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May 3, 2023 | 15 Mins Read

Thoughts on Field Service Palm Springs 2023

May 3, 2023 | 15 Mins Read

Thoughts on Field Service Palm Springs 2023

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Sarah shares her observations from the 20th anniversary of Field Service Palm Springs, which she attended last week. She also summarizes the “5 Lessons We’ve Learned in the Last 20 Years That Will Help Forge the Future of Service” that she presented in her keynote.

Sarah Nicastro: Welcome to the Future of Field Service podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Nicastro. So this week, I was at Field Service Palm Springs. I wanted to record this onsite, but I ran out of time and you can tell by my heavy sweater that I'm back in Pennsylvania. But it was the 20th anniversary of the Field Service events, and I'm sure some of you that listen have attended before. They have Field Service Palm Springs, a Field Service East event, which typically used to be in Amelia Island, last year was in Hilton Head. There's Field Service Europe, and then they have a series of Field Service Connect events in different areas. And so it was the 20th anniversary. I was asked a couple of times and was racking my brain to try and remember what was the first year I attended. I'm thinking it had to be 2009 or 2010, I certainly don't remember for sure, but it's been quite a long time.

And when I first attended the event I was typically one of two, maybe three, women at the entire conference. So that's certainly something that sticks with me because I remember, and I shared this a bit this week, the first presentation I ever gave, and it was horrible. It was horrible. I was very nervous and certainly some of those nerves came from being in a room where I was the minority. So we've come a long, long way. The attendance this year was really good and certainly consisted of a lot more diversity. So there's a long way to go. We're not where we need to be, but one of my observations was just looking around and thinking about how much that aspect has changed in the time that I've been attending.

I really enjoy this event every year, not only because it's in a beautiful setting in Palm Desert, which is nice to look at out of the windows, you're not spending a whole lot of time enjoying it per se, but it's a really nice backdrop. But there are people in this industry that I have now seen year after year for over a decade, and it's given me an opportunity to build some really great relationships. And it's always nice to see those people and have a chance to catch up. And it's also nice to have an opportunity to meet new people every year. So it's a great event, and the attendance was good this year, the energy was good, and I think it was a really great 20 year celebration for WBR and the team that puts the Field Service events on.

When I think about the progress the industry has made, it was representative to me in the diversity in attendees. Now, if someone from outside of our industry walked into the event, I'm not by any means saying they would take note of how diverse the crowd is. We're not necessarily that far, but comparatively speaking, I guess is my point. The other thing in terms of progress though that stood out to me is the topics being covered. So this year it felt like there were a lot more conversations related to leadership, to employee engagement and company culture. And those things to me show that service is becoming less of a silo and more a foundational aspect of the business because when service is or was a silo, it's easy to just focus on more of the operational things, and that's what this event used to be primarily about.

But as service becomes perceived as more of a path to growth, those other aspects start making a bigger and bigger difference because the responsibilities you're giving to your team are different. The, not ability, the responsibility you have to create a culture where innovation can thrive becomes a consideration. Obviously, there's a lot of conversations about talent. And I think that's not only because companies are struggling to find talent, but also because the type of employee field service organizations want today is different than it used to be. They want people that are more self-starters, more entrepreneurial in spirit, more empowered, more creative, and that's something that just demands some of these other changes when we think about leadership and things like that. So I really enjoyed hearing about that.

There was a session on the first day of the event from Darren Elmore of RICOH, and that session was primarily about how they are incorporating a remote first service approach, which I'm hoping to have him on the podcast to talk about. But he also talked about five essentially excuses that companies use to not innovate. And I shared a recap of that in our article on Monday. And I really liked that portion of his presentation even on its own before he got into their journey with remote service, because that's where we are. We're not necessarily talking as much about how do we incrementally improve. We're talking about how do we innovate and how do we evolve to what the next generation of service and field service will look like. So I love that. On day two, I think, yeah, day two, Charles Hughes with High Wire gave a presentation on the realities of employee burnout and the responsibility leaders have in creating better work-life balance for their teams and for themselves.

I thought it was a great session, and I also think the fact that a topic like that is on the agenda is just representative to me of progress and evolution in the space. Josh Zolin was at the event, so Josh was on the podcast before, I should have looked up the episode number. He wrote the book, Blue is the New White, he is the CEO of Windy City Equipment, and he took over his family business and he is a huge advocate and evangelist for the skilled trades. And he gave a very powerful presentation on day three talking about how we use stories to paint a better, sometimes a different, sometimes just a picture, to people about the opportunity for careers that services represents. So that was, I think, a really great session as well. So there was some great things that took place, and I gave a very short keynote presentation on day two.

I took the opportunity with the 20th anniversary theme to talk about if I were to step back and look at my observations in the time that I've been in this industry, what are the five macro lessons from the last 20 years? So really we'll say 15 years. I haven't quite been in this space 20 years, but what are the five lessons that we have learned that will really need to remain top of mind as we forge the future of service? So for those of you that weren't able to be at the event, I thought I would go through what I shared and share some of that with you. So going back to Josh Zolin's point on day three about the power of stories, I mean, I talk about that a lot. For those of you that listen to this podcast with any regularity, that is really the premise of this podcast. It's sharing the stories of service leaders, what's on their mind, what are they working toward, what are they grappling with, what lessons have they learned, et cetera.

And I think the fact that I am in a position to hear those stories, day in and day out, over a really significant amount of time at this point, because it's stories they stick in my mind. And so there's a quote, "If history were taught in the form of stories, it would never be forgotten." It's Rudyard Kipling, and I really, really like that quote and like Josh, I am a big believer in the power of storytelling. And so when I think about reflecting on the years I've been in this space and what were these macro lessons that stood out, I'm sort of consolidating a lot of different stories to present to an audience about what are those core themes. And the reason that I can pull those together is because there's a lot of different stories that stand out that really illustrate some of these points. So let me share with you the five lessons. So the first one is service is a path to brand differentiation and revenue growth.

So I'm sure to some folks, that sounds very obvious, but when I started in this space, that was not an obvious statement at all. Service was perceived as a cost center. All services that I was talking with folks about were very transactional. The revenue model put a lot of focus on speed and efficiency versus value or customer experience, which meant that the workforce, the emphasis was really on productivity and technical skill versus things like soft skills and the customer journey, things like that. So it's one of the most fundamental shifts that I've witnessed in my time in this space, this recognition that service holds so much power in terms of our brand identity. It really is an ability to differentiate your business and a path to grow revenue. And I think most organizations that I speak with today have learned that lesson. They've had that recognition.

However, I think when it comes to taking that lesson and turning it into capitalizing on that potential, there's just still a lot that can be done. So there's so much more opportunity for organizations to put a focus on service, to use it, to create that brand experience and that differentiation, to move toward outcomes-based models, to leverage technology that exists today to be more predictive and to really transform the value proposition that they offer to customers, which can lead to new types of digitally focused and digitally driven offerings. It can lead to new lead to new service models and new revenue models. I think there's still a huge amount of opportunity for co-innovation with customers.

So it's a lesson that I think most have learned, but one that we need to keep thinking about because the potential that exists, the potential that this lesson could teach us, is only limited by the restrictions a company puts on itself. So that was the first one. The second one is the frontline worker is a powerful position. So tied very closely to the first, but here's where I think in terms of the continuum, the recognition of service as a path to differentiation came first. The recognition of the role the frontline workforce plays in doing that came after and for some, is still a work in progress. So historically, employees were viewed as assets, and the focus within organizations was more so on controlling them, getting them to comply with whatever change was happening, getting them to execute on the job that the company wanted them to do.

There wasn't a whole lot of acknowledgement between that correlation between the employee experience and the customer experience. And again, I said this before, there was more focus on technical aptitude versus the incorporation of soft skills and how that changes the customer relationship. So when you think about that evolution combined with the challenges companies face today around talent, this is an area where we really, really need to be thinking about that frontline worker is a very powerful person in terms of our customer experience and our brand identity. So what does that mean in terms of what that role looks like, what their experience looks like, how we treat them, all sorts of things. So we know that we can't exceed in our goals for service growth without the frontline. And as our service delivery evolves, the frontline must evolve with it. And the way that we treat our frontline workforce, the way that we leverage that position, the way that we empower them, et cetera, has to change as well.

I think a big part of that is moving beyond that inclination to want to control, and instead focus on what it takes to empower those workers and create more of a sense of ownership. So that is number two. Number three is technology when applied well is a great enabler. So this is obviously another very clear lesson we've learned. However, the point I talked about here is that, again, if you look back to when I started, a lot of the interviews I did were companies moving from actual paper to their first generation of a field service management solution. I would say that's very, very rare today. Most companies have been through that evolution, and they're now moving to their second generation, third generation and beyond of their service management systems. The technology though, has come a long, long way in terms of the sophistication and the functionality and the capabilities that exist. I mean, it really is impressive what technologically speaking, is possible today. I think what is happening is that a lot of the organizations are catching up to being able to use the capabilities that exist today.

So I think as organizations, there's a lot of layers of change that come in to digital transformation. And so I think we're at a place where really the technology providers are a bit further ahead than, not all, but some of the organizations in terms of really putting the internal change in place, refining workflows, all of those different things, to make sure that they have a good really well working foundational service management solution in place before they start to look for ways to augment that. So when you think about some of the more advanced capabilities that are in use today, augmented reality, machine learning, AI, all of those things, they all have very attainable practical applications for businesses today. And you see certainly some organizations that are ready to leverage those capabilities and are doing so with incredible success. When I look at the industry as a whole, I think there are also a lot of organizations that are catching up to being able to put those tools in place and really leverage them to their full capacity.

So there's been a lot of change, and certainly there's a lot of variety from business to business on where people stand. But there's just this idea that the technology has changed so much that some organizations are still trying to move beyond maybe a first or second gen solution to a more modern solution that's fully functional based on today's standards, and then leverage some of the more sophisticated capabilities. The companies that try and rush through that foundational step and they're on maybe an outdated or a poorly deployed foundational system, and then just try and layer in these new capabilities, tend to see issues in doing so. So it's just one of those things where it is a great enabler. It's not only a great enabler, I mean it's really, really just a necessity for today's businesses. It just needs to be handled in a way that aligns with business objectives.

So that was number three. Number four, the most successful companies change before they have to. I skipped ahead of myself. I guess going back to the technology point, the main point I wanted to make is that while there are so many powerful capabilities that exist today, they're only as powerful as an organization's ability to manage change. So I guess that's the conclusion of what I was trying to say. The companies that have gone through the school of hard knocks in managing change and coming up with a good way to do that, they're a bit ahead in being able to implement some of the more advanced technologies today. There are other companies that are still working on managing that change well so that they can leverage everything that exists today. So all right, onto lesson four. The most successful companies change before they have to.

So again, when I came into this space, things were really stable, maybe even a bit stagnant, and then things started to progress at a far slower pace than we've seen in recent years, but we started to see changes in our consumer lives from a technology standpoint. We had the introduction of the iPhone and Amazon and all of these different things that really started to put pressure on customer expectations across any industry, even those that are not really consumer centric. And so digital transformation has changed our ability to have always on constant real-time communication across the organization and with our customers. And that has just snowballed the amount of change that has taken place. Of course in the last couple of years, we've had a whole lot of other things that have forced organizations into other degrees of change, and the reality is it really isn't slowing down.

It's only getting faster. So there are companies that embrace that reality and have reconciled the fact that they need to be a lot more flexible, nimble, agile in how they work. And there are some who are still maybe looking back with longing on what was 15 or 20 years ago. So I think the message here is, you don't want to be forced to change. You want to be making the decision to do so before it becomes a necessity. Again, Darren Elmore from Rico had a great message within his session that I shared some of in Monday's article, but this idea that you want to do the disrupting, you don't want to be disrupted. And I think complacency is really at odds with creating competitive advantage. So we need to get comfortable with that reality. We need to be thinking outside of the box, looking outside of our own industry for inspiration and information and really thinking about from a company culture and leadership perspective, what are we doing to create a culture of innovation and eliminate fear of risk or fear of failure.

So I think that's a big opportunity for the industry going forward. Number five, we must prioritize people first and profits will follow. Again, when I started out, this was all very cost center conversation. It was very just like I said, employees as assets. It was very cut, cut, cut, minimize, et cetera. And that maybe worked for the place that businesses were in then. But today, with the opportunity for service as an opportunity to differentiate and to grow, we need to think a bit differently about how we juggle that or how we strike the balance and how we think about not just short-term objectives or the quarterly goals, but the big picture. This is true in how we treat our customers as people and how we focus on building better relationships with them and understanding their needs, to a degree where we can innovate from the outside in. And it's certainly incredibly important when we think about how we engage with our employees, our talent, our people internally. So I'm not saying this in the sense of profits don't matter, numbers don't matter.

They absolutely do. I just think that the companies who are focused solely on that are taking a very shortsighted approach. And I think that there is a lot of ties in with this lesson to the realities of what's important to attracting, attaining, and retaining talent today, what customers value from the companies they do business with in terms of its authenticity, it's commitment to them and to its people, et cetera. So I think this is a big trend going forward as well. And again, how that ties back to company culture, individual leaders, et cetera, will be really interesting to watch. There's another quote I shared that says, "The purpose of knowledge is action, not knowledge." So I think there are certain situations where these are lessons that have been learned, but maybe not applied as much as they can be. So that's why I wanted to reflect back on some of them because I think they're not only representative of the biggest changes I've seen, not only attending this particular event year over year, but just thinking back on all of the conversations I have and all of the things that I've witnessed.

They're representative of that change, but they're also really five of the keys to unlocking the potential that exists as we move ahead. So that's what I shared in a much faster manner, by the way, at the event, and I hope that you can take some value from that as well. So it was a great event. If you haven't had a chance to read Monday's article that talked about some of the points from Darren Elmore's session related to embracing innovation, please have a look at that and stay tuned. Hopefully I'll have an opportunity in the coming months to get some of the folks that I connected with at the event to come here and share their stories with you firsthand. So that's it for now. You can find more at futureoffieldservice.com. While you're there, be sure to sign up for the Future of Field Service Insider so that you don't miss any of our weekly articles or podcasts.

Also, make sure you take a look at the live tour schedule. We have events coming up in Birmingham UK on May 17th, Paris on May 24th, Minneapolis on June 15th. Yes, June 15th. Dusseldorf, June 21st, and Stockholm, September 7th. So if you are near any of those areas and would like to come and join us for a day of conversation and connection, I would love to see you. All of the events are free to attend. You can register for the location nearest to you on the website, so futureoffieldservice.com. 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.

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April 26, 2023 | 25 Mins Read

How to Fortify Your Service Business Amid Economic Turmoil

April 26, 2023 | 25 Mins Read

How to Fortify Your Service Business Amid Economic Turmoil

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In a session from Future of Field Service Sydney, Sarah talks with Jordan Argiriou, Director, Service Solutions APEC at QIAGEN about how the company is channeling its service focus to navigate current economic conditions.

Sarah Nicastro: So what we're going to talk about is some concepts around customer centricity and this idea that right now everyone is facing some sort of economic realities, turmoil, et cetera. And so I mentioned earlier that historically, service was seen as this cost center where it would be like, "Okay, well where can we cut? We'll cut here." And I think companies with the recognition that it is a profit center need to find ways to be cost conscious without it negatively impacting the employee experience or the customer experience. So we're going to kind of talk about some of those elements a bit. But before we do that, tell everyone a little bit about yourself, your role and Qiagen.

Jordan Argiriou: Sure. Hey, so I'm Jordan Argiriou, as everyone can see. I'll start with the personal side. I'm married, a father of three beautiful kids. That's the gray in my beard, everyone I think can all relate.

Sarah Nicastro: There's barely any, so they must be well-behaved.

Jordan Argiriou: No, it's true. They're not too bad. I've worked, initially started out as a service technician slash engineer, and that was with an Australian company, very small. Moved across to a company called Biolab, which some people may recognize in the room. Quite a large Australian company for biotechnology and within that space. Biolab was then acquired by Thermo Fisher. So I was there approximately 10 years. And now with Qiagen. So started off as the Australian Head of Field Service, or Australian New Zealand Head of Field Service. And now I look after service for APEC. So Director of Service for APEC.

Sarah Nicastro: Excellent. Okay.

Jordan Argiriou: And been with Qiagen 10 years this year.

Sarah Nicastro: Now would everyone here be familiar with Qiagen

Jordan Argiriou: I don't know. Is anyone here familiar with Qiagen?

Sarah Nicastro: Okay. This, yeah, so maybe talk just a little bit about what the company does.

Jordan Argiriou: So we are a leader in biotechnology, again. Molecular testing, research from the life science academia side, clinical testing. Something that people may be familiar with, quite obviously, is COVID testing. So we have the robotics, the instruments, the kits, the consumables. So end-to-end, sample to insight, a solution for the customers.

Sarah Nicastro: Okay. So when we're facing economic turmoil, I think this gut reaction can be to look internally immediately and start looking for, "Okay, where can we cut? How can we cut," et cetera. Let's talk about how there's another way to do this, which is Qiagen's approach has really been to look externally and to use this as an opportunity to connect with customers more deeply in a different way and do a lot more listening. So tell us a little bit about this idea of resisting that urge to just cut, cut and to really take that conversation externally first and learn what customers' changing needs are.

Jordan Argiriou: Yeah. I mean, look, and I think we're all facing the same challenge. We heard it with the round table discussion. The post COVID effect of having to do things very differently versus what we traditionally did, is obviously still in effect somewhat today. And it's going to continue because it's something that we've now become quite accustomed to and we've adapted to and we've changed, the whole world's changed in how we're working.

However, I think we all do a lot of listening. Through, across the whole service industry. Again, from your presentation this morning, from the discussion, there is a lot of listening going on as to what the customer needs, wants, would like to see for the future. I think what we've done differently or what we have done differently is assemble teams internally. So both actively listening, actively surveying customers, asking them what they want. We all do that. That's traditional.

What we've done now is to put together teams globally from very different diverse backgrounds that wouldn't typically be on that sort of team and ask them to create a solution for the customers. Also, in conjunction with that, asking the customers to be part of that pilot, trying it out. The advantage we have here in APEC is that we work with a broad range of markets. So we have some that are very, I guess still emerging and in their infancy, where we have the country we're sitting in today of Australia where it's quite a mature market. So we have a good stretch between the two to know, "Okay, this is working there, it could work here." Something that we might overlook in Australia by saying, this is what's always worked or this is what traditionally works in the mature market. We may be able to adopt something, an idea from an emerging market that we could implement here today.

And that's what we've done in terms of listening to the customer. So it's continuous improvement. And that's again, normal for most industries that we're looking at here today. However, adding that extra component of the internal people saying, "Okay, this is what we know works, but what else could we do?" Again, specifically Australia has a lot of good best practice that we could adopt in the emerging. However, they have a lot of new technology that they might adopt quite quickly that we would be more, "Let's analyze it, let's test it, let's look at it. So that's working today for us."

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. Now, do you have any examples of... with the customer listening you do, and the way that you've built those teams internally, like new offerings that have come out of that? So we saw this during COVID, and there's different industry examples. So for instance, there's a company that we work with in the restaurant industry. Well, restaurants were closed. So at a maximum they were doing some volume of takeout business, but a lot of them were shut down. And so obviously if your livelihood is servicing that equipment, there can be some panic. But they look for ways to help introduce new, maybe even temporary offerings to help keep the equipment. They can't just let it sit, either. So just really getting creative about as the customer's needs change or as the economic landscape changes, how can you get creative and adapt?

Jordan Argiriou: So one of the initiatives we undertook was to look at, so not so much implement in each country, but to look at the customizing of our offering to each sort of market: what their conditions asked for, what the customers needed post COVID, or during COVID, post COVID, and then to come up with a customized solution that would fit that country or region. It sounds quite simple, but it's actually quite difficult to do because each country and region has all these different needs and there's north and south and there's different types of agreements and products that they want. So we've come up with a semi customizable approach to service.

The other thing we did as well, actually, just to add to the answer before, was to survey our sales team across the region and globally as well, and ask them, "What products are you comfortable selling? What works for you?" Again, sounds simple, sounds something that you could do anytime. But post events, post coming out of that COVID environment and not being able to have a touch point with the customer, or a very forced touchpoint where they didn't really want too many people out on site in their laboratories, specifically for healthcare providers. So we asked the sales team, "Hey, what are we doing? What are you comfortable selling? What would work?" And that in conjunction with asking the customers with the offerings we came up with, we've come up with some fairly customizable solutions for customers.

So like a subscription service instead of going for the whole agreement because of the economic pressure. Various other products that we are starting to put together now to be able to offer them some relief from the economic pressure, but at the same time keeping their operations running as they were before.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. And I think sometimes if we look at it in terms of opportunity instead of challenge, in an economy where customers have their own cost consciousness, sometimes that can be a good thing for service. I mean, if you manufacture equipment assets, organizations are looking to extend the life because they don't want to make new CapEx investments. If you can offer these new arrangements as a service, that might not be what you have done or maybe an ideal, but it's a way to think outside of the box.

Jordan Argiriou: Yeah.

Sarah Nicastro: What I'm curious about though, Jordan, is when I hear customized, I think that being at odds with scalability.

Jordan Argiriou: That's true.

Sarah Nicastro: So how do you strike that balance between customizing offerings to the customer need without it becoming unsustainable for the business?

Jordan Argiriou: Absolutely. So the word customized is quite appealing to the service industry and to customers because they're thinking, "Great, I get this end-to-end solution, I can prolong the life of the instrument, et cetera, and I'm getting exactly what I would like." However, as you said perfectly, it becomes quite challenging for a company to be able to manage the customization per product, firstly, per market, per economy, per everything. So it becomes quite a challenge when you're presenting that sort of solution, because you know that the next step is to customize even further. And you'll get to a point where you literally can't do anything more. And the customer's going to say, "Well, you've run out of ideas, or, "this is now the new norm that I can ask for whatever."

