cetera, that's a sliding scale, I'm sure, right?   Sarah Nicastro: Some of these people maybe are in a situation where it's just not happening, but Scott's point made me just want to ask you: What made you ... How did you find that tenacity? What made you listen to some of the, "No, we've tried that. It didn't work," and just keep pushing, instead of saying, "Okay"?   Howard Bowland: The easier path probably would have been to accept that, I guess. I think a couple of things. Yes, definitely a lot of energy required managing stakeholders and finding a pathway. It's important, if I go back, why did I have that energy? I think one of the reasons was on the back of success I'd previously had with Scott and with Hewlett-Packard in changing the business model inside that company. To be honest, it was difficult at the beginning there. We had almost a lost year, or I did, in terms of finding the way through, but, in the end, it was very successful. I understood it was challenging. Understood, though, it could be done. And trying to draw the parallels to see is this vision really doable here? Believed it was.   Howard Bowland: I had the advantage, I guess, of my upstream management being open to discussions and then ultimately finding a global leader that was really passionate about it as well to help the funding. But there's a lot of people between that person and getting it done, and that's where it takes a lot of energy. You're right. In large, particularly in large technology companies, there's obviously the traditional product sales method, and there's a lot invested in that. That's still an important model, so managing in a non-threatening way how this can be an additive offering that is really customer driven, and the ability to bring in ...   Howard Bowland: You talked about consultants, and some people might think of consultants as advisors that can write a report, for example, but, really, the Mossrake team and Scott were in the trenches actually developing the offer. What it gave me the opportunity to do was to have confidence that we had done it, that we had people that knew how we could navigate it in a new location, and then to bring my own people on that journey and see and learn from being part of that. What I found was that people wanted to join the team and wanted to be part of it because they saw the excitement through in the innovation, the learning opportunity to do something really quite new. And introducing a new business model into a company of any kind is even more challenging than you think even if you've done it before.   Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, that makes sense. Okay, so let's talk a little bit. Howard, can you summarize the value proposition of the offering and let's just talk a little bit about ... We alluded earlier to some of the perhaps ... Maybe not misconceptions, but interchanging of terms that can cause some confusion when you're talking about this evolution.   Howard Bowland: Yeah. Yeah, okay, thanks, Sarah. Yeah, often people will use a finance company and call something as a service or a subscription as a service, and that tends to muddy the water a bit about what really does it mean to be consuming something as a service or getting an outcome for your service contractors, opposed to piling together the hardware, software, and services and just financing that.   Howard Bowland: There's a number of key value points, I guess, for the offering. What we found is that any given customer might resonate strongly with a few of those, some with all of them, but it varies across customers. Firstly, there's an OpEx orientation. There is the ability to change the way that people spend their capital into possibly an OpEx classification, but in a time-based way rather than committing their capital budgets up front, and then they're able to use that released capital to do other things with. It lines up their costs with their business model, particularly, or their needs. The way they get billed and charged is in accordance with their business model, and so it can line up the costs for them of running things like secure power to the way that their business model runs. That's a benefit for them as well.   Howard Bowland: It's much more scalable. One of the big ... And sustainable. What I mean is that, as in IT, we found that there's a lot of over-provisioning going on in technology because people are either not experienced in sizing it or don't have the time to size it right or don't want to take the risk because changing it is really difficult. So you end up with over-provisioning and therefore over-consumption of things that is unnecessary. You end up with possibly a less-scalable model. Through an outcome-based orientation, as the needs change for the customers, so we can change the provisioning of the technology to match those needs in a much better way   Howard Bowland: Another big point we found was that customers were consuming a lot of their own resources in managing this asset. It seems to be complex. We saw that there were two classes, broadly. Customers where having critical support for their power was really important but not their core business. They did something else. They're a healthcare agency, for example, or a manufacturing company. They really needed it, but they didn't really want to be bothered with the technology. Then there's another class where it's really core to what they do.   Howard Bowland: In that first category, customers were consuming a lot of their internal resources looking after this infrastructure and offloading that burden to somebody is actually a better place to do it because we understand the technology better with a really important piece. That helps them and we see that doubling down here in this theater, anyway, the ability to get talented people in the market is really challenged because of the growth that's coming in places like data centers and so on.   Howard Bowland: Operational risk is reduced because the aging of the assets and the life-cycle management are no longer the problem of the customer. It's something that we manage. With a digital connection and analytics, we're able to do that in a much more effective way. Of course, there's the resilience of the infrastructure because we're monitoring it and managing it on a 24-by-seven basis. They're the core pieces, and one or other of those would tend to resonate more strongly with a customer than another, but, in the end, they all go to making a strong value proposition that resonates.   Sarah Nicastro: Okay. You said earlier this isn't for everyone, right? This isn't a situation where Schneider is deciding to only offer the outcomes-based model. You are adding it in addition to. Talk a little bit about why that is and the need to be able to meet the needs of customers that are on either side of that equation.   Howard Bowland: It's the case that there are customers who obviously manage their capital, their balance sheets, and so on in different ways. So owning capital items or not, having assets or not is sometimes a business decision for the customer which is unrelated to IT or unrelated to secure power, and so there are reasons why that's what they will want to do. They will want to perhaps be close to their infrastructure and manage and operate it themselves, and so there's a need there. The go-to-market model itself is the ability to reach a large number of customers. We have an indirect go-to-market model. There are customers that prefer to transact in different ways.   Howard Bowland: The traditional capital asset-ownership model is still alive and well and still fits a portion of the market. As customers are looking to maybe shift their risks to get greater value, to get probably a bit more mature in understanding how their business model works, would be looking to move to this outcome-based model. There's going to be horses for course there: size and importance of these assets to customers. There's always going to be smaller footprints that perhaps it doesn't make sense to do it with, and there will be customers that are major, hyper-scale customers, for example, that will always want to have a much different relationship there. There are a few thoughts from me on that.   Sarah Nicastro: Now, is it more complex for you to, as an organization, offer both choices than it would be to just pick a path, or does it not so much matter once you've made the transition to both, phasing one out would be neither here nor there?   Howard Bowland: Yeah, I think my view is that there's no added complexity by having both models available. The complexity perhaps comes in how the go-to-market model works. If you decide you're going to have an outcome-based model that's asset free for the customer, that has a whole lot of value-adding services, we need to be able to manage and record and deliver against, that's a piece of complexity that, once you've decided to go there, you have to solve for.   Howard Bowland: Whether or not you continue to have an asset model for capital purchase doesn't really add to that complexity a whole lot except perhaps to say that you could redesign your entire supply chains and manufacturing processes just for as-a-service model, and that perhaps would ultimately simplify things.   Sarah Nicastro: Yeah.   Howard Bowland: In fact, the opportunity with something like an outcome-based offering is to start thinking about building your products so that they're fit for, designed for servitization, and this could mean you need fewer customer-facing features, and you could create a lower cost, potentially, or something that's more suited to this flexible outcome orientation.   Howard Bowland: In some ways, there isn't extra complexity once you've decided to go that way, but probably you could ultimately simplify things. That sounds a bit contradictory, but that how I think about it.   Sarah Nicastro: No, it makes sense, and I think what made me ask that question ... I was just recently recorded a podcast with Phillips and was talking in a similar vein about the fact that they too are offering outcomes, but they have not shied away from their traditional business model. It's similar to what you were saying, which is they want to offer the choice, and that's why I was asking that. I don't know in their situation, I don't think that I asked if he envisions everyone migrating at some point to the outcomes model. You just said that you'll always have customers that you feel keep the capital model.   Sarah Nicastro: It's just interesting, I think, to talk about these things because, again, I think organizations that are looking at how to progress through this journey maybe look at it as an either or, not necessarily a both, right? Just looking at these two examples, yourselves and Phillips, those two examples of people that really is leading with the customer-centricity of choice, right? You're basically saying, "Great. If you want this, we can do this. If you want this, we can do this." It's just an interesting aspect of ... It doesn't have to be you put all your eggs in one basket.   Howard Bowland: Yeah, I think I'd be interested in Scott's view. If I just maybe reflect a little bit more on that comment that it's very challenging to switch the business model to as a service and let go of your traditional model because you need to obviously feed the machine. At some point, I do think, yes, a company could make a decision, so this is not speaking for Schneider, but you could make a decision to say, "Our future is in as-a-service consumption-based models, and we're going to retire the traditional capital way of doing things. Those customers that need that, we feel that there's a bigger opportunity to stay here. It's going to simplify our operations. It's going to simplify our go to market," because it's true.   Howard Bowland: As we go out there, and we think about our customers and what they need, we have to make a choice about how do we position the best value to them as we go option A or option B. If you offer everything to a customer as a big menu, it can become confusing, so it's important to be clear about what you think the best value is for them. There's definitely complexity, and we found that as well on this journey of migrating our go-to-market model to understanding how compensation works, how people are motivated, their own skillset, what their knowledge base is, and shifting to talking to ...   Howard Bowland: You need to talk to a different part of the customer about this proposition. The traditional people you engage with aren't necessarily the people that make this decision. Sometimes you're displacing somebody's job because, actually, in a sense, you may be moving work from them to us. Scott, I'd be interested in your view, though, on that, please.   Scott Weller: Yeah, I think you said it well, Howard. The reality is this new business model changes your company. It also changes your customer. They have to think differently about who Schneider is, how to interact with you, how their operation marries up to you as a supplier, and so all those changes are when really they're onboarding in the midst of changing to what looks like a pretty straightforward shift to paying differently for an asset, if you will. Being able to think more in terms of outcomes than managing assets, but it's that wholesale change on both sides that I think is one of the reasons of many, as you mentioned, that companies need to continue, suppliers need to continue providing both ways. The market is mart. Customers are smart. They figure out what they want, and, when the time is right ... And our experience in the past is, when the time is right, they begin to adopt more quickly into this need model.   Sarah Nicastro: Scott, can you talk a little bit about what is involved in developing that new go to market, right? You come in, and you did this at HP, but you come into Schneider, and it's a whole new world, right? What are some of those considerations in developing the go-to-market strategy and the different points that companies need to be aware of examining?   