sarah.nicastro@ifs.com, Author at Future of Field Service

Episode 262

In this episode of the Unscripted podcast, host Sarah Nicastro is joined by Ralf Bootz, Services and Solution Delivery Lead for International Markets at Philips, to discuss what he has learned over his 24+ year career with the company about how organizations and leaders must constantly reinvent themselves to remain relevant.

Ralf is a Change and Transformation Manager, a certified Six Sigma Program Manager, and a Lean Master who has effectively led major performance and change initiatives, enhancing customer satisfaction, revenue, and profit margins. His experience includes managing large teams through strategic leadership, strong interpersonal communication, and relationship-building skills.

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Ralf: And you need to build that trust there because that's a different relationship you are engaging yourself with a customer. So it's not transactional, you know, we do the service or the break, fix, and see you next time into more relationship building and, you know, a different partnership. And there needs to be trust if you go that direction that you together can do something because it's never, you know, something that we can do on our own. Maybe we need stakeholder A or stakeholder B to work with us. We change something in there, and, yeah, it's a different type of service that we need to offer and also a different way of engaging with the customer.

Sarah: Hello, welcome to the UNSCRIPTED Podcast, where you'll find discussions on what matters most in service, leadership, and business transformation. I'm your host, Sarah Nicastro. Let's jump in. Welcome to the UNSCRIPTED Podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Nicastro. Today, we're joined by a service leader who has been in the business for 24 years, and we're going to talk about some of the things that he's seen in that time, what that means in terms of what today's landscape looks like, and also what the future might hold. So welcome to the podcast, Ralf Bootz, who is Philips Services and Solution Delivery Lead for International Markets. Ralf welcome, and thanks for joining.

Ralf: Yeah, welcome. Thanks for having me, Sarah.

Sarah: Absolutely. It's great to have you here. So before we get into the conversation, just tell everyone a little bit more about yourself, your background, anything you want to share.

Ralf: Yeah, my name is Ralf Bootz I'm Dutch, living in the Netherlands, working for Philips. 24 years. Before that, I worked in supply chain and smaller companies. And I have a master's in supply chain. Now, the world is service delivery and solution delivery in the international region. So those are all the markets besides China and North America. And we are mainly in the healthcare sector. So servicing hospital and hospital equipment and do as service. So there's a selling part and there's a delivery part. So that's a little bit about myself.

Sarah: Yeah, excellent. So I always say when I have folks join that have been with a company for, you know, 15, 20, 25 years, it's interesting because today you don't always see that, right? And I think it's always indicative of usually a good company culture and a place where, you know, you've felt you can thrive. Otherwise, you may not have been there for 24 years. And also usually it's, if you look through people's progressions, you know, they've had an opportunity to continue to learn and develop and grow within that business, right? Otherwise, again, people might not stay put for that amount of time. So that being said, 24 years at Philips, is a major accomplishment. I have to imagine you've learned a lot and the service landscape has changed tremendously in that amount of time. So can you share some observations of just, you know, the evolution of service over your career at Philips and, you know, anything that you take note of that stands out to you over that timeframe?

Ralf: Yeah, I never thought about that in that way. But in that sense, it was never a boring place. It's always something new to innovate or procure. Hands-on and make things better. 24-year-old Philips was always in the healthcare industry. And if you see the healthcare industry changed over that period, and of course we changed with that. Now in the past, we were kind of pioneers with a few other companies and medical devices to put them out there. And these were high-tech, complex machines in a healthcare environment. So service was sort of a given that people needed to do service. And at the time, it was easier, if you will. And I remember the days when I started, we did three big things a year. So these are the top priorities, these three. And we nailed them and we improved. And we did that year after year. Now, 24 years forward, it seems like we have so many priorities and the healthcare industry. It's much more professional than it was at that time. Moved around, including new competition, more demanding customers, more pressure on the whole healthcare system. So that pressure comes also into our company, where we need to deliver and step up to the plate. So from break-fix 24 years ago to still break-fix, but then with more digitalization and more professional services, it's a fast track, putting things forward. Still, we have all the time better improvements, and we still have a way to go. But there are still opportunities to increase the business and increase even our profits to reinvest in better healthcare.

Sarah: Yeah. You know, you said that I've never thought of it that way looking back. And I think sometimes that's a factor of a type of person who spends less time retrospective and more time just what's next, what's next, right? Which is something I can identify with. So what you were saying about, you know, the three priorities each year and how that shifted to today's landscape, you know, it's an illustration of and maybe interesting to reflect in that way of just how complex things have gotten, right? So, it's, you know, the amount of information, the amount of demands, the amount of possibilities, you know, a lot of those things are great, but it's just the pace of information, the pace of change, you know, it's just very complex today. And so, obviously, organizations like Philips have to figure out how to contend with that and how to simplify as much of that complexity as you can for your customers, right? Because often that's what they're looking for you to do.

Ralf: Maybe one additional thing is that in the past, service was these guys from service, you know, somehow in a corner. And I'm saying guys, because at the time it was male-oriented, you know, these guys in the corner. You know, well, now service is kind of, you know, hot and it's a differentiator. So that gives also the pressure of, you know, more stakeholders to manage in a way and more pressure because service is a differentiator. And in the past, it was kind of a more hygiene factor. So that makes also a huge difference in the positioning where you are in the organization.

Sarah: Yeah, no, that's a really good point. Yeah. You know, slowly, but surely we're working on it. Yeah. So, you know, that's a good point as service has become a differentiator. You know, it does put more pressure on the frontline talent, on the business, on delivery, execution, all of those things, right? It's not this, as you said, it was sort of a given, but it was a given in a way where it was just there in the background. It happened when it needed to, but there wasn't a lot of emphasis put on it. And that has changed, which is really exciting, but also to your point, brings a lot of pressure with it. So when you think about where we are today and what today's landscape looks like, can you comment on sort of two things, they may be different sides of the same coin, or they might be some different points, but what do you see as the biggest challenges and the biggest opportunities?

Ralf: Things that stay the same, and that's still the biggest challenge, is our people and services and people business. So how do we keep the people, keep the people motivated, and keep the people customer-centric? I think that is still the biggest challenge that we need to manage. Now, besides managing customer demand, that is much more challenging. So I would say customers, people, and then internally too, you know, based on what I said earlier, is to align all these stakeholders and manage them too, and still get the right attention in the company to do things like remote investment, you know, like training capacity, etc. To make sure we keep, you know, running the business as such. So I would describe them in these three buckets as the biggest areas or the biggest things, we were working on.

Sarah: Now, what about the other side of that? So like, what do you see as the biggest opportunities?

Ralf: Yes, in our case, it's still driving productivity with remote and working with customers on more data-driven insights and services to enhance their operation. So basically get closer to the customer by just doing a service. You can buy our service, here you are, in more output-driven services. So we get closer to our customers to understand their pain points and see how we could develop services to help with that. And then internally, it's more this switch to the more proactive remote, where we learn to trust these signals and act upon that and get better at that.

Sarah: Yeah. I like that you bring up the people part. That's kind of what I've in many ways built a career talking about because it's almost always the answer to what's the hardest piece or what's the most challenging piece. You know, it's, there's a lot of headlines that get given to the technology, but that's never really the sticking point. You know, the sticking point with it is how it's put in place and how people feel about it. And, you know, that sort of piece, not necessarily those pieces themselves. And I think there's a lot to what you're saying with the people part that has come into play. You know, it's, you know, you mentioned, how do you keep your people customer-centric? How do you keep them engaged? But also as service has become more of a differentiator, the expectations we have of the people and what we need to look for in the people has also shifted a bit, right? So it's, you know, there's a lot of layers to that piece of the conversation. Also, you know, getting closer to the customer, understanding their business in a way that you can develop new service offerings that are appealing to them. Sounds very simple, right? To just say in a conversation, but I mean, you know, that actually doing that, building the skills to do that, building the relationships to do that, taking that insight and taking it back in the business and innovating with it. I mean, there's a whole lot that goes into that. So.

Ralf: Yeah, no, and especially, you know, that's what does the engineer or the field service engineer of the future look like? And technology plays a big part of that. And you can dream about the glasses and all these features that come in, or artificial intelligence and AI. But at the essence, it's still people's business. People do business with people. So how do we train our engineers today? And are all these people like that? I mean, some people like, give me a complex issue, fix it, and I'm moving out. Now, with the digitalization, the information that we have, so, yeah, we see also a generation split in sort of engineers, the new generation coming in and the older generation, and how to deal with that. Yeah, we have a lot of engineers still in our company. And that is basically part of our product that we sell as a service.

Sarah: Yeah, absolutely. Can you talk a little bit more about the transition to, you know, more data-driven outcomes, the digitalization of service? What are, you know, the things that you're doing today to look for how to create those new value streams, to look for ways to use service to contribute, you know, new revenue streams, et cetera?

Ralf: Yeah, and there's not a one-size-fits-all. If you think about our customer base, they have different needs. Think about a university hospital versus a private government hospital. There are different ways of working and different needs. The trick is more to connect to what are they looking for. What is their improvement? So where are their pain points or where are their opportunities? And connect our services to that. So if you have a university hospital, maybe they just want very good-quality pictures and not looking for throughput. And another hospital, they're having a waiting list and they're looking for throughput. So then the throughput KPI is something that we can work on. How can we help you to scan more patients with the same quality, with less dose, or something like that, as an example? So it's basically around cost, speed, and quality, where we try to develop services and link them to customer needs. That is the transition we are making. But not every hospital is open for our customers. I'm open to that. But there we see kind of a trend moving into output-driven KPIs and services. And put some skin in the game for ourselves to say, hey, we can help you with that. Let's take that risk or that opportunity together. But that's a new area in which we need to define the rules of the games. In terms of how we do things, how we make those agreements and measure the success. You need to build that trust there because that's a different relationship you are engaging yourself with, with a customer. So it's not transactional, you know, we do the service or the break, fix, and see you next time into more relationship building and, you know, a different partnership. And there needs to be trust if you go in that direction that you together can do something because it's never something that we can do on our own. Maybe we need stakeholder A or stakeholder B to work with us. We change something in there. And yeah, it's a different type of service that we need to offer and also a different way of engaging with the customer.

Sarah: Now, it's interesting you bring up trust. Incredibly important. I think also, though, what I wanted to talk about next, and it's a good segue into that, is the role of trust among your teams and as a leader, right? So this whole evolution of service and where the business is headed requires, not only engaged, but empowered, you know, team members and strong change leadership, change management, right? It's this, you know, we talked earlier about the complexity, that complexity means that we're almost always today in a state of change. You know, we're continually improving, we're continually evolving. And while that's good in many ways, and also just is what it is, you know, there's no escaping it. If you don't have that good cultural foundation, you don't have strong leadership, it can really fall apart internally, right? So can you talk a little bit about company culture, empowerment, leadership, and how that comes into play with keeping everyone on board with where things are going?

Ralf: Yeah, and culture is important, and we take that very seriously because we are in a healthcare environment. So we want to drive patient safety and quality and all of that. And we're proud that we can contribute to that healthcare industry. But then on the flip side, yeah, how do you – and we have many thousand engineers. So how do we make sure that we drive that culture down to them because these are the people that are most of the time with the customer? It's not the account manager. It's the service person who is all the time in front of the customer, representing the company. So how do we engage with them to convey that culture and that trust? And, yeah, we have different programs in going to that culture and these culture elements and these behaviors and what we want to do. So, yeah, we're pretty strong on that. And, of course, we've got a great history as a 130-year-old company. But you need to reinvent yourself all the time in that one and, yeah, drive that culture through. So it's also... Dealing with the world is different cultures. So you get your Philips culture that we have, you know, company culture, but then you need to mingle that with the local culture. Now, that's an interesting mix that we need to stitch together, and then the local people need to drive that, you know, towards engineers. But, yeah, are we listening to them? Are we taking their concerns seriously? Are we equipping them with the right things? And, you know, how do we also, in a way, drive that whole Philips skill for what do we want to be and how do we, you know, kind of work together to solve issues, teaming up, etc. So we got a whole booklet and training and all of that. But at the end comes also down in how the local managers in the different markets are, you know, kind of conveying that and work with their teams. And also show what we say that that is true. Because, yeah, if the first occasion comes and, you know, we throw all these things out of the window and just go to the old ways of working or whatever we can do to stress out people.

Sarah: Yeah, if your booklet is just a booklet that somebody reads and then their experience is completely different from that, you know, it means nothing, right? And it's, yeah, the execution of that and how the managers show up day after day. And that's how, you know, going back to the point of trust, that's how that trust gets built. It's important to have those philosophies as a company, but then the trust comes into how are they displayed day in and day out.

Ralf: And we have these metrics that we measure and the engagement survey, and a lot of them are also linked to that culture. Now, to measure that and to react to that. And, of course, the field people are the biggest population. So we take that seriously and see, okay, what are those people telling us and what do we need to do different? Although I still have great ideas and things that we didn't implement we still need to do. And it's also our duty to make sure that these people, the field people, the service people are being seen in the company. Because typically the sales guy gets the big buffet and the biggest guy. But the people in front of the customer, that helping the customer, those are also the heroes in there. And I say it wrong. It should not be hero. It should be consistent. Really bad. People that do a good job informing the customer time after time.

Sarah: Yeah, absolutely. I think that recognition is very, very important. So you mentioned something you said, when it comes to company culture, we continually have to be reinventing ourselves, right? Do you feel like that's also true as an individual leader?

Ralf: For sure. I mean, we need to see what's the situation, you know, what our customers asking for us, what is the company asking for us and what are our employees asking for us and fit into that picture. So what worked, you know, many years ago doesn't work. And, you know, think only about hierarchy. I mean, in the past, it was much more, you know, there was a hierarchy and now it's much more flat. People want to go much faster, you know, don't recognize that hierarchy anymore, are more inspired by vision and, you know, kind of want to change things instead of making a ladder, career ladder. So, yeah, you need to reinvent yourself and your leadership team also. So diversity is an important topic. How do we bring in, you know, not only male, female, different cultures, like I mentioned, you know, how do we bring that together? But also different opinions. So if you get a team of only people that think the same or are the same, then you kind of get the same outcome.

Sarah: Yeah.

Ralf: So create that diversity, you know, in your team setting. So to answer your question, 100%, you need to stay open and stay close and what's happening around you and adjust to that.

Sarah: Yeah, absolutely. So Ralf when you think about, you know, the future, I know no one can predict the future, but what do you think are the biggest shifts we'll see in the next one to three years?

Ralf: I think it's more continuation of what we see now or the world they do. You know, with whatever circumstances that happen. So, for now, I see that we are more outcome-driven, that we connect ourselves more to customer outcomes, and that we drive more digitalization in whatever we do. So that is, you know, portals, getting customers, you know, digitally connected. More remote in that way, more software, you know, upgrades, updates via that remote. So less field work, but more remote and more the outcomes as a service so that we switch on some business models and drive more services. So I see things going to services and software, if you will, as a pivot point going forward. I think that's the change we're seeing going forward, which we need to adjust to. Now, then the engagement with the customer. So that's a customer engagement that we more, yeah, help the customers, especially in the healthcare industry, to also transition to their needs. Because the customers have, you know, the healthcare industry is struggling with the aging population, their staff. You know, higher cost. So how do we connect ourselves to these issues and develop services around that, if that makes sense.

Sarah: Yeah, that makes sense. After 24 years with Philips, what makes you still excited to come to work? I won't say every day because we're all human and some days we just, you know, maybe won't be, but most days.

Ralf: Yeah, first of all, the industry. I think the healthcare industry is a nice industry to work in. And this evolution that is still every day, every year, it's not that, okay, we're bored. There's always something new that you can put your... Your hands are gone to make that happen. And in my place, it's also the diversity, you know, with the different cultures that we work with, the different regions, you know, the different opportunities. So that basically always made me, you know, come to work and never think, okay, I'm bored with what we were doing. There's always something to improve. Still, I thought that would, when I started Philips, I thought, okay, now maybe at a certain moment you plateau, but it doesn't seem like that. So that makes me every time stay. And of course, the opportunity you get to do all these things and to change that and to put your own, thinking in there and the freedom that you can execute that. So it's not a given that comes from the top and say, okay, you need to go here and here, but it's also we can develop that ourselves in a way. So that's also a nice opportunity for me to be very creative and think ahead about what we need to do and where we should focus. Yeah.

Sarah: Yeah. I think that it sounds really good. I mean, you have, you know, you mentioned being in the healthcare space and I think that, you know, we talk often about how younger talent, especially wants to feel that sense of purpose. And so in the industry, you're in, it's really easy to connect what you're doing every day to things that really, truly matter and make a really big difference. And, you know, then you're in a, it just sounds like you have such a good mindset about enjoying the process of learning, taking things in, you know, encountering different opinions, different situations, and then to your point, sort of creating from that, you know, and I think that sounds really good.

Ralf: One thing on the future, maybe going back now that we talk, how do we get talent, you know, kind of in this whole game with us? So I can be excited, but you know what?

Sarah: How do you get them excited? Right. Yeah.