So we do have a limitation in terms of customizing. So you have your base agreement and then you can add on and things like that. For future scalability, I mean, it's going to become a world where we're going to have to customize our offering for the long term. However, there has to be an end point. Otherwise you're going to end up spending a huge amount of money. Well, not just money but time, effort, employee engagement with the customer just trying to figure out which customer has what, which it's quite a difficult process.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. So I think this is interesting. It kind of bleeds into one of, I guess another of my favorite conversations. You can tell, I happened into this space and now I'm such a nerd about it because I'm like, "Oh, I love talking about this." But what this makes me think of to some degree is not that there isn't any actual customization to what you're offering, so I'm not saying that., but I do think we have this whole conversation right now about what is the narrative we're creating with customers? What is the dialogue we're having with customers? And how is that maybe different or how different does it need to be from the dialogue we're having internally? Okay. So what I mean by this is customers want to feel that you are customizing your solutions to their needs, but that doesn't necessarily have to mean that every solution is completely customized to their needs. It can mean there's a menu of standard customizations, et cetera.

So there needs to be this acknowledgement that the way we talk about things internally is not always the way we should be talking about them externally.

Jordan Argiriou: Absolutely.

Sarah Nicastro: So I have this example, one time I was talking to this gentleman... He was so frustrated and I felt so badly. He's like, "Well, we've invested in IoT and no one will buy it." And I'm like, "Because they don't care that you've invested in IoT. They care about what value-

Jordan Argiriou: Correct.

Sarah Nicastro: ...that provides." But the reality is we struggle a lot with taking the innovation that we're doing as a business and turning that into a value proposition that resonates with what our customers want. So I guess in my mind, I'm thinking part of it is like, yes, I'm sure there is some customization, but there could also be more perceived customization than actual customization.

Jordan Argiriou: Absolutely. And you raise a good point. The value proposition is probably the strongest part of that customization. If you can't deliver an end-to-end solution for what they need, and like you said, you invest heavily in technology in terms of their accessibility remotely. A lot of customers might just see it and go, "That's great. I'm not going to use it."

Sarah Nicastro: Or, "Great, well that's saving you money because you're not on site, so I'll pay you less."

Jordan Argiriou: Yes, correct. Correct.

Sarah Nicastro: This is another one of my favorite conversations. Yeah.

Jordan Argiriou: Correct.

Sarah Nicastro: Okay. Yeah. What this makes me think of is I had this conversation once with a gentleman from a company in the US called Spencer Technologies, and he used the analogy of, hopefully this makes sense, if you go bowling with children and you can put the bumpers up, so like bumper bowling, the customer just thinks that they can... But really you're keeping them in the lane you want them to be in.

Jordan Argiriou: Absolutely.

Sarah Nicastro: Hopefully I'm making sense to everyone. So you're finding ways to meet this customer demand to have more flexibility, more customization, personalization of offerings. If you think about where we're headed, we talked quite a bit this morning about the world of delivering outcomes. What do you think is coming along?

Jordan Argiriou: I don't think there's going to be an end to the customization. And again from this morning, from the round table, one of the comments was, and I think it was yourself that made the comment, that the next generation coming forward, the generation following that, they're all now accustomed to having things immediate. They're having at their fingertips. They're wanting that sort of interaction. As they become consumers, managers, leaders within businesses, they're going to adopt that same idea. No matter the cost, because it's going to become... it's already become the norm in their world. In ours, it's starting to seep in. It's here, but we're still, I wouldn't say resisting, but we're still being realists about what we can do and what our capabilities are.

But by the time they enter the landscape as, like I said, either employees or consumers or leaders, that is very much going to become everyday life. So we're going to see a lot more of this. In my opinion, a lot more. So that customization, the digitization, it's going to become normal. So if you think about it, with any sort of piece of technology that you own, you can customize it to be you. But again, it's within those bumpers that you have that. However, moving forward you can see it's becoming a lot more open-ended and you can completely customize what you're doing with that bit of technology, which I think will translate into us as well.

Sarah Nicastro: Mm-hmm. I think it's also interesting when you think about this conversation of delivering outcomes, ultimately a customer wants more to be able to rely on you to do something they don't want to need to do. They just want the peace of mind. However, we don't live in an age where anyone's comfortable trusting entirely that you'll deliver that. Meaning they don't want to be hands-on, but they want to at any point be able to look at a dashboard, a real-time visibility into the fact that you're doing what you said you could would do for them. So there's this, I think, parallel need of, "I want you to do it. I also want to know at any given time how you're doing it, what's going on, what the status is, et cetera."

So let's talk a little bit about talent and what you see there. So whether it is being agile and adapting to economic challenges and being creative, or whether it's hopefully that normalizing and moving towards this next phase of delivering outcomes. How do you see the role talent plays in that? And how are you navigating that?

Jordan Argiriou: Absolutely. So I think that there's a, yeah we spoke about it earlier today, with talent retention not only being around a career path, not only being around incentive and conditions, but more around the diversity, the sustainability, all of those factors together. And something that I truly respect of our company, of Qiagen, is they implemented very strong type of diversity targets 14 months ago. Which in my opinion were probably perceived at the beginning to be a checkbox. I'm just being blunt, and this is my opinion here.

Sarah Nicastro: We're all friends here.

Jordan Argiriou: Absolutely. But it was perceived that it was something that we needed to do as part of a corporate responsibility.

Sarah Nicastro: Sure.

Jordan Argiriou: However, come to this day today, we have seen these initiatives and programs that we're running really be part of our everyday lives. So they've actually, our executive team has done an extremely good job of number one, correcting gender diversity across leadership. It's an extremely... I mean, the company at the moment is probably 50/50 gender roles on either side. A lot of leadership where typically it was governed by, service leadership as a good example is typically male dominated because that's who's-

Sarah Nicastro: Because they progressed through... yeah.

Jordan Argiriou: Come through, right. But I would say now our global service team is more or less 60/40, which is a challenge in itself to get to that number. But we've found really good talent within our marketing side, within our financial side, within our... Even from our global product services side that actually run our third level support. And we've introduced that. So in terms of retaining and attracting, the activities that Qiagen have put in place some time ago have really paid off today because we are attracting the right people now. We are attracting a stronger group of people applying for positions, because they're seeing a pathway no matter... Where you're located where you are, you can have a pathway forward if you want to move into that space.

Otherwise, even if you want to stay within your own space, there's lots of lateral moves you can make within the organization. I think one that pops into my head now is post COVID everyone was talking about the... What's the word? The great resignation and people moving on and shifting and everything else. Our global head of HR at the time said, "No, it's actually the great re-imagination because we want to offer, instead of moving along and going to the next place, we want to offer lateral moves for people." So is it, if we can't offer you what you really want in the future in this position, then we can think about a different pathway.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah.

Jordan Argiriou: And really mixing it up and allowing people to go into country, taking on different roles. It's actually been a very positive experience. And when it comes to service, we're doing the same thing in the region. We're changing things up. We're looking at the traditional structure differently. Not having the traditional service manager, supervisor, engineers. It's changed quite a bit in the past, I would say, three years for us.

Sarah Nicastro: I love that perspective of the great re-imagination.

Jordan Argiriou: Yeah.

Sarah Nicastro: I had a conversation recently about how so much of the potential in service is about how you perceive it. Because each of these challenges is also an opportunity, but you have to push beyond the realities of the problem. And that's not to say they are not real problems, but you have to get over perceiving them only that way to be able to see that opportunity that lies beyond there. I love that. Danielle, I'm assuming it's uncommon for a company to start DEI as a checkbox exercise and then realize, "Oh wow, this is actually really benefiting us."

And again, not to spook out our internal organization but all credit, in my opinion, goes to our CEO for really driving all of... I mean you've got that whole sphere of diversity and there's a lot of tags in there, but he's really driving that forward, and that's the next phase for us. Because again, traditionally male dominated, traditionally very structured sort of org charts that you would see and think this is how we're going to move forward. But all of that has changed and it's actually been an extremely positive shift for the company. So it's amazing.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. So I hope you don't mind me sharing how we met.

Jordan Argiriou: Course not.

Sarah Nicastro: Okay. So Jordan and I met a few years ago, and I think I reached out to you because you had attended Field Service Asia.

Jordan Argiriou: Yes.

Sarah Nicastro: And I wasn't there myself, but I was looking through the folks that spoke at the event and I reached out and said, "Hi Jordan, I have this podcast, I'd love to have you on." Et cetera. So anytime, I mentioned at the beginning, my goal is to be the voice of the industry. So that means I don't have an editorial calendar, I don't believe in them. I think there is not much value in my content if I'm driving an agenda. So my goal is always just to connect to people in the industry and chat with them to understand what it is that they are really struggling with, learning from, passionate about, and then help them frame that into a conversation that will help others. That's my job.

So we set up this sort of introductory chat, very informal. And here is this tough guy from Australia and I'm like, "Hey Jordan, so here's what the podcast is, blah, blah, blah. So if you were to come on, do you have in mind what you might want to talk about?" And he was like, "Mental health." And I'm like, "Oh my gosh, I love this." Right? Because you don't often hear that from a man or in field service, I mean. But-

Jordan Argiriou: Absolutely.

Sarah Nicastro: ...a lot of this stuff. So I want to talk about this a bit. Because at that time we were in the midst of COVID, and so there was a lot of things you were facing as a leader with very real struggles that your teams were having. But I mean, in reality, we have barely navigated out of the COVID climate into all of these other crises.

So as human beings, I think most of us have faced some really, really tough points over the last few years. And I think we're foolish as leaders to not acknowledge that our employees are human and have had the same. So I just wanted to bring this into the conversation. Because I think when we talk about company culture, creating a psychological safety among our workforce, this vulnerability, this openness, mental health and making sure our people know that we care about that aspect as well is very important. So can you just maybe share a little bit about how you saw the gap in that not really being something that was being addressed or supported? And some of the ways that you put focus on that?

Jordan Argiriou: Yep. I think there's two sides to that. So I'll share my side and then what the company actually did post, or during and post COVID and what we've set up for the future. Recognition of what was going on was truly that we were all going through the same thing. We all faced the same challenges, the same frustrations. I think us in Melbourne probably had a little bit worse than other people. Anyway, being the most locked down city. Just slightly.

But I think that highlighted to me, it was conversations we were having with people such as Carrado leading the service team here in Australia, other staff in the region leading service teams, they were still in the field. So specifically for service, yes, everyone was struggling on the outside. The service engineers were still expected to get in their cars, to get... If I think of India, to jump on a train where they could cross borders, where there was very strict control.

It all impacted the teams dramatically. But they would be exhausted at the end of the day. Not physically, because they've only gone out for one job because there wasn't much going on. But mentally they were thinking, "Here's another checkpoint, here's another thing where I'm going to get asked to produce papers." So all of that and on top potentially becoming sick because you're in that environment where there are COVID cases right next to you-

Sarah Nicastro: And who do you have at home?

Jordan Argiriou: Correct.

Sarah Nicastro: That you need to protect.

Jordan Argiriou: You've got your family at home, you've got your children. The impact on the kids who were locked in as well with not being able to go too far, et cetera. So from that, we started having different discussions, started thinking differently about how we deal with the teams, what we can do for them. Are there little things we can change every day to make life easier for them?

These are small changes, but for them, they were enormous. Things like reaching out. I mean, Carrado, probably one of the better ones who's also quite passionate about mental health honestly. I'm not talking him up because he's my colleague, but it's more-

Sarah Nicastro: I don't mind.

Jordan Argiriou: No, he's very passionate about it. So again, staying in constant contact with them, asking if they're okay, "Do you need a day? Do you need something else? Can we provide something for your family to be able to be a bit more comfortable during this time?" So we did all of that in the region. And it actually ended up that we retained, I think we retained everyone. I think it was one or two that moved on to other companies though. So it was a natural progression, but we did retain the entire team.

The second part of this is though, what's come during and post COVID is that Qiagen has set up a lot of global user group... Or not user groups. Global collective groups. There's one called, and we put a Qia tag in front of everything. So there's Qia Thrive, Qia Diversity. So there's ones that cover general parenting throughout the pandemic, general parenting post. And now just being a parent, being able to juggle potential economic struggles that are happening for everyone. And country. And then, there's a lot of talks that happen, live face-to-face discussions.

And from those groups, we then come up with initiatives that roll out into the company. So the most positive part for me is that the senior leadership or our executive council are actually a part of all of these groups. So they're sponsoring these groups. I am part of the Qia Thrive group as a global leader in there. And again, things that we talk about, the initiatives that come out of it... and it's all stuff that we are all contributing to. So these aren't topics that we're going, "Okay, they're on this list, we need to address them. There's economic pressure, there's..." These are topics that are coming up in discussion, and if they are considered to be quite critical, then we move forward.

Sarah Nicastro: Mm-hmm. So I think there's a couple things I want to say. So going back to the podcast conversation we had, we talked about some of the things you were doing at that time. And just to maybe paraphrase a couple points, I think it really, there was no magic bullet to making it a focus in the business. It was really about treating every conversation as a human conversation and starting with, "How are you? Are you okay?" Looking, sharing vulnerably your own status so that people know it's okay to also share.

So a lot of times there's these big issues and if you're not a mental health expert, it can seem daunting. Like, "Well, how do we accommodate for that?" But when we're dealing with people, it's really, intent is so important. Because I think if you come from a place of genuine intent and people feel that, that in and of itself helps tremendously. But just normalizing the conversation is something I think you said, "You can't just have a retreat once a year that's like a mental health guest speaker, whatever. It needs to be part of the day to day."

Jordan Argiriou: Yeah.

Sarah Nicastro: And I think that's really important. I also think when we talk about how this topic ties in with the overall talent conversation, a lot of times we say, "People are our most important asset." but they're not an asset, they're people. And people don't want to be perceived or treated as an asset, they want to be treated as human beings. So keeping that perspective and making sure you're connecting on a human level, you're not treating people as a line item on your balance sheet is also important.

Jordan Argiriou: I think as well, there's an aspect to when you've got a team of leaders under you or reporting to you. Under you, sorry, is a bad term to use. Reporting to you. I think you need to remind them to stay grounded. Because quite often a younger, and this isn't the generalization, but a younger leader who has progressed quite quickly can sometimes perceive their team as like, "Okay, I'm in charge now. This is what I'm going to say. This is how it goes." And then they get so caught up in the everyday and the challenges we're facing now with expenditure pressures at a high level, particularly we don't want to pass that down to anyone so we deal with it within our sphere. However, that person that gets caught up in that pressure and then forgets the human side of reporting. So this is where it comes back to having to coach them to remind them to stay grounded. I was in those shoes one day, some time ago. If you don't stay grounded, that team quite quickly disrespects you because you're prompting the disrespect.

Sarah Nicastro: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Jordan Argiriou: They don't respect you as a leader.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. And I think that's a really good point. With the economic pressures that are reality right now, it can be really easy to unintentionally pass that burden onto the frontline.

Jordan Argiriou: Absolutely.

Sarah Nicastro: But at the end of the day, that isn't their responsibility. And so making sure that you don't negatively impact the morale, how they feel about their roles, et cetera, just because the organization itself has these pressures, I think it's a really important part of the discussion.

So I mentioned earlier this idea, going back to the topic of just navigating the need to be cost conscious without sacrificing employee experience or customer experience, what opportunities do you see to better leverage or expand leverage of technology to work smarter instead of harder and to look for ways to help?

Jordan Argiriou: Yeah. I think we heard it this morning that the connectivity, the remote connectivity into the instruments, which is something that we're now investing in quite heavily. So any new instruments will come out with some sort of connectivity and pre prompt to us that there is something wrong. However, the other side is that we are now looking at solutions that will enable us to be able to repair or offer some sort of fix, post sending someone out. So that impacts both, not just the employee, but also... Sorry, not just the cost saving to the company, but also the employee. Because there's less stress on them to be able to have to go out and repair this instrument physically versus being able to do some sort of a remote repair or it can be done elsewhere.

And that, again we heard it at the round table, that the remote connection is something that we're all trying to do. Is it what our customers want today? Not everyone. I think within our space they are asking for it more and more because they want less interaction physically-

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah.

Jordan Argiriou: ...and they want operations to be as smooth as possible. So moving forward, I mean this is going to be the next step. Within the space we work in, the biotechnology side, the healthcare side, this is going to be that next level. To be cost conscious as well, it can be a heavy investment at the beginning. But if you've got everyone aligned, then if you see an outcome that's going to be positive, and again, get that feedback from the market, get the feedback from internal, get the feedback from our engineers as well as to where that should go, then that's where we'll head.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, I agree. There's a ton of potential in remote. And I think that it's goes back, it's maybe the best example right now of how the value proposition to us as an organization and the value proposition to our customers are two very different things. And they have to be articulated differently. If you can speak about it... It's not about saving truck rolls to them, because all that translates into is, "Let's pay you less."

Jordan Argiriou: Correct.

Sarah Nicastro: It's about faster time to resolution, right? So it's making sure the narrative matches the appropriate party.

Jordan Argiriou: Yeah. And I think what you said before about being more customer-centric, that's something that in my opinion, was lost somewhat during COVID. Not because we weren't still customer-centric. We still wanted to keep them online. We'd wanted the lowest downtime possible. However, we also tried to do it in a way where it was the most efficient way and we had to be there quickly and in and out. It was very rushed at one point. Then we got used to the idea of having to do it. Or by used to it, we had to do it. We adjusted.

Now that we've come back, I feel as though, and not just within the service space, but other companies that we see have taken that on board and kept it, but the customer centricity isn't there anymore. It's more of a transactional, the relationship isn't there because they're not on site as often.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah.

Jordan Argiriou: So changing the scope of an engineer to be more than just the person who turns up and fixes it, they already have a relationship but you can improve on that as well. Giving them different skills.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah.

Jordan Argiriou: Again, keeping it customer-centric. So again, and then if you think about a cost in the long run for a company, I mean if that engineer is selling that second, third, fourth instrument, fantastic. Right? I mean...

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah.

Jordan Argiriou: No reductions, I'm just saying.

Sarah Nicastro: Yes. No, for sure. All right, any final thoughts or comments for folks here?

Jordan Argiriou: No I think, look... Yeah, absolutely. First of all, thank you for having me.

Sarah Nicastro: Thanks for coming.

Jordan Argiriou: I appreciate it. And thank you for everyone for turning up and offering valuable feedback as well and having good conversations. But in terms of what we've just discussed, I mean, if we don't... Okay, so on the mental health side, if we don't stay on top of it's going to just consume us. You're going to lose talent. You're not going to be able to retain the right people. If you don't structure your organization to offer engineers and others a pathway to where they want to go, it doesn't have to be specifically up, sideways, wherever. Just offer them something that is a bit more tailored to them and feels like you're listening. Then I think overall, the customer centricity, the savings and everything else will cover themselves because you're looking after your people.

Sarah Nicastro: Okay, thank you.

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A Logistics Leader’s Perspective on Innovation, Digital Transformation, Diversity and More

April 19, 2023 | 29 Mins Read

A Logistics Leader’s Perspective on Innovation, Digital Transformation, Diversity and More

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Sarah welcomes Trine Storgaard Nielsen, Head of EMEA Ocean at Flexport, for a discussion on drive, strategy, innovation, being a working mother, fostering greater diversity of thought, and much more.

Sarah Nicastro: Welcome to the Future of Field Service podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Nicastro. Today, we're going to be getting a logistics leader's perspective on innovation, digital transformation, diversity, and more. I'm excited to welcome to the Future of Field Service podcast Trine Nielsen who is the head of Ocean, EMEA, at Flexport. Trine, welcome to the Future of Field Service podcast.

Trine Nielsen: Thank you so much, Sarah. I'm so excited to be here.

Sarah Nicastro: I'm happy to have you. Okay, we're going to talk about a lot of things today. But before we get into it all, tell our listeners a little bit about yourself, your role, anything you want to share about you.

Trine Nielsen: All right, thank you. So my name is Trine, as you mentioned. I'm 38. I am Danish. Apologize for the accent to everyone. I have 18 years of experience in the logistics industry. I have lived in four different countries during those 18 years, and I have primarily spent my time in commercial roles, actually ranging all the way from a back office in Mumbai, India and to being customer-facing and dealing with clients directly.

Before joining Flexport, one of my most recent roles was in Twill, which was a corporate innovation in Maersk. Maersk is a big carrier in the logistics industry. And I think if I've had quite a few jobs, that's how you work in Maersk. But if I had to talk about some personal characteristic, sorry, then I focus a lot on customer outcomes. I am very passionate about leadership and I care a lot about the impact that I make when I go to work. Now, I've joined Flexport, which is super exciting. It is a tech company in the logistics industry. The purpose is to make global trade easy for everyone, which is something that personally I'm very excited about.

And on a personal note, I have my boyfriend Casper and we have little Vigo who is 20 months old. So also a recently new mom.

Sarah Nicastro: Yes. So a lot going on, which is exciting.

Trine Nielsen: Yes.

Sarah Nicastro: Okay. Trine and I had the opportunity to meet and have lunch in Copenhagen not too long ago which was awesome because a lot of times, I have folks on the podcast that I don't actually get the chance to meet in person. And it's your energy for innovation and creating new offerings to help customers achieve their outcomes is what I found really interesting about you. So I'm excited to talk about that all a little bit more.

I came across Trine, her LinkedIn profile, because you were doing some content with Frank Mattes. Frank Mattes, who has been on the podcast before, spoke at our Frankfurt live tour event last year and he wrote the Lean Scaleup. So if you all haven't listened to that podcast, I'll put it in the show notes. It's definitely worth a listen. But his content is a lot related to scaling innovation, so figuring out for organizations how they come up with these new ideas, but don't keep them in a bubble or let them fizzle out, but rather integrate them into the broader business. And that's something you have experience with, which we'll talk a bit about later. But when I came across to your profile, I loved the opening line of your bio on LinkedIn. You said, "I go to work to make a difference every day for customers, the company, and for people around me." What I wanted to ask you about that is how do you know when you are accomplishing that mission?