Scott Weller: Well, I like say, and not entirely in jest, that a new model like this into a big, mature business breaks everything, including the go to make, so you can imagine the go to market is one of those places that people are paid very closely aligned to their performance. So you can think of that part of the operation as being highly optimized for the outcome, and now you're asking them to tell very different stories. Maybe they're not stories that they're comfortable telling or you need a different mindset in those roles to tell this new story and have those kinds of customer dialogues, as Howard said, with different people. Instead of maybe someone in procurement or someone on the front lines of operations, now you're talking to somebody in the CFO's office, let's say.   Scott Weller: That's the start of it, so the sales enablement for a different kind of sales operation is a big piece of this. Can't forget the channel implications, particularly companies that are heavily channel oriented. You have a whole set of different issues to resolve, but it really starts with: What is the story; what is the vision; what is the pitch for the offer? Then bringing them through that journey so that they can tell the story, be effective at doing that.   Scott Weller: The sale cycle is completely different, much longer, typically. They have to be accustomed to doing that. If they're more transactional, it's very difficult for those individuals to transition, and so there's just a lot of work involved in bringing the go to market around. What I had to do is build a SWAT force, a global SWAT force, because you couldn't rely on bringing people along fast enough. You had to show and do and bring people along that way, figure out who could come along on the journey to this new kind of go to market. In a way, with Howard, we've done a little bit of that, injecting people who, both from our firm and other folks within the organization, to be that SWAT deployment to go after the early deals and bring the rest of the organization along.   Sarah Nicastro: It's almost like train the trainer. You're doing that initial push yourself so that they can see how it's done, and then you can see how they do it and if they're capable of bridging that gap.   Scott Weller: Yes.   Sarah Nicastro: That makes sense, and I want to come back to that, but, real quick, what would you say the ... I know I'm asking you to really generalize here, but what would you say is most important when you shift the conversation from talking to purchasing or operations to the CFO. For companies that are adjusting to having the CFO-type conversations, what have you learned is the key to your best chance of success there?   Scott Weller: I think the appetite to move to a model that doesn't tie up capital is a way into the conversation because capital lock-in, in many cases, not everyone, because there are capital-intensive companies that intend to remain that way, but that a hook for someone in the CFO's office is just to explain to them that this gives them flexibility in an uncertain world. But then, also, to think about it operationally, that their people are focused, perhaps, on the wrong things. Get the people you have focused on things that are actually core to business. Those are really the interesting conversations you can have. Of course, you can have that with someone who is, today, operating the equipment or managing the equipment.   Sarah Nicastro: Sure. What about risk as well, right? I would think that would be another significant aspect of the conversation that would be appealing.   Scott Weller: Well, certainly, in a lot of industrial products, they tend to get sweated. They run longer than they should or they're operating without all the care and keeping that they need. So, yeah, there is definitely a risk element. We would never want to say that their current operations are sub-par or anything like that, but, for sure, having experts keeping an eye on things, making sure that when certain elements or certain entire products really need to be replaced or refurbished or what have you, that that gets done timely, yeah, absolutely, that's a risk element that we can address with an offer like this.   Sarah Nicastro: Okay. All right, and then going back to the SWAT, I think it's a great idea, and we're going to talk in a bit about the fact that, for Schneider, doing this in a region is a really smart approach, right? Because I'm just thinking that SWAT model is something that you couldn't do if you were doing this all at once on a global scale, right? That idea of creating success and then replicating it, versus trying to create massive, wholesale success all at once is important, and we're going to come back to that. But that SWAT idea makes a lot of sense in terms of the specific skill it takes to initiate those different types of discussions, to map and to articulate that value proposition, and then to be able to tailor it to specific customers you're speaking with.   Sarah Nicastro: That's a super-smart idea, versus just saying, "Hey, here's a really important customer, so hey, sales rep that's been selling capital sales for however long, go give this a shot and let us see how it goes," right? I like that point. Howard, in terms of the go to market and adjusting to this new world of conducting business, what other points would you touch on?   Howard Bowland: That's a good point you just made as well. In the early stages, in fact, you want to keep the uneducated or uninitiated salespeople away from the customer conversation until ... Because there's the opportunity to actually spoil the ground by misrepresenting what's happening, for example. The most common thing that gives you a signal that something's going wrong is that the sales guy will say, "Look, the customer wants a capital quote, and he wants your as-a-service quote." Okay, well, straightaway we know you haven't had the real conversation because it's not about getting cheap hardware. That's not ... If you want cheap hardware, this isn't the way to get it. This is getting an outcome, which is more cost effective for all these other business reasons. You're either talking to the wrong person, or you've talked about the wrong things.   Howard Bowland: The go-to-market change is a really important. You do need the specialization, the SWAT, to come and start profiling the customers before you go meet them with the salespeople, and then introduce ... In the early days, at least, have the topic introduced by the specialist to detect whether there's real interest. We've since offered some sales tools and some training and so on that helps the general sales force understand the concept better, helps us profile the customer better, and can start those conversations. But to work them through the pipeline, we need to still have a pretty high degree of specialization.   Sarah Nicastro: Now, just a quick point on that, Howard. Did you find that, again, this is a general question, have you found that you've been comfortable looking to transition to this new strategy with the type of people you had already had on staff, or have you started in recruiting to look for different skillsets?   Howard Bowland: Yeah, so it's a sensitive question, I guess, perhaps it depends who's watching. It's a bit of both. As you look across the existing sales force or the go-to-market people, we can see there are people that can go on the journey of understanding the proposition and be able to articulate in a way. So a small number of people we can highlight in our organization that can go on that journey, and we need to recruit specialist salespeople to support that and to drive that last mile. It's a bit of a combination, and there's definitely people who it's not their core competency to be able to do this, so again, selecting the right customers and preparing them the right way and the resources around that to get scale is important to do.   Sarah Nicastro: Well, and going back to the fact that you're still doing the capital side of the business, right, so the people that don't necessarily want a new challenge don't have to embark on this journey, but, yeah, that makes sense. Not everyone likes change, right? Some people think, "Oh, this is cool. This is new. I want to learn this, and this could be a really interesting opportunity for me to do something different," and other people are going to say, "No, thank you. I'll just keep doing this thing that I like to do."   Howard Bowland: Even the people who say they like change don't really like it. It is a challenge, and so you're right. Some people are definitely happy doing a good job that they've done for a while. Others are really looking for growth in themselves and are excited by the innovation. Now coming back to the notion of the SWAT team and the way we've been successful. You do need high levels of energy and commitment and belief. You've got to, as Scott talked about in his previous experience, believing in what you're doing is important. If we were to move any other geography, you have to have some visionary or somebody who really wants to take on the ownership and the belief to ... Because it will take a fair bit of energy. We've been able to do a lot with what we have, but it also has, as Scott mentioned, it breaks most pieces you touch, and you have to do something to put it back in a different way.   Sarah Nicastro: That's good point, Howard, because, obviously, as you're spearheading this evolution, you're still doing your other, quote, day job, right? A lot of other folks are as well, right? How did you enlist people to help run those things in parallel, right? When you're in that exploratory and design and build phase, you're still doing all of the normal things you're doing while you're also working hard to innovate and build something different. You have Mossrake, and so you have external help. You're committed to it because you're the one with the passion behind it, but how did you bring other people on board to buy in early and be a part of bringing it to life.   Howard Bowland: It's interesting. It was a couple things, I guess. Being able to tap into my own experience, but people that I'd worked with and trusted, enabled me to go find some people in my organization who were willing and enthusiastic but maybe not experienced to put those two things together. Without either of those things, it would have been very difficult to do. At the same time, we took the decision, as we're building out and changing things, documenting them, all the service processes, all the changes, in a structured way, so they could be reused both internally in our operation here, but also it could be translated elsewhere.   Howard Bowland: What I found in talking to people about the vision and the idea was, actually, there were some pretty enthusiastic people in my team or in my organization that really wanted to do something different. I could ... We got them ... It enabled me not to have to build a structure internally that was dedicated to this mission. We could leverage some external resource, use some agile resource, maybe I appointed one full-time person initially, and then we had people ... Actually, I asked them to spend their time on it, and I directed the traffic a bit and freed up their resources, but then we had people volunteering, really to spend discretionary effort on it, and they were excited about what we were doing because it was new and different, and they could see the vision. They saw themselves learning and getting a fabulous professional experience as well, so that's enabled us, this journey over the last 18 months, to use this agile ... Agile doesn't mean ad hoc. It means that you've got, perhaps, people coming and going from team and achieving the things in smaller timeframes.   Howard Bowland: That's really the approach we took that I think ... I'm very proud that the team locally actually has stepped up, the people, to be part of it. Subsequent to that, I've now appointed a digital transformation manager that oversees all the operational capability development, and we've reached out to other parts of Schneider to understand how their system development can now fix some of the manual processes that we've had to develop and so on. So restacking the bricks of Schneider service actually was, in some ways, not the most difficult thing, although it's challenging. I would still, on balance, getting the go-to-market model right, talking to right part of the customer with the right message, that's still the most challenging thing in this business-model change, I would say.   Sarah Nicastro: It makes sense, makes sense.   Howard Bowland: You could have a great offering, right, but if you can't get it to the market, then it doesn't really matter.   Sarah Nicastro: Scott, would you say, based on your experience going through this process with other organizations, do you think those, I don't know, for lack of better term, change agents or the people that you could enlist to help get this off the ground, do you think they're ... Can you usually spot them? Are there commonalities where you can say, "Okay, this person, this person, and this person, let's approach them and see if they want to get on board," or is it just you have to get started and see who shows interest?   Scott Weller: Well, my experience is just that. You know who the adventurers are. Now, not everybody who's excited to go on a journey is really the right person at that time.   Sarah Nicastro: Up for it, yeah.   Scott Weller: Well, they may be up for it, but really not the right person, not the person you need at that moment, but in big companies, adventurers are hard to find. People get pretty siloed, and even I would call professionals in the sense of what they do they do very well, and change, as you said, is difficult, so that is really key. Fortunately, Howard had a number of adventurers in his organization who he could tap. The other thing is they have to keep doing their day job as well, in many cases, as they come on board. And eventually can be assigned full time, but it takes a lot of commitment, tenacity, and a curiosity about how things work to really thrive in that kind of environment.   Sarah Nicastro:   Yeah, it sounds really interesting to me. I think I would be a volunteer, Howard, if you're doing it again. Okay ...   This is part one of a two-part podcast. Be sure to tune back in next week for part two! </div> </div> </div> </div> <div class="col-12 col-lg-3"> <div class="form-wrapper"> <h2 class="form-tittle">Stay Connected</h2> <iframe src="https://info.ifs.com/GM-CP-CU-2012-12-FoFS-Newsletter_IFrame.html">