Ralf: But how do we get the talent following us in that way and get them on that journey also? And I think developing talent, that talent stay, you know, and let them also think about and give them that freedom in which I was talking about. Because they got different needs. Maybe they get being different ways to have different expectations. And I think that's why we also need to be open and work with. So what's the next generation of leaders we need to get in service?

Sarah: Yeah. It seems like you have a really good mindset and approach to that though. Even earlier when you were explaining, you know, that in today's landscape, there's far less of a hierarchy. You know, I think there's this sense of ego that makes that really hard for certain leaders to accept because the mentality would be, no, I've been here for 24 years. I know this, I've had this experience. So you listen to me, right? I mean, I'm generalizing, but, as you stated, that is truly not the way we work today. And it's not just about what the next generation wants in their roles. It's also about the complexity of problems we're trying to solve and the fact that it isn't realistic anymore for someone or someone to be the knower of all, right? We really have to bring together those different, skills, experiences, and opinions in order to solve the challenges at hand today. So it seems like you have a really good mindset of being open to that and, you know, not feeling stuck in exercising authority or, you know, trying to fit people into certain levels or roles, but rather looking at... What can we all do together? And I think that is a key to being able to develop those next leaders because you're not forcing them into a structure that they're not going to be comfortable in. You're sort of open to how do we create together? How do we learn from each other? You know, how do we solve these problems together? And I think that that's, it's just a really positive way of looking at it.

Ralf: It's not easy.

Sarah: No, not at all.

Ralf: I can say it very nicely, but it's still a challenge to get that working and to listen to these people. Because you see that bridge between the older generation and the newer generation. How do you keep those two together?

Sarah: Yeah. And I think, you know, it's a good point that it's not easy. I remember an interview I did a while back with a woman in Copenhagen who leads a logistics company, Trina. And, you know, she said, it's very humbling. Its leadership today is very humbling because it's not the way it used to be. And you really have to reconcile that, like, you know, it just requires a different mindset and a different level of acceptance. So it's not easy, but I think as long as you're open to it, right, and you're not closed off to, you know, that's where so many people get stuck. I think today is they're really yearning for the way it always was rather than being open to, you know, okay, so what are today's criteria and how do I reconcile that? It doesn't have to be easy. You don't have to like all of it, right? But when you can just keep your mind open, instead of closing yourself off, I think it just, you know, really helps not only maintain relevance, but, you know. Give yourself the opportunity to build that. Future talent pool and to, you know, set things up well. So last question, Ralf you know, is just, I can imagine you have so many and it's probably going to be hard to narrow it down, but if you just sort of think about, you know, your career journey so far, what would you say is the biggest lesson or lessons that you've learned as a leader?

Ralf: Yeah, that's a difficult question. I would say teamwork is dream work if you will. So you cannot do it alone. So you need to work with a team but also have a vision and a shared direction for where you want to go. I think maybe I came with this illusion in the company, you know, from school that you say, okay, now I'm, you know, highly educated. I can I know the stuff, you know, I can do stuff and, you know, I can bring that. Yeah, but at the end, it's people working. You know, that's somehow that you need to work together. And I think that's the most rewarding if you achieve something with a team, set out what you want to do, and achieve that. And I think that gives also a great feeling of recognition and, you know, colorful in people's minds. If you talk to people, you know, over the years, what was a good thing or, you know, what we achieved there, what we did there. I think that's the biggest learning in making. And of course, you go into this habit of, you know, give me this and I will run with it and I will fix it. But, you know, to step back, to inspire, to take people along the journey. I think, yeah, for me, that's the biggest learning that pops into my mind right now. Maybe there are many others, but I would say that's the biggest learning.

Sarah: Yeah, I love it. Ralf thank you so much for coming and talking with me and sharing your insights and experiences. I really appreciate it.

Ralf: Thanks, Sarah.

Sarah: You can find more by visiting the home of the UNSCRIPTED podcast at futureoffieldservice.com. You can also find the podcast on your favorite podcast platform, Apple, Spotify, any others. Be sure to subscribe so that you don't miss any episodes. The UNSCRIPTED podcast is published in partnership with IFS. You can learn more at ifs.com. As always, thank you for listening.

I’m a big believer in the power of storytelling, which will come as no surprise given the time I spend weekly hosting the UNSCRIPTED podcast. But you don’t need to take my word for it; there’s ample evidence of the importance of storytelling in business.

According to UC Berkely Executive Education, stories increase trust and engagement: “Stories engage people on a personal, values-based level. They can also help “humanize” a brand (people connect with other 'people,' not faceless factories), increasing trust and compelling customers and employees to become brand advocates.”

This Forbes article explains that “storytelling refers to the art of crafting narratives that capture the essence of your brand and appeal to your audience. It also involves communicating narratives in a way that is both relatable and memorable.”

Entrepreneur lists 5 Compelling Reasons Storytelling is Crucial to Business Success, including making your brand memorable, differentiating from the competition, and establishing thought leadership.

In the service world, a story is told every time we have an encounter with our customers – whether through words or simply through the actions of what we deliver. I wrote an article a while back prompting our audience to consider, what story is your service telling? But while the experiences we provide tell their own story, leaders (and teams) more and more need to embrace the importance of storytelling and hone the skill.

This is increasingly important because the influence and impact of leaders with employees, and with teams and customers, depends more and more on the ability to truly connect and appeal to a person’s emotions, not just intellect. Being adept at creating those connections is something not every leader has historically had to do; there was more emphasis on exercising control versus fostering trust and creating connections. And with customers, particularly in today’s outcomes-based landscape, the engagement, trust, and differentiation that storytelling nurture are crucial for expanding relationships, evolving business models, and growing revenue.

So, I suppose the first major misstep would be overlooking the importance of storytelling as a crucial skill. But for the sake of this article, let’s assume you understand its importance. Then where do things go awry? Well, like many of the nuanced topics we discuss, this is one of those skills or artforms that sounds simpler than it really is.

In my interactions, conversations with leaders, and personal experiences, there are some missteps I’ve picked up on that seem to surface over and over again.

#1: Speaking without listening first. Does this sound obvious? Well, yes! But believe me, this is a bigger issue in both internal and external interactions than people want to accept. And there are many reasons why – for instance, we know that knowing our audience is important, but we think we do. Truly, and well (spoiler alert: no, you probably don’t – at least not as well, or as currently, as you think or need to). We know it’s important to listen first, but we don’t have time! We have an initiative to roll out or a number to it, and we just have to do our best with the information we have. There are many complexities that make investing the time to understand your team members or customers as intimately as you need to, but I promise you none are worth skipping or rushing this step. Understanding what’s important to your audience is fundamental to storytelling success.

#2: Using internal narrative externally. This is a trap that is all too easy to fall into; we fail to recognize the ways in which our audience may not find our messaging relatable and tailor it to their viewpoint. Let’s consider a couple of examples. First, when you are leading a change internally – you relay the companywide “why” to your team and expect them to understand the reasoning and accept the change without hesitation. But does that companywide why relate to them in any way? Is it personalized into a story that will help them see how the change helps or is important to them? Or with a customer, you get excited about an innovation or investment you’ve made to help serve them better and then excitedly tell the story, in an internal narrative. “We’ve invested in IoT, and it’s so exciting because we’ll have X, Y, and Z data about your equipment!” How does this benefit them? “We’ve put new technology in place to be able to help predict failures on your equipment and eliminate downtime.” Much better. Same story, but from the perspective of two different audiences. It’s so important!

#3: You lack authenticity. Storytelling is meant to prompt an emotional connection, but if you’re disconnected from the “story,” it’s really information sharing versus storytelling. If you want to appeal to someone’s humanity, share something that sparks not only interest but emotion, or helps build trust, you have to be willing to get personal. You must genuinely care about whatever it is you’re communicating, otherwise your efforts will fall flat. If you find yourself robotically telling a “story,” you need to do some self-reflection on why that is and find a way to either create your own personal connection to what you’re sharing or determine if you can delegate the task to someone who can be more authentic in their delivery.

#4: Your message is boring. I couldn’t think of a nicer way to articulate this, really. Part of the art of storytelling is the energy, the “pizazz.” Simply regurgitating a company message to your employee isn’t storytelling, nor is sharing a blanket company message with zero personality with your customers. Storytelling is more. It’s creative, it’s exciting, it’s emotional. Sometimes boring stems from a lack of interest, which I’d tie back to the previous point on authenticity. And sometimes boring stems from delivery, which can be a factor of feeling like you don’t have enough creative freedom to storytell in your own way, or because storytelling is a skill that you might need to practice or put some effort into. If you aren’t receiving the response you’d like, dig into some further insights around storytelling and see if you can find some areas to work on.

#5: Your delivery is one-dimensional. We have to keep in mind with storytelling that different audiences may prefer to receive messages in different ways. You might be very skilled at a one-to-one, face-to-face delivery, but manage a fully remote team. That’s an issue! Storytelling can be written, it can be verbal, video, and more – and chances are, depending on the message you’re trying to convey, you may need to branch out from just one format. If you’re creating a new offering, yes you need to be able to articulate it well, but you also could likely benefit from some really strong copy on a landing page and some video testimonials to support your messaging.

#6: Your story isn’t appropriately backed by data, evidence, or resources. While the person delivering the story may not be the same person to execute all the follow-through, there’s a real problem when we don’t have actions in place to back up the words we are saying. Consider a change initiative; you tell a good story to get employees bought in, but when they ask what the plans are for training, you don’t have the information. Or with a customer, you position a next-generation capability that piques their interest and then when they ask what use cases are in existence or what a commercial agreement might look like, you have nada. We don’t have to have the final conclusion in mind when we start sharing the prologue, but there does have to be enough meat to the story that we don’t hook our audience in and then leave them hanging. That, unfortunately, can deteriorate trust rather than build it.

I’m sure there are many more missteps we could cover; these are just the few that quickly came to mind. What would you add to the list? And how do you feel about the topic of storytelling in business overall? I’d love to hear!

Episode 261

In this episode of the Unscripted podcast, host Sarah Nicastro is joined by Joseph Michelli, Professor of Service Excellence at Campbellsville University and New York Times #1 Bestselling Author, to talk about how service organizations can achieve success in creating differentiation through customer experience.

Joseph is a globally renowned speaker, author, and consultant known for sharing expert business practices to create joyful and productive work environments with a focus on customer experiences. He is also a Certified Customer Experience Professional and CEO of The Michelli Experience.

If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to subscribe, rate, and review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Google Podcasts.

Watch the Podcast Video here:

Joseph: I think we hear so much about transformative leadership and this digital transformation. And so people really do think it's just going to blow everything up. Transformation has a sense of whatever it was turns into something phenomenally different. And that is one way to do it, obviously. And the speed of change in digital definitely predicts a need to not just be incremental about things. But I think the biggest thing is to figure out what's working and to improve on it today over what you did yesterday. It's how we leverage strengths and step into opportunities from that SWOT analysis. But I love people who are willing to get on the leading edge of technology and innovation, but not all of us should do that. I think the really great place is to be a fast follower of the things that work. So you don't have all those upfront costs and all of the learning curve problems that the early adopters have.

Sarah: Hello, welcome to the UNSCRIPTED Podcast, where you'll find discussions on what matters most in service, leadership, and business transformation. I'm your host, Sarah Nicastro. Let's jump in. Welcome to the UNSCRIPTED Podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Nicastro. Today, we are going to be having a conversation about how to create customer experiences that will help fuel business growth. I'm excited to welcome to the podcast today, Joseph Michelli, who is the Professor of Service Excellence at Campbellsville University, as well as a New York Times bestselling author, certified customer experience professional, and CEO of the Michelli Experience, where he helps companies create outstanding customer experiences. Joseph, you told me before we started that you've written 12 books on this topic.

Joseph: Yeah, I think I'm going to finally get it right one of these days. But I keep approximating the world of customer experience excellence for sure.

Sarah: Well, what I think is just you're learning a lot. And as you go and you learn new things, there's more things to share with people. So I think that's incredible.

Joseph: Well, and I think that speaks to customer experience. Just for all that are joining us, this is a journey, not a destination. If you think that you arrived today, holla, aloha, we've got it now, you don't understand this.

Sarah: The game has changed tomorrow, right? Yeah, so there's always opportunities to learn and evolve. And yeah, I think that's great. So tell everyone a little bit more about yourself.

Joseph: Yeah, I've been doing this before we called a customer experience in the days when in a hospital setting, we were trying to come up with consistent service delivery. And we even had scripted service. And so it's been a journey for me and an evolution and fortunate to get a PhD in organizational development that gave me context. But really getting in the game is important with this and really making all the mistakes necessary to understand how to use people, process and technology to make craveable experiences that cause those customers to keep coming back and spending more and telling their business friends to do the same.

Sarah: Yeah, I was sharing with you before we started how this topic applies to field service is really interesting because I've been doing this for quite a long time. And when I started, the conversation was never around something like customer experience. It was always around how do we cut costs? How do we eliminate headcount? How do we maximize productivity to the nth degree? And while companies obviously still have to pay attention to those things, as organizations began to realize the power that service holds in impacting the customer experience and customer loyalty, and the differentiation of their brand, it's been really fun to have a lot more opportunities to talk about this topic through the lens of service and to really expand the conversation beyond some of those really specific operational things to this bigger world. So. I'm really excited to have you here to talk about it.

Joseph: I love the evolution. Just if I can put a pin in that for a second. I think it's a natural evolution for businesses to go from more of a commoditized view of the service phase of a customer journey to one where this is a value creation and really an important flywheel back into the sales cycle. I love that evolution and I've seen it now across industries, whether it's automotive or even contact centers, rethinking the contact center. It's exciting to see it in field service.

Sarah: Absolutely. So one of the things that I thought was really interesting is this piece of research from Arizona State University's W.P. Carey School of Business, which says that in the U.S., 80% of companies think their customer service is going well. Only 8% of customers agree. That is a massive, a massive disparity there. Where does that disconnect come from?

Joseph: All of us think our kids are above average and that we have great senses of humor, right? Unfortunately, other people get to weigh in on the opinion on that to validate the perception. I think that what happens here in organizations is we want to believe that our customers love us and that we are creating a lovable experience. While we're thinking about things like how to cut costs at this turn, how to use automation instead of people, we're doing all these things and wanting to believe that there's zero negative impact to these decisions. And really using the voice of the customer to guide our decision-making is the true north for most organizations today. And that not only are they giving you the voice, but they're also giving you their behavior. So tracking the behavior of purchase intent, repurchases, stickiness of your offerings. So I think people are sobering up to that and they're starting to look at where the perceptions that matter are. And I think it was Drucker who said that we're not in business to make a profit, we're in business to make a customer. And so it's through customers that profits come. So who cares what we think, really? Who cares what the 80% thinks? The opportunity lives in how do we take that 8% up and make sure all our decisions are guided.

Sarah: Absolutely. When reading that stat, I'm sure people would have different reactions, right? My initial reaction was, boy, what an opportunity, right? If you think about if some of that 80% started putting real focus on bringing that 8% up, how much impact that would have. How would you describe that opportunity to listeners in terms of going back to our title of this conversation? How can... Getting honest about those numbers and putting appropriate focus here really helped them grow their business.

Joseph: Well, yeah, getting honest is everything except you have to then execute. So we have a lot of businesses today that appreciate that they need to do better on the customer experience. It's a strategic priority for more than 50% of all businesses. So I think people get it. Now the execution of it is a whole different thing. So we've got a lot of money going into trying to improve customer experiences. And yet the American Customer Satisfaction Index a couple, about a year ago, was at its lowest point in 17 years. So we, knowing that it's important and executing are two different things. So the opportunity lives in figuring out how to execute an experience that's resonant for your customers. Using the technologies that you need at the moments that matter most. Having people available when people need to opt in to humans to deliver the experience. Training your people to not let your technology down by the attitude they bring to the service call. When all the technologies have notified people and they've got all the smart, intelligent technologies to have the right products on their vehicle as they're coming out to the job. And all the IoT has given them all the diagnostics that they need. All the wonderful technologies can be let down by an attitudinal problem on behalf of the person who's representing all that technology. So I think that's where the challenge is. How do we go from 8% to 50% because we have really put the people, process, and technology in the right place. And we have the right people to deliver against those processes and technologies.

Sarah: Yeah. It's interesting what I'm thinking about in my mind is you're saying that more than 50% of companies have this as a strategic priority. Which makes sense. But it's one of those things where. We talk about these different buzzword categories as it would be crazy for any board or CEO to say, yeah, we don't really care about customer experience. They know it has to be a priority. But I wonder if the amount of intent that turns into action is correlated to the recognition of what you said in the quote earlier, or the belief, I should say, that profits come from customers, right? Because there's this whole sort of philosophy around the chicken and the egg, or what should come first, right? If we... Focus on the numbers versus focusing on the customer experience and letting that drive the results. Does that make sense?