Trine Nielsen: That is a good question. Coming from a digital transformation background, one thing I've learned to appreciate a lot is data. I think there's two aspects to how I look at that. There's the data-driven aspect and then there's the more personal, empathetic feeling around it. When looking at data, I think in my past roles what I've focused a lot on is NPS. So really, how happy are customers with the service that we're delivering? And I've actually in the past spent a lot of time understanding in more detail exactly what is the customer feedback.

I've been fortunate also to work with employee engagement tools. I have experience with Gallup and Officevibe, so the old school and the new school, which I find, especially Officevibe, is something that I've used very actively with my teams. And also if you work in a global environment, you can keep track of the engagement constantly. You can go down to quite detailed levels. That, I have used a lot as a leader to make sure that the teams that I'm dealing with are feeling engaged.

And then of course from a company perspective, I know at the end of the day, a lot is about profit. I think also the impact on society is something that is being measured a lot more. But I know at the end of the day, working for a company, you need to deliver the profit. So to me, the perfect triangle of creating that positive impact is to deliver very exceptional on all of those three aspects.

And then I think the more personal, to me, feedback is a gift. I'm used to getting a lot of feedback from people around me and I actively ask for it. And then seeing especially growth in people, seeing customers being able to deliver better results because we have helped them out. I think it's the more softer aspects that it's not as analytically driven, but where I feel that there's a lot of things to measure as well.

Sarah Nicastro:I think it's those wins that resonate emotionally that keep you energized about that mission, you know?

Trine Nielsen: Yeah.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, that makes sense. Okay, so if you look back at your career trajectory, a lot of your roles have in common that there's a vision to grow and transform, and you've played various roles in helping bring that vision to life in a meaningful way. What that makes me think a little bit about is how sometimes we get a little bit stuck or lost in the differences between vision and strategy. So can you talk a little bit about what each of those means to you and why they're both important?

Trine Nielsen: Yeah. To me, the vision is the greater purpose. It's how you look at the future and the impact that you want to deliver in the future. If we look at the vision that we had in Twill, it was about leveling the playing field in global logistics. We found that a lot of small companies were always being down-prioritized in terms of space, especially during Corona, by the way. There was not enough space. And typically, it's the big corporations who then have the power to get the space. And I think I've always rooted for the underdog. And I think to really breed innovation, a lot of it will come from small entrepreneurs. So we had this vision of leveling the playing field, especially for someone who just has one container. I think that vision sets the direction and gives the connection and feeling of purpose when you go to work.

And our strategy was much more related to how do we then enable that vision. One of the big game changers in logistics, I think, was the entrance of technology. I completely understand why small companies have not been prioritized in the past because moving a container from A to B is a commoditized business. The thing is, when technology comes into play, it actually changes the environment. And you can build very effective solutions that can make dealing with the small guys much more profitable than it was in the past. But in the past with the profit margins, when there's pressure on everything, you optimize for scale. You drive economies of scale. So I think for me, the strategy was all about technology and how to solve the problems through technology. But the vision was something that was closer to my heart in terms of okay, let's make this equal for all.

Sarah Nicastro: And I think when I think about our audience, leadership level mostly in service and across a variety of industries. When I think about people that are maybe similar to you in their desire to innovate and see innovation come to life, and wanting to look for ways to do new things, to be creative, to have that vision, not just for incremental improvement but for real change and growth, it makes me think about the vision is so important to make sure there's alignment on.

Because sometimes, I've talked to individual leaders who their vision for where the company could go or where the service offerings could go or where the technology landscape could go, whatever it is, and the company's vision, they're not aligned. And then it makes someone like you who is energized by seeing this stuff come to life just get very frustrated. Because if you are someone who's innovation-minded working for an organization who is not, then you're going to feel very stuck. So I think that vision is yes, that mission, but making sure that there's alignment on that vision throughout the organization, that you as an individual feel like you're in a place that has a vision that's fits what you want to do in your career is really important.

The other thing I was going to say is what you were saying about Twill and leveling the playing field, it made me think of a conversation that I had on the podcast with a gentleman named Alec Anderson who is the managing director for an organization called Koolmill with a K. And they're a very innovative company that manufactures rice mills. I learned so much about rice milling that I didn't know before. But it's really cool because their machines are innovative in and of their own, but they're using an as a service business model, which is disruptive in that industry because it's typically been incredibly expensive CapEx equipment that to your point, a lot of smaller rice mills could not afford or could not afford to update, could not afford to maintain, et cetera. So from a competitive standpoint, they were at an extreme disadvantage, oftentimes not even able to really sustain because it was almost like the industry was just targeting the very top level of these producers.

And so we had a really interesting conversation about how technology and shifting business models can democratize innovation. Because what they've been able to do is not only introduce innovative equipment but do so using a business model that makes it attainable to everyone, from the largest to the very smallest mills. And it's really interesting when you think about how that does level the playing field and change the game when it comes to making innovation accessible to everyone. So it's really cool parallel in what you're talking about.

Trine Nielsen: And I think one of the things that I was extremely proud of when there was the total logistics chaos during the COVID pandemic, we managed to protect companies who would've never... Companies would've gone bankrupt because they didn't have any goods to sell, and we managed to protect them in the most highly pressed capacity situation ever in the industry. And innovation can be a lot of things. To me, it's also sometimes about changing mindsets about business models and so forth. And I feel proud that at least we were able to really make a massive difference for a number of companies, and technology was a part of that. But maybe we helped a few innovative companies actually survive, and I hope the business is thriving still today.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, that's really cool. And you talked about your mission. That's goes back to making a real difference.

Trine Nielsen: Yeah.

Sarah Nicastro: Okay. So I want to talk about digital transformation has been a through line in different roles you've had. If we think specifically about Twill, bringing that concept from that vision to reality. We talked a lot about digital transformation and the way it enables a lot of change, and I just want to talk through some of the aspects that are important to consider and get your perspective. The first you mentioned at the beginning of the conversation which is always focusing on customer outcomes, can you talk a little bit about that?

Trine Nielsen: Yeah. I think there's many ways that you can look at a business model, and I've now seen many cases from many different companies. But I think in an industry that has historically been extremely product-driven, it has become commoditized. It is so easy to focus on productivity, economies of scale, and so forth. I think my learning in the digital transformation area is that if you focus on how to actually solve customer problems and trying to do that in a different way, so by focusing all of your efforts on delivering positive outcomes to customers, a lot of the other topics will actually follow. Customers will be willing to pay a little bit more because the value is there. But so if you take a process, you can focus on making that process extremely effective. But if you focus on delivering high quality outcomes to the customer, the effectiveness will often come along.

So I think what we were very successful in was to sometimes in the short term accept that we were not perfect on effectiveness, but over time we would be much more effective because we were so dedicated to delivering a specific outcome to the customer.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, that makes sense. I think when we talk about the potential of outcomes-based service, like I often say, when it's done right, it's very mutually beneficial. So to your point, if you are leading with that in mind, a lot of what you're trying to accomplish internally or efficiency-wise, et cetera, can come because you're focusing on what your customers value.

You mentioned earlier you're a huge fan of data. So how does that factor in when it comes to digital transformation? And I'm thinking either from the perspective of making sure you are achieving what you've set out to achieve in your transformation, but also leveraging data from the standpoint of customer value proposition.

Trine Nielsen:  love customers. And customers tell you a lot of different things, and they all say they need something different and they need something very specific. And what I love about data is the fact that it is an unbiased, unfiltered way of, for example, understanding how your customers behave, which can then help you understand what they truly need. You also need to listen to them, of course, but the data can help you detect the deeper problem because you can analyze their actions and understand it through that, at least if you're working in a platform type of business.

I also think data takes a lot of the bias out of the conversation. I think to be honest, during my 18 years, I've made a lot of decisions based on gut feeling in the past where data was not as easily accessible. That was what leadership was all about. It's like you have a lot of experience. You use that to make the right decisions. But I think as data has come in, it's been such a gift because it has helped me remove some of my biases, helped me forget some of the things I've learned along the way because things change over time, and it's just given me a lot better customer insights, but also faster, in my opinion, better decisions and more innovation.

I know that might be a little bit fluffy, but I think a perfect example is instead of asking 10 salespeople which customers should we prioritize, instead you can look into all the data. You can really try and assess which of these customers has the best potential, has the best impact to your business, fits best to your, if we talk about service model, fits best into your network. You can just make a better and more informed decision that will also deliver the better outcomes.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. I think the point you made is interesting too about all good points. The other thing I'm thinking about in terms of, like you said, customers all, it's not that they're not unique or that they don't need different things, but they're all going to think they're more unique than they are and need something different than they do. And so I think a lot of times, we see companies struggling with how much to customize offerings or solutions. And I think there's a really interesting conversation to be had around this idea of... Because the conversation you have externally and the conversation you have internally can be very different, right?

Trine Nielsen: Yeah.

Sarah Nicastro: Because of the data. You have the ability if you are leveraging data well to create systems internally that are pretty standard but make the outcome to the customer feel quite customized. Does that make sense?

Trine Nielsen: Yeah, I agree.

Sarah Nicastro: So I think that's really interesting as well. But I love the point about relying on data to remove some of your bias.

Trine Nielsen: And let's be honest, scalability is absolutely critical. We were targeting small and medium-sized companies. If we started customizing, every customer needs to feel that they get their needs met, but it has to be in a scalable version because otherwise, your cost to serve will simply be too high to make it profitable. So the scalability point to me is I agree so much, it's critical.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, all right. When you think about digital transformation, can you talk about the role of leadership and the need to create creative, challenging, and trusting environments?

Trine Nielsen: Yeah. I think leadership is going through a transformation these days. I think there's a lot of talk about diversity. But also as technology is becoming more and more something that we're dealing with, I think depending on how long you've been a leader, at least when I started having my first leadership position, we were at the macro level. Excel was the most used tool. And suddenly it's technology that is complex. Even if I tried, I would never be a technology expert. But the way of working when you deal with technology and digital transformations, it just requires, at least in my opinion, a different leadership mentality because you have to...

I think in the past, I felt like everyone expected me to have all the answers. Where today as a leader, you need to accept that there'll be people around you who are smarter, who are maybe more well-educated than you, in some cases, even some who are better paid than you because that is what's required to get the best talent. And I think facilitating the diverse community where you combine the people who are experts in technology space with people who are experts in the business space, because at the end of the day, digital transformation is all about taking something that we know and have done for many years and then doing it in a digital way. So trying to combine those two worlds, I think, requires a much more humble approach where you facilitate people rather than give all the answers.

I think my experience has been that actually if you don't have a strong vision and the strategy is not clear, it will be extremely difficult to be a successful leader because those two things is what will drive the team in the right direction. And you need to accept that the team has to come up with the answers. So you need to trust that they understand where you're going. And I think it is a humbling experience as a leader feeling that you are so dependent on your team, but I also think it's extremely healthy. And I think it just fosters so much more creativity when instead of having one brain to rule them all, you have maybe eight brains who collectively try and solve problems. So I think digital transformation is the perfect example of how diversity of thought can truly come into play. And it's probably where we see it coming to life the most at the moment compared to more traditional business models.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. On the diversity note, I think based on what we chatted about when we had lunch, in both of our worlds, logistics and service, there's a lot more room for diversity, okay?

Trine Nielsen: Mm-hmm, yeah.

Sarah Nicastro: When you think about that, what are your thoughts on how we bring that diversity of thought into these industries that are typically very homogenous?

Trine Nielsen: I have this feeling that there's still some legacy which we need to accept. We're not going to change the world tomorrow. Also, because as a female, and I believe you feel the same way, but I would never accept getting a job simply because I'm female. I want the job because I'm the best candidate. That is part of my pride and DNA. But historically, I think it's a very human thing. We hire or have hired people who look like ourselves. So I think there's something that we need to solve in terms of making sure that we actually... Because I have seen teams that are extremely diverse delivering so much better results and outcomes compared to teams that are not. There's something about the way that we go about hiring. There's something about the way we go about looking at capabilities. We need to take the personal traits and way of working a bit more out of the conversation.

And I don't think I have all the answers for how we do it, but I like there's some companies, if you have a group of people who are part of a hiring panel, that can help take some of the unconscious bias out of the process. There's also in some companies where they always have to have a female as part of the final two, three candidates. And as I said, I believe that you should always hire the best person for the role. But I think there needs to be a process where leaders are assisted to hire more complimentary skills, but having that support in place.

And then I think we need to give it a little bit of time. I'm seeing in the logistics industry, things are changing. They're changing slowly. But I'm also seeing, Maersk is a massive company. There's almost a hundred thousand people now. And I'm not there anymore so this is probably six months old knowledge. But at that time, the talent base at the levels, every five years or something like that, the talent base of females if we just talk gender continues to expand at the different levels. So I think the focus on nurturing, appreciating different ways of thinking and working, and helping leaders actually facilitate that in the best way, I think is good. And then we also need to evaluate our leaders on different parameters potentially, right?

Sarah Nicastro: Mm-hmm, yeah. Absolutely agree on that. I think part of the legacy that exists is different layers of sometimes very unintentionally toxic leadership. I think that's just reality. You have a lot of times there's these glaring toxicity gets dealt with because it has to, from whether it's a legal standpoint or a PR standpoint, et cetera. But there's these different layers of bias, just very outdated thinking or beliefs that it's a lot harder to pinpoint where that is in businesses and how it's affecting diversity, but also teams. When you have, just that permeates, you know what I mean?

Trine Nielsen: Yeah.

Sarah Nicastro: I do definitely agree that we need to be really digging into this idea, as you stated, the role of leaders has changed from needing to know it all to needing to enable a lot more. And as part of that change, what's required is different, and we need to make sure that we're measuring based on today's means. The other thing that's interesting, because you mentioned that you rely a lot on data, and so it's an interesting catch-22 with this idea of I think to some degree companies saying, "Well, we need to have this type of candidate be one of the final few," or what have you. Those type of parameters, they get put in place. Sometimes it's I think people are like, "Well, if you don't measure it, it won't change."

So from that perspective, I appreciate the fact that people want to at least pay attention. The problem is it's like they're acknowledging it but they're not understanding it. And I think a lot of it comes down to what is the why behind any given organization focusing on diversity. If it's because you feel like you have to, the outcome is a lot different than feeling you know you will be better, do better, have greater success because you value that diversity of thought. So it's not about checking a box of we need X percent women, we need X percent this category, this category, this category. It's we need more diversity because it will help us achieve our goals and grow and be different.

Trine Nielsen: And I think to be fair, it's also... I have had the pleasure of leading an extremely diverse team, and I have seen the outcomes and the results of that, which were, in my opinion, exceptional. And I don't take credit for that. I give full credit to the team. I was just a facilitator. But I think if you've never experienced that, how can you value it? So I think this, I agree. It's a catch-22 because we need to somehow force the initial phase, and that can be done in different ways. But I also have this feeling that when if everyone just tries being part of a trusting diverse team, they will feel so quickly why it adds so much value. But in a big corporate where you've done things the same way for many years, you also don't know what you're losing out on. So it's not a burning platform.

And I think that's also what will hold a few people back, because we need to get it done. But my business is running fine, so not really the biggest priority.

Sarah Nicastro: Right. And you have, again, it goes back to these individual leaders who quite frankly, managing a diverse team, if they've one, not seen the value, but two, they're probably complacent in managing a lot of people that are different iterations of themselves, which is easier than learning how to evolve as a leader and embrace new ways of working, be more humble, et cetera. So that's where I think it's a really good point that I think going back to your point about you don't want to get a role just because you're a woman and they're trying to check a box. This is where I think the measurement can't just be on what are the final hires and/or even who's in the final interviews. It needs to be on how wide of a net can we cast to get more diverse applicants? Because then if you can bring them in, you have more selection to work through the process.

But to your point, it needs to be not only that. It needs to be on leadership because leadership ultimately will have an immense impact on not just your ability to bring in diversity of thought, but retain it. Because if you have leaders that don't value that in the ranks and these people are reporting to them, they're not going to want to stick around.

Trine Nielsen: And it can be extremely uncomfortable. I'll be super honest. Having someone in your team tell you off because the data says something and you have thought something else your entire life, that is uncomfortable. Having to coach someone who is a PhD and you are a shipping professional, it is extremely difficult and challenging. But I also think it is one of the most fun and most developing... Well, one of the most interesting development areas as a leader. But yeah, uncomfortable for sure.

Sarah Nicastro: I think you said this earlier, but we just recently had our Future of Field Service event in Sydney and one of the topics that came up in a conversation we were having around company culture, leadership, et cetera, was this idea of reverse mentoring. And that's the crux of it is, to evolve as a leader, you have to understand that you have just as much to learn from the people you're working with as they do from you. It's not this idea of a hierarchy so much as it is creating that team approach.

So when we think about diversity, I know this is getting into a subset here, but it's a subset you and I both fall into and bonded over a bit, which is being working moms and balancing motherhood and careers. So you mentioned Vigo is 20 months, and here you are. You're still here. You're still passionate about what you do. You're still driven to contribute and create and innovate. But I think what we talked about is the reality that oftentimes, the companies who want that type of drive and talent have environments that make those roles incredibly difficult for anyone who is raising children to realistically take. So I guess I'm interested in what do you find most challenging? What to you makes it worthwhile to undertake the balancing act? And what do we wish that employers could take from the conversation to consider in terms of having folks like us on the team?

Trine Nielsen: Having incredible working moms.

Sarah Nicastro: Who have sick kids often.

Trine Nielsen: All the time who get sick themselves and sometimes don't sleep at night, yeah. The challenging part, and I think we actually touched upon this when we met in Copenhagen, we as women.... Men have worked as fathers for many, many years and had great careers and so forth, so it is doable. I think as a woman, we are different, which is also part of the diversity. We maybe have a slightly... One of my core priorities is to be an incredible mom. I feel like I brought this little person to the world, and I feel like it's my primary job to make sure that I try my best to create a great human being who hopefully one day can make a great impact in the world, which actually at the end of the day is when we talk about having a purpose-driven or vision for something, that is a great purpose.

But I think the challenge is that we as women are met with a lot of legacy. This is how females should be. I've met that before having kids as well, to be honest. And I think that's also changing, but it is difficult to have people look at you like you're not good enough because you are working X number of hours or because you have a career job. You mentioned this, Sarah. You get asked, "Oh, how is it to be away from your kids when you are traveling?" But probably most men will never be answered or asked that question, and it makes you feel like you are wrong.

Sarah Nicastro: Right.

Trine Nielsen: I think to me, that is really challenging because none of us want to be bad parents. I don't think men want to be bad parents as well. So being met with that constantly is quite a pressure. So all of you out there, keep that in mind when you meet some of the working moms. I think making it worthwhile is everything. I actually feel that I'm a better person. I'm a better leader. I feel like I am much more productive. I get so much shit done, stuff done in half the time because I have to and because I want to prioritize being with my family. And having a kid now, the first part is not so fun. But now, it's actually really fun. And I think it gives nice perspective.

When it comes to what companies can do, I think honestly, there's so much potential. There's fundamentally, I think, flexibility for everyone is such a gift. And I think the COVID pandemic has also, if we want to look at the bright side, that is one of the things that came with it. So I'm at home today. I work at home much more than I did before, which saves me transport. And it gives me focus time. Before, I was sitting in an open office. But it also means that I can do a bit of laundry so when the kiddo comes home, I'm there. There's not 10 other things that I need to do. So the flexibility for me is absolutely critical.

I also think something really simple as changing maternity and paternity rules and payment during maternity and paternity is extremely important because in small companies, I think a lot of females or working moms are out of the running because there is what if they go on maternity leave? Europe is different. In Denmark, a woman can be out for up to 12 months. So having someone who could potentially be out for 12 months can be a very large expense. So I think there's a lot of structural things that we as society can do to make it more equal also for the sake of the men. Why shouldn't the men get paid on paternity leave?

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. Well, also you mentioned flexibility for all, and that's a really good point. First of all, it wouldn't be fair to only offer flexibility to women because they may be moms, but more importantly, you and I have talked about the fact that we both have very supportive male spouses. So them having flexibility helps because it creates a better balance in the home ecosystem to say, "The pressure isn't on me to have the flexibility to be able to run to school or to do this or whatever." It's shared, right?

Trine Nielsen: Yeah.

Sarah Nicastro: So yeah, that's a good point. IFS did a video, a panel discussion with some folks for International Women's Day, and our chief customer officer, Mark Moffitt, was interviewed. And I loved one of the points he made which was around your point of, "I get comments that a lot of men in my role wouldn't get about being away from my kids. Who's taking care of your kids? Et cetera." And he said, before you ask someone a question or make a statement to someone, could you reverse that and could you say it to another gender? Or if you wouldn't say it to everyone, just don't say it. Because there's a lot of... And I don't think it's ill intent.

Trine Nielsen: No.

Sarah Nicastro: Its just people aren't aware of, to your point, then as a mom, you walk away and I'm like, "Oh my gosh," questioning all of my life's choices. But at the end of the day, I think you and I both love what we do. And so we are moms and we love our children, but part of what makes us who we are as human beings is being passionate about the work we do and doing that work. So it's a balance that to us is worthwhile. And I think there's a lot of benefit to employers to be creative about how to support not only women and working moms, but all their employees, to have a good balance and to offer more flexibility, more resources, more support to... Everyone can benefit from being able to better integrate their work and their lives.