By Sarah Nicastro, Creator, Future of Field Service

I absolutely love sitting down to talk with different service leaders about how they are spearheading innovation and transformation within their companies. Across industries and regions, the evolution from break-fix service to delivering experiences and outcomes holds so much potential and excitement. There’s so much to learn from listening to how various organizations are tackling the complexity that comes with this migration.

I recently had the chance to sit down with Howard Bowland, VP Field Services Australia at Schneider Electric to talk about how he’s led the region on a journey to delivering power-as-a-service. He’s enlisted the help of former Hewlett-Packard Enterprise colleague Scott Weller, who is a partner at Mossrake, to use his region of Schneider Electric as a blueprint for success for the global organization.

Both Howard and Scott have experience at HPE and realize that the IT industry’s progress in outcomes-based service is just as possible in a wide variety of other industries. “Any time you have a long-lived asset that may require specialty skills to maintain, it's a perfect setup for pay-as-you-go pricing,” says Scott. “Then, if you think about a business that thinks of these assets as critical but not core, it's not the business they're in. It's not a core competency. It's very clear that this is a perfect setup for as-a-service models and really a shift to a focus to outcomes.”

When Howard joined Schneider Electric, he recognized the opportunity to introduce his learnings into the organization and transform service. “Coming into this company, a slightly different segment from the IT industry, I was coming from having worked with the IT industry in developing that cloud economics for IT assets and for really operationalizing that in the Asian Pacific theater,” he describes. “As I came into Schneider Electric, there really wasn't anything in place around providing customer greater value over and above the traditional asset-ownership model. It first started with the thought of, "Could we do this? Why couldn't we do this with the kind of assets that the customers are acquiring from Schneider Electric?"

From that initial thought has grown a project under Howard’s leadership, with Scott and Mossrake’s help, that has brought Schneider Electric’s EcoStruxure outcomes-based service model to fruition. Coming up this week and next on the Future of Field Service podcast, I do a deep dive with Howard and Scott into the project – from vision to future plans. Be sure to stay tuned for the two-part discussion, but in the meantime, here are five worthwhile aspects of their approach you may be able to learn from.

#1 – Enlist Help

Howard, having worked with Scott at HPE, knew firsthand his expertise in building an outcomes-based model. He decided that if he were to introduce this evolution into Schneider Electric, he would need to enlist help to juggle both the day-to-day work and a major transformation. “Some people might think of consultants as advisors that can write a report, for example, but, really, the Mossrake team and Scott were in the trenches actually developing the offer,” he explains. “What it gave me the opportunity to do was to have confidence that we had done it, that we had people that knew how we could navigate it in a new location, and then to bring my own people on that journey and see and learn from being part of that. What I found was that people wanted to join the team and wanted to be part of it because they saw the excitement through in the innovation, the learning opportunity to do something really quite new. And introducing a new business model into a company of any kind is even more challenging than you think even if you've done it before.”

One of the most common challenges I hear from service leaders working to progress on the outcomes-based service journey is the constraint that comes from essentially working two full-time jobs; one leading the current business, and one building the future business. Brining in outside help may be a great option to temporarily augment your team with folks that have fresh perspective and vetted skillsets. “We came into this opportunity with Howard having all that experience back at HPE, so we knew, certainly lived through, the trenches of trying to introduce a new business model like this into a large, multinational company,” says Scott. “Of course, we started with a look at the market but then quickly turned to an internal view: the culture, the appetite for innovation, the process for innovation, looking at the full value chain from sales channel, delivery operations. We came to the conclusion, that there was a huge opportunity for Schneider Electric. We built a plan, and the plan was really based on the premise of agile development.”

#2 – Take a Pilot Approach

To introduce this type of change at a macro scale in a multi-national corporation seems a bit daunting, right? It certainly would be. Therefore, what Schneider Electric did, was allow Howard, his team, and Mossrake to essentially pilot the transformation within his region with the intent of documenting the journey in detail to serve as a blueprint for expansion to other regions. “This is also the approach we took at HP. We've done it with Howard and Schneider Electric, and we're working on a couple of other clients as well,” says Scott. “I would say the beauty of this is being able to do this in a microcosm, where if it were to fail for some reason, the risk to the company is small. The reputational risk, primarily, but even operationally, even financially, the risk is very small. It lets you learn, because inevitably you're going to learn. No two companies are the same. No two as-a-service offers are going to be the same, so you have to allow for that.”

Using the pilot approach allows you to contain those learnings to a region, so that you can adjust and improve and determine exactly what works before you take the transformation to scale. “Being able to de-risk the journey helps for a lot of companies who first consider stakeholder perception,” explains Scott. “If you think about yourself as a dividends-value company, moving to a model like this may really upset stakeholder perception, so it gives you time to succeed, learn, and really be planful about how you want to pivot the company around something like this in a way that you can talk to your stakeholders about, you can talk to your employees about. It's really, we think, the right approach.”

#3 – Leverage a SWAT Team to Build Acceptance, Foster Skill Building and Minimize Risk

Howard, Scott, and I discuss in detail within the podcast that far and away the most challenging aspect of this journey is around the go-to-market. Because the value proposition of an outcomes-based or as-a-Service model is so fundamentally different, getting this part right is absolutely critical to success. What Schneider Electric did is use a SWAT team approach to protect its customer experience and ensure buy-in was built among internal and external stakeholders.