Joseph: Yeah, Michael Tushman at Harvard says we do a lot of and or thinking when it is a both. I think that's where we are with a lot of this. You've got to drive numbers. You've got to have tight margins. You've got to operate efficiently. There is no pass for sloppy work and really loving people. That does not get you where you need to be. On the other hand, tracking all those KPIs on the here and now sales and then not investing enough in the technologies in the service side or in the people development side so that humans have an experience that keeps you sticky is not particularly sound. I worked for a long time in the automotive industry. I wrote a book about Mercedes. And, you know, a lot of money goes into trying to get people to sell cars. But the car sales margin is fairly thin. And the way that manufacturers make a living is getting people to come back to their dealership for service. And having a positive service experience that then causes them to have a relationship with that dealership for the purposes of the next car purchase. And in the B2B, it's even more substantial in terms of fleet sales. So I think it is appreciating how do we make sure that that service team is a part of the sales team, that that field service group understands their role in revenue generation over the long term. And some of that is efficiency driven. But a lot of it is understanding how do we create more value in our service calls, the anticipatory value, the need not to call me again because we've taken care of things that would be routine service annoyances. That the service team thinks more about the equity you have in this product more than the person does because they're tracking on your behalf the maintenance and the regular performance of the product. So those are really big shifts, I think. And the brands that do that well are the ones that I think are going to hit the numbers and also capture hearts of the people that they serve.

Sarah: Yeah. And to your point, it comes back to getting honest, right? Which requires you to understand not what do we as a business think is important to our customers, but what are they telling us is important to them? And then figuring out how you create the value proposition around your ability to impact that. Okay.

Joseph: And what do you know? What do you know that they don't know that you can create value that they don't even realize they need for?

Sarah: Yeah, absolutely. Okay. I'm thinking about, you just said, that's a lot of change, right? And so there's different reasons, some conscious, some subconscious, that companies fear innovation when they think of doing whatever would be different than doing the status quo, especially when the status quo is working okay. Is it possible for companies to improve customer experience, make a positive impact here without disrupting things at a large scale or not?

Joseph: Yeah, I mean, I think we hear so much about transformative leadership and this digital transformation. And so people really do think it's just going to blow everything up. Transformation has a sense of whatever it was turns into something phenomenally different. And that is one way to do it, obviously. And the speed of change in digital definitely predicts a need to not just be incremental about things. But I think the biggest thing is to figure out what's working and to improve on it today over what you did yesterday. It's how we leverage strengths and step into opportunities from that SWOT analysis. But I love people who are willing to get on the leading edge of technology and innovation, but not all of us should do that. I think the really great place is to be a fast follower of the things that work. So you don't have all those upfront costs and all of the learning curve problems that the early adopters have. Now, if you're incredibly huge and you have a lot of money, and I'm sure there are a lot of people in the field space, the field service space who are in that, you can be there. But for the rest of us who aren't really willing to gamble at all, or gamble, given that we don't have as big of a pot, then we just have to really be aware of who are our customers and what's working. And I just released a book called Customer Magic, and that's one of their superpowers, to be really honest. There's a company I work with out of Australia, and they do these study tours. So they're based out of Australia. Sometimes they're coming to the United States a lot. They're going to the UK a lot, and they're looking at what's working in those markets. And then they're going back and saying, let's look at the use case here in Australia. That'll work for a country of shopkeepers in England, but it won't, work for us given the geography of our clientele. So they're constantly looking the horizon for what is everybody on the cutting edge doing, and then saying, oh, data centers, that could be a good idea. So some 10, 15 years ago, they started to get into building data centers, which has been incredible for them.

Sarah: So they can learn a lot and have that curious mindset, but then pick and choose what applies to them. Based on a variety of different criteria.

Joseph: Yeah. And it's not as disruptive for them under that scenario to go back to your original question.

Sarah: Yeah. And I think that's also, I talked about how in service we've seen this shift toward focusing on customer experience over the past decade plus. But along with that has come the need to look outside of your own competitive set. Like you shouldn't be looking for those best practices or that what can work only from the companies that are your direct competitors. You need to really be assessing trends across different types of industries and see what could apply or what could work. So I love that they're using that exercise to be learning and evaluating different ideas and different concepts.

Joseph: I have lots of clients, you know, in areas like field service who are studying a Ritz-Carlton. And my goodness, that's a completely different model, right? Ritz-Carlton is a hospitality brand. It's all about nurturance. It's all about anticipating needs and really strangely personal ways. But the idea of anticipating needs in a Ritz-Carlton is something you want to take into field service. It really is a part of we want to service you today, but we want to anticipate what you're going to need up ahead. Both for our cost savings elements of our service delivery, but also for you to see us as a trusted partner in your long-term journey with these products.

Sarah: Absolutely. Yeah. Okay. So when we think about looking at customer experience in helping drive business growth. What do companies need to get right to make that connection?

Joseph: Yeah, well, growth is an interesting question. For me, growth isn't necessarily opening up another brick and mortar somewhere. And a lot of companies gauge on that. For me, it really is a growth of your market share and relevance to the markets that you're attempting to attract. It's looking at once we've really got a foothold on that beachhead, how do we get our adjacencies? So most of all, that starts with understanding who your customer is, what they value, what your products can bring to market and have value to. It's always trying to understand what catches their eyeballs and their attention when you are marketing those things. So it's really a lot about customer analytics and customer design. So designing from the customer outward and your people process and technology and knowing what are your target markets for that growth plan.

Sarah: So when we go back to that divide between the 8% and the 80%, where are most people getting this wrong?

Joseph: Most people are getting it wrong because they want to be everything to everybody, first and foremost. So they don't really have a tight understanding of the psychographics and demographics of their core customer segments. That's part of where they get it wrong. I also think that they get it wrong because they talk about it, but the discipline of it requires only taking on a few things at a time. So what are those three or four moments of truth we have to absolutely execute on every single time, every customer, no excuses. And I don't think a lot of people have that. I don't think they know beyond the practical benefits of their product and service, what are the emotional benefits of the experience that we want to deliver. We want to be known as the nurturing brand if we're the Ritz-Carlton, right? That's a very different value proposition than if you call Zappos where they want to create this personal emotional connection called a peck, right? And they want you to leave feeling like you've had a fun personal moment. It's not understanding the emotional dynamics and creating an experience that both hits all the operational drivers at the key moments of truth, but also the emotional drivers as well.

Sarah: Yeah, that makes sense. And I like that you bring up that piece, especially for companies that we're talking about that are in the B2B space, because they might not naturally think about the emotional in addition to the operational or the product deliverables. And I think that is an important part of why customers, whether they're individuals or organizations, are loyal and feel a certain way about the relationship they have with a provider, et cetera.

Joseph: Let me just, I'll take that for you really quickly. In Mercedes, we define that as delight. We said we wanted customers to experience their service journey with delight. So when we would do that pulse survey, like we're accustomed to doing after a service interaction, and one of the questions was, to what degree do we delight you today? Maybe one question or two questions. How likely are you to recommend and to what degree do we delight you today? On a scale of zero to 10, we got a lot of zeros early on, right? But what we started to communicate to service professionals is that your job is to create delight. In addition to resolve the problem, anticipate future problems, you're to create delight. And what might you do today during the service call that would increase the likelihood this person would give you a score as a 9 or 10 on delight. It's important to help people understand what the final product looks like. At the human level besides the operational excellence on the execution of the service technique.

Sarah: Yeah. So I have a question related to that. Would you say getting this right, so delighting customers, is it more art or more science?

Joseph: Oh, it's both. There is definitely art to it. And it also takes a certain disposition and a willingness to engage because humans are challenging. But there are certain processes if we impose consistently on the raw material called human beings, increases the probability that they will leave an experience delighted. And those things involve listening. It involves proactive communication. It involves a lot of the emotional intelligence components like empathy. All those things are absolutely scientifically proven to increase the likelihood of this. And there are trainable skill sets. But then there's also some nuances to know when not to do certain things because Sarah likes it done differently. She has an invisible sign that's telling me something different than John who follows her in the next service call.

Sarah: Yeah. So, part of why I wanted to ask that question is because when I think about customer experience, I think about NPS. That's one of the first measurements that comes to mind. And I think you can share your opinion on whether that's a valuable tool. But I think to me, it seems like when it becomes not so is when two things happen. One, it's not paired with any sort of anecdotal insight. There's no listening customer sentiment, like you can rate us. But what does that rating mean? Tell me more. What would you like to see? What would delight you, etc. And then the second issue is when people ask those questions and do absolutely nothing with the feedback, because obviously that's going to frustrate people. So I was thinking about art and science also from the perspective of more quantitative measurement tools and then also like more of the qualitative. Methods of engaging and listening and to your point, empathy, et cetera. So how do you see those things?

Joseph : Well, I'm a fan of NPS at a relational level. NPS is a transactional tool. The jury's still out a little bit for me in terms of, you know, I just had an interaction. I'm much more interested in the satisfaction, whether or not it resolved to the completion. I'm looking more for how was the experience in the moment, in the now. I'm looking for some of those as predictors of relational strength as measured by NPS or customer effort score, other relational metrics. But to get to your point, I think just having any quant number like seven, well, thank you so much for the seven. And now what do I am supposed to do with it? I know it's not as good as a 9 or 10. And I know you supposedly would love me and tell your friends if it was a nine or 10. But a seven, what do I do with that? And you may be, for you, a seven may be a nine or 10 for the average person like, that was a rock my world kind of thing. And for someone else, a seven is really like, oh my gosh. I wanted to give you a zero, but I'm too nice. Unless you have some qualitative ability to read that data, it's pretty hard to do much more than looking at trends. Are we better or are we worse than we used to be?

Sarah: Yeah.

Joseph: As an aggregate. So I do think the only valuable information is a combination of transactional pulse surveys that have quantum qual and longer term surveys that have some quantum qual. And then you have to just use your big data analytics as well as your intuition and nuances to move those things forward with actual solutions.

Sarah: That makes sense. What is the advice around creating a culture that delivers those delightful experiences? So let's say we have a company who has this as a strategic objective and means it. How does that permeate down through into creating a culture that collectively wants to put focus on this and move the needle forward?

Joseph: I think you have to look at yourself in the mirror, leader. The culture starts with you. I wrote a book about a fish market where the owner said, fish smells from the head. I still don't know what that means, but I think it implies the likelihood that if it's not working at the top, it's probably not going to work throughout the organization. So it starts with how are you treating the people you serve? Because if they're not being treated well, then the people they serve are probably not going to do too much better. I think it really is a fundamental understanding. We're creating human experiences, not customer experiences. Customer experience is just a label for one group of humans who actually pay the money, but everybody else in the supply chain is pretty important. So I think that's the beginning point. I think you have to be very clear about what you value. You can't be all things to everybody. You have to have a set of values, and then you have to live by those values. And you have to tell those values to people who are prospects, and you have to determine whether or not they have the basic ability to execute against those values in the way you really interview them. And once you have that, then you have to celebrate the stories of the people who do the things that are mission and value consistent. And you have to really invest in storytelling is one more pitch to the group that on the recent book, they do an incredible job of having a department that actually collects stories and shares those stories back. And links those stories to values and constantly narrates, this is who we are here. This is how we roll. I used to say in the Michelli household, I had a certain set of values that included sitting down to dinner together. And when my kids would say, Dad, this is the lamest thing other kids don't have to do this stupid stuff. I said, that's how we roll here. That's how we screw up Michellis for future generations. They have to sit and watch their parents eat. And until the other people are willing to take you on as a project, you're going to be contaminated with that set of values. And I think that's the way we should think about business. We really are trying to behave so consistently. That's how we roll here. And if it fits you and we can do great things together, you're part of the fold. And if not, find a company whose values align more with you and enjoy your journey on your career.

Sarah: Okay, so we're looking at that from the perspective of sort of the workforce. What about the, it was referenced as the way we serve statement. What about how, to your point, when you think about, let's say a company has a long way to go between closing that 8% gap, right? They're not going to be able to do everything at once. You already said that one of the keys is you have to focus on making some improvements and having success before you move on to the next thing, et cetera. So how do you sort of articulate your customer experience ethos to your customers? Like what they should expect? Or how do you communicate when there's feedback that you can't address at that particular time, et cetera?

Joseph: Well, there's two pieces to that. First off, I think you have to start by taking your values and flipping them around. So oftentimes we talk about we are going to, integrity is our value. Well, if that is our value, then what would the customer experience if we had it? They would trust us. So our job is to create trust that we're in the trust creating business. Integrity is our buzzword as a value. And so you think if you're always looking through the lens of what is the customer going to experience if we live our values, and then you define that. And that is what the way we serve statement is to me. It's like articulating our values in reverse from the customer's vantage point. That being said, then we have to communicate something to customers. I would not communicate our most aspirational deliverable to them until we're executing it with enough consistency, because otherwise it's just fluffy language and it doesn't execute. So I would say, here's our service standards and we're going to execute against those. We're going to make sure there's a little cushion so we are consistently there. We don't want to make the cushion so big that we were basically underselling what we're going to deliver. And people are going to go, well, big deal. You're going to get back to me in two weeks. Great service standard. So I think you have to find that sweet spot that is reasonable where you can execute every single time. And then you have to over deliver against that. In instances where people want something that you can't deliver, it really is a conversation to say, this is what we can and to define whether or not there's a roadmap for you to be able to get to that place. And if enough people want it, it better be on your roadmap, irrespective of whatever you think your technology advanced romance are going to be. You got to really define where you want this business to go to meet where the customer is going. So that's my nutshell answer to I kind of think a three pronged, an effort at a three pronged answer anyway.

Sarah: Yeah. And I think it is interesting to me how challenging it is for people to really truly embrace that outside in perspective. It's not always about, oh, yeah, customer experience is important, but it's not even people that believe it and have the intent default to that inside out perspective so often. And I think that really is just fundamental to this whole thing is being able to think through the eyes of the customer. Like you said, if this is what our values are, this is what we're doing, delivering, et cetera, what are they experiencing? It sounds super simple, but I'm just thinking about how incredibly challenging that can be.

Joseph: I think it's the secret sauce. You just want to put it in a nutshell for the podcast. It is to continually force yourself outside of the way you do things. I'll give you an example of how we do it. We created something called the customer walk. And literally, the employees had to walk from the parking lot as if they were a customer, make sure no signs were mowed down during the night that they might not have seen because they parked in a different parking lot, stand in line, listen to what customers were saying, look at the condiment area, fix that because that was in their purview. If there had been a sign knocked out, tell a supervisor so that gets escalated. The point is, when you're on that side of the interaction, you see the smudges on the glass before you see the pastry. When you're on the other side, the glass is a long way away from your view. And it's just the way to get an advantage and to create that into your process, as opposed to just add talk about stepping into the shoes of your customer.

Sarah: Yeah. So let's talk about that a little bit. Maybe you can talk some about how you put that into process by sharing a bit of the story from the new book. So the new book, the latest book is Customer Magic, and it's talking about a story of an Australian company that has taken sort of a revolutionary approach to customer experience. So tell us a little bit about what makes them interesting.

Joseph: Yeah, and a formative. Well, first off, when I first got a contact saying that they'd read my book about Ritz-Carlton and their telecom and they're in Australia and their world-class customer experience journey, I thought it was a prank phone call because who in the telecommunications world really cared about that? But they did, and they got their market share in the mid-market B2B, so mid-sized to large companies, B2B. They went up against the government-owned behemoth telephone company just as AT&T got dissolved in the U.S., so they were a few years behind in Australia doing the same. And they had no capital, but they focused on one thing. We are going to create value for markets that are overpriced and underserved. And so I think as long as you constantly are looking for that space and if part of the value proposition is a better understanding of what your people need and filling those gaps, that's how you take on the Goliath businesses and get more and more market share. And for them, it's sometimes just as simple as saying, let's make your bill readable. Let's make it so that this is not in technology ease, but it's really made easy for you to understand. And that mindset and that over-the-top and using NPS very effectively to our earlier conversation and leveraging it as a way of getting. Another level down to understanding how can we make it better, constantly evolving, just allow them, along with other things we've talked about, non-disruptively looking for trend data that fit their, what they knew about their customers, and then making offerings in those spaces. That's how they did it. And really, they are a story worth learning about. And unlike most of my books, whether it's Ritz-Carlton or Mercedes or Zappos or some name that everybody knows, I think the beauty of this particular example is that a lot of us are not going to have books written after us. And yet we're doing some pretty amazing things that we can learn from each other. So that's the hope that people will take when they look inside Customer Magic.

Sarah: Yeah, it's also interesting that it's, like you said, you thought it was a prank call because it's a telephone company in Australia. But it shows the way that this focus has become important in every industry, in every application. Any other... Thoughts or advice around how to do this right or what people commonly get wrong.

Joseph: I think the greatest one is to say, keep listening to Sarah. And I mean that in the ultimate sense of continuing to be growth-oriented. Just as we suggested, there is no destination to this. People are coming up with some pretty exciting ideas. I think it is a lonely journey to continue to make a better experience for people and testing your ideas, being part of community, looking for resources that have curated content to people who are actually doing this. I do this for a living every day. I have lots of scars to show for all the things that we try to make customers' lives better to drive more engagement, to drive more referrals, to drive increased repeat business. The KPIs are how we live and die. And it takes a lot of trial and error, experiential design, thinking, iterative design work. And so being party to communities like this, I think, is the biggest thing you can do to have an advantage over those who are trudging alone without looking up to see what's happening.