I don't like the idea of balance. I think it's more of a blend. If you can be in an environment where you're at work and something happens with your son and you're not scared to say, "I'm really sorry, but I need to go be with him, and we'll have to pick this up tomorrow," and then they know you will. So they get the benefit of having your intelligence and your talent. You don't have that constant stress of, "What if? What if? What if?" It's just, "Okay, today is a great day to put 90% of my energy into work, and tomorrow it might have to be 5% because the little one's sick and I have to stay home with him," or what have you. So it's an interesting thing to sort out.

Okay, I realize we are over time. Do we have time for one last question?

Trine Nielsen: Yes.

Sarah Nicastro: Okay.

Trine Nielsen: Let's do it.

Sarah Nicastro: All right. The last thing I just want to do is go back to the role you had at Twill. When I found you through Frank, his post had said that you created this offering and experienced 400 times growth in three years. I'm not sure if that's accurate. Sounds like it is. So extreme success in taking this idea from vision, putting the strategy in place, executing on the innovation, and more importantly scaling it. If you look back on that journey, particularly if you look back on that journey thinking about listeners that might be fighting some legacy, what is the biggest lesson you learned or words of wisdom that you would share with folks from that experience?

Trine Nielsen: I think, listen, a corporate innovation can be challenging because the legacy can hold you back. But I also think the legacy can be what really fuels you to move with speed. Looking back at everything, by the way, it was a massive team effort and a lot of people involved to make it a success across the world. But I think one of the things, the first couple of years, we did not have much traction. We were not sharp enough on who our target customer was. We did not have enough focus because of that so we were developing left, right, and center, and we were not sharp enough on what is scalable, what is not, what is truly needed to win in one particular place. So strategically, we made a shift where we said, "Okay, now we're focusing on this segment of the market and we're going to do everything we can to win it."

And I think that was the game changer because also when we did that, it was much easier to say, "Okay, on these five points, we will use the legacy way of working because it will not add any significant value to the customer that we try and rebuild this from scratch." So that means speed and reduction of complexity. And then we said, "Okay, these five points is what will truly differentiate us and what we feel will make us win with this segment, so this is where we have to really challenge the existing legacy, think different, and build something completely different."

And I think because it was in a corporate context, trying to find that balance between how do we not disturb the corporate enamel too much by being too creative? So these things we will do your way, yes, yes, yes. And then trying to see how do we get the corporate to also change their way of working through being very insightful on customers using all the data that we have. So never speaking of, "Oh, but we need this because it's nice," but saying, "We need this because we can see from the customers they're acting like this so we have to change this process."

I think one of the big challenge that we had was how do you get priority when your business model is all about delivering something in the future. So delivering for potential where in a big corporate, everything is about delivering right now. And I think that was something that was a constant battle, and that slowed us down more than we would've liked to. You can say we grew significantly. It was a combination of a lot of hard work, a little bit of luck. So the COVID pandemic, customers not having space anywhere meant customers came to us so we could pick and choose which is actually really nice and very fortunate. But they also only came to us because we had been out trying to find them before so they actually knew who we were.

And I think hard work, a bit of luck, and a different way of thinking is what enabled us to do that in three years. It was crazy. We made so many mistakes. We had so much fun. And I think we all had that purpose of allowing the one container person to be as successful as the big corporations, and I think that was a really game changer.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, I love that. And I think there's plenty of points in there about, to your point, driving progress with specifics, focusing in so that you're not trying to be all things to all people, at least in the beginning. You get that initial success that you can look to scale. And I think you mentioned that it was slower than you the first bit. You didn't make that much progress. So I think it's a lot of persistence and tenacity.

Kudos to you and the team to seeing it all the way through.

Trine Nielsen: Thank you.

Sarah Nicastro: Yes. All right, Trine, I've taken so much of your time. I really appreciate you coming and sharing with us. Thank you for being here today.

Trine Nielsen: Thanks for having me.

Sarah Nicastro: Yes, you can find more by visiting us at futureoffieldservice.com. While you're there, be sure to sign up for the biweekly Future of Field Service INSIDER so you can stay up to date on the content. Also, take a look at the remaining locations for the Future of Field Service Live Tour events, and register for the one closest to you. 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.

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Electrolux’s Consumer-Centric Transformation

April 12, 2023 | 25 Mins Read

Electrolux’s Consumer-Centric Transformation

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Sarah welcomes Kristoffer Brun, Service Operations Product Manager at Electrolux, to discuss how the company is transforming across the board, including service, in a consumer-centric way and the impact those efforts are having on service execution.

Sarah Nicastro: Welcome to the Future of Field Service podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Nicastro. Today we're going to be taking a look at Electrolux Consumer-Centric Transformation. I'm excited to be joined today by Kristoffer Brun, who is the service Operations product manager at Electrolux. Kristoffer, welcome to the Future of Field Service podcast.

Kristoffer Brun: Thank you very much. Hello.

Sarah Nicastro: So this is your first time here on the podcast meeting, Kristoffer, but he and I have had a number of conversations and he, alongside one of his colleagues, spoke last year at the Stockholm Future Field Service live tour event. So happy to have you with us before we get into the story of the transformation that you have underway, just tell everyone a little bit about yourself, your role and the Electrolux business.

Kristoffer Brun: Yes. I can start with saying that I'm really looking forward to the next Future of Field Service event. So yes-

Sarah Nicastro: Thank you.

Kristoffer Brun: ... looking forward to it. I joined Electrolux over four years ago. It was actually not my first contract with Electrolux though, because I spent two summers during university working in one of our factories where actually my brother worked at the time as well. So I already had a personal connection to the company before joining this time, I should say.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, and a family connection.

Kristoffer Brun: Indeed.

Sarah Nicastro: Now he is not still with Electrolux, is he?

Kristoffer Brun: No, nope.

Sarah Nicastro: No. Okay.

Kristoffer Brun: Yeah. But overall, Electrolux group leading a global appliance company, brands such as Electrolux, of course, AG, Frigidaire in the US and more than a hundred years old, we celebrated a hundred years a few years ago. Headquarters in Stockholm, Sweden, where I'm based. And I am working as a product manager for service operations tool and processes in Europe. And in Europe we have a landscape within service operations where we have both employed the service technicians and also of course service partners. So within a country, we can have a mix of both employed service engineers and service partners.

Sarah Nicastro: Okay. All right. Okay. So that lays the land. Now, I think one of the most important things you said there is a hundred year legacy. And transformation is hard overall, but it can be particularly hard for companies that have this deep rich legacy because you're really digging in and changing the way that people have worked for quite a long time. Now, at Electrolux, I love the way that this transformation is structured because it's, in my opinion, the way it should be done. It's not a transformation for transformation's sake or this concept of, well, we just need to be modern, so let's do X, Y, and Z. It's consumer centric, so it's centered around your customers, how their needs, expectations, preferences have changed, and then matching internally how you need to adapt to that in terms of whatever transformation it entails.

So we're going to talk obviously and mostly today about service because it's the future of field service and you're in service. But I guess to start just broadly explain to people, the drivers for this overall company quest of consumer centered transformation.

Kristoffer Brun: I think we are like many companies, and this is a few years before I joined even, but us and also many companies with us at the time, or let's say a decade ago or so, was more or less looking at consumer interaction as a necessary evil. Basically discussing how to reduce consumer contact. While of course, we and many others shifted that mindset to instead, today the Electrolux Group purpose is around the shaping, living for the better, shaping living for the better consumer. We're basically, our products and services are simply helping consumers in their lives. Can be instead of just having an oven instead that we are making great tasting healthy food for friends and family. We help consumers care for their clothes by making them stay new, great looking for longer. These thoughts and messages and visions basically.

And related to that, of course, it means that we would like to have as much data as possible across the consumer journey, and where we can of course also own the touchpoints to a greater extent. And the focus has been for many years now to make it easy for our consumers to interact with us at every stage of their journey with us, from purchase and ownership, et cetera. And with that, we have restructured the entire organization around this new mindset. And of course a lot of initiatives around having the consumer at the heart of the business model, both central of course, but a lot of focus locally out in the countries in how to work in making the consumers happier. So it has been an extremely impressive journey, I must say, although I wasn't part of it from beginning, but just looking at our NPS and CSAT curves, extremely amazing.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. And I think, you telling that story is representative of the trajectory of viewing service as a cost center. So to your point, it was not that those customer interactions were a nuisance, but it was something to be minimized. It was something to be as efficient as possible, not something like you're saying now to put at the heart of the business. So an opportunity to understand what do they value, what do they want, and how can we take that insight and use it to differentiate ourselves and to add more value or become their brand of preference, et cetera. So I think what's interesting to me is that a lot of organizations recognize the opportunity of service as a profit center versus a cost center, but for a variety of reasons, they don't actually tackle their transformation through the lens of customer centricity. And so that's what I think is good about Electrolux, is this recognition of, okay, so there's an opportunity to change. We need to do that by orienting what we do around what our customers want, need and value.

A lot of times companies can assume they know, okay, well if we do this, we'll be better. And then our customers will feel that impact, but they're not really positioning the need for that journey around that customer experience. So I think that's a really positive mindset and it's a good anchor for a lot of the change. So we'll get into this a bit later, but change is hard. So if you can tie that to we're doing this for our customers and here's why, here's how versus we're just doing this, period.

Kristoffer Brun: And especially if you're doing it as an organization instead of just one or two roles within the organization that should drive this and try to influence the others here. We basically restructure the entire business model purpose, organizational structure, all of it. And I think of course, that it takes a lot of courage to do that and a lot of hard work, obviously. But yeah.

Sarah Nicastro: Especially from a business that has a hundred years of history. I was being interviewed by someone the other day that's working on a thesis and they're looking at different service business models and they said, "Well, what's the difference between a company that will take this on and a company that won't?" And I said, "Honestly, a lot of it is leadership, it's mentality." Because to your point, complacency is very appealing for a lot of folks. And it does take courage to change. And I think this journey that you're on is one that people will have to embark on one way or another at some point, but making the decision to do it proactively and go this road is definitely courageous. So this is a journey at Electrolux to the point we just talked about. This is not just a service transformation, it's a company-wide, consumer centric transformation. Obviously service plays a big part in that. So let's talk about that part specifically. What is the contributing factors of service and how have you looked at the ways in which service needs to evolve to contribute appropriately to the company's mission?

Kristoffer Brun: I mentioned the purpose before and beneath the purpose, we have also three drivers. So that is act as sustainable, create better experience, and always improve. And I think service operation ties into actually all of these three drivers one way or another. So it actually plays quite a big part in our overall strategy. And in short, it's all about the consumers today and always has been I guess, they expect a smoother service appointment booking. So if something is wrong with my appliance, I would like it to be easy to book a visit. Obviously, since it's an appliance, I very often would like a technician to be here as soon as possible and with information and reminders perhaps leading up to the visit. And I also expect that the technician should solve it first visit, because otherwise I can't cook for another two days or whatever that can be.

And obviously on top of that, I expect the technician to be tidy, professional, et cetera. And our technicians, they have an extremely difficult task at hand here because they are in some of the most private environments of all consumers bathrooms or kitchens, basically. Often, the consumer needs to be home and they are often quite interested in what a technician is doing and worried, of course. Will I be able to do the laundry tonight or not, basically. So it's a quite stressful experience. If you think about it from that perspective, considering service technician in other industries, for example, B2B with a planned maintenance, et cetera. But basically, we needed tools and processes that could support this to meet the consumer's expectations around this. So for example then, we needed an optimization engine that could help us utilize the technicians in a way that we could reach maximum number of consumers in a day or give them the act sustainable aspect, for example, drive less kilometers per job. So yeah, it ties into so many of the company’s overall strategy basically.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. And it's interesting, this evolution that we've seen in the way customers were approached, perceived, communicated with 10, 15 years ago versus today, the expectations are significant for a brand like Electrolux to keep up with. And I think that it bleeds into a B2B environment for sure. The expectations we have in our personal lives are influencing the expectations in the B2B service landscape, but consumers of all, the tolerance level is very low because we've just become accustomed to the real-time visibility and the ease of logging onto an app and all of those things so it's a lot to keep up with.

So you're looking at, okay, how do we take these expectations? And in part, part of the solution is leverage technology that will help us manage that complexity so that the outcome for the customer is a seamless experience being there as quickly as possible, first time fix, et cetera. So you landed on IFS as your service management provider, and then a few weeks into the project COVID hits. So that's a major, major disruption at the beginning of what is already a very big transformation project. So talk a little bit about what that meant and how you adapted and managed to move the project ahead and stay focused on the transformation.

Kristoffer Brun: Yeah, I actually remember more or less when COVID hit the project, say it was a Friday evening and we had planned a workshop the week after in Stockholm, physical workshop where people were flying in from all of Europe. And this Friday afternoon we all received the text messages from Electrolux basically with the instructions around physical meetings with immediate effects. So of course the chat, it was quite a crazy Friday evening from that sense. But we basically moved it from physical then to online within just a few hours. And Electrolux, at least in Swedish standards. They were very early and very proactive when this hit. And we were actually weeks before other companies in limiting physical meetings and really putting our own restrictions in place before actually it was forced upon us basically. I must say, I was very impressed by how that was handled by the company.

And of course also we had office restrictions immediately as well. But I think also that moving one day to another from physical meetings to online meetings only, we were also able to come together as a group very well, although a very big group, but we were able to do that in a very short amount of time, I must say. And it can be a natural effect with a external threat like COVID, right? But we really did it and we had a great team doing the best with the situation at hand, basically. And we have been struggling as well to find our new ways of working in the new world, especially on the meetings booked versus meetings needed, and I guess at least other organizations to struggle with that as well, because in an online world it's so much easier to book an appointment with.

And it's also easier to add more people than really needed because it's just a click away to add one more instead of meeting in a room face to face. Because if you do that, everyone should be contributing more or less, but it's slightly different online. And of course, we sat centrally, both in Stockholm in the headquarters and working remote with a local pilot country implementing a solution that was new to us, new to them. So of course we would like to have met the local organization much, much more. And of course the end users, but also the local project team. But I must say that I'm very impressed in how everyone involved in this exchange and the positive attitude, I must say, because the local team came from an unsuccessful pilot just before this pilot where they rather than complaining, just went on the horseback again, more or less, and delivered this pilot instead with very good business results so far. Very, very good transformation work.

And I think that this was a part of that success. The pilot country and all the other countries that will be using the solution, were part of making the decision, which solution to go for. So we involve all the end, I wouldn't say the end users, but the countries that will be using the solution. We involve them all in the decision process with the central people of course as well. And on top of that, of the local team, we have the central team based in several countries and working in imperials more or less day and nights to deliver. So it has been extremely impressive to see also from the big change that COVID brought on top of everything else that needed to be done, basically.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. All right. So you have the central teams and the local teams working together. You mentioned that prior to deciding to implement IFS, you had had a pilot of a different solution that failed. And so I think that's important to mention just because it contributes to the complexity of managing the change. So I think it is amazing that the teams reacted the way they did because they could have just been frustrated by that experience and let that blend into negativity and instead, like you said, got back on the horse, they were invested in this project and choosing a solution and all of that. But I think to have to change gears and do this entirely remotely is really, really tough because this idea of change management is really the biggest challenge most companies face in a service transformation. And so removing the opportunity to interact in person, but like you said, when you're doing it remote, there's so much that changes.

People can hide in the meeting and not contribute. It's harder to read if people are okay or if they're frustrated or if they're struggling. There's all these things that become more complex. So I think it's incredible that you all pulled together and stayed focused and figured out how to navigate that and still progress. Is there anything from that experience that stands out as a lesson learned? How do you think particularly the local teams, what do you think it was about their minds that allowed them to not get negative but stay focused on moving ahead?

Kristoffer Brun: I think it's very much and leadership question this. And the attitude and the atmosphere that we leaders and of course also locally in that country provided and was the messages that they were sending locally basically. And I must say also, it's quite impressive that we dared to say that the previous solution was not what we wanted and let's take another route because that is expensive, that is time-consuming, that is a hard way out. Instead of trying to fit whatever process into a solution that is not really fit for that purpose. I'm sure that other companies and ourselves likely in the past would've gone that route instead because that is easier. We have invested so much to this point, so let's continue to do that instead of just taking a completely different route. And I think also that mindset together with that this country and all the countries were part of the new solution, the new route forward, that also led to that mindset, to that approach in the end. Because everyone got what they wanted this time, it's safe to say.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, you're absolutely right. That is a hard decision to make. And maybe part of the mentality going into this project was unappreciation for the fact that the company was willing to start fresh and say, "Okay, let's get what we need to get. And we're listening, we hear you that this isn't going well, so let's stop and work together to find the right thing." Yeah, that's a really good point. So another aspect you shared with me that I thought was really interesting and impressive is that 50% of the European implementation team working on this project are women, which is awesome, and not always the case or often the case in service. So I'm curious, your thoughts on how do you feel like having that diversity of thought contributed to the success of the project?

Kristoffer Brun: First of all, Electrolux Group is working extremely hard as a company with what we call diversity and inclusion where agenda is one part and it's part of the yearly sustainability report available on our website. And the vision there is to become a leader in diversity. And we do a lot of initiatives around this internally of course, but also externally. So we partner with a yearly event in Stockholm called Women in Tech, for example. And the past few years at least, I've seen an increase within the share of women working in the products without being involved at least. So I'm quite impressed by this. You can see that we as a company are succeeding in this. And traditionally, we talk about contact center, mainly women and service operations, mostly men. And I think that is changing. It's changing now, and it's changed since I joined this has changed. So just the four and a half years where I've been here, I see a big change in this.

And of course if we take it also to also other nationalities, if we take that approach, we have a central team based in a variety of countries across Europe, Spain, Belgium, Poland, Denmark, and also in the Stockholm headquarters, we have so many nationalities working under the same roof. So it's a fantastic mix of both nationalities and locations and gender, I would say. And of course we have effects of that in terms of not being as streamlined. New angles, new ideas or creativity I guess is the word I'm looking for. So there are a lot of synergies to come from this. And of course it could be easier to do if you are a really big company, of course. But I think it's quite cruel to be a part of a company working very hard with this. I think it's for the employees, it's something to be proud of, I think.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, and I think if you take it back to the overall mission we're talking about, which is this consumer-centric transformation, I have to imagine you have diverse consumers. And so-

Kristoffer Brun: Yes.

Sarah Nicastro: ... putting a focus on creating an organization that is representative of your customer base helps a lot with being able to bring in different perspectives of what would be helpful in the transformation. And I think that companies, DEI is a huge topic right now, but it's one that there's a big difference between companies that are just paying attention to it to check a box and companies that are making real progress. And I think that progress comes from a recognition of how the diversity of thought, it's not about we need X percent women, we need X percent, this type of person, this type of person, et cetera. It's about knowing that the more diversity you bring in, the more creativity, the more perspective, insights, skill sets, and the better that helps you be if you're looking to innovate and transform and evolve. So I think that's really cool. And I think 50% women in service operations in a European team is a really, really good example of that work paying off and benefiting the organization.

Kristoffer Brun: Indeed.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. All right, so here we are midway through the journey or partway through the journey, and Electrolux has some guiding principles in place to keep you focused on the consumer centric transformation initiative. And so I just want to talk a little bit about what those are, where you are today, what your thoughts are on what comes next, okay. So I'm going to list them off and then you just talk about however you want to talk about. But they're the consumer experience, the employee or what you often call end user experience. The idea of exceptions only, meaning automate whatever's possible to automate, information sharing and collaboration and performance visualization. So these are like the five pillars. So can you share a little bit about where you're at, where you're going and how you're using those principles to stay focused?

Kristoffer Brun: And I can mention that this is the service operations product mission and our base try also to connect the overall strategy from the company overall business model into how our processes, functionalities, and features basically fit into the big picture. And I don't really have the how to all of these yet. So it's basically themes where we would like to evolve, where we would like to build. And I can say that we're not running short of things we want to do at the moment, but rather it's a hard work of prioritizing it. But we can start with the heart of the business model, again, the consumer experience and remember that they would like us to be there as quick as possible, solve it first to try being informed, leading up to the visit. And we have seen, very, very good results in both CSAT and NPS since Go Live and functionalities here will of course be going forward, route optimization engine, the new functionalities coming there.

So there of course I wouldn't very... Where I will explore future possibilities with IFS going forward in how we can make that even better. And of course, also how can we forecast our workforce in terms of what happens with the different scenarios. So what happens if service repair volumes drops by 20%? What would that mean in terms of our workforce forecasting? Because the data is there in the system and we are doing this outside the system, but how can we tie those processes and tools now together? And maybe we have some machine learning, maybe we have some AI on top of this as well. So I think we have a lot of possibilities going forward in that area.

If we then go into the end user experience, and to your point, it can be both employed but also service partners, but the end users, they would like a system that is intuitive, efficient and value adding. And basically here we're looking into also connecting everything in one place. So if we have a system where everything then user needs in their daily work, and also it could be less frequent such as working with electrolytes. What do I need there? What kind of systems? What information do I need as a service partner? Then everything should be one place. The time needs to be over very soon at least where a user or working with Electrolux need, I don't know, five, 10 different logins to different places. Sorry I don't remember where now, but I read somewhere, the technicians are not afraid of technology. They are afraid of bad technology. And I think that's our responsibility not to bring bad technology.

Sarah Nicastro: I agree.

Kristoffer Brun: Yeah, and very quickly you mentioned it, but around the automation and validation exception handling, basically, I think, and this ties back also to one of the drivers around always improve, because we should all always review our processes and see whether we can reduce repetitive work and instead move to more value adding work. Because we should basically always reserve capacity to improve these things, but because it's so easy that you define a process, you go live and then that's it basically. And then you work on new things. But I think, and this is of course tightly connected also to the end user experience, but here we will have a lot to do always, I should say.

Sarah Nicastro: Just keeping up the date and continually improving, like you said. Yeah.

Kristoffer Brun: Yes. And also of course, preventing end users to enter incorrect combinations of different fields, et cetera. it's quite easy to prevent that these days.