“There's definitely complexity in migrating the go-to-market model and the sales approach is vastly different,” says Howard. “In the early stages, in fact, you want to keep the uneducated or uninitiated salespeople away from the customer conversation. The SWAT team can come and start profiling the customers before you go meet them with the salespeople, and then act as specialized resources who introduce the conversation,” explains Howard. “From there you can offer sales tools and some training to help the general sales force understand the concept better, helps us profile the customer better, and build the skill to have those conversations. But to work customers through the pipeline, we need to still have a pretty high degree of specialization.”

If you can leverage skilled resources to lead those initial conversations in this SWAT approach, you can more adeptly familiarize your talent with exactly how different of a story the outcomes-based service value proposition is. “The sale cycle is completely different, much longer, typically. They have to be accustomed to doing that. If they're more transactional, it's very difficult for those individuals to transition, and so there's just a lot of work involved in bringing the go to market around,” says Scott. “What I had to do is build a SWAT force, because you couldn't rely on bringing people along fast enough. You had to show and do and bring people along that way, figure out who could come along on the journey to this new kind of go to market. In a way, with Howard, we've done a little bit of that, injecting people who, both from our firm and other folks within the organization, to be that SWAT deployment to go after the early deals and bring the rest of the organization along.”

#4 – Adopt Agile Methodology & Strong Documentation to Refine and Expand

Howard and Scott agreed from the beginning in an agile approach. “The agile method is key. We're making this thing work. The customer sees a good outcome. Inside, we've got people running around on treadmills, but we'll replace that with systems and automation and so on at the right times,” says Howard. “It's just keeping ahead of that curve. That makes it an affordable way to develop it. If we tried to develop all the capability and have it readied and put in place so that we could cut the ribbon it, it would be a much more challenging assignment to get the investment for it.”

As with any transformation, starting with small successes and then building is a consumable, practical approach. The journey to outcomes can be similar. “Agile doesn't mean just winging it. You have to have a sense of where you're trying to get to. You have to have a fundamental vision and a belief, as Howard mentioned, and then that guides you,” says Scott. “Even though, on any given day, you might be working on pricing, or you might be working on a revised channel program, which itself takes several steps to mature through, but you know where you're going. It's just a matter of accepting that you won't have a completely finished product on day one. You've already stated that. You've got a minimum product. That's going to be good enough to have a conversation with the customer about, and even sell to them, in a pilot sense.”

Also key to Schneider Electric’s initiative was impeccable documentation so that this pilot-approach transformation could be followed by any region to come. “I felt that it was important that this be repeatable and we document our journey,” says Howard. “As we went on this journey as well, we, strengthened our existing process documentation for just our regular bricks of service capability. There was a systematic approach to building out the blueprint for how to do this and document that, and that was a key part of what Mossrake brought to us, what our team worked on, and we've created that repository of documentation and learnings and insights, which has been really useful to keep us on track and will be useful as other regions of Schneider replicate what we're doing here.”

The deliverable of this documentation and blueprint was another area of value from brining in expert help. “One of the key deliverables from our work together is this operational blueprint, which covers every aspect of the value chain, and then, on top of that, the operational description for actually how the run what's effectively an engagement with the customer,” explains Scott. “As-a-service ends up looking like a consulting engagement that just doesn't necessarily have an endpoint. All of that is what, in our conversations with other countries and regions within Schneider, that's the foundational element is that operational blueprint.”

#5 – Be Tenacious in Your Pursuit of Potential

Finally, know that the journey will not be smooth sailing. “I have to give a lot of credit to Howard,” says Scott. “It takes a lot of stamina and tenacity to really navigate this into a big company, especially if you're sitting in a region. You're not at worldwide, where a lot of the innovation is expected to come from.”

Howard reflects on his experiences at HPE as motivation for seeing this potential come to life at Schneider Electric. “We’d had this success at HPE, and so I knew it was challenging but I also understood it could be done,” he explains. “I had the advantage of my upstream management being open to discussions and then ultimately finding a global leader that was really passionate about it as well to help the funding. But there's a lot of people between that person and getting it done, and that's where it takes a lot of energy. You have to understand the importance of not taking no as the answer. You've got to find the person that can say yes and get support. We could easily have stopped at various points because it looked like it wasn't going to be possible to do what we wanted to do. That tenacity comes in in making sure you continue to look for the way.”

Click on the link for more information on Schneider Electric’s innovative aaS offer EcoStruxure Outcomes: Secure Power as a Service - www.se.com/au/outcomes

By Tom Paquin

Office work sure ain’t what it used to be (eighteen months ago). Businesses are hybrid-izing work expectations and streamlining office space for a more streamlined in-office staff, ISPs are being pushed to the brink to support home office videoconferencing on a whole new level, and many people are discovering what some of us have known for a while: Working from home can be really, truly, what you need to (literally) get the job done.

I’ve written about the service ramifications of this from ITSM, wherein businesses now need to think very carefully about supply chain, device management, and triage in order to manage how, where, and why service vehicles are deployed at all. But this new paradigm has internal and external ramifications across a wide array of different axes. Let’s explore one of them.

The truth of the matter is that service businesses may be just as likely as any other busines to want to limit the amount of physical footprint that they have, chiefly within the context of the backoffice. Obviously this is less of a possibility for manufacturers, telco providers, or utilities, where there’s more of a need of physical infrastructure. For straight service providers, though, there are certainly some possibilities.

Is the prospect of shuttering a great deal of physical real estate a unique challenge? Obviously, yes, but with a set plan of how you’re going to proceed, and what you need to do to make these moves equitable to your staff, there are a lot of tools that can support. As we always say here, your business’ unique needs will shift marginally from certain elements of what we outline here. Nevertheless, it’s worth considering. Let’s break down some elements:

Getting a holistic view

Service businesses can’t build a coherent strategy if dispatch centers are siloed islands of data and operational utilities. If, for instance, you have a telco that has commercial tower services disconnected from consumer services, you’re doing it wrong. Systems feed off of a shared resource base, even if the technicians or parts will never cross over between two groups. Businesses looking to decentralize their understanding of their business need to start by centralizing the insights of service, parts, and asset management.

Increasing the ratio of technicians to dispatchers

Thinking about reducing the size of internal offices means naturally thinking about how resource allocation meets the dispatch. We of course already know how businesses succeed at doing this: They employ true scheduling optimization. Not drag-and-drop schedules and pretty colors, like what some companies call “optimization”, but AI-powered utilities that offer a single view of asset performance, available resources, and SLA-powered job expectations, all synthesized in a system that can update in real-time across the whole of your company, not just a single location.

Getting in all on mobile

Yeah, I know that I’m a broken record on mobile supremacy, but whether or not your technicians have office time, they need 100% of their desktop resources on their mobile devices, no exceptions. Mobile field service is so mature that treating it like some sort of ornamental dongle is just plain reckless. What it will take to make this work for your business will depend a lot on what you do, obviously, but at the very least, systems need to be unified across all platforms. No redundancies, no forgotten work order submissions or part requests.

Rethinking parts and logistics

I love a good depot, don’t get me wrong. Be it a train depot, where I spent a lot of my young commuter life, or a Home Depot, where I dump thousands of dollars a year into landscape fabric and screwdrivers, there’s something very nice about a place that has a confluence of all the things. Whether that depot needs to be within spitting distance of a technician’s truck or not is another question. If you’re disseminating service and limiting office space, you have an opportunity to expand service territories out much farther. You just have to think about how you get parts to technicians, or, conversely, how you get materials from technicians available for repair and remanufacturing. You’ll find the mix that works best for you, but with a holistic view, you shouldn’t have a problem employing parts and reverse logistics systems to meet employees wherever you find them, including their homes, or the homes of your customers. The right tools are right in front of you, waiting for you to set the criterial for what they do.

These are but a few small considerations for what the future of work might look like for service, and there are a lot of others worth evaluating as we continue on our post-pandemic journey. While the last year and change has not been particularly fun, the ripples of change offer us all an opportunity to reflect, and reposition ourselves to make the future a lot brighter than it was before.

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Sarah welcomes Johnny Crowder, suicide/abuse survivor, TEDx speaker, touring musician, mental health and sobriety advocate, and the Founder & CEO of Cope Notes, a text-based mental health platform that provides daily support to users in nearly 100 countries across the globe, to discuss the criticality of prioritizing mental health in the workplace.