Sarah: Yeah. And to your point, when you can connect with people that are on similar journeys, it's less lonely, right? You know that we have live events that we do in different cities across the globe. And one of my favorite pieces of feedback is always, I feel so much less isolated. I feel reassured, too, that we're not the only company that doesn't have this all figured out, right? So there is a lot of benefit in that. And also learning as...

Joseph: I think of it as...

Sarah: Right, like the new book.

Joseph: Yeah, I think it's a lot of being in a maze. And so you need some people who might have already been through that path of the maze who can tell you, no, there's no cheese down this end. Or we really got some momentum and traction over here. So attending those live events, listening to podcasts, being a lifelong learner, all those things make a difference.

Sarah: Absolutely. Joseph, can you tell everyone where they can find you, find the book? Where can they learn more?

Joseph: Well, readcustomermagic.com is the website for the book. You can find me anywhere and everywhere if you have my name. I'm mercilessly Joseph Michelli at LinkedIn and Joseph A. Michelli at TikTok. If you have my name, you're going to be able to search for me and find me, I'm sure.

Sarah: Okay, excellent. Well, Joseph, thank you so much for coming and spending some time with us today. I really appreciate it.

Joseph: My pleasure, Sarah. Thank you for having me.

Sarah: You can find more by visiting the home of UNSCRIPTED at futureoffieldservice.com. The podcast is published in partnership with IFS. You can learn more at ifs.com. As always, thank you for listening.

Episode 260

In this episode of the Unscripted podcast, host Sarah Nicastro is joined by Ken Marsh, Manager of National Service at Marmon Foodservice Technologies, for a discussion around her favorite topic: data. Ken shares what KPIs are most important for service today, advice for what makes data most impactful, and thoughts about AI’s impact.

If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to subscribe, rate, and review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Google Podcasts.

Episode Highlights:

[04:30] - Dara is a powerful tool for service organizations, providing essential insights that guide focus and improvement strategies. By identifying key performance areas and pinpointing opportunities, data allows you to establish a baseline, measure success, and address shortcomings effectively. Making the most out of data goes down to selecting the right metrics and integrating them with other business processes and leadership skills. A good practice is to start with a clear problem statement, use data to inform decisions, and continually refine approaches based on feedback and results to help your business stay competitive and responsive to customer needs.
[10:12] - To effectively use data, start with a clear understanding of your problem or goal rather than getting lost in the sea of available information. Think of it as storytelling: just as a story evolves from its plot, data should serve to illustrate where you were, where you are, and where you aim to be. Much like the principle of continuous improvement seen in Lean Methodologies and Kobe Bryant's Mamba Mentality, this approach highlights getting slightly better each day.
[15:53] - Use data thoughtfully to identify and address the root causes of service issues rather than simply penalizing underperformance. By digging deeper into why certain KPIs aren't met, businesses can collaboratively solve problems, leading to more meaningful improvements and reasons to celebrate success. Resolution is crucial in in-service incidents, as it directly affects customer satisfaction, as well as the total cost of ownership and the frequency of service calls when evaluating equipment from a service perspective. The point is to adapt KPIs to fit the specific context of a business to better articulate value to customers and stress the importance of maintaining good relationships with partners.
[32:22] - AI's potential to enhance data use and introduce greater automation is exciting, promising more detailed insights and efficiency in processing information. However, it's essential to maintain a personal touch. This human element remains vital for customer interaction and storytelling, ensuring that AI tools complement rather than replace the complex human connections that are valued across generations. As AI evolves, it should enhance our capabilities and free up time for critical thinking and personal interactions, ensuring we leverage technology to its fullest while preserving the essential human aspects of business.

At the end of February, I had the opportunity to deliver a keynote address on the future of outcomes-based service at Lely’s North American Care Conference. Lely provides agricultural automation systems, including robotic feeding, milking, and grazing solutions for dairy farms, and I remember the first time I spoke with them about their service transformation journey, I was intrigued by a world of robotics I’d never before been exposed to.

Leaving the conference perhaps I simply had robotics on my mind, but I took note of numerous headlines about how the technology is being used in a wide variety of industries. I even happened upon a story about a robot dog that can do backflips off a skateboard! If that’s a story featured in TechCrunch, isn’t it telling that we should be thinking more about the applications in field service?

Robotics systems of all kinds – humanoid, dog-shaped, and R2D2-style rolling units – have rapidly advanced and are continuing to do so. Robots have become a regular feature of many manufacturing plants, warehouses, and even retail stores. I distinctly remember recording a podcast last year in the United Club in some city being distracted by the robotic table bussing system wheeling around.

Historically, when field service organizations have considered robotics, it has generally been in the context of servicing more complex robotic equipment. Manufacturing plants have deployed increasingly advanced robots on production lines, and companies like Amazon and UPS are designing distribution centers around them, and of course those systems require service at times.

But robots are also starting to pop up in field service environments, including inspection and maintenance applications, begging the question to what degree the autonomous technology will progress in use. Here are some examples of service applications emerging in the robotics space:

The University of Houston has launched a micro-credential course to help professionals understand how robotics and artificial intelligence can be combined for energy infrastructure maintenance. Specifically, AI-powered robots could be used to inspect large and remote energy assets. Inspecting these systems can be dangerous and costly, but a robot equipped with sensors and some decision-making capabilities could quickly spot issues that might need additional human intervention.

Companies in the pest control and landscape management space already use drones for inspecting difficult-to-reach areas, and it seems like autonomous drones could not only be useful in these types of applications, but also in other inspection scenarios. Sending a robot ahead into challenging environments could help service organizations gather information on what repairs or parts will be necessary before sending out a technician, for example.

A company called Gecko Robotics is working with the U.S. Navy to determine how they could leverage robots for ship inspection and maintenance, another application where the size of the job and the dangerous environment seem like the sweet spot for robotic interventions.

Supply chain and staffing issues have made it very difficult for the Navy to roll out a systematic way of planning and scheduling maintenance for ship readiness purposes. Gecko has developed a program called Shipview that uses sensors, LIDAR, and robots to help identify and prioritize maintenance tasks. The Naval Research Lab is also testing robotic dogs to take on maintenance tasks in dangerous or difficult-to-access areas of a ship, and even help with fire prevention and control.

But what about using robots to perform service tasks or repairs? There are fewer examples of robots actually fixing things, but they do exist. There are two companies right now that have created AI-powered robots to wash windows on the world's tallest skyscrapers. While this isn’t applicable to the broad field service category of course, the general concept – an intelligent robot tackling a necessary but dangerous task in a risky environment – certainly is. One system, from Genosar, is a Roomba-like device that suctions onto the window and uses sensors for cleaning. Skyline Robotics, on the other hand, has a system that uses mechanical arms to clean windows. Window cleaning (like service) faces a labor crunch because of an aging and retiring workforce. Robots can address the labor shortage, while also reducing risk and saving money.

In the UK, the University of Liverpool and Hertfordshire County Council are testing an autonomous vehicle that can automatically repair potholes.

Considering Change Management

Those two examples may induce some anxiety among field technicians since they seem designed specifically to replace employees. Field service technicians, however, are unlikely to be replaced by robots because of the mix of flexible decision making, technical skills, unique service situations, and in-person customer service required for the job. That doesn't mean that robots cannot be used for inspection, or to help automate repetitive or dangerous elements of the job. Potential use of robotics, as with any new technology, will require change management and reassurance that tools like AI and robotics aren’t intended simply to replace workers, but to offload work that’s either menial or unsafe. In an industry where talent is in shortage, there shouldn’t be too much angst as there is plenty of work to go around, but don’t take for granted that employees feel secure.

There is at least one potential application, however, where a robot might be doing fairly complex repair work. We all know how expensive a service truck roll is (in the thousands of dollars, depending on the industry). Imagine if you had to send your technician 250 miles – into space? Fixing satellites or parts on the International Space Station is extremely costly, both because of the lack of handy repair parts and the risk involved in sending an astronaut out for a space walk.

This is a big deal for companies and universities that launch minisatellites, which fail at a fairly high rate. So researchers at the University of Sydney are trying to design a robotics system that can repair these satellites in orbit. The system would likely involve sensors, LIDAR, AI, and potentially 3D parts printing. NASA is already in the design review stage for its own robotic repair and refueling system, OSAM-1.

We are only at the early stages of seeing how the integration of AI and advanced robotics is going to play out. I would love to hear your thoughts on how you see robotics playing a role in the future of work in field service. Feel free to email me here.

Episode 259

In this episode of the Unscripted podcast, host Sarah Nicastro fills listeners in on some exciting changes they can expect to notice with the podcast, some improvements as the former Future of Field Service Podcast hits a milestone, and what the live event landscape will look like for 2024.

If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to subscribe, rate, and review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Google Podcasts. Also, subscribe to our newsletter right here: https://www.futureoffieldservice.com/the-insider/

Watch the Podcast Video here:

Sarah: I think the biggest opportunity in the name change is to help us in reaching more people for whom the content is relevant. One of the things that happens if I reach out to folks on LinkedIn that I don't already know or don't know me, they sometimes can say, well, I'm not in field service, where that might be the case, but the content is still very relevant to what they do, or what they might be interested in, if they're a guest that I would like to have on, etc. So I would say no foundational changes to be expected from the content, just a bit of a name change to better represent the things that we have been talking about for quite some time.

Sarah: Welcome to the Future of Field Service Podcast. Actually, we're gonna talk about that in a minute. I'm your host, Sarah Nicastro. I am flying solo today to share a little sneak peek at a few bits of exciting news with you. So first and foremost, as I alluded to, we are changing the name of this podcast. We are doing a little bit of identity update and beginning soon, the name of the podcast will be Unscripted, discussions on what matters most in service, leadership, and business transformation.

So let's talk about why the change. I have spent over 15 years covering field service, and field service is very near and dear to my heart and always will be. And I want those of you who have been here along the journey to rest assured that you're not really going to notice a whole lot of change other than the name. But let me explain then why is a name change necessary. So, when I started in this space, field service was very much its own identity. And it still is, but it's far less siloed than it was all of those years ago and far more an integral piece of a company's business strategy, business operations, and business differentiation. And so, along the years that I've been doing this, a lot of the conversations have started to really branch out into things that aren't necessarily categorized as field service. So we're always looking at those things from the lens of the field service leaders that we interview. But we often find ourselves talking about things related to talent and company culture, leadership, and business differentiation, and revenue growth, and technology trends, and digital transformation. So when we think about what that means for the podcast, it's really an issue of the name just not necessarily being representative of the breadth of topics that we cover. And that is why we decided to update it. So, I don't expect that those of you who have been here and have enjoyed the content will notice a whole lot of change. It's still going to be mostly an interview-based podcast, still going to be focused on interviewing service leaders, and still talking about all of those things, field service and the elements that bleed into leadership topics and business transformation.

I think the biggest opportunity in the name change is to help us in reaching more people for whom the content is relevant. One of the things that happens if I reach out to folks on LinkedIn that I don't already know or don't know me, they sometimes can say, well, I'm not in field service, where that might be the case, but the content is still very relevant to what they do or what they might be interested in if they're a guest that I would like to have on, etc. So I would say no foundational changes to be expected from the content, just a bit of a name change to better represent the things that we have been talking about for quite some time. The website is still futureoffieldservice.com; 'Unscripted' will be housed there from a website perspective. And then obviously the podcast will continue to be available on Apple, on Spotify, all of your favorite podcast platforms. So hopefully you find that exciting. There will be a new look and all of that that you will see soon. If you do have any questions, feel free to reach out, we will be sharing more details, and we will make sure to share on social, share in The INSIDER, and on the website so that people understand that what has been the Future of Field Service podcast is now the Unscripted podcast.

So that is the first piece of news. The other piece of news goes along with that change, but it's just a little bit of an aesthetic update to the Future of Field Service brand itself. So you will see soon that we will have a new logo, a bit of a new look on the website, a bit of a new look on our social media pages, things like that. We're also going to take the opportunity to pair this bit of a brand refresh with more options for community engagement on LinkedIn, things of that nature. It's really hard for me to believe, but Future of Field Service as a brand launched more than five years ago. And so it's just maybe time for a little bit of an update. I absolutely loved working with the team that created the initial look for Future of Field Service and have also really enjoyed working with the team that has created the new look. So we believe really strongly in staying true to our core mission, of course, but we are always looking for ways to continually improve, and doing a little bit of an update to our look seemed to be a welcome change for five-plus years into doing this. There are a few people who work behind the scenes on Future of Field Service that are just incredible and have spearheaded a lot of these efforts. So I want to say, a huge thank you to them, as well as the partner that we worked with on the new look. So keep your eyes peeled for all of that. And hopefully, you will like the new appearance.

The third piece of news that I wanted to talk about today is to share that we have officially announced the information for the 2024 live events. So if you've been here a while, if you remember back in 2022, we did five events. In 2023, we did six events. And this year we are doing three. So there are a number of reasons for that change. But for those of you who maybe were hoping for an event in one of our former locations that we aren't visiting this year, rest assured that 2025 will likely bring a fuller schedule again. But for 2024, we will have an event in Stockholm on May 21st at the Volvo Studio, which looks to be a very cool venue. On June 13th, we will be in Cologne, Germany. And we are planning special participation in IFS's Unleashed conference, which is in Orlando, the 14th through 18th of October. And we will have more details on that soon. The information on the agenda items for Unleashed, the venue, and all of those things is available now at ifsunleashed.com. What we are working on is more details that we'll share soon on some of the Future Of Field Service-specific aspects. So we will make sure that there are content opportunities and networking opportunities, specifically for people that are there to engage from a Future Of Field Service perspective. I will say the Stockholm and Cologne events are similar to the events that we have hosted in the previous years, they're free events. There will be a day of content that consists of interview-based sessions with some round table discussions, networking opportunities, that sort of thing. The Unleashed event will be a bit different. It's a big event. It is a very lively, very exciting event. Tickets are required. So you will want to look at all of that information if you decide to come along at ifsunleashed.com. But like I said, we will make sure that we have some more intimate future of field service opportunities within those days as well. So really exciting stuff. I am hoping to see as many of you as possible this year. We're already quite a way into it, which is just crazy. But I hope that these changes are received well. The podcast name, the brand refresh, the event series, they are all things that we've been working on to, like I said, continually improve. And I hope that we can see as many of you as possible. And always look for ways to keep things exciting, to better serve our community, and to make sure that the work we're doing and the content we're putting out reaches as many people that it can help as possible.

So as always, I welcome your feedback. If you have thoughts on anything, questions on anything, feel free to reach out anytime. And you can find more always at futureoffieldservice.com. You can sign up for the Future of Field Service Insider so that you will get a monthly recap of our content delivered to your inbox. And as always, the Future of Field Service podcast is published in partnership with IFS. You can learn more at ifs.com. Thank you for listening.

We sincerely hope you enjoyed our month-long focus on covering themes relevant to International Women’s Day 2024 and Women’s History Month. As we started the month, we asked the opinions of the Future of Field Service LinkedIn community on the current state of diversity in their organizations, and here’s what they shared:

Q: How strong do you feel the diversity in your organization currently is?

Very – 47%
Good, but could improve – 24%
Mediocre – 18%
We’re really struggling – 12%

On one hand, these numbers show that almost half of respondents feel their organization is very diverse – and that’s great! Another 24% would categorize their company’s diversity as “good but could improve.” This may well reflect that companies are making strides in the actions that help create a more diverse workforce.

On the other hand, while we can’t see who responded to this poll in particular, if you look at the overall makeup of the Future of Field Service audience, it tends to be male-dominant. So, could it be, if that representation held true in the responses here, that the perception could be skewed? Perhaps respondents view their companies as very diverse, but in reality – are they? And does that persist throughout various categories and all roles? No way to know the answer, but it’s an important point to reflect on.

Another important point, as we close out our March focus, is that the importance of gender equity – and all diversity – should be a focus year-round. We should all be looking for ways to elevate diverse voices and support our under-represented team members each and every day.

To help us in considering how to support women at work all year long, I’m excited to share the insights of Ellen Connelly Taaffe, who is a Clinical Associate Professor at the Kellogg School of Management, where she teaches Personal Leadership Insights and is the Director of Women's Leadership Programming. Prior to her academic career, Ellen spent 25 years with Fortune 500 companies holding the top brand management post at divisions of PepsiCo, Royal Caribbean, and Whirlpool Corporation.

Outside of Kellogg, Ellen serves as an independent board director for two public and one private company boards, runs a leadership advisory consulting, speaking, and coaching business, and is a TEDx speaker. She shares her insights on leadership, careers, and advancing women and inclusion through her writing and speaking, having been featured in media such as Harvard Business Review, Forbes, Business Insider, and more. She’s also authored the book, The Mirrored Door: Break Through the Hidden Barrier that Locks Successful Women in Place, to use her vast experience to help women understand and navigate through internal and external obstacles to create the future career they desire.

Future of Field Service: Despite huge gains, 73% of women continue to experience microaggressions and everyday comments rooted in bias. Can you explain why microaggressions matter so much?