And if we go then to information sharing and collaboration, it's basically a statement, and this is my statement I guess, but basically new technology enables new ways of sharing information, and collaborating, and driving business results. What can we do with that? What can we do with this new technology? And one of the questions we are working with is around how can we provide the employee technician or our service partner technicians with just enough details to successfully execute the service repair? And that is basically information of course from the consumer during the booking for information from the past, from similar visits, and of course also with the experience we have with this consumer, et cetera. But how can we tie everything together and share that information to prepare the technician for the BC as well, the examples.

And in term of terms of the last team, performance, visualization and reporting KPIs, dashboards, et cetera. But one thing I really would like to begin to one day is gamification and basically what gamification within a service operations landscape could look like. And here if there are others out there with this experience, I'm very interested. But basically, how can we make our teams, our end users, competing with each other’s, with themselves? Three, for example, could that be something to look into? You completed 10 successful visits in a row. Here's a, I don't know, a recognition at least, or a notification around it. And also I would like to build it evolving around the consumer. So rather than focus on how many visits we have executed, for example, look at it, how many consumers we have helped. So tying back to the consumers and face there as well. But that would be really interesting to look into.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. So like you said earlier, there's no lack of things you'd like to do, it's just a matter of moving ahead. And I think that's good. It's really representative of how the use of technology has changed. Similar to, we talked about where consumers were a decade ago versus today, technology a decade ago versus today, you used to take a solution, deploy it, let it do its thing and move on to something else. And with the sophistication we have today, there's always ways to continue to improve upon what you have and look for, okay, well we have this capability, I bet we could also use this in this way or over here. So the goal isn't to just put something in place, achieve the minimum possible performance and then let it roll. The idea is to invest in a solution that you know can get more out of overtime and can grow with the business. So that makes sense. And it's good to have a to-do list keeps us busy.

Can you just share quickly, you're still in the process of deploying the service management solution, but what have you seen so far? Where are you at with that today?

Kristoffer Brun: Two things on top of mind. First one is the importance of involving the end users. And maybe no use these days, but if we do the whole work beforehand, if we understand where they come from and the current processes, their current challenges. Because if we can tackle a few of these, we already have a quick wins in the transformation journey already there. And if we can have them involved across basically from business requirement gathering to design phase, and then from there on, we already have a win there because they have been part of this and we haven't made this stupid central, this bad technology basically what I referred to earlier. So we have a win already there also on the transformation side of it. And on top of that, we have better processes. So I think it's a given.

And the second one is around simulation beforehand. We now have a system which offers this. And I think the times we spent before Go Live simulating different scenarios, simulating different optimizer settings. It paid off Go Live because we didn't impact the consumers in that extent that we could have done if we went live and then set the mix with the settings afterwards basically.

So I'm quite confident that we had a positive impact on the consumers actually. And of course from a transformational side here as well, if we involve the key users that will be working with the resource optimizer, they are involved in these simulations, so they build understanding from the tool. They had the ownership of the settings earlier and we also have that already from that point, instead of having that from the goal line or from the training later on.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. Now, you mentioned earlier that you've seen improvements in CSAT and NPS. What about the objectives of increasing visits per day, reducing kilometers per job? Where are we at as far as achieving those objectives?

Kristoffer Brun: So we have seen a positive impact in both of these areas as well. So we are doing more service repairs per job now, service repairs per day than before. And of course driven kilometers is also less now. So we have seen both of them from the Go Live, which is of course really impressive.

Sarah Nicastro: And I think the goal is looking at those things and how they all intersect. So with a tool like IFS, PSO, so that's what we're talking about, an AI-based planning and scheduling optimization. The goal is to be able to do more visits per day, but not just to do them, to do them in a way that ties to those increases in CSAT and NPS or contributes to that and to reduce miles without affecting that consumer experience. And so that goes back to the objective is to do these things, to make these improvements within the business that all contribute to this better consumer experience. So it's not about, well, we achieved one of these goals, but unfortunately we didn't hit the other two. If you can do it the right way, you can achieve them simultaneously. So last question is, for you as a leader, what is the most important lesson you've learned in this journey?

Kristoffer Brun: I know that I sound like Michael Scott in the TV series The Office or David Brent for UK listeners, but it is to have fun. And basically what does that mean in this context? Basically in implementations like this, I would argue independent of company, that everyone is under a lot of pressure, at least during time periods. So basically how can we as leaders support our teams, especially like we talked about earlier today in an online world. And how can we recognize good behavior and good performance, and how can we motivate, how can we inspire in front of a webcam? And I think definitely if we as product managers now in this case for the Field Service operations, we are responsible basically to connect what we are doing to, in this case, Electrolux groups business model and strategy. Everyone needs to be on the same page. What we are doing today impacts the entire business model, how the entire vision, how the entire strategy.

And I think in order to have more fun, or at least to be more motivated, we would need to have a clear and understandable product mission connected to this strategy so we understand why we are building what we are building, why this feature is important. And of course, like we said, a sense of belonging in an online world, it's hard. Just a few years ago we shook hands and as hello to in a meeting, and now the standard hello phrase is, can you hear me? And I think we have a lot of things still to do here in this online oriented world, and I learned a lot, but I guess I fortunately have a lot to learn around that as well.

Sarah Nicastro: I think that's such a good answer because you're right, the transformation itself is pressure. Obviously we talked about how that was compounded in this case by COVID hitting, which was an immense amount of stress and angst for a lot of people on top of work. And there's always going to be something, right? And so looking for the opportunities to have fun. And as a leader, remembering that in so many ways, your attitude and your mindset sets the stage and people will mirror and mimic that. So if you can look for ways to be enthusiastic and celebrate the wins, even the little ones, and have fun and make people feel connected, then it's a lot easier for them to handle that change and to show up with the mindset of, yeah, we can do this because we're all in it together versus it being some frustrating task that they're being mandated to do.

So I think that's a really important answer. I like it. Good. Well, Kristoffer, thank you so much for coming and sharing your experiences with our listeners. I always enjoy talking with you and we'll have you back at some point in the future to see where things are at and how the continual improvement journey is going. But in the meantime, look forward to seeing you in Stockholm soon.

Kristoffer Brun: Very good. See you soon.

Sarah Nicastro: All right. You can find more by visiting us at futureoffieldservice.com. While you're there, be sure to sign up for the future of Field Service Insider, which is how you can make sure the latest content is delivered to you every other week in your inbox. Also, check out the live tour schedule so that you can join us at the location nearest you. 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.

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How Whirlpool Creates Field Service Differentiation

April 5, 2023 | 29 Mins Read

How Whirlpool Creates Field Service Differentiation

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

Sarah Nicastro: Welcome to the Future of Field Service podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Nicastro. Today we are going to be taking an inside look at how Whirlpool creates field service differentiation. I'm excited to welcome to the podcast today, Simone Silva, who is the Senior Director of Consumer Services. And Matt Ganus, who is the Director of Home Services, both at Whirlpool. Simone, and Matt, welcome to the Future of Field Service podcast.

Simone Silva: Thank you, Sarah. It's a pleasure to be here with you today.

Matthew Ganus: Thank you, Sarah. It's a pleasure to be here.

Sarah Nicastro: Awesome. Okay. We're going to have ourselves a regular party here, and I'm going to do my best to make sure, it's been a long time since I've had two people on at once, but I think I can handle it. Okay. So to start, I'm just going to ask you both to share a little bit more about yourself, your backgrounds, et cetera. And Simone, I'm going to start with you. I think most people are familiar with the Whirlpool brand, but if you can just also recap the organization as well, that would be great.

Simone Silva: Sure, no problem. So starting with Whirlpool, Whirlpool Corporation has a portfolio of iconic brands, not just in the United States, but all over the world. Here in the United States the brands that we go to market with are the very popular major appliances brands, Whirlpool, Maytag, KitchenAid, Jenn-Air, and Amana. So pretty clear segmentation in different portfolios by brands, but we do believe that's one of our strengths. We go to market with products that really deliver to the experiences that our consumers are looking for. Whirlpool has 111 years of history in the United States and in the world, so it does make us very proud to be part of such a great corporation. Switching gears to myself, I've been with the company for 16 years now. It's hard to believe it's been that long.

And prior to Whirlpool I worked in automotive for additional 11 years. But here with Whirlpool, my experience has been in quality and service, so about half and half. So half of my tenure with Whirlpool in product quality, supplier quality, and half of my tenure with the company in field service, and more recently in the last four years leading consumer services as a function for Whirlpool. For us consumer services is inclusive of our B2B and B2C contact centers and all of our home services, home delivery, installation and appliance repair.

Sarah Nicastro: Okay, great. Thank you, Simone. And Matt?

Matthew Ganus: Yes. I started with the company about 15 years ago. Most of my responsibilities were all within consumer services. I actually started off as a call agent into the call center with an array of responsibilities. Started on the front line, went into project management, and even got the opportunity to lead our executive corporate teams. I transitioned to service about five years ago to help elevate the service as a differentiator strategy. And as we focus on services, my team's responsibility to deep dive into process opportunities for operational improvements in the field.

Sarah Nicastro: Awesome. I always say when people have been at an organization, especially today, we know that talent is tough, turnover is high, et cetera. When people have been at a company for 10, 15 plus years, I always say it tells me that the company does a good job of not only keeping people happy, but giving people opportunities to grow and expand in their careers, which I think is really cool. Okay. Simone, when we chatted previously, you said that about seven years ago, Whirlpool made the decision to really focus in on field service as a path to differentiation. We're going to talk a little bit about how the company has done that. But can you talk first about how the company recognized the opportunity to use service in that way and really put more power behind the brand through its field service function?

Simone Silva: Sure. Well, I like to describe this as, it all starts with the realization that when a person makes a decision to purchase an appliance, that person is making a long-term commitment. Nobody buys a major appliance for their homes to be a short-lived product that they will deal with for just a couple of months and then be already looking for the next replacement. We are talking about durable goods that will very likely be part of a person's life for the next seven, 10 years, many times way over that timeframe. In pretty heavy use you deal with your refrigerator, your stove, your microwave, every single day, multiple times a day. What we realized is that when somebody makes that commitment to one of our brands, we need to offer more than just the product itself. We need to offer an ecosystem that comes with that product and really impact their lives in a positive way.

That's the role that service can play. When you go to market with a portfolio of products that carry that credibility of high quality service, of friendly service that will be available in any place where you need it, at the time that you needed, I think this gives peace of mind to consumers that is definitely part of the consideration set of whether or not they should be making an investment. I said it started with that realization. It was about seven years ago, like you said, that we agreed to pursue that opportunity. So to really make service a differentiator for each one of our brands, and it's not just the look and feel, we are not talking about a technician that shows up in someone's home with a branded t-shirt and when they go on the next appointment they change shirts.

It's not just the optics of it, it really goes down to leaving that home and leaving the consumer with a very positive experience, an experience that makes them want to stay loyal to our brands. Matt can for sure talk more about all the details of what we do there, but we do take seriously the opportunity of being welcomed into somebody's homes and really make the best of that. Not just repair an appliance that needs repair, but also educate that consumer on the best way to maximize performance and quality and really make their lives easier by utilizing our appliances.

Sarah Nicastro: That makes sense. I talk to companies every day that are looking at how to evolve through service, expand their business through service, differentiate through service, et cetera. And you mentioned that Whirlpool has 111 year old history. And so it's really common that even once a company recognizes that there's this potential to use service more strategically, when you're going from just a long history of a product focused mindset, it's a big change to put service at the top of the list as well and to have that be top of mind. One of the things that I thought was really interesting is we talked about the fact that the company, I think in part to work toward that mindset shift, the company will have a service leader go side by side with a salesperson to customers so that you're always representing service alongside the product and making sure that the brand is always seen internally and externally as both.

Matt, can you talk a little bit about that process and the thinking behind it and what you've found by, I don't want to say forcing them to unite, but I think it's making sure everyone's working together.

Matthew Ganus: I think it's really critical that you have a collective strategy on the sales and service side. Sales, they have to sell the product really well and it's important to showcase if, products do fail and we don't expect them to, but if a failure or repair does occur, we need to have the right service recovery processes, not only to fix the product, but ensure that we regain trust from our consumer within the service network. I look at this as service as a true catalyst for brand power. And when you couple that with the right selling strategy, this is where I believe that differentiating in the marketplace can truly occur.

Sarah Nicastro: It's a stumbling block for a lot of companies, right? Because they focus on the service transformation within the service function, but not on connecting it to the other parts of the business. It's a missed opportunity, because a customer becomes a customer through that sales process, but if you have service there from the beginning, it makes for a more seamless customer experience. And it also reinforces internally the mindset of the fact that the product and the service go hand in hand. So service is as of seven years ago a key focus in terms of differentiation for Whirlpool. And we're going to, again, talk about some of the specific tactics and processes, et cetera.

But another thing we have to mention that I think people will find interesting, is that Whirlpool made the decision to focus on providing its service exclusively through independent service providers. Simone, can you talk a little bit about that decision?

Simone Silva: I sure can. We've explored both models. We've had many years of experience with a factory service model, and we also have a lot of years of reliance on independent providers. I think that anybody who is really invested in understanding the service industry will come to the conclusion that in the United States the most successful service companies, most of them start as a family business and they are on the fourth, fifth generation within that same family. The way I like to think about it is that by partnering with those providers, we get the best of both words, because we come in with the drive and likely shoulder the infrastructure of a big corporation, and we pair that with the passion of a small business owner or a family owned business.

It is very regionalized. We do know that our characteristics when it comes to regulations and licenses and things that are very particular to the subdivisions or the different geographies in the country by partnering with independent providers, that factor already starts to not be a roadblock for a large corporation operating out of the headquarters here in Michigan. I think independence have more agility and flexibility to scale up and down to our service needs more so than what a large corporation would have. But it doesn't come without a very high level of trust and partnership. Like I said, we only were confident that this would be a model interesting for us and right for Whirlpool, because we had the right relationships with those providers, we had their absolute loyalty and passion for our brands.

When you talk to any of our providers, particularly the ones that are from what we call the W service network that's a subset of independent providers that manage most of our volume in the market. They speak about our shared consumers with all the same passion and willingness to provide a great experience that any of us would within Whirlpool. So when you have all those elements, there is no reason why not to leverage that as our model and build up on all the positives of it, the small business mindset, the passion, the knowledge of the different regional areas. That's what I see as one of our biggest advantages.

Sarah Nicastro: I love that. And I think that when you talk about the decision strategically to put more focus on differentiating through the field service experience, I think for some people then saying, and we're doing that through independent providers, those two things would be at odds with one another. Do you know what I mean? That's what makes this an interesting story because you have found a way to, like you said, bring together the best of both worlds. And so we're going to talk a little bit about how you're doing that. Matt, were you going to say something?

Matthew Ganus: Just to build on that, Sarah, I think we've had, to Simone's point, both models, our internal technicians and independents. I think there's benefits of both. I think what we see as a unique and interesting dynamic to play out here is the entrepreneurial spirit with our independents, as Simone alluded to, we look at these entities in the marketplace as entrepreneurs. And I think that provides a level of skin in the game if you can look at it as we both partner with a trusted relationship. And I think if we back up and we start to see how this relationship plays, we mutually agree that we need to improve, we have to have the right operational efficiencies and ultimately we want to deliver to the customer expectations and those requirements to have a five star experience.

I think if we do it right, we've learned that these efficiencies not only help serve our mutual consumers, but they also can deliver higher profit margins to the bottom line. And together it becomes a very viable partnership. It doesn't always have to be a hands-off management system. In fact, we found the more integrated and embedded we both are, that partnership continues to grow and both of these relationships I think have a significant amount of skin in the game and we win or lose together.

Sarah Nicastro: I think that's a good point, Matt. It's mutually beneficial, but it's also shared risk I guess, or shared reduction of risk. And what by that is if you think about an entrepreneur, a lot of times the objective there is they want to be independent. They don't want to go work for Whirlpool proper, they don't want to sell the family business, they want to be independent. But with that comes the risk of, okay, am I going to have enough business from quarter to quarter, year to year? And so this partnership gives them some stability. And then on the flip side, it gives Whirlpool I think a lot of agility. Simone, you mentioned not having to worry about those regional differences. Being able to trust those providers with some of the things that don't need to be Whirlpool's core competency or area of expertise, allows you to not have to focus on all of it and leverage these partners in a more agile way than if you were trying to globally or even regionally standardize everything. So yeah, really interesting.

Simone Silva: Sarah, one aspect that I think is very critical and at times people in corporate jobs like ours, we lose sight or we don't think of how relevant that is, is to design an experience around the consumer behaviors. The human element was that individual who will make the first phone call to request a service visit. When you run market studies in this area, in North America, you see that there is a tendency, there is a preference of consumers to rely on that company that they drive by every day and they know it's a reliable service provider associated with Whirlpool. They have in smaller towns, they have kids who go to the same school and that's the reality of our service industry. It would be not very smart of us to ignore that fact and just assume that consumers would also value our approach to service with a one size fits all, a national provider as being their best choice.

No, when they have that trust, that reliance on a community small business that they're serving, we are better off partnering with those companies and bringing our very best to them, but also leveraging what they can bring to the table in order to deliver that ideal customer experience that we want the Whirlpool consumers to count on. It's definitely a win-win and they know we depend on them, but we also value our partnership. We are here for the long run and year over year they have our commitment. Don't take that as we don't hold them accountable. Matt can speak to all the details of our management operating systems, our governance, but at the end of the day it's all to make all those independent providers better and together deliver an ideal customer experience.

Sarah Nicastro: That makes sense. All right, so Matt, let's talk about some of those aspects. You said, and Simone said this to me the first time we spoke is, we have to keep in mind that going independent doesn't mean being hands off. I think a lot of that trepidation comes from you're just relinquishing all control and hoping that the people you are partnering with will do what needs to be done. And so we're going to talk about how that's not the case. We're going to go through some of the ways that Whirlpool is working to direct, equip and empower its field force via the partnerships. The first thing I think we've talked about a little bit, which is this regional approach. You are taking this regional approach, but you have district managers, am I understanding this correctly? That gives regional leadership to pair with the contract workforce or the independent service providers. Can you talk a little bit about that structure?

Matthew Ganus: Yes. Think of it as deploying consulting services across the nation. And a lot of the times our service providers teach us way more than what we can teach them, but we believe it all starts with the proper values, establishing them within their culture, what type of tools they're utilizing on a day-to-day to potentially solve problems, and then how do they maintain the proper disciplines day in day out to maintain the results. So some of the things in terms of our methodologies of how we work is all around continuous improvement and lean tools and principles. We believe by applying these and we've tested, and these are tried and true establishments of how our partnerships work. In terms of governance, and we think about this as our operating rhythm. We call our management operating system here the foundational elements of how we work.

We look at, what are the process nodes that make up taking care of a consumer? Do we have all the right attributes? Is there waste within that process? Where do we want to find improvements? How do we start to go and prioritize those improvements one by one through maybe even a process failure mode effective analysis? Establishing this type of infrastructure into our service companies, we believe makes them stronger and ultimately allows them to solely start to identify and get very excited when opportunities or problems arise. There's a couple of other things around capabilities and competence building that I wanted to talk through as well. We do have traveling trainers. We have what we would have depending on some of the opportunities that we see, byproduct categories and dedicated training that goes across our network.

But it was not only focused on the technical altitude, it's also the soft skills. And that competency development is really critical, When we do have a repair needed, an elevated experience that as we aspire to achieve and we have to think about in some cases fixing the consumer first versus the product and focusing on listening and learning from our service providers is very critical on how we do that emotional intelligence in the home and ensuring that we have the right consumer interaction training. And that's deployed through our competency development training in-house. And if we do those things right, it all equates to what our output of measurements are. We're very big on the numbers here at Whirlpool.

We try to measure all the things that are valuable within the experience, but measuring performance such as customer ratings or even operational metrics, it really is a way to look at are we meeting expectations? Are we delivering upon our promise? And if we are coming up short, what are our actions to get us there? And that's really what our regional approach is with our field service business managers across the nation.

Sarah Nicastro: Okay. So those regional managers, I have a couple questions on this and I'm assuming our listeners would be curious too. How many independent service providers do they work with and what do those relationships look like? How often are they interacting? Are they interacting in person or do those people only work remote? What do those relationships look like?

Matthew Ganus: From a relationship, ratio based, it depends on the region, it depends on the district, but you could have a field service business manager that takes up anywhere from 150 companies depending on their market. What we do have is different tiers within our network. We do prioritize our exclusivity. That's where we have a lot of companies that have gone all in with us, and we see this as a competitive advantage. So a lot of our time is spent there. And how the relationship dynamics play out is, obviously we look at a relationship based approach. We feel like we have the right relationship, we're going to get the right result, but results are going to take a response and they're going to take folks that are going to listen and apply and also have us listen and apply what they need from our end to be in position to win in the marketplace and ultimately take care of our consumer.

What I do think is critical though is, you still have another 149 service companies that are out there that need to be taken care of. It is all about how we put together an operational rhythm through the management operating system. We do look at how do we optimize, how do we automate, how do we create self-service options? Those are very critical. So the reliance on these field service business managers are minimized and they can go after truly what the strategic priorities are in the field.

Sarah Nicastro: That makes sense. I want to go back to the point you made about the exclusive partners. So going back a couple years, there was a podcast I did with a gentleman from Foxtel in Australia and they had an all contract model, different situation, different industry, et cetera, et cetera. But this idea of prioritizing those relationships makes sense. And I'm just curious, what motivation does Whirlpool give those providers to be exclusive providers? Does it just happen or are there incentives for them to be or do that? Do you know what I mean?