Sarah Nicastro: Welcome to the Future of Field Service podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Nicastro. Today, we are going to be talking about the need to de-stigmatize, normalize and prioritize mental health in the workplace. Hopefully you are aware that this month, May, is mental health awareness month. Those of you that listen to the podcast regularly or read our content, know that this is a very important topic to me. And I am thrilled to have here with me today, Johnny Crowder. Johnny is a TEDx speaker, touring musician, mental health and sobriety advocate, as well as the founder and CEO of Cope Notes, which is a text-based mental health platform that provides daily support to users in nearly a hundred countries. Johnny, welcome to the Future of Field Service podcast.

Johnny Crowder: Thank you for having me. I'm pumped up.

Sarah Nicastro: Thank you for being here. So I found Johnny on LinkedIn and I am a big fan of his content and messages. I'm also a big fan in general, about how mental health is something that you see discussed more and more on LinkedIn, right? I think that's kind of a bit of what we're going to talk about today is this is not needed to be a conversation that you reserve for Facebook or Instagram or whatever your personal social media platform is of choice, it is a conversation that is important for us to be discussing in professional forums as well. So Johnny, tell us a little bit about yourself and your background and your journey and how you got to the point of becoming a mental health advocate and public speaker.

Johnny Crowder: Yeah. So the short version, I'll tell you the short version. The long version, I have a TEDx talk. So if you want to go listen to that, that's like an 18 minute breakdown of how the heck I got here.

Sarah Nicastro: Okay.

Johnny Crowder: But the short version, I'm going to leave out a lot of details here, but essentially I grew up in an abusive home and I learned all the wrong things about myself at a very young age, started developing symptoms of mental illness much, much younger than most people. So I'm talking like toddler years, elementary school, middle school. So I never really had like a normal day, that like childhood day where you go play soccer and you eat a freezer pop or whatever. I had a lot of trauma and a lot of illness at a really young age. And it kept me from performing daily tasks for a long time.

Johnny Crowder: So like any child would I resisted treatment for like 10 whole years. I just wouldn't touch it. And then I started mandatory treatment in high school because of some behavior issues. And then I wound up taking psychology courses to prove my doctors wrong. It turns out they were right. And then I took more psychology courses, eventually got a degree from the University of Central Florida in psychology. And then I switched. The big shift was thinking that I wanted to become a clinician to realizing the power of peer support and just using what I had been through to employ empathy. So now instead of being a doctor, I just work with doctors and then I provide that peer perspective from someone who's actually been through it firsthand. And then those doctors can provide the book learn inside.

Sarah Nicastro: Yes. Okay, good. So when did you do your first, I guess, public speaking thing related to this topic? How old were you, what was kind of the... how did that come to be? Was it your TED talk, or I'm assuming you've been speaking before that?

Johnny Crowder: No. I can't imagine the TED talk being like my first time talking about it. Well, I think, so it started, it's a really unglamorous start. I found out about NAMI, the National Alliance on Mental Illness, when I was in college and I was like performing, I was teaching and performing improv and I was in a band and we were touring and stuff. So I was a little bit familiar with stage, but definitely not talking about my own personal mental health on stage. And I met NAMI greater Orlando when I was in school, and they were like, "Yeah, we have people come up and speak at events and schools just about what they've been through," and I was like, "Oh, well, I'm still really sick. So like, can I participate while I'm still having a lot of issues?" And they were like, "Definitely, come get involved and volunteer."

Johnny Crowder: So I actually just got a LinkedIn notification that my 10 year anniversary with NAMI was this month. So literally 10 years ago. You got to picture me. I'm 18, still have pimples. I'm still trying to figure out the chest hair situation, whether or not I'm going to grow any. And I just started getting on stage at these really small, local volunteer type events and just trying to awkwardly share what I had been through. And over time it became... it started feeling more and more natural to the point now where if someone asks me about my mental health in a professional setting, I'm not like, bah, but they're seriously when I would apply to jobs, I would try to do everything within my power to prevent my employer from learning that I was taking anti-psychotic medication or seeing a therapist and so on, so the stigma was real.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. And I think, going back to what I mentioned in the introduction with some of the content you see come up on LinkedIn and some of the conversations we've had even on this podcast, that dialogue is changing and I'm very grateful for that, but there's a long way to go. There's a long way to go. And there's a couple points in what you just said that I think are important. One is, normalizing this topic is everyone's responsibility, right? And it's not just if you struggle with it and it's not just if you don't, right? It's sort of understanding that collectively is how we make more progress in making this a more normal part of dialogue and a more normal part of our professional lives.

Sarah Nicastro: The other thing is, I like what you said about sharing even though you were still struggling. Right? I mean, I know when you and I connected last, I told you there's a woman, Glennon Doyle, for anyone that is not familiar with her, she has been a writer and a public speaker and an activist in different ways. She wrote a book in 2013 called Carry on Warrior that really, really changed my life. I read it on an airplane rides in California. And I remember I just had tears streaming down my face, but it was talking about her experiences with anxiety and depression. And it was really the first time in my life I felt that it was okay that I wasn't okay. Do you know what I mean? And it was, 2013 doesn't sound so long ago to me, but really it was before there was as much open dialogue about this in, whether it's blogs or podcasts or just on social media. It was huge.

Sarah Nicastro: She actually just launched a podcast and the first episode was last week. And one of the listeners asked something about her coping mechanisms for anxiety. And she said, "Well, the first thing is I had to admit I'm never getting better. It is who I am and it's not going to go away. So once I could stop waiting for it to disappear, I could breathe again, because I wasn't trying to fundamentally change who I am as a person. And then I could actually look at, okay, how can I cope with this? Not how can I wish it away?" And I thought that was super powerful. But anyway, all of that to say, you never know when sharing your own experience or being open to listening to someone else's struggles is going to really, really change things for someone. And so it's important for us to all acknowledge the role we can play in this topic. Does that make sense? That was a lot of me babbling. I'm sorry.

Johnny Crowder: No, I specifically remember clarifying with NAMI before I... I have really bad memory loss from medication like long-term, but this is one thing that I specifically remember. I was quadruple checking with one of the organizers before I first started sharing it, like in a peer support setting. I'm like, "Are you sure it's okay? Because I'm still pretty in the thick of everything and trying to figure stuff out." And they were saying, "That's actually great because you're not so far out of it that you're saying, 'Oh yeah, dude, read this book and take this vitamin and you'll be fine. And I'm fine. Look at me now.'" That doesn't help as much as someone explaining to you what they're going through and you're going, "Holy crap. Yeah, exactly. It is really complicated. I wish it was that easy, but it's not," like that is the essence of peer support.

Sarah Nicastro: Right. So in terms of peer support, not only do you public speak and advocate yourself, but you've also created Cope Notes. So tell the people listening a little bit about what Cope Notes is and why it exists.

Johnny Crowder: Yeah. So Cope Notes uses daily text messages to improve mental and emotional health. And the whole reason we're doing that is because a lot of people don't have time for like an hour appointment or they don't know what their schedule is going to be like, so it's hard to plan for traditional mental health services. Or they have privacy concerns. I know that that's something that I was pretty concerned with when I was first starting to use some online digital mental health supports. And then it's also for people who struggle with consistency like me. So I'm the kind of person who, with all the best intentions, I either over commit or under commit and the under committing is a result of over-committing. So I'll be like, okay, I'm going to run seven miles every day for the whole year. And it's like, dude, that's such a bad plan.

Sarah Nicastro: Right.

Johnny Crowder: Like you're going to burn out, you're going to... It's not going to work long-term. So I wanted to create something that could sustain the consistency necessary to improve mental health long term. So Cope Notes, one thing I want to clarify is Cope Notes isn't like a magical, it'll make you better overnight. This is something that, we're investing in you a year from now. Just like if you brush your teeth every day, it's not going to magically get rid of cavities, but over time it will prevent you from getting cavities. And Cope Notes is kind of the same thing, like low effort. There's a low threshold, low barrier to entry and it's pretty passive. So these texts come to you. It's not like you have to remember to use the tool, and over time, it literally trains your brain to think in healthier patterns.

Sarah Nicastro: Cool. Very cool. Okay. We've both shared a little bit about ourselves. And let's talk though, let's start talking about why it's so important to de-stigmatize mental health issues in the workplace. So as you know, most of the people listening to this podcast are in the business world and responsible for teams and responsible for employees, and we probably have people from different ends of the spectrum, people that are like, "Yeah, let's normalize mental health," and then people that are like, "What? I don't want to talk about that or think about that or address that." So let's talk about why it's important to commit to de-stigmatizing this topic.

Johnny Crowder: Well, I'm thinking if you're a leader right now, you're listening and you are a manager, you have a team, picture yourself like a coach for a second. So you're the coach of a soccer team. Because I mentioned soccer earlier. How important is it for you as a coach to create an atmosphere, an environment for your team to let you know if they're hurt? Like imagine if you were the type of coach... and this is what's happening in the corporate world, by the way, we have coaches proverbially who are saying, if you break your ankle, I don't want to hear about it. Your team doesn't want to hear about it. Don't show weakness, get back out there on the field and crush the opponent no matter what. And what you're doing is guaranteeing that you will lose the game. And you're guaranteeing that you will lose a star player. Because he only thing that will make a broken ankle worse is continuing to play on the broken ankle.