Ellen: Microaggressions matter so much because they add up. One brief comment that questions a woman’s credibility, ideas, or ability might be overlooked in the moment. When it happens repeatedly and comes from multiple people in an organization, it becomes exhausting, frustrating, and wears women down. It can lead to less engagement, lower belonging, and can seed an interest in new opportunities outside of the company for a better culture. Whether women experience or only observe these slights, it could lead them to question whether they can truly succeed in their organization.

Future of Field Service: Could you share three key strategies for employers to champion their female workforce all year-round?

Ellen: Employers can champion women by solving the issues they face, coaching their development and potential, and creating an empowering culture.

Analyze the numbers to celebrate progress and fix the pain points. The best employers review employee data to see what levels and at what intersections the pipeline narrows. For example, the numbers may show that there have been huge gains in parity at junior levels but a big drop off at the Director level and further narrowing at VP. Deeper analysis could uncover the whys behind the gaps to be fixed to target solutions.
Train and incent people leaders to giver better feedback especially to women, who research shows receive more vague and subjective feedback. This includes acknowledging their career potential, providing specific guidance to build their skills, and understanding of the promotion process, and sharing a caring yet candid perspective on how they can grow their influence and careers.
Build a psychologically safe culture where everyone is empowered, encouraged, and see a level playing field. This includes stamping out microaggressions by modeling a “see something, say something” approach. It prioritizes a learning culture where people grow from successes and failures to enable the company to become more innovative and deliver against the goals.

Future of Field Service: As a mom who struggled so deeply when my kids were little to make it work because I worked for a company that didn’t create a supportive culture, how do organizations cancel the ‘motherhood penalty’ and support women’s career trajectories?

Ellen: Employees’ child raising years have become increasingly difficult due to cost and availability of day care, the need for dual incomes and career trajectories, and the complexities of changing workplace flexibility. Adding the motherhood penalty adds more difficulty to this normal stage of life impacting both women and their companies.

This biased mindset impacts recruitment, return to work, retention, and promotion practices. Companies that hold pregnancy or parenting against women will eventually lose the war for talent as they limit engagement, compensation, and careers along with their own reputation.

Today’s strongest organizations understand employees’ challenges, make a commitment to pay and promotional transparency, and create cultures that provide flexibility and the belief that one can both parent and deliver results in ways that fit both individual and team needs. Forward-looking companies develop policies and practices that support working moms through their return-to-work, embrace parental leaves that lead to shared work at home, and ensure equitable practices that remove the biases that limit job offers, pay, and promotions.

Future of Field Service: It’s important to understand that better workplaces for women mean better workplaces for all. Can you share how so?

Ellen: Women want to be valued, have purpose in what they do, feel they belong for who they are, and believe they have a fair shot at joining, developing, having an impact, and succeeding in an organization. Workplaces that are better for women do all these things well and everyone benefits.

Regardless of gender, today’s employees want a culture that values them as human beings and enables them to thrive in work and life. This is especially true with Gen Z. Biases against those not in the majority along with outdated workplace practices built for another time prevent that from happening. The opportunity companies have is to make work workable for all.

Future of Field Service: For a woman who is struggling with feeling unsupported in any way in their workplace, what advice can you give for moving beyond self-doubt and taking action?

Ellen: In my book, The Mirrored Door: Break Through the Hidden Barrier that Locks Successful Women in Place, I’ve identified a dynamic that many women feel. It’s when faced with an opportunity like raising our hands or posting for a promotion, we think we aren’t ready or worthy enough then hesitate. Frequently, this is a distorted view from the conditioned assumption that we can’t move forward unless with do it perfectly with 100% certainty and no risks to reputation or relationships. In reality, we are more ready than we realize.

My advice is to:

1) reflect realistically about your performance, career potential, and real risk in sharing an idea or going for a new job.

2) Seek out people who have seen you in action to gain feedback on how you are doing and what you could do in the future developmentally.

3) Identify that doubting message inside you and create a counter balancing message to disrupt it. When that doubt creeps in, remind yourself of the opposite. Imagine you believe that new message vs. that harsh critic. If so, what is the next best action you could take? Tap into your courage and take that small courageous step into action as you open the mirrored door.

I can’t think of a better note to leave off our month of focused content and discussion. Huge thanks to Ellen and the others who have contributed! If you missed any of our earlier articles or podcasts, here’s the list with links:

AI’s Unique Opportunity to Shape a More Inclusive Future: Q&A with Angel Vossough, CEO and Co-Founder of BetterAI
A Look Back at 32 Years as a Woman in Service – Podcast with Dot Mynahan, recently retired from Otis Elevator
Article – The Pressure for Women to “Have it All” is Alive and Well – Is the Possibility?
Equity is Everyone’s Responsibility – Podcast with Daniel Trabel of Thermo Fisher Scientific
Article – 6 Actions that Have Spurred One Company’s Success in Hiring More Women into Field Service
A Multifaceted Approach to Creating Sustainable Service – Podcast with Sarah McKay of Concentrix

Episode 258

In this episode of the Future of Field Service podcast, host Sarah Nicastro is joined by Sarah McKay, Vice President of Service Delivery at Concentrix, to discuss her career as a woman in service, her passion for sustainability, and the connection between diversity and sustainability.

Sarah is an experienced Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) leader dedicated to fostering inclusive spaces where people of various backgrounds can flourish. With over 26 years in the field, she began her journey as a Team Lead at HCL BPO. By 2006, she advanced to Concentrix, where she effectively managed a multicultural team across various domains, including digital, social media, technical support, customer service, and sales.

Watch the Podcast Video here:

Sarah Mckay: Personally, I feel so strongly that sustainability needs to be at the core of how business runs, right? We need to operate ethically in a way that improves our environment and contributes to our local communities because it makes business sense as well as it being the right thing to do. And so for that to be true, everyone in the company needs to be involved. It can't be a specific team or 20 people that work over there in that function that do our ESG stuff. It has to be something that everybody in the organization has accountability for. And I suppose when we start, then everybody does something. We position our ESG goals alongside our performance goals. So when we do our annual appraisals, when we submit our goals, we have our business goals, we have our personal development goals, and we have our social goals where we submit one thing that we can do to make things better.

Sarah Nicastro: Welcome to the Future of Field Service podcast, where we deliver both information and inspiration on how to differentiate your business through service and lead through change. I'm your host, Sarah Nicastro, and I'm here to guide you through conversations around the trends that matter most, from business transformation and customer-centric innovation to the service evolution and attributes of effective leadership. Join us on this journey as we welcome industry leaders, visionaries, and experts to share their personal stories of change, challenges, triumphs, and transformation. Let's dive in. Welcome to the Future of Field Service podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Nicastro. Today is the last interview in our focus in the month of March on talking about the International Women's Day theme of inspiring inclusion, sharing women's stories, journeys, and amplifying women's voices, as well as talking about the issues that are relevant to us creating more diversity in service and inspiring inclusion. So thrilled to be here for our last featured episode to talk about creating sustainable service. So I'm welcoming to the podcast today, Sarah McKay, who is the Vice President for Service Delivery at Concentrix. Sarah, welcome to the Future of Field Service podcast.

Sarah Mckay: Hi, thank you for having me.

Sarah Nicastro: It's Sarah Squared. I love it. And we both spell our name the same way, which is just makes it easier for me to not make any mistakes. So thank you for being here. Thrilled for our chat today.

Before we get into it all, just tell everyone a little bit about yourself, your role, Concentrix, whatever you would like to share.

Sarah Mckay: Okay. So my name is Sarah McKay. I have a husband, three children and two dogs. They are all boys. So I live in a very high energy environment. Personally, I love to travel. I love adventure travel, particularly hiking, mountain climbing, things like that. And in three weeks from now, I'll be heading to Patagonia to trek. So super excited about that. Workwise, Concentrix, we're a customer experience company. We combine human talent with technology to design, build and run customer journeys at scale. Like you said, I'm a VP of service delivery and I've worked here for almost 18 years and I've always been in an operational role. So for 15 years, I managed regional operations up to about 7000 people. My job is to make sure our people are happy and successful and our clients are happy and successful. And 18 years sounds like a long time, but really in that time, our business has changed and grown hugely. We've had seven acquisitions in that time. So I've had major opportunities to develop and change what I'm doing. For the last two years, I've moved into a more strategic role. I lead a center of excellence for performance management. So I define why we measure, what we measure, what our go-to processes are, and create an operating system to guide the team. But I also represent client success on our ESG leadership team. So working through our environmental or diversity targets and goals and working on those projects that contribute to our overall commitments.

Sarah Nicastro: Awesome. What a journey. Okay, so I have a couple of questions that aren't on our outline. How old are your boys?

Sarah Mckay: My boys are 15, 12, and 8. And I can tell you that just before we started recording this, my 12-year-old sent me a text message saying, Mom, guess what? I've got a girlfriend. So I am completely challenged. I'm not quite sure what to do with that information. But yeah.

Sarah Nicastro: Oh, yeah. I don't think you can ever be ready for that. And then my second question related to what you shared is, so you have Patagonia coming up, but you know, thus far that you've been, what has been your favorite adventure travel destination?

Sarah Mckay: Without a doubt, Kilimanjaro. So this time last year, I was at the top of Kilimanjaro in Tanzania. So it's pre-sanding mountain in the world. And I can't even tell you to stand at the top of Kilimanjaro and watch the sunrise over Kenya. It's the only point in the world where you can see the actual curvature of the earth because there's nothing on the horizon. It was just the most special experience. And my poor husband thought that that would scratch the itch on my adventure plans. And all it's done is introduced me to more people who've done more things and added more to my list. So once I go to Patagonia, then when I come back, I want to go to Slovenia and climb Mount Triglav. And the Julian Alps. So I now have a long list of things to do and places to go.

Sarah Nicastro: Okay. All right. So we're going to have to have a separate chat about this because I want to bring on some things, but I love it. Okay. So as you mentioned, you have been with Concentrix 18 years. You were for quite a big chunk of that focused on the strategy and execution part of it and now focus quite a bit on change leadership and ESG, et cetera. And so today we're going to be talking both about the, you know, the, you know, the, you know, the, you know, the, you know, about sustainability in service and also how that intersects with the themes of International Women's Day and this idea of diversity and talk a bit about your journey as well. So to start, when you think about the ways in which your company and other companies can be thinking about how to make service more environmentally friendly. So thinking about the environmental piece first, what are the things that you're going to be thinking about? And then I'm going to What's the perspective you have on that? What's the lens in which you look at that? It's a huge topic. It's something that I think everyone knows is important. People are committed to, obviously to varying extents, but how do you frame your approach to that journey at Concentrix?

Sarah Mckay: So there's so much commentary and pieces in the news and drama about the environmental crisis, climate change, all of those things. I think it can be quite overwhelming and it feels too big and people don't know where to start. So therefore they don't start and we do nothing, right? The approach that we take is we are a company of 450,000 people now, nearly half a million people in our company. So we have huge opportunity and huge responsibility to do something. So our starting point is every one of those people did one thing. Small or big, we would have a huge combined impact. That's where we start from. Personally, I feel so strongly that sustainability needs to be at the core of how business runs, right? We need to operate ethically in a way that improves our environment, contributes to our local communities, because it makes business sense, as well as it being the right thing to do. And so for that to be true, everyone in the company needs to be involved. It can't be a specific team or 20 people that work over there in that function that do our ESG stuff. It has to be something that everybody in the organization has accountability for. And I suppose when we start, then everybody does something. We position our ESG goals alongside our performance goals. So when we do our annual appraisals, when we submit our goals, we have our business goals, we have our personal development goals, and we have our social goals where we submit one thing that we can do to make things better. And that kind of helps. Drives that one concentric culture within the whole organization. So we do have teams of specialists who work on very specific and scientific things like our carbon contribution targets. That's scientific, that needs help. But we have 450,000 pledges from our game changers that could range from litter picking. It could be that they're going to support a local food shelter. It could be that they're going to take up composting. Everybody makes their own personal contribution in line with what they can do. And then that gives us overall a massive impact. And the truth is, it actually helps us build our employee engagement and our sense of belonging with the company. Because we can join people together. So if you live in Portugal and you want to do a beach clean, you can bring your team together and go and do that as a team building exercise. It hits multiple goals as well as doing the right thing. And one of the best things that I've done in my entire career has been leading what we call project change within our business. And it's a partnership with an organization called One Young World, who are amazing. But we go out and we ask the business, give us your ideas, tell us one project you'd love to do if you had the chance, if you were given the time, if you were given the resources to be able to do it. And we pick the top 10 ideas that come into us. And we have supported those and mentored those, given them the resources they need to deliver in our business. And what those people have done is huge. And they're from every level in our business, right from entry level, through the management level, through to accountants, through to salespeople, everybody. And these are things like we've had a girl in Brazil who had set up a migrant employment and refugee program. We've employed 70 migrants in Brazil through her training package, but not just giving them employment, help them settle. We have a girl in Brazil who is really passionate about bees and how bees support the ecosystem. She's adopted 600,000 bees. And in the next couple of years, we'll push that to 5 million. It's really opening up the eyes of our team to say, we're serious about it. We give you the resources. We help you to deliver and really just lights a fire under people and encourages them to do something. And they then in turn encourage the people around them to do something. And the effect is just like a ripple throughout the business. But that has given me so much energy over the last year to then take it to the next level. And I've just been on the rounds of completing roadshows to launch Project Change 2024. So we'll have another 10 people can do another 10 amazing things. And that'll be our growing network within the business from an activist point of view.

Sarah Nicastro: I love that. That's an amazing initiative. And, I think the point about how it helps with employee engagement and helps build that sense of purpose and connection to the company is a really good point. Thinking, I guess, taking a step back, right? And just thinking about advice for others, right? I think the point you made is a good one, which is because it's such a tremendous responsibility and a broad challenge, people can get stuck on how do we get started? So I think, are there ways, you talked when we spoke before about the idea of not needing to completely change things, but looking for opportunities to embed change into standard practices. Do you have any examples of that that you could share so that people can get a sense of how to take some of those steps without feeling like they have to change the whole world at once?

Sarah Mckay: Yeah, so I think the basic starting point for me is I don't know all the things. I don't have all the answers. I don't know all the solutions to all the problems, right? I am not going to be able to solve climate crisis and food scarcity and all of those different challenges that we have in the world. So I think it was really important to me to talk to the team. First of all, what are you passionate about? And we will see that depending on the country that people are in, they will have different focuses based on what's going on around them. So some countries are really experiencing significant issues through climate crisis. So they will be most focused on energy reduction and how we reduce our energy. But we go out and ask them. And in the UK, for example, the projects that came to us from the UK that people most want to work on are things around poverty. How do we support people who are struggling right now? How do we help with food banks? How do we contribute? And it doesn't have to be fundraising. We think of things in a give money, give time, give things triad. If you don't have the money to fundraise, well, then go and donate time. And that's how we structure it. But my starting point was to sit down and ask people, what would you like to do? In the framework of our ESG goals, what kind of most gets you excited and what would make you feel most like you had been able to do something? And then you can relate it personally back to that individual. For me, mentorship is something that I get hugely involved in and promoting women in business. And so I give my time to mentor schoolgirls in leadership because. That I can see the difference I'm making in that. My input to how do we reduce our carbon footprint in the business is now going to be great because I don't know. I don't know the answers. I don't have those skill sets. I think about what skills have I got that I can give to somebody else. And then somebody else will have the skills to calculate our carbon footprint and be able to reduce our utility consumption. And that's where that person's skills can most be involved. And we also sought out organizations who can help us. So One Young World are a great organization to be involved in. And they give you another level of mentorship and support for your team to help them understand how to develop their ideas and take them forward. Yeah, I think the basic starting block is where are you in the world? What are the primary challenges that you're facing in your region, in your town? And how can your staff help to make it better?

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, and I love that point about step one is ask the question and do some listening, right? Because I think that's probably why it's so closely tied to employee engagement, because you aren't saying, here's what's important to Concentrix. Can you be involved? You're asking what's important to them and structuring the initiative that way, which makes sense. Okay, so the next area I want to talk about is around well-being. So can you talk a little bit about why well-being is such an important topic across what sort of layers? What's your take on this as a focus?