Matthew Ganus: Yes. What we have here is an earned performance model. And so as performance is recognized, the market is earned by the service provider. It's critical for us to do our part to position them well to win the market. But as Simone alluded to, we hold our servicers accountable through the 200 plus MSAs across the country. Majority of those are filled with our exclusive providers. And as they are performing, what we've done in the past is we've recognized that performance by actually clearing out some of those servicers that we're in those markets as backups, as long as they're providing the proper availability, meeting our customer expectations, we do everything that we can to create more of a healthy, viable service network, especially with our exclusivity.

Simone Silva: And it's a conclusion that we get to together with them. Part of the things that those district managers are charged with is really to understand the exact service need for the area that they cover. What is the demand? Align what we are seeing from a service calls standpoint with sales projections, what are the new products that are hitting the market and likely staying within that area. So that business intelligence allows for them to understand, okay, do I need to grow an exclusive provider that might be based out of a highly populated metropolitan area and give that company an opportunity to expand? Am I better off because I'm in a rural area with houses that are miles and miles apart from each other to operate through independence? There is a strategy behind each one of those decisions. But when we see an opportunity for somebody to turn exclusive, there are a few things that needs to be true. So performance for sure is one of them.

Healthy demand, flow of business going into that company is another one. And at the end of the day they get to that decision by themselves, because they also see all of the efficiencies that they can gain and efficiencies translate into higher profitability by simplifying their operation, by eliminating the complexity of filing service claims with two or three or four warrant administrators, by having to keep their workforce trained and up to date in a variety of different brands. If it's hard along for them to get familiar with all the products in our portfolio, our four brands, imagine if they are a shop that serves everybody else. So they get to those conclusions and we only convert somebody to the exclusive model when it's mutually beneficial, it needs to be a win-win.

We really take along that commitment of high partnership and that district manager will get to that conclusion together with a candidate when we have a company that is a candidate for exclusivity. But fair enough, we do prioritize. We would like to see that model growing even bigger than it is today.

Sarah Nicastro: Now, this is maybe an unfair question because it wasn't one we talked about, but I have to go off script when I think of things that are really relevant. We've talked a lot about how this works when it's going well. The investment that Whirlpool is putting into having these regional managers that work with these different companies, investing in capabilities and competence building, et cetera. What happens when it doesn't go well? Okay, so what I'm envisioning is, what if there's a company that you're saying, hey, we're doing some traveling training and we want to come through and meet with the team, blah, blah, blah, and they say, no, we don't want to, or they don't want to really meet or engage a lot with the regional manager.

I guess I'm talking about there would be in the metrics if there's a glaring problem, that's going to come up and you're going to be like, whoa, whoa, whoa, this is a bad customer experience, we need to deal with this immediately. But I'm just wondering, knowing that the objective is differentiation through field service, through a very positive brand experience. I'm not necessarily asking how you weed out any flagrant problems because that seems like they would surface, but more so how do you move past the relationships where they don't want to be as collaborative as Whirlpool wants to be? Because that is the risk, right? Is the companies that aren't engaged or don't want to participate, that's where you would be nervous about the customer experience.

Matthew Ganus: I can take a shot at this one, Simone, and then maybe you can fill in the gaps. Sarah, as I talked to a little bit of the management operating system, I'll bring it right back to that. We do have early warnings being identified or signals within the management operating system that says, okay, things just aren't going the way that we expected. And the first thing that happens is you get a phone call, right? I will say with our network, and maybe we're spoiled and lucky on this, 99.9% of the time you have service companies that are willing to work with us. I think it's really important to set those expectations at the beginning of the partnership. We're very diligent on who we authorize. You're just not coming into the network to be authorized for no reason, or we just put a check in the box and you go do your thing and service our consumers.

We're looking at how do we actually build a fundamental relationship with you operationally, and that's going to take both of us to do our part. And as I start thinking about the authorization process, we have robust governance and systems that they have to be approved for. It starts with the background checks, it starts with making sure that they have the right insurance and all of the criteria established there to be an authorized servicer. And as we're going through that process, that process is long data. This doesn't happen over 24 hours. This is a two, three week process where we're working with that company. We have a whole onboarding package, it's a playbook that we share. Within that playbook we're setting the expectations of, what are these metrics that you need to hit? If they aren't hit, what are going to be some of the consequences?

And what we do is we give everybody the benefit of the doubt of what do we need to bring to the table to make you successful? And we start there, we ask questions, we go and see. A lot of my team is traveling across the country on a weekly basis. I just came back yesterday from New Jersey. There are a lot of time and dedication here, commitment to going, seeing operations. When we go and see, it's just not a honk wave, we bring donuts and coffee and we'll see it in the next couple of quarters. It's a matter of let's go in and really diagnose your operations. What's the assessment? Are you healthy? Let's look at everything end to end. Let's map it out. And that lean and continuous improvement methodology is critical. And if they're not embedding that, what does it take for them to understand a couple of those problem solving techniques so we can get these incremental wins.

And after we've exhausted all of our resources and things still aren't happening right, of course we have an improvement plan and we have consequences behind that. But it's within, I think, the relationship expectation that we do everything to be successful and we grow together. And when things don't go right, it's not about pointing the finger, it's about let's go to the data and understand what can we operationally change or adjust to put us back into a winning position.

Sarah Nicastro: That makes sense.

Simone Silva: I would give kudos to Matt and his team for how detailed, how granular that management of the network in the entire country is. They have all of their early signals like Matt called them, down to a zip code level, down to technician level. We have the ability to chase every single one of those signals. And honestly when you approach a problem that way, it's less about finger pointing and having that very cold relationship where we are paying for a service and they need to service well. No, we are there to problem solve. And then they are very open to that. In my couple of years leading this team, some people might get the wrong idea there that we hire and fire companies every other day and it's not really the case. We have a very consistent and sustainable base of service companies that are wanting to work with us.

A lot of them have opportunities for improvements, but we are working together to address. And so there were very few and rare cases where we had a straight elimination of somebody from our network. And it's never a quick move. We consider the consumers that will be impacted. We make sure that that district manager once again has a plan for that area because we need to have coverage. And I agree with Matt, maybe we are spoiled because we rely on, I wouldn't be afraid to say the best ones out there. They are working with us, but we also have very strong coverage. I used to ask the team, why our coverage is not 100%, it's 97%? Their answer has always been, we only do not cover the zip codes where there are no appliances, cemeteries, airports. That's the kind of thing.

But jokes apart. That puts us in a position that whenever we are dealing with problems and chasing those signals, we have time to put a plan together and make sure that the service needs for that area will be taken care of.

Sarah Nicastro: That makes sense. I didn't mean to insinuate I think you have a lot of those, it was more the conversation around the early indicators, because you don't want to wait until you see a lagging indicator in customer experience to notice, okay, maybe something's off here. So that makes sense. Okay. Have a couple more questions I want to try and get through. I'll put this to both of you, which is really just, there is this element within companies that sort of fear this model, that fear lacking control or that they're going to sacrifice quality or consistency of service. And so what would you say to that fear?

Simone Silva: I think that the fear keeps us on our toes and keeps us honest to what we intended to achieve with our model. It's not about taking control over their businesses. It's never been. It's all about that customer experience and together we succeed. So that's how we see it. That's how I hope we come across when we approach service companies and we walk the talk there, we play fair and transparently, transparently to recognize them for their successes and transparently to hold them accountable for their misses. I think when we first started seven years ago or six years ago when we signed the first exclusivity agreement, there was a lot of fear. That was a new thing. And a lot of companies were like, why should we, why would I put all my eggs in the same basket? How can I be dependent?

But I think time has showed then that we were true to that initial value proposition of the elevated experience, the highest quality levels. And by consequence they would grow their operation in a healthy and profitable way. I think the fear being there doesn't bother me. I think it is that constant reminder that we need to deliver on that value proposition and never deviate from it. I don't know, Matt, if you would have different thoughts about it.

Matthew Ganus: No, I don't. I think it's just really critical for us to, from an OEM perspective, demonstrate that we're all in as well. I think once they realize that we're in it together, the fear doesn't necessarily become eliminated, but it does minimize. And then how you work with the opportunities or the problems that are presented, not just focusing on the inputs, but also the outputs. And demonstrating we have an operating system, we do business assessments, we look at the health, we also bring in their perspective. And that's critical. Like I mentioned, and just to reiterate, we're continuing to learn nuances of how service operations are ran every single day. There is just not a plug and play strategy out there. But these servicers, especially the ones that have demonstrated great performance and just becoming very much differentiated in the marketplace from a brand representation standpoint, these companies teach us just the agility that it takes.

And a lot of times we have to try to keep our pace up with theirs. And so I think that's what minimizes the fear, is when you both come to the table, you both have skin in the game and you can look at each other eye to eye and say, yep, we're in this together and our definition of success here is to win and to be very healthy as we continue our journey together.

Sarah Nicastro: Simone, I think the point you made about control is so important. Like you said, it isn't about control, it never has been. Because for a lot of companies it is. That's the fear. But I think that's really the crux of how this entire industry is evolving, because whether we're talking about Whirlpool as an organization looking for how best to partner with independent service providers or whether we're looking at internal leaders, looking at how best to manage W2 workers, relying on control and compliance is not the way that you're going to get the outcome, it's partnering, empowering, equipping for success and then trusting. Yes, is that a little bit scary? Sure. But no one is having success with control as the objective, whatever the model is.

I think that was a really good point. Okay. I know we're over time. I'm just going to ask you guys a last question, which is, I'm going to ask you two different questions. Matt, I'm going to ask you, if you think about the way that Whirlpool invests to make these relationships successful, is there an element of that that you think has the most impact or that companies who are trying to achieve what you're achieving are most commonly missing?

Matthew Ganus: I think just as some lessons learned being five years in, I probably personally underestimated just how important relationships were in the industry. And if I think about really service, I think maybe we might have an opportunity to look at it differently. It's actually just a people business. It's not a product or service business, it's all about dealing with people. And when you get those things right, you unlock capabilities and potential. That's what a lot of our companies have taught us. And I think once you see that being embedded into a culture, now you really know that you have the right partnership there. I think it's not relative on investment. It's a matter of what are those infrastructures that you can build out and ensure that that is cascaded across your network and how do you put that philosophy into a significant amount of companies that can get that right.

Sarah Nicastro: That makes sense. All right. Simone, last question, looking back on your 16 years at Whirlpool, what would you say is the biggest lesson you've learned? You're on mute.

Simone Silva: I could probably split my answer into two here. If I try to stay focused on Whirlpool as a company and their relationships, I think we really leave our values on ours leave, and we take very good care of our people. Whirlpool is very people oriented, and that's probably one the biggest reason why I've stayed for with the company for so long and intent to continue. It's that true and genuine care for the people that make Whirlpool a successful company. If I answer your question more specifically to how we go to market and do service, I think we are not afraid of trying new things and adjusting and being flexible. So yes, we are 111 years old. Yes, we operate in field service through a network of independence that's made of family businesses that started four generations ago, but that doesn't put us in a position that we are complacent and not open to what is next.

I think we are very open to understand the different generations that are out there, not just interacting with our appliances, but in need of service and their choices as ways of communication, or what their expectations are for service. And I think we try to bring that to our network of servicers too, that they too need to be open and remember that when a consumer is assessing how good or bad we are and a service experience they had with us, they are comparing that service experience with the one that they had for their cars, with the ones that they had with their internet provider. I think our words today is so, everything is just so tangled. We are surrounded by all these experiences. That was a big learning for me with Whirlpool, that we take that as a very important thing. We don't lose sight of it, and we are in constant pursuit of how to adjust, how to better respond to that dynamic, not fight it and not be in denial, but to adjust for a better outcome.

That's to me, one of the biggest things that I've seen. And that translates into being customer-centric and putting the consumers first. It's not what Whirlpool can do for them, is how Whirlpool serves them and how Whirlpool responds to their unmatched needs and expectations. And so I think that comes across very consistently in our actions, in how we go to market, how we manage our service network.

Sarah Nicastro: I love that. I think for the people listening that are still focused on fear of losing control, they should shift to being afraid of complacency, because that's the real thing to be scared of at this point. All right. Thank you both so, so much for coming on and sharing with me and our listeners. I really, really appreciate it.

Simone Silva: It was a pleasure to be with you here, Sarah. Thank you so much.

Sarah Nicastro: Yes, thanks.

Matthew Ganus: Thanks for having us, Sarah. Appreciate the opportunity.

Sarah Nicastro: Absolutely. You can find more by visiting us at futureoffieldservice.com. While you're there, be sure to sign up for the Future of Field Service Insider so you can stay up to date, and register for the Future of Field Service live tour event closest to you. 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.

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Busting the Biggest Burnout Myths 

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Busting the Biggest Burnout Myths 

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Sarah welcomes Cait Donovan, burnout expert and host of “Fried – the Burnout Podcast.” Cait and Sarah demystify burnout as a buzzword and Cait shares insight not only for individuals concerned with burnout but also for companies looking to reduce burnout to retain top talent. 

Sarah Nicastro: Welcome to the Future of Field Service podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Nicastro. Today we are talking about the biggest burnout myths. So we are here to bust the biggest myths that exist about burnout. Really excited for my guest today, who is Cait Donovan. Cait is a burnout coach, author, and host of the Fried Podcast, and I love that you say you're on a mission to end burnout culture. So welcome to the Future of Field Service podcast.

Cait Donovan: I'm so excited to be here. Thanks for having me.

Sarah Nicastro: When Cait and I connected to prep for this, I had to stop myself multiple times of trying to turn it into a one-on-one coaching session related to my own burnout. So we'll try not to do that today either, but this is the topic that of course, is timely, relevant to so many folks and companies, right? So whether it's from an individual perspective, the leader's perspective, looking for ways to support their teams or the company, thinking about the relevance of this topic, a lot of different perspectives. So before we get into it all, tell everyone a little bit more about yourself, your journey and how you came to be the burnout expert.

Cait Donovan: Well, I'll start with the burnout expert. I always have a trouble with the word expert, and if we're going to use Malcolm Gladwell's sort of description, then 10,000 hours I covered ages ago, so we can go with that if we need to. But we'll start with I'm a super nerd. School was always easy for me. I got through things. I got a full scholarship to college. I did all the right things, and I think that when I started my burnout recovery, when I realized I was burnt out, I spent a lot of time digging in the research, and one of the things that really ended up standing out to me was that I wasn't represented in it. At the time of my burnout, I was a female entrepreneur, and all of the research was on corporations and hospitals, and I just sat there thinking, "Well, that means there's a lot of gaps in the research."

So I have spent the last seven years, I even went back to school for another degree because I really needed space to be able to dig into some of these gaps. So talking about the burnout myths is really important to me because there's a lot of things that I see out there where I'm like, "No, no, not that."

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. So you were an entrepreneur when you kind of hit your burnout phase, or I guess realization, right?

Cait Donovan: Yeah.

Sarah Nicastro: So what were you doing at the time, and then, so you've written a book, you host a podcast, you do a lot of public speaking and you do coaching. So tell us a little bit about how that journey has unfolded.

Cait Donovan: I realized I was burnt out because of an article. I saw an article, I started reading it. It was about burnout. This was 2016, and it was one of those moments that I know that people say that they have now when they listen to my podcast that I was going, "Tick, tick, tick, tick, oh, shoot." I just kept going down the list and saying, "Oh, okay, this is what's happening to me. And I had been struggling for quite some time." When I look back on it, I really think that my burnout was a good six or seven years long, and I couldn't figure out what was going on, which is strange because at the time I was practicing as a full-time acupuncturist and I was living in Prague, and I didn't understand how someone with the kind of knowledge that I had and the introductions to meditation and stress management and all of those things that are a part of my medicine, how it could happen to me.

Plus I'm a little bit of a perfectionist. So I was a little annoyed that it happened to me. I'm like, "Why didn't I fix this before it happened?" I was a little bit mad at myself. So when I went through the process of healing, I was writing about it online, not for any purpose, just for the sake of saying, "Hey, this is what's going on." People started asking for help, and then I got to a point where I did all of that research. I read through every single thing that was available on burnout in 2016 over the course of one year, everything that was downloadable, and I did it through Cambridge University because my husband was doing a post-grad at the time. So I had all the access to all the university libraries. Like, "Get me everything." I read through it all, and I was reminded of a Charles Bukowski poem about being an author that I read when I was a senior in high school, I think, and I remember reading it and thinking, "Oh, someday this is going to be me."

The poem starts out, and I'm not going to say it word for word because I don't know it word for word, but the idea is you shouldn't be a writer until the words are so piled up in your body that you can't help but get them out, that they're just pouring out of you because you can't keep them in anymore. I remember reading that and being like, "Someday that's going to happen to me." This is when it happened to me. So I wrote the book, not even really for anybody else, I wrote the book because I felt like if I didn't get this information out of my head, I was never going to have room to learn anything ever again. I needed to make space.

So when I finished writing the book around that same time, I had just gone through an injury. I ruptured my achilles, I was unable to work. We had just moved back to the United States. I wasn't able to work. I was in bed all day every day because I couldn't stand for 16 weeks, and the podcast was born during that time. The podcast was born out of a few different things. There's an origin story somewhere out there in the interwebs if anybody wants to look for it. But the dual goal of creating a resource for people and gathering stories for my book that weren't just about me was behind it at the end of the day.

So then the podcast started nine months before a pandemic hit. So people always say, "How do you create a successful podcast?" I'm like, "Get lucky with timing," because you can't control that bit. So I got really lucky with timing, and both of those things catapulted the rest of my work. So all of my coaching clients come directly from the podcast, or 98% of them come directly from the podcast, and a lot of my speaking engagements can come from there as well. Even if it means that a listener is saying, "Hey, there's this speaker I know that has this podcast about burnout," and is sharing it with their HR team or their people.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, what a wild ride. So let's get into our myths. So the first one isn't so much a myth, but more bringing clarity to I guess a working definition of what burnout is. So there can be some misperceptions or maybe widely varying thoughts around what burnout actually is. So can you start by just talking about what is it, and why is it commonly misunderstood?

Cait Donovan: In order to do this, I always go back to the definition that has been accepted by the World Health Organization because we have to start at a common place. According to the World Health Organization definition, which is based on research done by Christina Maslach and a whole team of people, burnout has three components. The first one is physical and emotional exhaustion. This always makes me giggle a little, and this is part of the problem. Almost any symptom on the planet can fall under physical and emotional exhaustion, so that's confusing. The second is cynicism and detachment. So feeling like you're alone in the world, being really negative and cynical at work is part of it. Those two things both have to be there, and there has to be a third aspect. So all three pieces must be present. The third aspect is feeling like your work is not impactful slash you're not able to be productive and/or both. So those three things in a bubble have to all exist for it to be burnout.

Additionally, the definition states that this is primarily work related, so this is where things get confusing. First of all, physical and emotional exhaustion is confusing because physical exhaustion is fatigue. It's also headaches, it's also sluggish digestion, it's also crappy sleep. There's a lot of symptoms that can be related to physical exhaustion. So how does it present in people? So that can be confusing. Emotional exhaustion is also, well, what does that really mean, lack of bandwidth? Well, lack of bandwidth will lead someone to crying, another person to anxiety and a third person to eruptions of rage. So again, what does it look like? And after talking to hundreds and hundreds of people over the years, the biggest problem is that it looks a little bit different in everybody.

In Chinese medicine, we say that your weakest places in your body, which some of them are constitutional and some of them are gained because of life experiences, your weakest constitutions are the ones that will be exploited in high stress situations. So if you were in a car accident when you were 12 and you had whiplash, your burnout will likely have some neck pain. So that makes it make more sense to people to say, "Well, this person had asthma as a child, so they're having trouble breathing as part of their burnout." You might not have any issues with your breath during burnout, but you're having massive headaches because you have a genetic predisposition to migraines. So it's a little convoluted.

I think the next part of this definition that makes it difficult is there's so focused on trying to delineate burnout from depression because there's some overlapping factors that in order to delineate it, they're saying, "Well, this is work related," and the fact of the matter is it's not just work related. And so I think that that's something that will evolve with time. So I was really glad that you used the words specifically working definition, because this is very much a working definition. We have a lot to learn. There's a lot of gaps, and this is the best information I can give you at this time, understanding that if somebody listens to this podcast in five years, it might not be correct anymore.

Sarah Nicastro: Right, that makes sense. So then it seems like one of the biggest reasons it's commonly misunderstood is because those three characteristics can look really different based on an individual's experience. A lot of times when people want to understand something, they want to simplify it to where it's very specifically defined. They can look at it, and this is one of those things that you can only do to a point because huge aspects of it are very individual.

Okay, so I think we'll get into explaining it a bit more as we go along. So the next kind of myth I want to walk through is twofold and that is that people tend to see burnout one of two ways as the individual's duty to repair. So it's the person's fault or it's a result of their work environment. In reality, it's a lot more complex. So let's talk through those two things. So the first part being the individual needs to take care to avoid burnout. So this individual responsibility, so let's talk about why that is not so simple.

Cait Donovan: I think I would start by adjusting the sentence slightly and saying that it is an individual's responsibility to recover from burnout, but I don't actually believe it's an individual's responsibility to avoid or prevent burnout. I think that's a societal, cultural, organizational piece. So after everything that I've done, I can say with clarity that burnout is not ever an individual's fault, just never. I've never seen it be somebody's fault.

What does happen is that due to various situations in childhood, everybody has them. Some of them are traumatic, some of them are not really traumatic, but they create coping mechanisms and behaviors that each person chooses that allow them to feel safe. If those coping mechanisms and behaviors involve problems with boundaries, perfectionism, people pleasing, et cetera, that person will be more vulnerable to burnout. So those are some type of trait almost. I mean, I don't really want to say trait because trait is more innate and more baked in than this, and these are responses to life, but these are coping mechanisms that people are using and use them successfully for most of their lives, but leave them vulnerable to burnout.