Johnny Crowder: And a lot of people who are in a corporate environment, they'll start experiencing like crippling OCD to where it's interfering with their, it's not only interfering with their work, but also with their work-life balance. And then that's affecting their sleep and it's affecting their eating, and then that's affecting their performance. And we have leaders who are saying that's personal stuff. No, it's not. No, it's not. If it's affecting work performance, it is not a purely personal matter. Anyone... And you know what I've seen, there's a little more talk about this lately, which I think is important, divorce. When someone is going through a divorce, have you ever met someone who was going through a divorce and it didn't affect their work performance?

Sarah Nicastro: Right. No.

Johnny Crowder: So you can't... It's important to establish work-life balance. But also leaders are in a position where, I mean, if they actually care about their company, they actually care about the progress of what they're building and they care about their team, you don't even have to have a heart for the people. Even if you're like this cold calculated spreadsheet person, you don't give a crap about how people feel, you should still care about de-stigmatizing mental health. Because imagine if you were in a boat that had a hole and you couldn't find it, and the boat was going down and you couldn't find it because none of the people on the boat would want to tell you where the hole was because they were afraid to get in trouble or get judged. Your boat's going to sink, period.

Sarah Nicastro: Right. So that's it, that's a good point. I mean, hopefully you care because you care about people.

Johnny Crowder: Yeah, definitely

Sarah Nicastro: But for anyone that's listening that doesn't... No. But I mean, it is a good point that this is, you can care, and let's say that's the warm, fuzzy side of it, right? Like I really care about my team or my employees, but there's also an element of needing to realize the impact on performance and looking at it strategically in the sense of it isn't just about being a warm, fuzzy, I care about my people thing, it is also an element of the same way that you... A lot of companies have programs that help employees with their physical health because they want people to be healthy and they want people to show up and feel good and be able to do their work. It's the same idea with the mental health, right? It's maybe not as visible in some ways as physical ailments, but it's certainly just as important.

Sarah Nicastro: And I would say, with everything that's gone on in the past year, pro and con. Pro is, I think even companies that before weren't acknowledging the criticality of this topic have realized that they need to. Con is, people are a bit more stressed, burned out and struggling than they ever have been, right? So I said this earlier, we all have a responsibility in this, but let me hear from your perspective. Why is it everyone's job to normalize and prioritize mental health within a business?

Johnny Crowder: Well, you can either be an example or a non-example. And I know that for myself, if I ever had a non-example, I would cling to that. So I'm trying to think when I was in college, if I knew nine people, this is hypothetical, if I knew nine other students who were engaging with mental health services, and I knew nine teachers who are opening up about mental health, but I knew one student and one teacher that didn't want to talk about it, that's it. "Oh, that's not for me. And I'm actually good." I would identify with that person every single time, because people are naturally looking for an excuse not to work on themselves. They're always sure. Yesterday I had a sunburn. I still have one. I don't know if you can see it. It's mostly on my shoulders.

Sarah Nicastro: You don't even look red.

Johnny Crowder: But it was a real sunburn and I wanted ice cream because I was so hot. And I had ice cream, and it was great. And I can virtually guarantee you that if I wasn't sunburned, I would have found another reason to have ice cream, because I wanted it. It works the same way with something, I'll relate this to physical health as well, exercise. I can find a reason not to exercise. I've been working out forever and I can find a reason to be like, oh, you know what? Well, today is Monday. And maybe I should start working on organizing my closet because I've been meaning to do that for a while. I will avoid working out when I'm tired. And if I have a friend who says, "Oh yeah, I skip the gym a lot." I say, "Oh, I identify with that person."

Johnny Crowder: So each time you turn down the opportunity to share about yourself, or you turn down the opportunity to engage in a mental health conversation, you are providing a, it's not even a safe haven, it's a danger Haven. I don't even know if that's a thing, but you're giving someone who might need genuine help and support an opportunity to not engage by setting the wrong example. So no one is exempt from this. Like kids, trust me, if you have an eight year old who's talking to you about feeling anxious, that'll change a parent. So forget status roles or forget ages or demographics. Everyone has an opportunity to lead by example. And by choosing to not lead by example, you are accidentally still leading by example, you're just leading by the wrong one.

Sarah Nicastro: Right. Right. Yes. And it's, I think a recognition that you don't know when or how you're going to help someone in a significant way, but guaranteed, if you're avoiding, consciously avoiding the opportunity to do that, then you're not going to help someone, right? It is important for everyone to understand the role they play in normalizing these conversations and making this a priority within organizations. And I think that those negative examples hopefully are becoming few fewer and further between, and also standing out more. Right? That's kind of the flip side of this is as this conversation does normalize, those perceptions of this as a taboo topic or whatever are becoming less and less mainstream, that's... Yeah. So what would be your best advice for listeners on to create a company culture that's mental health friendly and/or what are some of the biggest mistakes you see companies make as they're making an effort to do that?

Johnny Crowder: So I'll start with mistakes. What I see really commonly is something like, "Oh, it's mental health awareness month. And for mental health awareness month, we're going to send an e-blast out to everybody. And then maybe if you reply to a poll, you can get entered for a chance to win a water bottle." And that's it. And then at the end of May, all the executives are patting themselves on the back like, "Yeah, we're so good. We're such good people." Or they'll do like, as for mental health awareness month, we donated $500 to a local mental health charity, and then pat, pat, pat on my back and then we'll do a press release about it. And then everybody's happy. I see a lot of that. And I also see it. I don't even have to tell listeners why that's not enough. So I'm not going to use time talking about that.

Johnny Crowder: But I will say that what I do see commonly as kind of like too much, too soon. So people going like, "Oh, now we're going to have yoga every morning. And then before the beginning of every meeting we're going to have this namaste moment where everyone goes around the table and talks about how they feel." And then productivity is lowered and people are like, "Am I really supposed to be honest in this setting?" So I see a lot of that, like too much, too soon where they're not really thinking about culture, they're more thinking about policy. And the best policy in the world won't save you from a bad culture.

Johnny Crowder: When I'm looking at something like a company culture around mental health, I think small incremental steps and including it in existing policy rather than drafting a whole new policy. I remember I was in the Carolinas and I was with my buddies kids. He has five kids. Five.

Sarah Nicastro: Can't imagine.

Johnny Crowder: And they were making lunch for the kids and they just, they don't like spinach. It's like something in the house where they're like, "Ooh, spinach is gross." So what she did was she put slices of spinach in a grilled cheese sandwich. Not slices of spinach, you know what I'm talking about, leaves.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, yeah.

Johnny Crowder: In a grilled cheese sandwich. And then she had them take bites with their eyes closed to see which slice of grilled cheese they liked better, one with spinach one without. And they realized they couldn't tell the difference with their eyes closed. And I was blown away. I was like, this is such an innovative approach to getting these kids eat spinach. And she's like, "Well, yeah, if I just pour out a big bowl of spinach no one's going to eat any. You have to work it into things that they're familiar with that they like." And I think the same is true for mental health.

Johnny Crowder: Don't just dump it all into a bowl and push it out to all your employees. You have to... it's lots of casual mentions. So using a term like anxious or anxiety or depressed or depression, even just those two very basic things or asking people like how they are feeling, or if you're too scared of stuff like that, and you're a leader, you can literally start with asking people like for a minute at the top of a meeting, what they did over the weekend and then encouraging people to follow up with each other to ask, "Oh, you said you rode BMX this weekend. How did you even get into that?" And fostering those interpersonal conversations. Because if all your work conversations are about work, I can guarantee that people will never be fully honest in the work place.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. That's a really good point. I think we had a gentleman from QIAGEN on the podcast a few months ago, and we talked specifically about how they've increased their focus on employee mental health, really seeing the opportunity or need that COVID presented, and making it a focus for their field service operations, and a lot... Go ahead, go ahead.

Johnny Crowder: I just wanted to mention, I just had a great idea. I mean, it's not even an idea, but it's, a lot of leaders that I speak to say, "Well, my people don't really know me like that" or, "I don't really want to be the one that initiates something like that." This is when you need a scapegoat.

Sarah Nicastro: Okay.

Johnny Crowder: So this is like, I am a professional scapegoat.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah.

Johnny Crowder: Because, if you're a leader and you say something and it falls flat or lands wrong and you're in your head about it, things can go sideways. But if you, "Hey, we're going to have a speaker come in or we're going to have someone come, like a third party," then you offload that like nervous responsibility.