Sarah Mckay: So well-being is something we've really started to talk about in a lot of depth in the last maybe three years. And when I think about it, well-being has... Two meanings for me. We have our physical well-being and we have our emotional and mental well-being. And they're related, but two different focus areas. And when I think about physical well-being, right, it's looking after yourself and looking after your team, but recognizing things like burnout, having the tools and the environment and plates that gives people the opportunity to have conversations in psychological safety, safety, to talk about working styles, to be respectful of people working hours, especially in a global organization. If it's two o'clock in the afternoon, my time and I need information, I need to be respectful that it might be three in the morning for somebody else. So just not going to get it. That's not reasonable. Making sure and being observant that people are taking breaks, that they're taking the right time off, that they're not just extending their shifts. Globally and ending up working over 16 hours. And I think as leaders, we need to be really conscious that we model that behavior. So if I'm answering emails at one o'clock in the morning, that sets the tone for, well, maybe I should be doing that too. And that example flows down through the organization. So I know that I need to show that I value time away from work, that I value outside interests and that I respect people's personal time. And I, my team will tell you, I have a common phrase that I start with where I say to people, if you can't do the job that I'm asking you to do in 40 hours, then either you're not doing it right or you're not capable of doing it. So I don't give brownie points for somebody, you know, staying on and working to 10 o'clock at night. That's a red flag to me, not a green flag. And then as finding the physical wellbeing, there's the emotional wellbeing. And a lot of people talk about emotional wellbeing and supporting people in times of crisis and times of need. And I think that's a really important thing to do. And I think that's neat, but it has to be more than just having processes or EAP schemes around mental health. It's back to that concept of having a safe space where people feel okay to say, I'm not okay today. I'm struggling today. Or that they can say, I don't like that idea. I don't like where we're going. I don't like what we're doing as a business. I don't think this is right. And I think that starts from, you talked about it earlier on that sense of purpose in the business. So it's such an old story, but I love that story of the janitor in NASA. And when he was asked what he did in NASA, he said he put people on the moon, right? I love that because everybody in our business has impact. Everybody, regardless of what job they do. And just because I have the title vice president does not mean that I have greater impact than anybody else. I've been here for longer. I love sitting down with the team and figuring out what is our sense of purpose? What is it that we're trying to do? What is our why? When you think about the side and side, and all of his teaching and getting that collective vision. And I think all of that flows then into emotional wellbeing because you've got a yardstick and this is what we want to do. This is who we want to be. And if we deviate from that, then people have a clear idea that they can challenge. And in that space, I think that helps support emotional wellbeing from the foundation. Yeah.

Sarah Nicastro: Do you feel like wellbeing is a topic that gets as much focus as it deserves?

Sarah Mckay: Yeah, we talked about this in the prep. I think when times are good, it's really easy to talk about well-being and really easy to talk about employee satisfaction. And that when the pressure increases and where performance isn't maybe where you want it to be, sometimes that collaborative and supportive approach starts to show cracks, right? You start to see more of the traditional command and control management styles that are driving cost optimization and things like that. And that's where people's workloads start to increase and people start to feel the pressure. And it's tough, right? It's really tough. But I think within Concentrix, the thing that helps us fight this tendency, and we're not perfect and we don't do it right every time for sure. We invest really heavily in company culture. We have nine culture statements. And actually, I've just been in London for two days with over a thousand people where we talked about our culture and has it changed and does it still fit? How do we live that? But why that's really important is because the whole leadership team say, this is what we want. This is what we expect. This is how we should interact with each other. And this is the sort of environment that we want to create. And that creates the language to challenge it if it's not happening. So if somebody is showing those cracks and if they're driving pressure and stress and anxiety in the business, it says, well, you're not really living up to that culture statement or I'm not really feeling that we're operating in line with our culture. And it depersonalizes the conversation and hopefully allows people to challenge. But sometimes that inclination to drive short-term success is overwhelming because you know, if you just push, push, push, you know you can get there. You can get to that number. But you also know you might break people along the way. And that's kind of a hard balance to really want to hit this number and I really want to look after my people. But the research points towards the fact that companies who stick to their culture have the sense of belonging, have a strong ESG policy, show commitment to well-being. A better growth race. It's better to do things in the right way. The numbers are there. Your business will be more sustainable. And Steven Bartlett, Simon Sinek, KPMG, Deloitte, all of those big organizations, all say that companies who drive purpose and sustainability perform above market average. So even if you're dealing with somebody who's a bit... I really about lovely concepts like wellbeing or like diversity. The hard facts are there and you can make comparisons between here's a company doing the right thing all the time. Here's a company that's just driving bottom line exclusively all the time. They're also different. So logically, for me, if people feel like a company cares about them and cares about the planet, they're more likely to care about the company and care about the results that we get. And so the results are mutually beneficial.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, I agree. I think what's interesting, I was thinking of two things as you were sharing. One is, I agree with you and we did talk in our prep about the fact that when we talk about employee engagement and well-being and company culture, there can be this focus on it that is tested when it comes down to those hard decisions of, do I push too hard to hit this short-term metric? Or do I believe in the approach? And as you said, very staff-based. I think it can also happen the other way. In the sense of when times are bad, particularly with an individual employee or in a situation like COVID, we saw more focus on mental health and well-being than ever before. So it's almost like when we reach a crisis point, then it can be like, okay, let's scramble and figure this out. What do you need? And I guess what I'm trying to impart is we need to not let it. Get to that point. It should be something that's part of the everyday. So people shouldn't need to reach a breaking point to speak up, right? They should be able to do so beforehand. And that's obviously the responsibility of individual leaders and the company culture. The other point I just wanted to make going back to what you said about like being conscious of your time online and when you're messaging people, things like that. I've heard so many stories about the impact. Thinking about... The focus on women this month and as a mom myself. Thinking about the impact that that has also specifically from male leaders. So male leaders being conscious of showing that example of not always being on, showing that example of doing a school pickup or attending this event and how that helps normalize it as not only a thing moms will want to do, but that any parent should have the ability to do at times or have that balance. I was just thinking about that as well. Okay, so the next area that I want to talk about is diversity and how it sort of, so this leads into the focus of the month, but how it also factors into sustainability. So can you talk about that connection?

Sarah Mckay: Yeah, so diversity, we're all in the service industry, right? It's our job to service the customers, our direct customers, our clients, customers. We're all, we probably all live and breathe by our CSAT, right? How happy people are with us and whether we're doing a good job, as well as the efficiency of that service, reducing costs to serve, all of those metrics. But we're servicing a diverse population, right? Our customers are not all white middle-aged men. They are all races, all genders, all ages, all religions. So if we don't have people in the service industry who are making decisions about how to serve those people, then we're just not going to have the right answer. So for me, diversity means that everybody comes with a different perspective, different learned experience, different backgrounds, different preferences. So if we have all of those people at the table deciding what the plan of service looks like, then we get a better answer to our customers, get better efficiency, get better cost to serve and all of those things. So for me, diversity means innovation and growth. And if we have new people, new experiences, we'll get new answers. If we have the same people making the same decisions, we'll get the same answers. And that's why diversity of thought is so important to me. And it's not anywhere in International Women's Day, but it's not just based on women, right? It's based on religion, it's based on age. And the more diversity, the more different people with different perspectives that you can have at the table, the better the quality of the conversation is. And sometimes it's awkward, right? Sometimes I don't like the answers because I don't understand. No, I'm not comfortable with that. It's better to have that conversation and understand because we're all representing a portion or a subset or a cross-section of the community. So essentially, we're all championing our groups when we come to the table with ideas.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. And I think that ties back to the cultural tenets that you have of it is better if we're all challenged and if we can do so respectfully and we can do so to align to our objectives and those sorts of things, then it, like you said, it creates context for people to operate within so that even if a conversation is uncomfortable because it's challenging you, it's not uncomfortable because any single party is being made to feel uncomfortable or different. It's more so just because it's a learning experience. Yeah. So thinking about the theme of inspiring inclusion, right? You've been at Concentrix about 18 years. So that's a good chunk of time to see a whole lot of change and transformation and innovation. What have you witnessed in terms of the diversity? And what are your thoughts on what needs to happen, not only within your business, but in service overall to create more diverse, inclusive, and equitable organizations?

Sarah Mckay: Yeah, so in some respects, there's been a lot of progress. We are being challenged to report on our gender equality, to be public about our percentages of whether it's people with disability or women in leadership or whatever it is. We have to declare in some countries our gender pay gap. So those are all positive steps. And we actively target in Concentrix our percentage of females in leadership, not through quotas, but through internal development and promotion. I was at an International Women's Day event the other day, and the most depressing fact in the world that I heard was that it's going to take, at the rate we're progressing now, it's going to take another 136 years before we achieve gender parity. And I thought, God, I thought we'd move further than that. The fundamental issues of childcare responsibility, flexible working arrangements, sometimes leadership style that sees women stopping at a certain level and not being prepared to move any further are still real issues. My own personal journey with this has been really interesting. I've always had male bosses, but I've been lucky in that I've had really supportive male bosses who've challenged me and pushed me on. And one boss in particular, at the start of my career, he kept pushing me to join networks like Women in Business or those sorts of organizations. And I fought him and refused to join because my view back when I was like 20-odd was I do not need special events to attend. I can network perfectly and happily in a mixed environment. And I took it really like defensively that he was asking me to do this. But through time, when you read stats like 136 years, my perspective has completely changed on that because the truth is women are starting from a lower base, right? We have more things and different things to deal with to get to the same place that men are at now. And so I actually have completely gone. And I feel that it's the responsibility of women who have made it in leadership roles. To seek out and support the next cohort of female leaders coming on because we can prepare them for the journeys and the challenges that they're going to have and we should be so that they don't have to experience the same challenges maybe that we did. Now I seek out groups and organizations who support women in business. I work with a local not-for-profit called Sisters Inn who work with 17-year-old schoolgirls to show them what it's like to be a leader in business. So they start to think about that as a career rather than teacher, nurse, doctor, lawyer. And we have a network of women in Concentrix which champions women in our business to support. And I honestly believe mentorship is one of the most powerful tools that we have as women to support each other and leave the ladder down as people coming along. I don't think I have all the answers to creating a more diverse organization, but I have a very logical mind and where I always start is to start with the reporting. So where are you at right now? What does diversity look like across your organization right now? Are there career levels or departments or functions where there's a clear gap? And if there is, that's where you go and you start to ask the question on why are women not coming into this function? Why do you not employ women? And then that starts to build your action plan for what you need to do next. And it'll be different in every function that you go into. But understanding that dynamic, I think, is really key. And I also think that being clear as an organization that diversity matters and it's valued and there's a business sense to it. So if I go back to better decision making, better outcomes, better results in a diverse environment. Setting that as the expectation rather than you need to get 50% diversity. I think that leads to quotas and I think quotas are really damaging both for women and for the business. But to encourage people to spend time thinking about how to achieve representation. And there's all sorts of leadership programs and mentorship and creating networks that will then start to shift the results. But knowing where to start is key. And I think something you said earlier is really important. Yeah. And I think that's really important. The rule of allyship can't be underestimated. So I think sometimes men feel like they are being disadvantaged if we are focusing on women to move into leadership roles. But actually, we need men to help model the behaviors that allow women to succeed. Not at the expense of men, but alongside men. So you know, our network of women includes, you know, as many men as women because they need to understand what our experience is like. I understand how to support us within the business and then understand what part they have to play in that story. And I think if we do those things that you know kind of helps turn it from a spreadsheet exercise if you need to hit this number to actually being something that's sustainable and grows within the business. But it certainly takes time.

Sarah Nicastro: I love that you shared you know your feeling about those women's groups early on because I've been challenged in creating content on this platform about women in service or talking specifically about gender equity or gender purity or talking about some of the challenges women face. And when I get that feedback, it's often, if you want equality, stop talking about it as its own thing. And I have reflected on that because I don't take feedback lightly and I want to think through it. But I think at the end of the day, I would love for it to not be necessary, but it still feels necessary. And I think for me, that's because sharing stories is a powerful way for people to understand that while there is in many organizations, these varying degrees of focus or goals around diversity, when you get into the layers of the business, there are often still very toxic biases, situations, experiences that do not create environments that women can thrive in. And so, the only way that I think we create better awareness about those things is to share them, to speak up both within the organization and in platforms like this, where we can share those things with one another and with others. So to me, that's really important. And I also agree that, I think women should feel a call to help others. I also think men should feel a responsibility to play a huge role in hopefully shortening that 136-year metric to the extent they can. We heard last week from Daniel, who talked about why he feels passionate about this topic and the actions that he's taking in his organization to really, I'm going to go back to that, but what I'm really trying to say is, I think that when we talk about It goes back to that focus on inclusion. Like you can have these, to your point, when people set these diversity goals, these benchmarks, it's, you can argue like what you measure gets attention. And so fine. But at the same time, if you are creating a goal to bring more women into an organization where they don't feel valued, they don't feel supported, you don't want to hear what anyone, not just women, anyone, anyone actually has to say. That's the difference, right? That value of diversity that you spoke about earlier comes from that diversity of thought. And that's only possible not when we're just trying to hit a quota, but when we value including all sorts of different people because we know it will make the organization stronger. So I think there is still a lot of work to do. And so that's why I think conversations like this are important to have and the work that you're doing both within the business to appropriately challenge, to advocate, to support, and then the work you're doing outside of the business to help young women see different potentials for themselves. It's hard work, but it's admirable and it's the right thing to do. So I really appreciate you coming. And sharing your perspective. And I guess my last question would just be after 18 years as in service and as a leader, is there any final thoughts, anything you would want to say to young women starting out or to anyone on the topics that we've been talking about today?

Sarah McKay: Yeah, so I think in the last 17 years, if I went back, how would I do things differently? I think I don't have all the answers, right? I think in my early career, I felt that I probably should. And if I was asked a question, I should know the answer to it. And that's not the case, right? So I think if I had asked more questions and been brave enough to ask more questions, I probably would have got things done a lot easier. And yeah, I would have learned more things. I think that was the first key learn is that if I don't know something, most likely somebody else in the room won't know it either. So just be brave and ask the question. And I think related to diversity. I think the core element of diversity is not to have the numbers match, not to have this percentage of women, this percentage of men, this percentage of people who are from the LGBT community, the percentage of the race. It's to have representation. And it's not that you need to be like them to get to that role. It's that we all bring something and we bring something different and unique. And that is valuable. And I think sometimes when you start your career and 17 years ago, you think, well, I need to be like him. I need to be like that person because they're really successful. So I'll model that behavior. And actually, you're in the role you're in because of what you bring. And that's different to everybody else. So those are the two learns that I have. And I love to lead through collaboration. I'm not a, I do you, I say you do, you type of leader. So I love getting everybody's input into a problem. I love it when somebody has an idea that I haven't even thought of. And going through that process of getting to the solution, together spending my time asking people with opinions and thoughts rather than just thinking about my own and then telling everybody else how clever I am. That's my style of leadership. And it doesn't have to be confrontational, but I am genuinely interested in people. I love hearing people's stories and I'm honest with my thoughts and those that honesty and openness. I think it's something that Concentrix has helped me learn and develop over the last 17 years and has given me. It's been to make mistakes, to relearn, to have it, to do things differently. So I've been very, very lucky to grow my career here.

Sarah Nicastro: I love what you said. And I think that's, it's a great note to end on, but I think part of the power of diversity is that sense of freedom that no one person needs to know everything or be good at everything. But if you bring a group of people together that have varied experiences and knowledge and insights and perspective, then together you can achieve these great things. I was nodding and smiling because often now when I speak, when I do a keynote or a session and event, people will come up to me and say like, oh, that was so great. You're natural. And I think back to when I first started, it was very similar. I was horrible at it because I was on stage thinking I have to be the smartest person in the room if I'm going to stand up here and speak to everyone. And over time I realized like, no, actually, if I just be myself, that's when people appreciate what I'm saying. And value my contribution. And when I leaned into that, that's when things changed and I became more comfortable, but I also became a lot better at what I was doing because I wasn't trying to be something I wasn't. I was just embracing the fact that like you said, we all have unique value. And if you just bring that to the table and are willing to learn and listen and work well with others, that's where the beauty of it comes from. So. Thank you so much, Sarah, for coming and spending some time with me and sharing your experiences. I really appreciate it.

Sarah McKay: It's been great. Thank you.

Sarah Mckay: Yes. If you've missed any of our other podcasts from this month, I encourage you to go back and have a listen. You can find them all at futureoffieldservice.com. The Future of Field Service podcast is published in partnership with ISS. You can learn more at ISS.com. As always, thank you for listening. Thank you for listening to The Future of Field Service podcast. We hope today's conversation has provided you with a light bulb moment or given you some valuable food for thought. To learn more about any of the topics discussed in this episode, visit us at futureoffieldservice.com. If you enjoyed this episode, please don't forget to rate us on your favorite podcast platform to help others join the conversation. Also remember to hit the subscribe button and turn on notifications so you don't miss a future episode. The Future of Field Service podcast is published in partnership with IFS. To learn more, visit IFS.com. On behalf of everyone at Future of Field Service, I'm Sarah Nicastro. Thank you for listening.

If you missed last week’s podcast with Daniel Trabel, Director of Field Service for EMEA at Thermo Fisher Scientific, I urge you to go have a listen now. He speaks passionately about why diversity matters to him, personally as a dad to twin daughters and professionally because he realizes the importance and value it brings. But in field service, a longtime male-dominated field, many companies have struggled to achieve success in hiring more diverse talent, particularly in attracting women to field technician roles.

Daniel has combined is passion for this focus area with a commitment to action that has yielded real results. Reflecting back on our conversation, I can pick up on six actions I believe led to the success that others can (and should) take note of.

#1: Define Your Why

The reality is, far too many companies’ diversity “initiatives” are rooted in the wrong why. Either they feel they “have to” do more in this area, or they’re looking at it solely from the perspective of reaching a bigger talent pool. Both of those things are partial truths, but if your efforts aren’t centered around actually valuing diversity because you believe how it benefits a business, those efforts will almost inevitably fall short.