It's not their fault that they created those things, and most of the time they're not even aware that they do it. So how can somebody be at fault for something that they created as a coping mechanism when they were four, right? That's just not even fair. However, once you've already burnt out, nobody can fix it for you, but you. You can work with someone like me, you can work with your doctor, you can go to a therapist. Of course, you can get support in the recovery process, but if you don't decide to go through the recovery process, fixing the outside world is not going to change it for you because there are concrete physiological changes that happen in your body that require healing. So this is the individual piece.

The organizational piece comes from a lot of the research that ends up saying that 80% of burnout is due to the organizational dysfunction, toxic organizations, et cetera. I have not found that to be true personally. When I talk to people, it usually ends up looking about 50/50, and my sample size at this point is around a thousand people. So I need five times that in order to make it a reasonable size study. So I'm starting where I am, but I do not see this 80/20 split. However, that doesn't mean that the culture of the organization has no effect. The culture of an organization has massive effect. If there is a tendency toward overwork, if there is a lack of fairness, if there is no recognition or praise, if there is a lack of community, if there is a values mismatch, these are all things that were talked about in a previous episode.

So we don't need to deep dive into those. People can go listen to that episode of the Future of Field Service podcast to get that. If those things are all out of whack, again, the environment is creating a vulnerability for burnout. So when I use the word vulnerability, I'm using it really carefully because we don't have a way to study burnout that would allow us to say that X or Y is a cause. There are a lot of correlations, and a lot of those correlations have been proven time and time again. So we are inching toward the word cause, but we aren't there yet. And you can't do an experimental study on this to check for cause for sure, because it would be completely unethical to expose people to things to see if they burn out or not, right?

So every time you see burnout and cause somewhere I've made the mistake, you'll find it in my material, but every time you see that somewhere, I want you to stop and remind yourself that yes, there might be a relationship here, but we can't talk about it being a causal relationship.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, that makes sense. So okay, so we talked about a myth is that it's the individual's need to avoid burnout. Not true. Another myth is the workplace is responsible for burnout and why we're seeing so much of this also not entirely true.

Cait Donovan: Untrue.

Sarah Nicastro: It is, but not in its entirety, right?

Cait Donovan: Right.

Sarah Nicastro: But the other thing that we haven't talked about, and I'm curious how it fits into the overall issue is as you mentioned, the societal aspect. Can you talk about that piece a little bit?

Cait Donovan: Yes. So the model of burnout that I've created is a biopsychosocial model, and there's six places that can affect you. The first one is work. We've got that. We know that the studies are done. We have the research. The second one is self, and this is all these trauma response things, right? But again, not your fault. It's just something that leaves you more vulnerable. Outside of that, we have culture. So right now we can talk about the United States culture because that's where we are. I have insight into other places because I have lived all over the world, but we can talk about this culture. Within our culture, the patriarchy is an issue. So if you are anything other than a white man, you will have to fight for things more. If you are subject to any of the isms, racism, homophobia, homophobism, sexism, any of the things, you will be more vulnerable to burnout.

It is very clearly shown in the research that when you are subject to constant discrimination, even in many ways like microaggressions, you have higher levels of inflammation in your body. So there are actual physical responses to being in the group of people that is not treated as well as they should be. So this is a cultural thing that has a massive effect on burnout.

In the United States in particular, we have two values in our top 10 list of values as a country that are problematic. One of them is hard work, and the other one is individualism. This is a pull yourself up by your bootstraps kind of country. We know where it comes from. We understand our history, we get it. And also that is not how we were designed. As a people, we did not evolve that way. We need each other much more than we are allowed to feel that we need each other in the United States culture, and our sense of community is breaking down over time, which is making it worse. Again, one of the reasons why COVID had such an effect on burnout rates, because we were kept separate, we were isolated, we lost a lot of our communal factors. So all of those things matter. So that's from a culture perspective as an overall culture and overall society.

Now we put those things into a workplace where very often those same exact things are concentrated, and this is how a workplace can create vulnerability for someone, especially if it's in combination with some of the bigger cultural issues, some of the self issues. There are also health components. There is a portion of your genetic code that's responsible for telling your stress response, how it should function, and there are epigenetic changes that can happen to that code. So an epigenetic change would be is something like a volume button that gets put on a little piece of DNA and it will turn it down or turn it up. So it can either make your stress response more hyperactive or it can turn it down so that you don't have an adequate enough response to situations, right? So it's like a volume button.

If you are not having the same stress response as most other people, you're not going to be able to manage life the same way as most other people, but you don't know this about yourself because it's an epigenetic change. So you're wondering, "Well, so-and-so can handle it, why can't I?" So you push harder, right? So this biological thing can be a problem. If you have a chronic illness and you don't pay enough attention to it and you're ignoring it because you want to be able to do what everybody else can do, this is going to be a factor.

So there's all of those things. Then we have family stuff where the trauma comes from, where the coping mechanisms come from. So if you have a family unit where you were parentified, where you were made to feel like you had to be in charge in your household, that will lead toward poor boundary issues, people pleasing, et cetera. If there's poor attachment styles, this is a whole psychological gamut of things, but your family of origin and your family of choice can both affect how you react in the world, how your stress response system works, and whether or not you're vulnerable to burnout.

The last piece is environment. We don't like to think about this because it feels like it doesn't matter, but it really does matter, and there's plenty of research that connects how many trees you see during the week, how much time you spend breathing fresh air if you like, the color of the walls of your apartment. Stuff like this really, really matters. So if your home is in an unsafe neighborhood, you hate walking into the building and you hate the color of your walls, you're going to be more susceptible to higher stress levels through things that seem to not matter. So all of these things combined to me are provide a web of causation for burnout.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, no, that makes sense, and I think it gives a really good perspective to folks on why it isn't so easy to say the individual or the organization. There's a lot more to it than that.

So I want to go back to the myth that you've already negated in what you said, which is an individual thinking, "This is my fault." okay. So you already said that that's not the case. When you are working with people who are going through burnout, how do you help remove shame because I would think layering in shame for feeling burnt out only slows the recovery process? So how do you help people to move past that and not feel personally responsible?

Cait Donovan: I package that into shame, blame, guilt, and judgment. If anybody ever listens to my podcast, they'll hear those four words always sort of packaged together and for good reason. To me getting information, like the information that I just told you helps people to release some of this just naturally because they're saying, "Oh, I get it. I get that all of these reasons happened. If there's 87 things that make you vulnerable to burnout and I have 80 of them, well then it can't be my fault. Clearly this happened." I think that's part of it.

I think another part of it, especially when it comes to this shame portion, is asking people to talk about it directly. There's very clear correlations between name the shame, and then it starts to dissipate. This is a Brené Brown thing, right? Name the shame. So just say it, saying it, which means that my job is to create a safe enough space where somebody will say it. We talk a lot about the guilt and the shame that comes from taking time for yourself and prioritizing yourself.

A lot of that is just a practice of doing it and noticing that everything's still okay. So we call this gathering data in my work, so I give people this sort of home experiment to do. I want you to go out and practice this and gather data about the responses and reactions, and then come back and report to me what's happened. Most frequently, if we put it into that, we're putting you in an observer mode. So now we're going into Buddhism and meditation, which this is the healthiest mode from which to view your life. We're putting you in the observer seat. Once you get into the observer seat, you're practicing. So you're not trying to make it happen. Take some of the pressure off and you know that you need to do it multiple times so that you have enough information by which to base some sort of new truth on.

So we are challenging the beliefs and truths that you have had ingrained in your body your whole entire life and saying, "Yeah, but can you prove it? Prove it to me," right? Because in science, a hypothesis is never proven. It's only falsifiable. You can only say like, "This is false," or you keep trying to find a way to make it false. That's how we get to theories and proofs, et cetera. So prove me wrong. Prove yourself wrong. Go gather data. Let me know what happens. And it gamifies it a little bit. It makes it a little bit lighter and gives people an exercise that they can use.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, okay. So another myth that I think is worth talking about is this idea of I or they, depending on if you're looking at it from the person experiencing or the environment they're in, just need to push through.

Cait Donovan: So the reason that this doesn't hold up to scrutiny is the physiological changes that I mentioned earlier. I'll run through those quickly so that people can understand why we can't just push through. I am only going to talk about the brain because we have a 45 minute to hour long podcast to do, and so we can't do all of the symptoms across the body, but just the brain alone should allow you to see that we need to take time and recuperate. When you are under chronic stress for extended periods of time, chronic chronic stress, let's extend the chronic part of it so that everybody really understands this. The front of your brain, the part, the piece that sits just behind your forehead shrinks. You literally lose neurons, you lose brain cells. That part of your brain is responsible for your executive functioning, which is your adulting, right? Your ability to plan, motivate, emotionally regulate, make decisions, et cetera. If the part of your brain that is responsible for you acting and feeling like an adult in the world is no longer functioning, what do you think is going to happen?

And how from that place are you supposed to just push through? You can't decide. You can't motivate. You can't do those things well, and if you can do one of them, you use all the power your brain had that day and you can't do any of the other ones. So pushing through is literally not possible.

There are two other things that happen in the brain that I think are really important. Another part of your brain that shrinks during this time that goes through hypotrophy is your hippocampus, and that's where your memory is. So you lose access to your memory. You can't catch things as easily. You're losing things, you're losing words, you're losing ideas. So planning and deciding, maybe you get through those things, but then you can't remember what the hell it's all for, so you're stuck again.

Then there's one more part of your brain. Of course, more things happen, but these are the critical, your amygdala, there's two of them. One on either side is responsible for scanning your environment at all times to look for danger. This is why the environment and the people you surround yourself with are so critical. The amygdala instead of shrinking gets bigger. So the parts of your brain that are supposed to be able to talk you down, plan, be logical, be rational, are shrinking, and the part of your brain that's like, "Fire alarm!" just got bigger and more sensitive.

How do you push through that?

Sarah Nicastro: So it's interesting, this explanation. So I'm going to share personally for a moment, which I don't know if this will make sense to you as a public figure or content creator, what have you. Like I do, but I don't share personally. Do you know what I mean?

Cait Donovan: Mm-hmm, yes.

Sarah Nicastro: I do. I'm very open, but there's also limits to, I think the detail people want to hear, but what you're saying really hits home to me because I've shared publicly. I have a seven year old son. He was diagnosed January 22nd, 2019 with type one diabetes. He was three at the time. And so there's a lot of layers to this, right? Because it was a terrifying thing. It was traumatic for sure. I actually was diagnosed afterwards with PTSD, and that was on top of already having anxiety, which I've also spoke publicly about.

But so it was four years in January, and the impact, I can notice on my executive function, my memory, and I'm assuming the last bit, that would feed into anxiety, right?

Cait Donovan: Yes.

Sarah Nicastro: Because it's your ability to basically self-regulate diminishes to where that becomes something that's harder and harder to control. All three of those things are absolutely present. So then, you think about that in the context of what we're talking about today, which is burnout. And I've said this before, but in a very surface level way, one night we were up a lot treating lows, and for people that understand, I'm grateful that he only has type one diabetes. So I do have perspective in the sense of it is something that he has a really good chance of living with to old age.

That being said, okay, what a lot of people don't understand because it isn't a super well understood disease, it's an autoimmune disease, so there's nothing he could ever do to cause it or fix it. He will die without insulin, point blank. And we are responsible on a day-to-day basis for dosing him insulin, which is a liquid that you mess that up and it can have dire consequences. So literally it is life-threatening and his life is in our hands. He can also have low blood sugars, which can have those consequences.

So it is a very chronic form of stress, and that's compounded by the fact that it will never go away. So you have to learn how to navigate that. So I've shared before in a kind of, I'm authentic, but no one wants to hear the gory details either. But I've shared a reminder for people from a professional standpoint, if I'm up all night treating low blood sugars, and then I'm on a Teams meeting at 8:00 AM the next day, you never know what someone is going through. So always be kind.

But also from a burnout perspective, if you think about just that one example, and that's just me sharing one example, everyone has their own versions of what they're going through, that to your point, is these contributing factors that it's not my fault. It's no one's fault. I said this to you when we were prepping. I'm probably categorically burnt out, but so everything you're saying about the impact on the brain rings true. What I'm also though interested in mentioning or getting your thoughts on, and we talked about this a little bit from your own personal experience too, is that I think a lot of times another myth is that there's this negative connotation of being burnt out means you're doing something you don't like doing.

So either you're showing up kind of like, "Ugh, gosh, I don't want to do this anymore. "I'm burnt out" or the organization is forcing you to do this thing that is causing you to be burnt out because it's not what you want to be doing. You and I were talking about the fact that you can absolutely love what you do, which in my case is my reality and still be burnt out. So can you talk about that a little bit? This idea of it doesn't have to have this negative connotation in this sense of coming from something unwelcome.

Cait Donovan: Yeah, I think the danger of that comes from the world of spirituality that says, "Anything that's wrong in your life is because you're not aligned somehow." And the only thing that I will say in that is that within something that you love, there can be aspects of it that are out of alignment with your values, and that can add to your burnout story. So I think it's important to be able to look at the thing that you love and understand that you can do it forever, but you might need to shift some mindsets, some perspectives, and some behaviors in order to make it really tenable for you.

For instance, as an acupuncturist, I was coaching people and giving them acupuncture within one session. I was totally overstepping my own boundaries, and I love doing both of those things. So I wanted to do it, but it was not nearly enough time or money exchange for me to make it actually worth it. At the end of the day, I got the recognition, I got the praise. I have clients that I still talk to. I haven't lived in Prague in four years. I'm friends with these people now. I created great relationships, but I was giving much more than I actually had the space for.

And when I moved into coaching, I had to learn how to not overstep my own boundaries in those situations, how to give people what they need but not overdo it. Part of the reason I was overdoing it was because I was afraid that if I wasn't giving people extra all the time, I had no value. So I had to do some work with a therapist on self-worth and on value. So this kind of goes layer, by layer, by layer, by layer, by layer into what you need to get into at the end of the day, if you're doing something that you love and you're burnt out, there are ways to adjust to make it okay.

Sarah Nicastro: So now, this is the last thing I'm going to say about my personal experience, but I have found with me, and I don't know that it's necessarily a type of burnout or personality type, but one of the ways I navigate this, and it could just be volume of things going on, because we talked about the chronic illness thing, but then there's work, there's travel. I am my mom to two kids, marriage. You have these compounding things.

For me, it very much ebbs and flows. I have times where I feel like I can absolutely do it all. This is great, boom, boom, boom. I'm energized, whatever. And then I have times where I do feel burnt out. Now I am fortunate that I have the ability to scale up in the times where I feel I have more to give and pull back to an extent in the times where I need to. Where I struggle is when I can't pull back as much as I need to do. Do you know what I mean?

Cait Donovan: Yeah.

Sarah Nicastro: But would you say that it is something that ebbs and flows, or is that more stress versus burnout? Do you know what I'm saying?

Cait Donovan: Yes. And I think that it is more stress versus burnout, because when you are in burnout and your brain has those changes, that's like saying, "I have PTSD today, but I don't have it tomorrow." That's not really true. That's not how it works. So I think that when it is burnout, you can have some good days sometimes, but most of the time it's not good. Most of the time you're feeling pretty bad.

In chronic stress, you can have those differing things. And I think the important thing to realize there is when those good things are, because things are just sort of okay, and when they are on adrenaline and caffeine, paying attention to that so that you don't end up in a place where you can't up and go anymore. You don't have that oomph anymore.

So I think what you're saying is actually a really great red flag for most people. If you are going through life and you're kind of going extreme to extreme pretty frequently, you're in a chronic stress pathway that can lead you to burnout, and it's a little bit dangerous, and you should pay attention to it. Life is always going to be stressful. There's always going to be stress that happens in your life, but a lot of stress can be healthy and positive. So it's not all a burden, and that's a whole separate conversation. But Alia Crumb is a good person to follow for that.

And so I think the thing after burnout for me is that I'm not afraid to burnout anymore. Mostly because I don't think that I would allow myself to get there because I know what to pay attention to. I also know that even if I did, I'd be able to get out of it because I've done that before. So yay. And when I'm starting to enter that place of higher stress, I notice it faster usually through paying attention to resentment. That's my red flag sort of thing, and I can shift things right away. So not necessarily change everything immediately. Sometimes things take three months to change because you have to implement a business decision differently or something like that, but you can decide to do things differently.

So I think, this sort of cycle that you're describing happens on a smaller scale in everybody's lives all the time. If you have to stay up with your kid and then you wake up in the morning and find out that your mother fell, and you have to be on a Teams call at eight or nine, you're not going to be fully present. And that day is probably going to feel pretty bad, but that doesn't mean you're burnt out. It means you're having a bad day.

So the question is, how big are the amplitudes between your extremes? How frequently are they happening? And can you soften the curves a little bit? Because it's okay to have a little bit over wave that's just humaning.

Sarah Nicastro: Sure, yeah.

Cait Donovan: Right?

Sarah Nicastro: That makes sense. So you mentioned resentment. So talk about, again, myth would be that resentment is a negative emotion, but let's talk about how it can be powerful when it comes to burnout.

Cait Donovan: Resentment is my favorite emotion. It's the best one with burnout because it tells you everywhere that your boundaries are off. And I use the words are off intentionally. Your boundaries being crossed from the outside is not actually something that happens all that often. It might be 30% of your boundary issues. The rest of it is you either overstepping your own fence to do more for other people than they're asking for, or opening your gate and then being mad that somebody's in your yard. So I think it's critical to have a tool that allows you to say, "Oh, I actually want a fence here." Okay, then you can figure out how to put a fence up and resentment when you pay attention to it will show you the patterns and themes in your life that need to shift in order for you to manage your stress better because you're keeping some things out and/or letting some things in, because boundaries are also about asking for help and asking somebody to come into your yard or into your house and bake some muffins because you don't have time.

So boundaries should go both ways, both keeping people more at bay or keeping tasks more at bay and asking for help. That's a two-way street that I think most people don't talk about, but resentment. And as a general rule, the anger group, as I like to call them, resentment, irritation, frustration, annoyance, anger, those emotions will tell you exactly where your boundaries are off, exactly where they need to be adjusted. And it might start off with, "I'm frustrated every single day because I'm making my eggs, and they always stick to this damn pan." If you're starting your single day with frustration over an egg pan, go to TJ Maxx, get a new pan, stop it already.

So if we can adjust a lot of these small things, we'll find that we have more energy for the big things. So I don't think that people should look at resentment and then say, "Oh, I have to have a serious conversation with my mother-in-law," roll back deal with your coffee mugs and your pans and your blankets and your laundry first, and then build up to it when you have more energy. But it's an incredibly useful tool.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. Okay. So let's kind of take this back then to the workplace aspect, because let's say that as individuals, let's just make a generalization here, we are going to do a better job of paying attention to our resentments and looking for these areas where we need to either set better boundaries or ask for more help. So from a workplace perspective, the speaking that you do for the corporate world, how do you encourage those entities to contribute to the burnout challenge by making some changes in their companies to better understand, et cetera.

Cait Donovan: So it depends on what's going on. It depends on what's going on in the company, but usually, we'll start with the six factors in the workplace that have been researched to death that we know are correlated with burnout. And we only choose one of them at a time, and we work on that and we see what happens. But if one of the factors, for instance, is a values mismatch. The values mismatch can happen in two ways. It can be a values mismatch between a company's spoken values and values in action. If that's the problem, then we work on that. How do we get those things to be closer together so that people are not reacting to the lack of integrity? Or it can be a values mismatch between an employee and a company. If you find out it's a values mismatch between an employee and a company or an employee and their direct manager, that's not a good fit for your company.

So sometimes we do talk about the fact that quitting for burnout isn't always necessary, but if you are in an environment that's constantly going against who you are as a person, you probably should look for a better environment, both for the benefit of yourself and the benefit of the company. Sometimes having people leave is the best possible solution, so we look into things like that that say, "Hey, what's really going on here?"

The other thing we talk about a lot, and I think this is the most important piece, is the modeling of good boundaries by leadership. So if leadership says, we're not going to do emails after six o'clock, but then sends an email at 8:00 PM well, again, we're lacking in integrity. You're breaking down trust and people don't know what the expectations are. So get real good about that. If your company can handle having a policy like that, it's worth it to have one, but schedule-

Sarah Nicastro: Or whatever they are, right?

Cait Donovan: Whatever it is.

Sarah Nicastro: And I think that also seeing it in action the other way, so setting those boundaries, but asking for help. Leaders that are comfortable, and we've talked about this a bit on this podcast related to mental health, leaders that are saying, "I'm going through a hard time and I need to take some time off," or whatever those things are, right? But not hiding that or doing it in a way that people understand it's okay. Yeah, that makes sense.

Cait Donovan: Yeah, the modeling is the most important part. I had someone on LinkedIn that wrote a post, and I wish I could remember who they were to give them credit, but I don't remember. They said that they started to try something new because they were dealing with some culture issues at their company. And they said, they started one of their weekly team meetings by saying, "This is a task that I really struggled with last week," and, "Either this is how I got through it," or, "This is who I asked for help," or, "I haven't solved it yet. Does anybody have any ideas?"

Sarah Nicastro: I love that.

Cait Donovan: They started with, they said, "First failures, what did you fail at last week?" So this allows everybody in the room, this increases the level of psychological safety and allows everybody in the room to go around and then say, "Hey, this is what I'm struggling with. I haven't gotten help with it. I don't even know what to do." Or, "I struggled with this thing and this is how I fixed it. So if you are also struggling with this thing, this option might work for you." And this sort of failure share moment brought their team back together. It was the only thing they changed.

Sarah Nicastro: And I think we had talked about knowing how to talk about burnout. I mean, there's also this idea of it doesn't have to be burnout as a topic always. It can be how are you struggling? What are you struggling?

Cait Donovan: I think those are tough questions. I think those are tough questions because people don't always know, especially when it comes to chronic stress and burnout. Like, "I'm not struggling with anything. I'm fine." And then three weeks later, they're taking FMLA because they can't function anymore.