Sarah Nicastro: Responsibility, yeah.

Johnny Crowder: And then you get to refer to someone who's not you. So it doesn't seem like, "Steve is deciding that this is the way it is." You say, "The speaker the other day mentioned..." and then you have like stuff to pull from.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah.

Johnny Crowder: So a lot of people are afraid of being like the bad guy or the mental health guy, the person to start the conversation. It's like the spooky taboo region of conversation for some reason. And I always tell people that's exactly when you need a third party to come in and start it so that you can work off the momentum of that conversation rather than you being like, "I don't know what to say or don't know what to do." Let somebody else start the engine.

Sarah Nicastro: Yes, yes. That's a good point. And I think, probably a necessity for some personality types or comfort levels, but I also think, don't be a chicken and don't try and shirk your own responsibility for contributing. Now, that could be following on a speaker or it could just be taking the initiative flat out. But I think that what you said is it's really a matter of baby steps into the already existing processes, right? And that can feel uncomfortable at first, but the stakes are low. I mean, you ask how everyone's feeling in a meeting and you might get a couple of weird looks, but if you do it often enough, then people will start to engage.

Sarah Nicastro: I also think that leaders have to understand that it's a two-way street. So it can't just be you asking, how do you feel, how do you feel, how do you feel, if you're never willing to kind of engage on that personal level in an authentic way, whatever that looks like for you, but you have to be willing to share some of your own feelings, thoughts, struggles, as well, so that you model the fact that that level of engagement is not just accepted within the organization, but encouraged.

Johnny Crowder: Yeah. I'm thinking of one particular board that I serve on where there's a doctor that leads the board and she will kind of, at the top of the meeting, everyone will like share for about a minute or so just very brief, very quick talking about stuff. And she did this thing especially early on when the board was new. I've been with them for a couple of years now, but early on, I was like, I don't know basically anyone here, so I don't know what I'm supposed to share and when I'm not supposed to share.

Johnny Crowder: And she did this thing where she was explaining, like we go around and share and she's like, "I'll go first. I had a paper due last Thursday and it was due for publication and someone messed up a submission number somewhere and it's been pushed off. And I thought about it the entire weekend. That happened on Thursday. Today's Monday. And I feel like I couldn't get my brain to think about other things because I was so anxious about the thing on Thursday and whether or not they'll let us submit late. So honestly I'm a little wiped out, but I'm looking forward to getting energy back from this meeting." And I was just like, holy crap, this is the leader of the whole thing. And then as people started sharing, I mean, you don't have to tell people to share something similar, they will do it naturally because they saw that there was no consequence.

Sarah Nicastro: Right. Yes. But you have to humanize yourself, right?

Johnny Crowder: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Sarah Nicastro: So let's talk then about why sometimes I think people don't do that, which is this sort of misconception that leaders have to kind of have that stiff upper lip, that I needed to be in a position where I command respect and I shouldn't let any cracks in the foundation show or signs of weakness or what have you. So what would you say to that misconception and why that is sort of an incorrect or outdated view of what leadership should look like?

Johnny Crowder: I think outdated is the right word, because that used to be a thing. Think back in the previous century and people were going through a lot of stuff, they needed a fearless leader, strong. And they're like, "Oh, we have to cut a thousand jobs this week," and the leader is like, "I will make it happen." That was kind of, I guess it worked for a long time, but now it's you see something like that and you just think, did they even hear? That's bad news. The thing that I think maybe a few decades ago what people feared most in a work setting was like a spineless leader or a leader that couldn't take action or a leader that couldn't command authority. Now people's fear is like a careless, cold, callous leader. They don't want to follow a robot. Why do you think there's like authenticity and vulnerability trainings and all this stuff for leaders? It's because people want to work for somebody who they know is a real person.

Sarah Nicastro: Right.

Johnny Crowder: And that's why I think, in the modern era, like before technology, I think strength was important. But now with everyone being able to access, basically they can look you up and find out all this stuff about you, they don't want to see that, they don't want to see your resume in a work setting or what you've accomplished. They want to see, oh dang, okay, he has a three-year-old and his three-year-old threw up on him. And that's, I've been through that, too.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. Who you are underneath.

Johnny Crowder: And all of a sudden you're like, "Man, you know what? I remember when my kid was three and I... Yeah, I want to give a little extra juice this week because I remember going through that" or, "Man, my kid is going to be three next year and I want to learn from this guy." So there's all of these opportunities to shift the way that you portray yourself in a work setting in order to provide more value. And in fact, most people think they're compromising authority and you're not. You're not. The people who have the most authority, if you think about virtually anything, the people who have the most authority are the people you like the most.

Sarah Nicastro: Right.

Johnny Crowder: For example, in my mind, if I've met you and I know you, you have more authority than the mayor of my city. Because I've never met the mayor of my city. So that, don't compromise, don't think that you have to compromise authority for showing your personality, because think about the people with the most authority in your life, they're most likely your friends and family.

Sarah Nicastro: Right. I was just going to say, I think the goal of authority in many cases is influence, right? And so I think that's going back to what we talked about earlier. Like hopefully you care about this topic because you just care. Right? But there is also an element of normalizing mental health discussions, not only because you care about your people, but because you don't need that hole in the boat, as you said. Same thing goes here. I wouldn't suggest trying to become more vulnerable as a leader just to exercise influence over people. Okay? It needs to be authentic. But when you can authentically connect with people in a human way, you do increase your influence over them. Do you know what I mean? There is also a correlation in terms of the positive impact on people, but also the positive impact on outcome. Right? So, that's a good point as well.

Sarah Nicastro: Okay. I know we're going to run out of time. I want to ask two other quick questions, Johnny. The first is, if you see an employee is struggling or if you know an employee, hopefully at some point it feels comfortable coming to you and saying that they are struggling, what is the best ways for a company or a leader to offer support?

Johnny Crowder: So, number one, don't be empty handed. Like don't say, "Well, no one's ever asked us for stuff so we don't need stuff." Wrong. Now is the time to have a few go-to resources. And I would say, make sure those resources are tiered. Don't give them three of the same type of thing. Like we have a red one, a blue one and a yellow one. Be like, what is your scale of need right now? Are you like a one to three? Are you a four to six? Are you a seven to 10? And then have at least one option in each of those categories? So I would say if you... Most people say, I want a suite of products to hand people, just make sure that they're covering different bases.

Sarah Nicastro: Right.

Johnny Crowder: And then I'll say, if you're identifying someone who might be struggling, the best thing you can do, best thing you can do is take them out to lunch. Best thing you can do. And no pretense, no anything like that, and just like spend time with them. Because I can almost guarantee, like food makes people let their guard down. If you take them out, you don't have to be like, "So how's your mental health lately?"

Sarah Nicastro: Right.

Johnny Crowder: Just be like, "Hey, just wanted to take you out. And I had a gift card to Chili's, so I thought it would be nice for you to get out of the office for a little while," and just talk. But I would say in either scenario, make clear that if they share something, make it clear like, "Hey, you're not going to get in trouble for what you just said to me. So don't leave this office and wonder if you made a mistake or anything. You got to know, we're not going to be... I'm not going to like go to all these higher ups and be like, oh, listen, this is what this guy is going through." Just remind them as they leave like, what you just did was really important, now I'm clued in. I can help and we can see, we can actually work together to solve this rather than you trying to figure it out on your own. So you just made the best decision you could make, like reinforce that

Sarah Nicastro: Right. Positive reinforcement of articulating that need. Right? Yeah. That's a good point. Okay. Last question. Tell listeners what resources, offhand, do you recommend for folks that want to either expand their own knowledge on mental health or look at different resources for their organizations. What are your suggestions there?

Johnny Crowder: So I'm going to be biased and recommend Cope Notes and also my TED talk. But outside of that, I would recommend NAMI, the National Alliance on Mental Illness. I can guarantee there's an affiliate close to you and they'll have a pretty good finger on the pulse of what resources are available in your area. And also TED talks in general. They have a way of taking these really complicated like subjects and then distilling them down into like 15, 10, 20 minutes. And that helps. Even if you, from now on, you send one TED talk a month, or you watch it with your employees over lunch, or you send it out via email or whatever, you have it on your internal employee board and you have the TED talk of the month and it's related to mental health, people will watch that and it will make a difference, because education is key.

Johnny Crowder: If you make health education easy and communal in that, "Hey everyone, homework for over the weekend, you watch this TED talk, it will take 15 minutes. And then on Monday morning at the first 10 minutes of our all hands meeting, we're going to just talk about some insights that we gleaned from the TED talk." That's the stuff that changes culture.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. Very good points. All right, Johnny. Well, thank you so much for coming on and sharing. I really appreciate you being here.

