By Sarah Nicastro, Creator and Editor in Chief, Future of Field Service

If you’ve followed Future of Field Service for any length of time, you know that I don’t see my primary role as content creation but to look for every opportunity to nurture the power of community. One such opportunity is bringing together our Stand Out 50 leaders on a virtual session every couple of months. This gives them a chance not only to network, but to ask for advice on different topics and to draw on the experiences of the larger group in a way that can expand thinking and spark lightbulb moments.

For our January session, one leader asked if we could focus the conversation on field force wellbeing – and I gladly obliged. The leader who requested the session kicked us off by sharing a bit about the work his company has done in recent years to better understand and improve field force engagement, and how that work has led to a current focus on wellbeing. The topic sparked a lively discussion and resulted in multiple messages after expressing gratitude for prompting thought on a topic that doesn’t get enough attention.

While these sessions are always confidential, there was plenty of insight that came out of the discussion that I can share anonymously – because this is a topic that warrants more discussion, more attention, and more action.

Why Field Force Wellbeing Matters

People leaders understand there are many reasons to care about employee wellbeing. From a business perspective, it’s proven that healthy, engaged employees do their best work, are more resilient to change, are more likely to stay in role, and provide better customer experiences.

While wellbeing matters for any employee, there are unique challenges and stressors for the field force that make it particularly important to consider. These characteristics also mean that many overarching employee wellness programs are insufficient (at best) for the field. Field technicians contend with frequent travel, feeling disconnected from the company, experiencing isolation, high stress and frustrated customers, and much more.

These factors can contribute to instances of mental ill health and, in extreme situations, suicide. Further, many leaders feel limited in how to support the field force. This can stem from lacking the knowledge of how best to approach wellbeing topics, realizing broader employee initiatives don’t translate well to field technicians, and/or being caught between what would help employees in need and what the business demands.

Pulse Check: Leaders Share the Current State of Wellbeing Focus in Their Organizations

We anchored our recent Stand Out 50 discussion with some live benchmarking. Here’s an overview of how leaders weighed in:

Question 1: Do you have a specific mental wellbeing or wellbeing program in place?

• Yes – 64%
• No – 36%

Question 2: Do you have a way to measure hot spots of stress in your teams?

• Yes – 45%
• No – 55%

Question 3: Do you offer temporary work alternatives to mitigate the stress for engineers facing wellbeing challenges?

• Yes – 70%
• No – 30%

Question 4: Are your HR/health & safety teams engaged with your field force?

• Yes – 100%

Question 5: Are you tracking mental ill health cases?

• Yes – 78%
• No – 22%

Question 6: What do you feel is the biggest wellbeing risk to your engineers?

1. Stress & burnout – 91%
2. Fatigue – 81%
3. Physical wellbeing (sleep/diet & exercise) – 80%
4. Physical pain (muscle/body/skeletal issues) – 73%
5. Loneliness/social isolation – 52%
6. Relationship issues/time away from home – 48%
7. Mental wellbeing – 44%
8. Substance abuse/alcohol – 33%
9. Gambling/addictive behavior – 22%

Considerations for How Best to Assess & Approach Field Force Wellbeing

Wellbeing should be part of a holistic focus on employee engagement. One leader shared the six areas of engagement their company focuses on for field technicians:

1. Ensuring employees are well-managed; strong leadership is crucial, especially for field technicians that are often all or mostly remote
2. Making field technicians feel part of the company – make sure they see how their role connects to the company’s purpose
3. Put tools, processes, and practices in place that help field technicians feel well supported in their work
4. Create a positive work culture for field technicians that sometimes can feel closer to customers’ cultures than their own company’s
5. Offer a clear and fair development and career path
6. Ensure field technicians are adequately recognized

These six areas were developed from an initiative to understand field technician sentiment, including what they enjoyed about their roles, what they felt proud of, what their biggest challenges were, what they disliked, and what contributed most to frustration and stress. When considering how best to approach field technician engagement and wellbeing, it’s important to start with a strong plan for assessment.

The following best practices were discussed in our recent session:

• Surveys can be effective, but not if they’re the only measure of assessment
• In-person workshops are very helpful to add anecdotal perspective to survey results, and to build trust by showing the quest is genuine
• It’s important to understand root cause and, for global operations, to consider how cultural factors will surface in findings (and requirements)
• Findings should be grouped and prioritized, this prioritization should be shared with field technicians – including an explanation for what input cannot be addressed and why
• It’s important to remember that imperfect communication is better than none

One area our conversation centered around is the fact that to make any real impact around wellbeing, efforts must combine both programmatic efforts and individual attention. Meaning, company-wide processes and resources and important, but without strong individual leadership, often won’t make a markable difference in wellbeing.

For many service organizations, who have leaders that have progressed through the ranks, this likely means that training and development will play an important role in improving wellbeing. Leaders with strong emotional intelligence, an up-to-date understanding of how to approach wellbeing topics, and clarity around effective communication are crucial to supporting frontline employees. Company-wide awareness, resources, and support alongside leaders well-equipped to navigate individual team member relationships is the winning formula.

Leaders discussed examining the contributing factors to field technician wellbeing and engagement based on the following categories:

1. Systemic factors – are there organizational or structural issues contributing to challenges that need to be addressed?
2. Role-related risks – are there ways to better address some of the factors known to effect field technician wellbeing?
3. Leadership support – are there ways we can better equip leaders to identify, support, and escalate issues before they become critical?
4. Communication effectiveness – is there help in place that simply isn’t being adequately communicated to field teams?

Getting Creative Around Improving Field Force Wellbeing

In a world that can feel quite heavy and with a talent landscape consisting of multiple generations with differing needs, many may find it time to get a bit more creative about how to improve wellbeing. Surface-level statements and company EAP offers don’t fit the needs of today, so as you understand what challenges exist among your workforce, I encourage you to think beyond what’s always been done in how to address them.

With increasing use of remote capabilities and AI, companies should be able to offer greater flexibility than they have in the past. This may help alleviate some of the stress of travel while maintaining customer expectations. Leaders agreed that finding new and better solutions for how to offer field teams greater work/life balance is important.

They also shared examples of some different tools being offered to help assist wellbeing efforts. One leader said they’ve begun offering a paid subscription to the Calm app to every employee, another talked about a tool in use to assess mood (similar to that developed by Rob Stephenson, who was on the podcast to discuss mental wellbeing a while back).

While challenges may demand greater creativity, it starts with listening to what those challenges are and really understanding how your workforce feels and what they need more (or less) of. If you have any input on how you’ve worked to better understand or address field force wellbeing, I’d love to hear from you!