Daniel, who has spent 20 years in field service, is familiar with the realities of the male-centric history and feels committed to making change, because he believes in its importance. “There is a saying, I think Albert Einstein said, ‘An evening where everybody has the same meaning is a lost evening.’ And that happens when you have a team where everybody has the same background, the same character and everything is the same. We need to have diversity to have high performing teams,” he says.

In field service, this means recognizing the value of diversity is more than the benefit of the comfort of the status quo. “Especially in service, there was a male environment, and it was easy for males to network because everybody speaks the same language, has similar thoughts. But that has to change, because with that, you can't develop further without any input from a set of fresh ideas. We need to change our thoughts and we also need to, in leadership positions, to push the importance. Otherwise, it's difficult to drive the necessary behavior change.”

#2: Get Creative – Really Creative

Where Thermo Fisher succeeded but many companies get stuck is in their willingness to truly get creative in seeking a solution. Even companies who have defined their why can find themselves feeling that the how just “doesn’t work.” Thermo Fisher proves that isn’t at all true, but this mindset can occur for a variety of reasons – some because the company truly doesn’t want to put in the effort it takes to change or step outside of their comfort zone, and some because despite the desire to they find themselves too embedded in their own bias or narrow thinking.

Like many field service organizations, Thermo Fisher company grappled with talent challenges. “That was our starting point. We had a problem to fill roles; few applicants who were not at all qualified for those positions. That’s a big cost for a company like ours. I have an organization of 500 people; if you have an attrition of 5%, imagine how many jobs we have always open. It's a cost, while on the other hand, it's a missing revenue,” he explains. “So, there is a desperate need of having those roles filled as soon as possible. We began having a discussion around the reasons of why we have an all-male environment. We believed as a leadership team that we need to have more women in the organization, and we knew that if we could attract more women, we could create a bigger pool of talents for those open roles.”

To me, this is where Daniel’s story becomes so impressive – because that recognition alone isn’t unique, but the action the company took from that point is. “We really explored the reasons behind why we weren’t attracting female applicants and identified the barriers in the entry expectations of those roles. Typically, what we were looking for is engineers with long experience in the field, electronic skills, all of characteristics of an ‘ideal’ hire,” says Daniel. “We thought about how we could change and how we could create a new kind of entry role to our organization that would fit the business needs. We developed the PIQ engineer role, which is preventative maintenance installation qualification. Because we are in a qualified environment for most of our instruments, this new role cut off the expectations of repair skills and instead focused on first-level support and maintenance aspects, allowing us to get new hires into roles more easily.”

Not only did the creation of this new role reduce the barriers around prior experience for applicants, but it lowered expectations of travel which can deter some candidates. “With the PIQ role we identified hot areas with a smaller radius of travel and less overnight stays. This allowed us to offer more flexibility and a better work-life balance as a result, but interestingly also gave us the opportunity to increase the response time SLA,” Daniel says. Thermo Fisher created six PIQ roles and was successful hiring women to fill four of the six.

To ensure the importance of this initiative was widely accepted, and to incorporate as much creativity as possible, Thermo Fisher involved a variety of stakeholders in the process. “We need to ensure that if we change something which also has an influence on the team, that we include the team in this conversation. Especially those engineers which are already working in the organization. They have some fears that if they only focus on corrective maintenance, that they need to travel longer distances because they don't have the nearby PMs anymore to cover. There were definitely talking points and risks we surfaced and worked through,” Daniel explains. “We also included talent acquisition because they have the conversations up front with the applicants, and HR to understand also from a non-male environment what they think we should think about because, to be honest, in my leadership team at that time, there was only men.”

The exercise Thermo Fisher went through, in truly reflecting on the barriers that were present, really stepping outside of the boundaries of what has been to determine what was possible and involving a group of stakeholders representing different functions and views to ensure as broad of thinking as possible, is commendable. It’s easy to acknowledge an area that needs to change, but far harder to put in the work to make change happen.

As Daniel says, it’s important to focus less on the problem and more on the solution. “It's important to ensure that you understand that you need to change something and really think about how to find a solution. For example, one of our issues in the beginning was around electrical safety; we’d required an electronics background because of guidelines we have to follow, but ultimately decided we could create an internal program to provide that certification with safety officers. There is always a solution. It's important to really step aside, take a step back and say, ‘Okay, that's my problem, but what should my solution looks like and how can I get to that point?’”

How do you know if you’re being creative enough? One measure is that if it feels safe or comfortable, you likely are not. “Maybe you're disruptive and you take a risk. But when you don't change, you will fail from the very beginning,” Daniel cautions. “If you want to change, you must consider there's always a risk. But you need to take the risk. That's absolutely key.”

#3: Enlist External, Objective Input

Even with a genuine belief in the need for change, unconscious bias is a real variable and something you need to consider and prepare to take proactive measures to counter. Enlisting outside help and objective input is essential, and there are many options available for how to do this.

You could hire a consultant, you could leverage technology that helps assess job postings and hiring processes to remove bias, you could poll the participants of an ERG to vet your thinking, and so many more. At Thermo Fisher, they used an external tool to analyze their job ads in the early phases of assessing what was limiting the pool of applicants or what could be off-putting to certain candidates.

“We looked at our job ads because we thought that the jobs were pretty male buzzword-centric,” Daniel says. “So, we used an external tool to analyze those job ads and think of how we can change that in a more human attractive way. And we found words like support, mentor, advocacy, recognition, flexibility, and really try to bring those and also reduce the expectation, the entry expectation. Even if we might have high expectation, we just didn't write that in the job ad. And what's quite interesting because of the results, we had a lot more applicants also from women. That was good.”

Of course, when working to incorporate more diversity, you want to be sure you check bias not only in the job posting and criteria, but in the interview process as well.

#4: Attract More Diverse Candidates; Hire for Fit

Which brings us to the next point – while a genuine objective to improve diversity and actions to attract more candidates are commendable, making “diversity hires” for the sake of achieving some pre-defined targets is not. The goal should be to truly reflect on what barriers are present in your existing processes that are inhibiting diversity and remove those barriers, as well as working to welcome a broader pool of applicants so that your chances to build diverse teams increases. All of that being said, you should be ultimately hiring based on candidates’ skills, abilities, and fit for your organization – not to check a box.

Now, again, where this can derail is if “fit for your organization” is impossible because your organization is refusing to move beyond boxes that exclude certain candidates. But if you are doing the work to change, like Thermo Fisher did, then you hire based on fit from the broader pool of candidates you are attracting.

“We got feedback also on the fact that, let's say, male might apply for a position if there is only 50% criteria they can match with, while women say, no, I'm not able to do this,” Daniels says. “That’s one reason we lowered the entry expectations advertised. We really found great talent and we not just selected the women we did because we were looking for them, they really stood out against the other applicants and they had a strong presentation and a strong background, which fit perfectly into the role as expected.”

While Thermo Fisher set out to intentionally redefine requirements in order to attract more women to apply for field service roles, the benefit of reflecting on what criteria may be restricting your pool of potential candidates is simply attracting a more diverse pool of talent overall. When companies move beyond hiring based on experience, which will deliver a fairly homogenous pool of potential, to instead listing the skills or characteristics sought for entry level, the result is a broader set of backgrounds, experiences, and traits which brings valuable depth of perspective to the organization.

#5: Consider the Experience of New Employees

It’s important that to recognize that your efforts aren’t complete once you achieve success in hiring more diverse employees. In fact, what comes next in many ways is more important – because otherwise your efforts won’t be rewarded by seeing that talent flourish and remain.

When you’ve had a male-centric workforce historically, or minimally diverse in any way, you have to consider what the experiences of the new employees coming into that dynamic will be. Are the existing workers welcoming? Are there toxic aspects of or dynamics to the culture? Are there inadvertent ways a new candidate may feel uncomfortable, such as a woman technician not having the option of a woman’s uniform? From things seemingly small to big, the need to reflect on how to make new candidates feel welcome, included, and valued is imperative.

For Thermo Fisher, the first hurdle was in the way the creation of a new role was perceived by some team members. “In the beginning, there was a bit of a bias from one or the other team members and it took a while to get this digested,” Daniel says. “Because the role was not as seen as a ‘normal’ field service engineer role, it was seen as let’s say second class in some way or another. It took a while to overcome that bias.”

Don’t shirk away from navigating negative emotions or challenging outdated thinking, because this will allow problems to fester that will undoubtedly cause a negative impact on the experiences of your new hires. “In a small team that has a woman as part of it for the first time, there’s going to be some phases of team building to work through,” Daniel shares. “It's the responsibility of the line managers to take care that every friction identified is dealt with and it’s important that the whole management team stand behind this program. That's why we included them in the very beginning. At the end, the whole team appreciates the diversity we have. While this was new for field service, as a company, we embrace employees for inclusion and diversity and have a corporate program where we share success stories and so on. Field service works closely with the sales department and with application support, where we have a lot of women in the organization. We also have ERGs to allow employees to connect with one another. So, there are a lot of touch points, even for a woman in a male-dominated team, to ensure they feel a sense of belonging.”

#6: Focus on Diversity at All Levels

Another often overlooked area of DEI initiatives can be ensuring that diversity is reflected at all levels of the business. For field service, while the focus may be on brining in more frontline candidates to fill roles, those candidates need to be given ample opportunity for career progression.

This is important not only for the development of those individuals and their own fulfillment, but in reflecting the company’s value of diversity of thought by making sure it isn’t concentrated at any one level or in any one function. For Daniel’s team, this happened quite organically – but it’s important to note that in some situations it may require a more intentional approach.

“Of those six new positions, you have people relatively new to the business that are already progressing into leadership roles. This is important because we need to think about not just how do we bring more diversity into the business, but how do we support and enable that progression, right? So that's one of the challenges we see is because bringing in frontline workers is an acute need for the business, it’s easy to focus all of the efforts there. But ultimately, you want to have diversity reflected in all layers of the business, right? And so, the fact that the people you're bringing in are already progressing through, I think, is really impressive. It’s also interesting to share that our German team is now led by a woman – so the more than 100 engineers are now led by a woman and that’s a massive change. It’s really good to see that.”

Remember What’s at Stake

If I’m being honest, what Daniel sharing Thermo Fisher’s story made me thing is that they’ve been willing to do what many companies find excuses not to – and that’s yielded results. There are all sorts of things people start pointing to – time, effort, cost, what hasn’t worked – to defend their decision to avoid doing the reflection and creative redesign that Thermo has proven pays off.

The companies eluding putting in the effort now are only doing themselves a disservice. While they spend time defending the status quo and accepting minute incremental improvements in hiring, companies like Thermo Fisher are breaking through bias and previously “unmovable” barriers to create roles to attract diverse talent and to develop a culture where that talent can thrive.

I ended the interview asking Daniel: What would you say to the people who are unwilling to get creative with this issue, or maybe don't even yet recognize the importance of it?

“In the end, I think they will fail because they can't unleash the power of people and they can't unleash the power of diversity, which is necessary to be successful,” he says. “When we talk about STEM, there's only a handful of people who can cover open positions and everybody is keen to get someone from somewhere. But if there is no someone, then there is no somewhere. And that's why I think we need to open up the talent pool. If you don't do that, if you are not thinking of changing your plans and your strategy, you will fail. That's my clear statement here.”

I couldn’t agree more.

Episode 257

In this episode of the Future of Field Service podcast, host Sarah Nicastro is joined by Daniel Trabel, Director of Field Service EMEA at Thermo Fisher Scientific, to share the success his organization has had in bringing more women into field service roles and why he feels those who ignore the need to take action to improve diversity will fail.

Daniel is a committed and visionary leader in service with a proven track record in the clinical diagnostics, life science, medical device, and biotechnology sectors. Before joining Thermo Fisher Scientific, he served as a Service Manager at Germany South for Waters Corporation, a Service Engineer at Cochlear, and held multiple roles at Bio-Rad Laboratories.

If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to subscribe, rate, and review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Google Podcasts.

Daniel: At the end, I think they will fail because they can't unleash the power of people and they can't unleash the power of this diversity, which is necessary to be successful. And we are dealing in a situation where when we talk about STEM, there's only a handful of people who can cover open positions and everybody is keen to get someone from somewhere. But if there is no someone, then there is no somewhere. And that's why I think we need to open up the talent pool. And if you don't do that and you are not thinking of changing your plans and your strategy in the long run, I think those companies will fail.

Sarah: Welcome to the Future of Field Service podcast, where we deliver both information and inspiration on how to differentiate your business through service and lead through change. I'm your host, Sarah Nicastro, and I'm here to guide you through conversations around the trends that matter most, from business transformation and customer-centric innovation to the service evolution and attributes of effective leadership. Join us on this journey as we welcome industry leaders, visionaries, and experts to share their personal stories of change, challenges, triumphs, and transformation. Let's dive in. Today, we are going to be talking about why equity and inclusion are everyone's responsibility. This is a conversation as part of the focus content we're doing in March to discuss the International Women's Day theme of inspiring inclusion and talk about some of those related topics. So I'm thrilled to welcome to the podcast today, Daniel Trabel, who is the Director of Field Service for EMEA at Thermo Fisher Scientific. Daniel, welcome to the Future of Field Service podcast.

Daniel: Hello, and thanks for being here.

Sarah: Yes, thank you for being here. So before we get into our conversation for today, which I'm very excited about, tell everyone a bit about yourselves, your role, and Thermo Fisher.

Daniel: Yeah, maybe I'll start with the company because probably the majority of the listeners don't know what the Thermo Fisher is. We call it a hidden champion. It's a huge organization with more than 120,000 people worldwide. We are in the scientific research, analysis, and diagnostics market where we operate in different various segments like in the life science, clinical diagnostics, and the analytical instruments and healthcare business. We have a mission, and that mission is to make the world healthier, cleaner and safer. And that's a strong commitment, I would say. And I'm representing here the Instrument and Enterprise Services Organization, which is the service organization for our chromatography and mass spec instruments. Those instruments were used for water analyzers, for drug testing, for drug filtration, and also for any other diseases like rare diseases, like cancer resurgence. So it's an important area. I'm super proud of, let's say, supporting our customers in their business. A bit about myself. I am now 20 years in field service, so it's already a long time. I'm based in Germany, so excuse my bad accent, but that's okay. I'm the father of two four-year-old twins. It's two girls, and I'm super proud of the two. And that is also one of the reasons why we are speaking here and why it's important for me to bring more women into field service.

Sarah: Yeah, I love that. Yeah, it's sometimes when these issues become personal, it takes on a different lens. So I appreciate that. Now, we're going to talk today about some of the methods that you have had success with at Thermo Fisher, increasing gender diversity among field technicians. But before we do that, what I'd like to talk a little bit about to sort of frame this discussion and expand on what you just mentioned is the theme of International Women's Day this year is Inspiring Inclusion. But they talk even on the website about how everyone plays a role in that, right? And so we're focused at Future of Field Service this month on discussing the themes that are related to the International Women's Day focus. We're amplifying and sharing women's voices of leaders in service. But I think it's important to recognize that everyone, men, all different types of leaders, all different types of roles within the organization across the board can play a part, have to play a part in this issue. So men need to listen, engage, be allies, et. cetera. So what are your thoughts on that? And how do you perceive your role in this idea of gender equity and inclusion?

Daniel: Yeah, so I think it's a change over the years. So especially in service, there was a male environment and it was easy for male to network because everybody speaks the same language, the same thoughts. But it's also, I would say it's difficult because with that, you can't develop further and because it's like when you're in the same family without any input from a site, fresh ideas, great thoughts. Again, about myself, I think one of the reasons why I'm so, let's say, pushing for this year is because I don't want to have my two little girls only thinking they're in gorgeous, they're pretty and they are, let's say, good looking, but they are strong and intelligent and also self-confident. And that's something I'm trying to tell them every day. And we need to ensure that women don't feel that they are, let's say, the weak people and they can't do the same male do. So that's why I think we need to change a bit our thoughts about that. And it's not only the women's network. We also need to my overarching, let's say, in leadership positions to push that. Otherwise, it's difficult to drive that behavior change.

Sarah: Absolutely. And I think it's a good point that it's the idea of gender equity is something that it's not fair to expect for us to achieve that if it's women trying to take that on, right? It's a shared responsibility. I know one of the ways beyond what we're going to talk about today in your talent recruitment and hiring processes, but I know another role that you play is you sponsor the Women's Employee Resource Group in Germany, correct?

Daniel: Correct, yeah. We have a network of BRGs. We call it Business Research Groups, resource groups, where we also have a network between all those local groups. And I'm sponsoring the one which is located to the entity we have in Germany. Yeah, we have all over the globe as we have many entities and many divisions, networking groups where they start to network. This one is a pretty young one, I would say. It's about one year-old now, while we have others, they already do a lot of activities like external speakers, like sharing training and sharing ideas and articles and so on. But it's important that it's not just something for women. As I said, it's also important that we open this up for all the males, the men in the organization as well, to ensure that it's not a soup which you can't put your ingredient in because of your gender.