Johnny Crowder: Absolutely. Thanks for having me.

Sarah Nicastro: You can learn more by visiting us at futureoffieldservice.com. If you within your organization are taking strides to de-stigmatize and normalize mental health, I would love to talk with you about that and have you on the podcast as well. The Future of Field Service podcast is published in partnership with IFS. You can learn more about IFS at ifs.com. As always, thank you for listening.

By Sarah Nicastro, Creator, Future of Field Service

In the last 14 months, as the lines have blurred between our personal and professional lives more than ever before, workplace discussions and action around mental health have never been more critical. Burnout is real and even employees who didn’t content with mental health struggles pre-COVID are experiencing the impact of the chronic stress the pandemic has introduced. Those, like myself, who already had a mental health issue to keep in check alongside their work, family, and home duties are in varying stages of struggle.

So, what do we do? Well, first, we need to acknowledge the criticality of destigmatizing, normalizing, and prioritizing mental health at work and we need to understand that doing so is a collective responsibility of us all. Yes, it is May and this is Mental Health Awareness month, but posting a few links to articles on this topic or checking the box on a ‘mental health meeting’ for your team does not a movement make. At Future of Field Service, we’ve been working to incorporate mental health into our content and dialogue because we realize how imperative it is to have this be a topic of discussion and an area of action as a regular course of business – not one month a year.

I recently sat down with Johnny Crowder, who I noticed from his active presence on LinkedIn surrounding mental health, to ask for some input on how businesses can improve and make progress in caring for their employees’ mental health. Johnny is a suicide and abuse survivor, TEDx speaker, touring musician, mental health and sobriety advocate, and the Founder & CEO of Cope Notes, which is a text-based mental health platform that provides daily support to users in nearly 100 countries across the globe. We started by discussing the fact that, in today’s world, personal lives and professional lives are simply lives – innately interconnected. “A lot of people who are in a corporate environment, they'll start experiencing a mental health issue where it's interfering with not only their work, but also with their work-life balance,” explains Johnny. “And then that's affecting their sleep and it's affecting their eating, and then that's affecting their performance. And we have leaders who are saying that's personal stuff. No, it's not. No, it's not. Mental health is not a purely personal matter.”

Small Steps, Repeatedly and Continuously

Johnny urges you to look at mental health as an area of responsibility and key focus, not as a buzzed-about topic that requires you to check items off a list. "Oh, it's mental health awareness month. And for mental health awareness month, we're going to send an e-blast out to everybody. And then maybe if you reply to a poll, you can get entered for a chance to win a water bottle. We could even donate $500 to a local mental health charity and then do a press release about that,” says Johnny. “Some companies do this and then at the end of May, all the executives are patting themselves on the back. I see a lot of that. And I don't even have to explain why that's not enough.”

But while it is important to take a genuine approach to incorporating mental health care into your workplace, it is also important to keep it natural and practical. “I will say that what I do see commonly is kind of too much, too soon. ‘Let’s have yoga every morning!’ I think this stems from a focus on policy rather than culture. And the best policy in the world won't save you from a bad culture,” says Johnny. “When you look at really incorporating mental health into your culture, I think small incremental steps and including it in existing policy rather than drafting a whole new policy work best.”

Think about where, within your existing processes, you can incorporate mental health discussions and actions that are non-intrusive, natural, and repeatable. “My sister in law was trying to introduce spinach to her kids that don’t like vegetables. She put it into their grilled cheese sandwiches! I was like, this is such an innovative approach to getting these kids eat spinach. And she's like, ‘Well, yeah, if I just pour out a big bowl of spinach no one's going to eat any. You have to work it into things that they're familiar with that they like.’ And I think the same is true for mental health,” explains Johnny.

What this looks like in practice often seems small or non-descript, but Johnny is confident that’s what works best. This can look like simply working to ask your employees more personal questions, about their hobbies or what they enjoy or their families or what they did last weekend, to simply get to know them better and to open a non-role related dialogue. “Focus on casual mentions. So using a term like anxious or anxiety or depressed or depression, even just those two very basic things or asking people like how they are feeling, or literally just start with asking people at the top of a meeting what they did over the weekend,” say Johnny. “It’s about fostering interpersonal conversations and connections. Because if all your work conversations are about work, I can guarantee that people will never be fully honest in the workplace.”

Embrace Vulnerability & Lead by Example

It’s important for leaders who are in any way uncomfortable with the idea of mental health as a focus to realize that vulnerability is the new superpower. “The strong, fearless leader with a stiff upper lip worked for a long time, but it is entirely outdated,” cautions Johnny. “A few decades ago, what people feared most in a work setting was a spineless leader or a leader that couldn't take action or command authority. Now people's fear is a careless, cold, callous leader. They don't want to follow a robot. Why do you think there are authenticity and vulnerability trainings everywhere for leaders? It's because people want to work for somebody who they know is a real person.”

Accomplishments and authority as a leader are still important, but today those things need to be balanced with relatability, authenticity, and humanization to be effective. The most impactful leaders realize how much power there is in building influence through connection rather than coercion and how critical personal relationships and openness are in attaining this. How you speak as a leader, your willingness to open up and share some of your own personal moments and even struggles, can go further in normalizing mental health in the workplace than countless dollars spent on formal programs.

Don’t Be caught Unprepared When it Matters Most

Finally, Johnny points out that as you start to normalize mental health discussions in the workplace, you need to be prepared with action when someone opens up about an issue they need support on. “Don't be empty handed. Have a few go-to resources. And I would say, make sure those resources are tiered for the level of seriousness of the issue. Be sure you’re ready to cover different bases,” he advises. “And never minimize the impact of just being present and listening. If you're identifying someone who might be struggling, the best thing you can do is take them out to lunch. Best thing you can do. No pretense, just like spend time with them.”

By Tom Paquin

Out in the wilds of the world (of the suburbs north of Boston) I’ve seen every manner of barrier, mask, visor, partition, dome, and so on—all with the purpose of quartering off those pesky microbes to keep one another safe. At one place, the partitions will be made of flimsy plastic, while another has installed glass barriers that permanently separate their staff, which is to say that the scope of personal protective equipment (PPE) ranges from things that can come down with the help of a light breeze to things that are now permanent fixtures of our lives. So, too, will it be for things like masks, visors, and so on.

Perpetual PPE, as it were, has a variety of connotations and considerations for service, certainly, and it’ll be necessary to start thinking now about how some of this stuff will function beyond the quick stopgaps that we’ve built over the last year. Here are some considerations for what the next step of COVID preparedness might involve:

Developing a Coherent Strategy for PPE

We touched on this last week when we were considering how to meet people where they are, but service businesses interact with the world in different ways, and building a policy of consent is, first and foremost, integral to meeting that customer’s expectations.

As we emerge from our caves, and allow people to enter them to conduct service, it’ll be important to establish boundaries to maintain the new expectations of a weary world. Cynical people might call this “kid gloves”, but a year’s worth of trauma and anxiety doesn’t wash off, and if you want to be a business that is taken seriously, you’ll take people’s expectations about personal protective equipment seriously as well.

This will start with evaluating employee expectations, but it’s also about enabling employees, ensuring that the right materials are available in vehicles and at job sites to maintain cleanlieness and expectations, and that that training is disseminated, understood, and agreed upon. It’s a simple thing that can go a long way for the customers. Some will certainly brush it off. For others, it’ll prove that you actually care about them.

Rethinking Resources

Perhaps, you have, like me, concluded that mask dispensers will now be ubiquitous in public spaces in much the same way as hand sanitizer and tissues. There’s a rolling spectrum of where, why, and how these sorts of one-off materials will be disseminated to staff and customers in any given space, but as people stop carrying masks in their cars all the time, because they don’t need to, perhaps they’d like one while they stroll through a department store.

This is another one that is simple, but courteous—get in front of customer expectations, and start planning for this future today. Many businesses have made slap-dash changes to their floorplans to combat COVID. Maybe now we can take a step back, look at what we have, and make clear plans for what comes next.

What do we do with Waste?

This is a lot more complicated. I’m not unearthing some vast conspiracy when I said that PPE waste will continue to be a problem—It will. What we do in the short-term is important, but if PPE will be a continued fixture of how you conduct field service, it’s important to at least consider what the environmental impact of those actions will be. Perhaps it’ll overlap with the way that you manage your investment in the circular economy, or it’ll simply be disposal guidelines, but there’s no doubt the opportunity for disruption at some level, here.

None of us expected that we’d be wearing masks and taking precautions for this long, and without a doubt, there’s a contingency of people who will wear masks forever, for various reasons. Building plans for how we navigate these new dynamics will be necessary, and may even end up giving your business a leg-up.

What Will Become of the Pure Service Provider?

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