Sarah: Yeah. And you mentioned earlier that one of the risks of not working toward gender equity in field services is that you have a group of people who get stuck in similar thinking. The same thing could be true of a women's employee resource group that is only women because they can go and share challenges and commiserate and network. But we need people there that don't think that same way to understand better and to understand the issues, understand the challenges and think creatively about what we can do to take that back into the business and make changes. So I think you're absolutely right that it has to be inclusive of all and it has to be viewed as an issue that is important for everyone to think about and to be creative with, etc. And so that's a good segue to what we're going to talk about, which is really getting creative then within the business about, okay, so we know this is a challenge and what can we do differently? What can we do to solve it? So we have an issue here where in service across the world, there's a talent gap. So companies are already struggling to bring in talent of any sort. And then you marry that with the desire for more gender equality. And that led you to make some changes in your organization that have had some positive results. So to start, can you just give an overview of that journey?

Daniel: Yeah, so exactly that was our starting point. We had a problem to fill roles. We had a couple of open roles. It was only a few people applied or people which are not at all qualified for those positions. And it's a big cost for a company like us. I have an organization of 500 people. And if you have an attrition of 5%, imagine how many jobs we have always open in this. It's a cost, while on the other hand, it's a missing revenue. So there is a desperate need of having those roles filled as soon as possible. So we started the conversation, the discussion around the reasons of why we seal this male environment. Because we thought as a leadership team together that we need to have more women in the organization. And we need to attract more women to make sure that we create also a bigger pool of talents for those open roles. So we did that together with HR, together with TA, with engineers, and also with the managers. And really explored the reasons behind and how we can attract female. And so one of the barriers we identified was the entry expectations to those jobs. So typically what we were looking for is engineers with a long experience in the field, electronic skills, and let's say all the pallet you want to see. Ideally only 20 years old. So all this stuff everybody wants to have. But that's not applied for most of the females. So that's why we thought of how we can change that and how we can ensure that we can open up some kind of entry role to our organization. And also fit that into the business needs. And we said, okay, one of the systems which could work is so-called PIQ engineers. So we call it for preventive maintenance installation qualification. Because we are in a qualified environment for most of our instruments. And with that, you cut off all the expectations of repairing skills. So you can really, let's say, focus on the first level support things, on maintenance and get new hires more easier into the roles. And with that, also the benefits of having hot areas identified with a smaller radius of travel with less overnight stays. And also with more flexibility and a better work-life balance as a result. And what's quite interesting because this also gave us the opportunity to increase the response time SLA. So the improvement of the response time for our CM customers for the existing engineers. Because we were able to reduce the PM for those engineers so they can focus on repair jobs. So that was a benefit which came as a second. And then we looked at our job ads because we thought that the jobs were pretty male buzzwords included. So engineering, manage, technology, executions, all this stuff where you as a male can get that strong. I take that. And that's exactly what I want. So we use an external tool to analyze those job ads and think of how we can change that in a more human attractive way. And we found words like support, mentor, advocacy, recognition, flexibility, and really try to bring that and also reduce the expectation, the entry expectation. Even if we might have high expectation, we just didn't wrote that in the job ad. And what's quite interesting because of the results, we had a lot more applicants also from women. That was good.

Sarah: Okay, yeah. So that was step one. Step one was identifying the need and the opportunity to kind of look at this in a different way. And I think that's important because oftentimes when we talk about the lack of diversity in technicians, we want to change it, but we're not always willing to go to the extent of actually making changes, if that makes sense. It's acknowledged challenge that a lot of companies would like to see change, but they're not necessarily willing to dig in and say, okay, but what do we have to do differently to get a different result? And so I think that awareness and then willingness to take action, to try something different, to break out of the way it's always been done, right, is incredibly important.

Daniel: Yeah, I think you need to identify this as a need and not just say it's because it's woke. So if you want to change, I think you need to go for the change and also need to consider there's always a risk. But you need to take the risk. That's absolutely key.

Sarah: Yeah. And so then this analyzing the job postings, understanding, and I like that you brought in an external tool to do that because, again, a lot of times, even when we have good intention, you can get stuck in your own thinking or whatever the historical process has been. So having this new objective view on, okay, the way these postings are written or the qualifications that we're expecting or the way that we're positioning this, how might we be limiting ourselves on who would potentially apply or who would see themselves as a potential fit for Thermo? So you started there. We talked about the fact that with the introduction of this new role, you were able to then have the opportunity to not have as strict of entry-level requirements that you had before. I think, again, that required you, if I'm understanding you correctly, essentially taking what before was all rolled into one person's duty and sort of splitting that out, right? So again, it's a redefinition internally of, well, this has always been one person's job. Okay, but what if we change that so that this portion is a different role? This portion then can be more effective at this role. So it comes back to that creativity and willingness to think outside of the box. Now, you mentioned this briefly, but I want to go back to. Who all did you involve in this process? Because I think it's important to think about the cross-functionality of that and who was involved in the decision-making, et cetera.

Daniel: Yeah, so again, the decision to change that is not only from the management. And we need to ensure that if we change something which also has an influence to the team, that we include the team in this conversation. Especially those engineers which are already working in the organization. They have some fears that if they only focus on corrective maintenance, that they need to travel longer distances because they don't have the nearby PMs anymore to cover. And that were definitely talking points and risks we saw. At the end, it really turned out it was not the case. And they do basically the same what they did before. It's just a matter of being more flexible to our customer needs and giving the new hires focusing on this local PM and installation activities and give them the chance to work there. We also include a talent acquisition because they have the conversations up front with the talents and HR to understand also from a non-male environment what they think we should think about. So let's say that we as a male leadership, and to be honest in my leadership team at that time, there was only male, only men. And you have a specific way of thinking and you might have, let's say, any different facets, but you don't cover it all by everything and the diversity you might need for such a program. And we got a good feedback also on the fact that, let's say, male might apply for a position if there is only 50% they can match with, while women say, no, I'm not able to do this. And this is only a small portion, so I'm going to apply. So that's also the reason why we lowered the entry expectations advertised in the [inaudible] .

Sarah: Yeah. No, I think that's important because you can always have more discussions, right? I mean, this is just the first impression with folks, the first outreach to get people to apply. You can always talk further about what the expectations are. But I think the challenge is in an environment where we are struggling so much to get talent, if you are limiting yourself from the very beginning, you're missing a lot of potential, right? And so, if you lower that initial barrier to entry, then in those conversations, maybe you will find someone who doesn't meet every single requirement, but that you just feel has huge potential for your business. And then you as a company have the ability to make those decisions instead of them, you never coming across them, right? So absolutely. All right, so talk a little bit about what the results were here. So with this new segmentation of work and having sort of the repair work and the preventative work separate, you created six new positions and four of those were filled with women, which is really exciting. Talk a little bit about what you found and what the results ended up being.

Daniel: Yeah, that was quite interesting because at least I was expecting that high percentage of first application. But also second later, we really found great talent and we not just selected the women because we were looking for them. So they really stand out against the other applicants and they had a strong presentation and a strong background, which fits perfectly into the role as expected. Interestingly, also in the beginning, for sure, there was a bit of a bias from one or the other team members. And it took a while to get this digested. Also because the role was not as seen as a normal Field Service Engineer role. It was seen as, let's say, an Field Service Engineer as a second class maybe for one or the other. So it took a while to get on it. Now, interestingly, because they are so strong in PM, in qualification, because they do it every day, some of them already now move to a mentors as role, where they support new IS, which are going for another position, which includes repair activities. So they really are a subject matter expert on the areas where they are working on. While we have also two of them moving now to other positions and really stepped up the ladder and on their career progression. So that's a great result. I was not expecting that in such a short timeframe. So we're talking about three years here. That's what's [inaudible] . And I'm really excited about it.

Sarah: Yeah. There's two things I want to go back to. The first I was thinking actually about the success you had. So you created six new roles with this sort of redefined job posting, redefined entry-level criteria. And what I was thinking about is if you expand this conversation for just a moment beyond gender equity, and we just talk about diversity overall, right? The other thing I'm assuming you have the value of is when you have the entry-level expectation of this qualification, this qualification, this many years of experience, et cetera, you're bringing people from a set of very commonly shared experiences where when you change that to having less strict entry-level criteria, I'm assuming you see more diversity in background. Like, where people are coming from different roles, et cetera. Is that true?

Daniel: That's true. And there's another thing I want to mention, because also the fact that we have more diversity in the team gives us or gave us more soft skill variance means that more, and it's not applicable for any, but for everybody. But I think the, let's say, percentage of women having a more focus on mediation or let's say different way of tackling problems, different way of communication that really influenced the team spirit and how the team bond and work together as a team. And that really brought an asset to my team. But secondly, as you said, background is a point because we are dealing with customers which are running their own applications on our systems. So it's an open platform where you can develop methods and they do it day by day. And the women we attracted, they were former customers. So that means that those new employees were able to speak the same language and they brought in their skills and their experience from their life as a customer. And it made it much more easier for them to understand. What are the customer problems and also to identify we're talking about a technical or maybe an obligational situation and problem. And we're able to identify that upfront before roping up the whole system and exchange, I don't know, 10 parts at the end and realize, okay, it was not any single broken part. So that was my hope.

Sarah: Yeah. I'm just thinking, you mentioned earlier, this topic isn't one where it's, well, we need to care about this because we want to be woke or we're trying to check a box on a certain level of gender diversity. The companies that are really making progress are doing so because they know that diversity of thought is important to a business that is innovative and creative, right? And thinking about how reflecting on your job postings and your hiring criteria, things like that, not only helps you potentially recruit more women, but just helps you bring people into the business with more diverse backgrounds and more diverse thinking really helps you build teams that are more well-rounded, more creative in meeting customer needs and just strengthens the business. And I think. That's a really big point.

Daniel: Yeah, there is a saying, I think Albert Einstein said that ages ago, an evening where everybody has the same meaning is a lost evening. And that happens when you have a team where everybody is with the same background and with the same, let's say, character and everything is the same. So we need to have diversity to have high performing teams.

Sarah: Absolutely. So the other thing I want to go back to, which is just such a, I think, really impressive point is that of those six new positions, you have people that relatively new to the business are already progressing into leadership roles. And I think this is important because we need to think about not just how do we bring more diversity into the business, but how do we support and enable that progression, right? So that's one of the challenges we see is because bringing in frontline workers is an acute need for the business, we can focus all of the efforts there. But ultimately, you want to have diversity reflected in all layers of the business, right? And so the fact that the people you're bringing in are already progressing through, I think, is really impressive.

Daniel: Yeah. And it's also interesting and something I can share is that our German team is now led by a woman. So the more than 100 engineers which were on their own before end, they are now led by a woman. That's a massive change. I already see some benefits. So it's really good to see that.

Sarah: Yeah. And so that leads me to the question then about how has this focus on bringing more women into the business? How has that made you then need to reflect on what is their experience like once they're part of the team? Because I have to think there's some evolution there in what the culture feels like. We have to make sure that if you change the job postings and the hiring criteria to get more women in, that's great. But then you have to make sure they're coming into an environment where they do feel it's inclusive and they don't feel ostracized or uncomfortable or have a negative experience. So is there any work you had to do to sort of carry the focus through to make sure that once they were a part of the team, they were having a positive experience?

Daniel: Yeah, I think we haven't done any specific, but for sure, when you have a small team where you're the only woman in the team, there might be difficulties, especially when you have, let's say, a lot of engineers are doing service for many years without any influence of a woman in the team. So there's always a stalling phase in team building and the team had to go to those phases. But it's the responsibility of the line managers to take care that every friction identified is turned away and the whole management team stand behind this program. That's why we included them in the very beginning. At the end, I think they feel happy. The whole team appreciates the diversity we have. And we're not talking about diversity, just male and female. We're also talking about people of color and not so many in Europe, but also in North America, my counterpart and any other. And we as a company, we embrace employees for inclusion and diversity. And we have a corporate program where we always share success stories and so on. And in fact, in case of the field service, we work closely with the sales department. We work closely with application support where we have a lot of women in the organization. So there's a lot of touch points. And also the fact that we have these ERGs giving them the chance to connect between each other, even if they're maybe only one in the male and dominated team, and that they give them the sense of belonging.

Sarah: Yeah. I think when I'm reflecting on what you're saying, I think there's three aspects to this. One is you mentioned you had support from top leadership down on this initiative. And I think that's important because you're going to make progress on what you're paying attention to. And when things arise that need to be navigated, it needs to be a shared and aligned objective that everyone understands the importance of. The second thing is, to your point, being willing to address problems as they arise. Don't ignore things that are potential issues. Don't sweep things under the rug that shouldn't be swept under the rug. Be willing to face things head on and be willing to dig into any behavior or thinking that needs to be changed and work with the teams to do that. And then the third is, whether it's through the business resource group, whether it's through these new team members, direct supervisor and above, make sure that they feel connected so that if they are having experiences that aren't comfortable or aren't ideal, they can surface those as well and figure out how to work through it. Make sure that they feel supported, not only in the performative aspects of their role, but in the mission of, we want you to succeed here. And so we want this to be an inclusive environment. We want this to be a positive culture. And if you are experiencing things otherwise, we want to work through that. I think if you can make sure you're focused on all three of those components, you're getting ahead of anything that could potentially be a challenge. And it sounds like obviously, in your scenario, if these people are already progressing through the business and leading teams, you're doing a good job of that, or they wouldn't be growing within Thermo Fisher, right? So that's good. So Daniel, I'm hoping with the success that you've had in this area, what have you learned that you think is replicable in another area of the business or by another company in terms of, if you are committed to this, these things work?

Daniel: Yeah, it's not always that you can adapt one by one. In our case, we have the lucky situation that's because of the application background and the fact that our customers are, let's say, focusing on application. We had some kind of synergy in areas, I can assume, where this is not the case. It might be a bit more difficult. But nevertheless, I think it's important to ensure that you understand that you need to change something. You need to think about how you can lower the criteria and how you can find a solution as an example, and that was also one of our issues in the beginning, due to the fact that they don't have an electronics background, we had an issue with the electrical safety. So we decided to go for an internal program and implemented that certification program with safety officers. So we got rid of that risk and that criteria. And we were now able also for them to that they can sell from their own undercovers and replace a board if necessary and so on. So there is always a solution. And don't think about the problem, think about the solution. Once I tell you, gets an elephant in the room, you will think about the elephant, but not about the solution, how to get the elephant out of the room. So I think it's important to really step aside, step a step back and say, okay, that's my problem. Okay, but how should my solution looks like and how can I get to that point? And it doesn't matter which business you cover. I think it's important that you really map the situation and try things out. And maybe you're disruptive and you take a risk. But when you don't change it, you will fail from the very beginning.

Sarah: Yeah. And I guess, what would you say to the people who are unwilling to get creative with this issue? Or maybe don't even recognize the importance of it?

Daniel: At the end, I think they will fail because they can't unleash the power of people and they can't unleash the power of this diversity, which is necessary to be successful. And we are dealing in a situation where when we talk about STEM, there's only a handful of people who can cover open positions and everybody is keen to get someone from somewhere. But if there is no someone, then there is no somewhere. And that's why I think we need to open up the talent pool. And if you don't do that and you are not thinking of changing your plans and your strategy in the long run, I think those companies will fail. That's my clear statement here.

Sarah: Yeah. And I think often the objection is, well, it's more effort, it's more cost, right? But at the end of the day, you can point to these specific things you've done to review job postings, to create new roles because you understand what the barriers to entry are for more diverse candidates. You redefine things to reduce those barriers. You mentioned you have this electrical certification that is necessary, but rather than expecting people to come in with that, you looked for a way to provide that internally. These are all changes that you have proven are possible if you are willing to do the work. And I think you believe that the effort is well worth the outcome.

Daniel: Absolutely is.

Sarah: Yeah. Well, thank you for coming to share. Your little girls are lucky to have a dad who has the perspective you have and is working really hard to make changes that are benefiting diversity in the workforce now and will certainly have an impact once they get there. So I appreciate you caring about this topic personally, but also coming to share specifically what you've been able to do that has had a direct positive impact on the business so that others can hopefully be inspired to make some of those same changes.

Daniel: Thank you for having me here, Sarah. Really appreciate it.

Sarah: It's a pleasure. All right. You can find more by visiting us at futureoffieldservice.com. Be sure to stay tuned throughout this month as we continue to talk about topics that are important to inspiring inclusion. The Future of Field Service podcast is published in partnership with IFS. You can learn more at ifs.com. As always, thank you for listening. Thank you for listening to the Future of Field Service podcast. We hope today's conversation has provided you with a light bulb moment or given you some valuable food for thought. To learn more about any of the topics discussed in this episode, visit us at futureoffieldservice.com. If you enjoyed this episode, please don't forget to rate us on your favorite podcast platform to help others join the conversation. Also, remember to hit the subscribe button and turn on notifications so you don't miss a future episode. The Future of Field Service podcast is published in partnership with IFS. To learn more, visit ifs.com. On behalf of everyone at Future of Field Service, thank you for listening.

Episode Resources:

Daniel Trabel on LinkedIn
Thermo Fisher Scientific Website

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