So I think that the modeling is a better way to do it because that creates space for just natural conversation to arise. It says, "Oh gosh, your son has diabetes. My mother has diabetes and she refuses to stop eating candy all day, and I don't know how to manage her." Dr. Kristen Donnelly taught, taught me this, the root of the word empathy, when you look at it in any language, in definition, in all different dictionaries all over the world, I think she looked at like 140 sources for the word something ridiculous. The root of the word empathy always has the word understanding in it. So if you want to increase empathy, you have to increase understanding. And understanding is a lot easier thing for most leaders to work on because it's easier to grasp than the idea of empathy. It's really easy to say, "Oh, my son has diabetes.," And for somebody to be like, "Oh yeah, my mom too," or whatever the heck, all of a sudden there's a different understanding. When you understand someone better, you are more likely to grant them grace.

When somebody understands you better, they're more likely to grant you grace. So creating that normal sea of life, it doesn't mean you're going to talk about your life all day, every day at work, but allowing the pieces of your story that you feel safe with to be part of the work environment will create more space for people to understand you, empathize with you and give you grace when you need it. And the same goes for you and other people. And this is modified by the oxytocin hormone, which is fascinating, but that's a whole nother deal.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, I think there's a lot more side conversations. I just want to end with, I want to talk about warning signs and then anything you would urge companies to consider in terms of how to respond to those resources to provide, et cetera. So what should they be looking for and how should they be reacting?

Cait Donovan: So if you are a company and you are looking for signs of burnout in your team, you should be looking for attitude change. Somebody that was always positive and is now negative, Nancy, that's a problem. You should be noticing attitude change. You should be noticing shifts in production. So if somebody can't keep up anymore and they always could, something's wrong, and you should be looking toward an increase of complaints about a person from other people in the company, even if they're just sort of whispers and things happening in the background. If you're noticing that a lot of people are annoyed with one person, either that person is a bully and needs to be dealt with, or that person is burnt out and needs support.

So there's those three things I think are really important. And as for what companies should do, it really depends on a combination of the company culture, the parts of the company culture that are contributing most to burnout, and how much buy-in they have from leadership. Nobody that is a team lead that doesn't have support from leadership should try and implement these things because it is impossible to carry this load by yourself, and you shouldn't have to.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, that makes sense. Okay. All right, I know we're out of time, so we're going to have to end there, but hopefully at some point I'll be able to have you back. In the meantime, let folks know where they can find the Fried Podcast, your book, any other information about your coaching, speaking, et cetera.

Cait Donovan: I think the best thing is to just share one resource because it's easy to remember. If people look up FRIED. The Burnout Podcast, they will find it anywhere they listen to podcasts. They'll also find the website and all of the information is available through there. That's one thing, and I would like to give one more resource before we wrap up, if that's okay.

Sarah Nicastro: Of course.

Cait Donovan: And when I was talking about all the brain changes, I know that some of the people listening were like, "Yeah, but then what do you do about it? How do you fix it?" You do not have to take six months off to fix it. Okay? One thing that is accessible, and by accessible, I mean free and available at all times is a guided "meditation" that's either called Yoga Nidra, N-I-D-R-A, or Body Scan Meditation. These are basically the same thing.

Andrew Huberman calls it non-sleep deep rest. It doesn't matter what you call it, but doing this for 10 to 11 minutes a day for 30 days will improve the functioning of your brain, calm down that part that's growing and regrow those parts that are shrinking. And so that's something that if you were listening and you're like, "But my brain is now broken." Don't be afraid. There's a super cheap, super easy way to help yourself. So go find, go to YouTube, go to Insight Timer, go to the Calm app, whatever it is that you use, type in Body scan or Yoga Nidra or whatever it is, and start practicing that to buy yourself back some of your function.

Sarah Nicastro: Okay. I feel like you were talking directly to me.

Cait Donovan: I sort of was.

Sarah Nicastro: I know. I can tell. So I'm going to get on that. No, I know, I do. I've said it on here before, and anyone that's listened all along is going to say, "You said you were going to start meditating a long time ago." I do. I do. I do. So yeah.

Cait Donovan: Well, this is an easy way to get that in that doesn't really feel like meditating and doesn't really require you that much work. It's just easier.

Sarah Nicastro: Yes. Okay. I'm going to give it a go, 30 days and I will report back.

Cait Donovan: Great.

Sarah Nicastro: Cait, thank you so much for being here. I appreciate it. Everyone look for FRIED. The Burnout Podcast, and it's Cait, C-A-I-T, donovan.com, correct?

Cait Donovan: Yes.

Sarah Nicastro: Okay. You can also visit futureoffieldservice.com to find more content, including some of the podcasts we reference today on burnout and mental health. Be sure to subscribe to the Future of Field Service INSIDER and look for the live tour event nearest to you. The Future of Field Service podcast is published in partnership with IFS. You can learn more@iffs.com. As always, thank you for listening.

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My Recipe for Success Using Service as a Competitive Advantage

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My Recipe for Success Using Service as a Competitive Advantage

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Sarah talks with Venkata Reddy Mukku, Vice President Worldwide Service & Support Organization at Bruker Nano Surfaces & Metrology, about the approach he finds impactful in achieving service excellence.

Sarah Nicastro: Welcome to the Future of Field Service podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Nicastro. Today we're going to be taking an inside look at one leader's recipe for using service as a competitive advantage. I'm excited to welcome to the podcast today, Venkata Reddy Mukku, who is the Vice President for Worldwide Service and Support at Bruker Nano Surfaces & Metrology. That was a mouthful. Venkata, welcome to the Future of Field Service podcast.

Venkata Reddy Mukku: Thanks, Sarah.

Sarah Nicastro: Thank you for being here. Before we get into our topic for today, can you just start by telling everyone a little bit about yourself, your role and what Bruker does?

Venkata Reddy Mukku: As you mentioned, my name is Venkata. I'm working as a global Vice President for Bruker Nano Surfaces. We do nanotechnology research equipment, and also metrology equipment that are used in semiconductor manufacturing. A lot of our instruments goes into universities, research centers, pharmaceutical, automotive, you name it, anything that to do with nanotechnology research and metrology science research. Our instruments help those researchers. I run a global team. We help our customers meet their objectives by providing good support when they need it.

Sarah Nicastro: Good. Okay. And how long have you been with the organization?

Venkata Reddy Mukku: 19 years.

Sarah Nicastro: Okay. I remember that, and I've said this many times before, but when I speak with a leader who's been with the same organization for quite some time, I feel like it's one, representative of their talent, but two, also representative of an organization that treats talent well and provides opportunity for growth, which is always really good.

So now what's interesting, Venkata, when you and I connected and sort of talked in preparation for this podcast, not long after, I had a conversation with another leader who was saying all of the ways that leadership needs to change. And I actually referenced your conversation with him saying, I do think that it's catching on and we're getting there. I'm excited to share your perspective today.

But before we talk a bit about the way you are approaching leadership and what your recipe is, can you just share your thoughts and viewpoints on, if you look at the opportunity that exists with service today and really all of the benefits that can come from us looking at service more strategically, thinking about service as a path to growth, et cetera, what does that look like in your view, from where you sit today and from the experience you have over 19 years?

Venkata Reddy Mukku: So service is actually a growth generator. Our sales teams work with customers, understand their needs and then sells the first instrument. Then the following instrument sales are done by service teams. We take the journey from one system to multiple systems over generations. So service is a complete advantage if done well. And what we are trying to do for the last few decades is to really invest in people, in making sure that we understand, we listen to customers and put processes to make their life easy and to help them achieve their objectives.

Sarah Nicastro: That makes sense. So I think that when we think about service as that differentiator, to your point, that's where a lot of Bruker's growth comes from. You have this initial sale, the expansion beyond that is done through the service function. Which in some ways maybe gives the organization a bit of a head start in how it views service because in some other organizations that maybe struggle with reconciling that growth opportunity, it's because service historically has been more of an afterthought. So for you all, since it is part of the commercial process, there's maybe a little bit more of, like I said, a head start in thinking about it the way we need to and investing in it the way we need to, to have that success, which is good because that gives you a perspective that could help some of those companies that are recognizing that potential. But the organization's structure still has to sort of catch up.

So when we spoke about this, you said exactly what you just summarized, that the key to that process working well, the key to service equaling growth is the people, right? And so you shared with me that you have a recipe for how you look at your leadership style, and I'm hoping you can share that with folks here.

Venkata Reddy Mukku: Yes. I spend a lot of time building teams, working with the team. Our aim is to make sure that every experience, every touchpoint we have, internally and with the customers, is memorable. It requires a lot of processes and more than anything, people's involvement and engagement, which means at every level we to understand the importance of communication, ownership and delivering the results. So we spend a lot of time with the people, their development, making sure that everyone understands our goals and are on the same page in achieving those goals.

In my opinion, people's attitude is equally important to their technical capabilities. And then creating that culture and environment in the organization plays a very important role in the success of the organization.

Sarah Nicastro: Absolutely.

Venkata Reddy Mukku: And we are not where we want to be, but we have a clear idea, a clear goal as to where we want to get to and how to get there. So we are working towards that.

Sarah Nicastro: And you shared that your recipe, if you will, is 60, 30, 10. So can you explain those numbers to the listeners?

Venkata Reddy Mukku: So, we have a global team. I tend to spend a lot of time with the regional leadership, making sure we understand where we are in terms of hiring the right people, training, putting the right processes, and creating the environment for them to enjoy being part of the organization and become solution advisors. That takes a significant amount of my time to monitor, to guide, and to make sure that we implement what we plan to implement. That really helps me understand what's happening in the field, what type of support I need to provide to the team, set the tone so that my leaders would actually do the same to their team members, and then that trickles down to the field people and admin teams we have around the world.

Sarah Nicastro: So the 60% is on your internal teams, on your internal employees, and then 30% is customers?

Venkata Reddy Mukku: So 30% is all about customer KPIs. Again, the 60% is all about team building, team empowerment, team engagement, so that they become confident to do their jobs. And then the remaining 30%, we work on customer touchpoints, customer escalations, customer requirements and improvements to customer experience, all related to customer. And I do tend to talk to customers, but again, my teams manage customer expectations very well. I don't get to talk to them as often as I wanted. However, I really focus on monitoring different KPIs that impacts customer experience and then see that we are on top of it so that our customers get what they want and they see us as trusted partners.

Sarah Nicastro: And then the last 10% is on the commercials, right?

Venkata Reddy Mukku: Yeah. I mean, again, the reason why we spent a lot of time on the team is, if we have the right team and processes in place and the remaining 30% where we understand different touchpoints and make sure that the customer gets what they need and see us partners, the third bit is upgrades, contracts, consumables, spare parts, that business comes automatically. So that's what we believe in. Again, of course that also helps with the new system sales, but when it comes to service revenue and then growth generation, if we take care of our own team members, if we take care of our customers, then the commercial part becomes easier.

Sarah Nicastro: And that's why I wanted to get that detail from you because I think that you were very specific with me that this is the formula or the breakdown for you. And I think it's very powerful because, to your point, if you're spending 60% of your time as the worldwide leader of service and support, making sure that you are pouring 60% of your time, effort, energy, resource into building up your team's capabilities, culture, all of that, you're focusing 30% on making sure that they are pouring into the customers, you know that you can spend less time on the commercial metrics because they will follow.

And I think this is really important because it makes sense, it's logical, but I think a lot of people struggle with that 10% needing to be 50, 60, 70, 80. And I think that can stem from a few things. One would be that they have pressure above that they feel this need to put a magnifying glass on that commercial aspect and really just drive, drive, drive. But it can also be leadership style or mentality. We were chatting before we started, I had the first Future of Field Service event last week in Sydney, and we were talking to a leadership expert about this sort of outdated mentality of command and control, that leadership was all about command and control. So it could be leadership mentality or it could be struggling with trust, right? But I think it's a really good example of having the priorities in the right order and maybe getting a little bit comfortable relinquishing some of that control and trusting that if you put the emphasis you need to on your teams, that outcome will follow. Do you have any comments on that?

Venkata Reddy Mukku: Yes. Again, it all about finding the right people with the right attitude, right? If we treat them well and we treat them like people, we give them opportunity to make mistakes, learn from mistakes, we invest in training and developing each individual. When we do that, people get engaged, people take ownership, and then people treat them as their own personal goals. It's not they are working for someone and someone is putting pressure to go meet that number or meet that NPS or customer satisfaction number. It's like, hey, this is my job, this is what I want to introduce. So they take it personal.

So we spend a lot of time also giving them soft skills training, the life skills they need to understand, to empathize, to take ownership and drive things to closure. So that creates a good environment for people to help each other because they're not individuals anymore. They're a group of people who wants to succeed together. So that culture really helps. We have lot of challenges. Our instruments are cutting edge. They do have lot of challenges. But as a team, we support each other and that helps us get to the goal easier than in the other way around where if you emphasize more on commercial, then it puts different types of pressure in the system that can actually put customer and team importance lower than it should be.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. Another conversation we had last week that I think ties in really well here is that we had a session last week with Jordan from QIAGEN, and we were talking about ways to navigate economic turmoil without negatively impacting customer experience or employee experience. And I think, when we're in an economy where there are challenges, and those are of course different based on region, based on industry, et cetera, but to some degree that it's a worldwide issue right now, a lot of times when we are really focused on the commercial, we tend to put pressure on the frontline. Stress, fear that ultimately has nothing to do with anything they can control. So it isn't indicative of their effort, like you said, sense of ownership. It has nothing to do with their performance. But because we as leaders feel this pressure to figure out how to hit the numbers, we pass that down and then you end up with a workforce that is really stressed unnecessarily because, again, you can't control the economic circumstances really.

So if you instead just focus on making them feel supported in doing what they need to do, and that could include if you think about your 60, 30, 10 in the 30, for some organizations maybe that's working with customers who are also dealing with the economic climate and looking for new opportunities for different service offerings, et cetera. But again, empowering them to do the right things to trust that the rest will come instead of this pressure. Does that make sense?

Venkata Reddy Mukku: Absolutely. That's what we try to do, really make sure that the team understand our objectives, our goals, and then using the tools and processes and empower them to do the right thing. They have that empowerment. If they have that ownership, they find creative ways of getting what we want to get of helping customers and also making sure the customer understands what our goals are so that we work towards a win-win situation. Things always change in service. There is always a new challenge and we have to be working together. And again, only with trust and ownership, people think out of box, they come up with solutions and they actually enjoy partnering and coming up with solutions. If you really say you have rule book and say, this is it. Yes, no, then people will stop thinking, stop coming up with innovative ideas to help customers, to help themselves and the company.

The main thing, the reason why we try to spend more time with the team, is to really increase that culture of taking ownership, thinking out of the box and try to find solutions. So we always say in my slides to the team, I say team first and we want the team to become solution advisors and then customers at heart make sure our aim is to make sure that they treat us as their partners. Then comes to company excellence. If you have a team of solution advisors who can make customers see us as partners, then the remaining commercial bit becomes easier and, of course, it's challenging goal out there. There will be some ups and downs, but if the team works together, takes care of customers, it's much easier to realize commercial success.

Sarah Nicastro: Absolutely. So one last question on this recipe, Venkata, is, you mentioned you've been at Bruker for 19 years. A lot has changed in service in 19 years, and I'm sure you've grown professionally a lot in 19 years. So has this sort of always been your mentality or has it evolved over time? Do you know what I mean? To be focused the way you are and to have that clarity on, if we do this, this will come.

Venkata Reddy Mukku: It evolved. Again, I'm fortunate that I've worked with very good leaders. The leadership team above me and below me are very people-focused. Of course, they're very smart. Also make sure that the company is successful and profitable, but they also treat people well. That kind of gave me a thought. If I treat my team well, the way that I get treated, my boss, my management team, because I worked hard and then I started as a design engineer and I grew in ranks and then did many roles. So if I got all those opportunities and empowerment and trust by the team, by my managers, previous managers, I should replicate that. I should try and do it. I should try and communicate it so that if we are not doing this in any region or any country, people know that, hey, this is what you are preaching, but that's not what I'm getting.

So I really go out there and make sure that everyone knows it's team first, customer at heart and commercial excellence, and this is what we try to do. And if you guys think that we are deviating from this, let us know. So I try and make sure that everyone gets this message and everyone tries to live this so that we enjoy being part of the team and grow.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, I love that. And I was assuming your answer would be something similar. And I say that because the company has to be similarly minded, right? Or if the company were a command and control mentality and then you came in and said, "No, here's my recipe," you wouldn't have the empowerment, or it would just be met with no, do this, et cetera. So we do talk though, when we think about employee engagement and satisfaction, particularly at the frontline, the field technicians, et cetera, we do often point out the fact that it cannot be a idea a leader has that they think will just magically translate to how it feels at the field technician level. It has to really permeate the culture because you have to have leaders all the way from the top down that feel that feeling to be able to create that the way that it's intended. So I think it's great that it's shared throughout the organization.

And I also think the trust you're talking about that's so critical to that empowerment, it does, in a lot of ways, come with time. I think particularly certain employees that have been in a different type of environment, they may come in and you say, we want to hear your opinions and ideas, and they're thinking, I'm just going to sit back and be quiet. When they see that happening throughout the ranks in the organization and they witness it time and time again, that's what helps them feel they can open up and be a part of that culture, right?

Venkata Reddy Mukku: Yeah.

Sarah Nicastro: All right, so what I want to do next is I think there is this increased focus on what we're talking about today, putting people first, okay? I've said before, I'll be interested to get your take. Here's what I sort of think has happened in service over the past, we'll say 15 to 20 years.

When I started in this space, so that was 16 years ago, service was very much in most situations perceived as a cost center. So it was all about productivity, efficiency, keep costs low, et cetera. And as we came to view service as a profit center, a potential profit center, it opened our eyes to the need to then focus on customer experience. So we had this wave of all of these customer-centric initiatives and metrics coming into play. Only more recently, I think, have we begun to reconcile that we cannot achieve those customer metrics without putting focus on the employee. So it's kind of like this reconciliation that I think we're in the midst of. Some organizations are way farther ahead than others, but this idea that, oh, okay, well if we want to be able to really harness this profit center, we need to treat our people a lot differently. They're actually far more intelligent and powerful than we were giving them credit for. And then you have talent gap compounding that, et cetera. So now we're kind of in this phase, if you will, but like a permanent one, where we're needing to take a step back and look at approaches like you're mentioning here today of, no, actually the people need to come first because if the people come first, here's where we get to.

So I think we're growing in our understanding of your type of approach being the needed approach, but I think there are a lot of leaders who are still struggling with how to make those words a reality. How to actually take the actions that put their people first. And so what I want to do is kind of talk through a couple of points that came up in our initial conversation and just have you share some examples on your thinking, your tactics, et cetera. So the first is putting focus on finding the right people. And you mentioned earlier, that has a lot to do with not only technical skill, but maybe more so attitude. So can you talk about that a little bit?

Venkata Reddy Mukku: So we have equal weighting for our technical and non-technical skills. Communication, attitude towards work, teamwork and the culture they were part of before and what type of culture they would want to be in. But we try to make sure that by the time our recruitment team filters the CVs and most of them are technically capable, and then we have some technical rounds and then that's all taken care. But what we really look forward to seeing in a candidate is how they approach if we use some scenarios. We try and understand their behavior, their thought process, and then how they would fit into our organization. So we try to look for the attitude because now we are not in nine-to-five jobs anymore. A lot of flex is needed, remote working, traveling. So people need to have the right attitude towards the role, then they can actually come and contribute. So we try and understand their behavior, their attitude towards the role that they're plan to join in. That is the first thing.

Once we get somebody on board, the next thing is making sure we have a good 30, 60, 90 plan, because that's when we can make sure that the employee or the team member, the new team member, get settled properly. We can't expect them to do very well if we don't treat them and give them the right tools at the start, especially in the first 30, 60, 90 days. We try to make sure that those first three months are productive for the team and make sure that they get, not just the technical knowledge, but also culture and the process of organization. 

Sarah Nicastro: That's their first impression, right?

Venkata Reddy Mukku: Yes.

Sarah Nicastro: So all of the things you're trying to accomplish with your team first approach, you don't want them to not notice any of that until six months in. Yeah, that makes sense.

Venkata Reddy Mukku: So we really want them to appreciate what we have to offer. Once they understand that, they become part of it. And then once they know that we are open, we are open to ideas, we are open to change, I always tell, the best idea wins. It doesn't matter if it comes from a junior engineer or from a senior director. We want to talk. As long as you have a better idea, please speak up. Until you have a better idea, let's make sure we follow what we have in place.

So that's the type of approach we take. We really want to make sure that everyone understand the processes, the culture and then gets empowered to do their job and then this continues. We do a lot of soft skills, remote and online trainings, as well as we get all the teams under one roof at least once a year, if not twice, to get some training. So we do a lot of technical trainings, but then in the past we were not focusing as much on the non-technical trainings. But now, once or twice, meeting everyone under one roof and having a bowling game or doing some activity takes us a long way, really makes them feel connected to different people that they talk or interact remotely all the time. That actually helps them build bonds and engage better, take better ownership and help organization in a much better way.

Sarah Nicastro: So that was another thing on my list is the ongoing training and development. So you're obviously still providing the technical training that you've always had, but if I'm understanding correctly, you're also then now equally prioritizing soft skills training and to your point, making sure you get people together to really solidify that team vibe and let people get to know one another and really, like you said, build those bonds and just spend some time together, right?

Venkata Reddy Mukku: Yes. That's one of the very important things, especially pre-COVID we were doing that a bit often. Now, through COVID, we couldn't do that. And the people that we hired through COVID, we had a huge growth and we are still going through the growth fortunately, you hire people without seeing, we hired people and have them not meet a lot of the team. Those people do not have any connections. It's very superficial. And then the attrition of such hires is much higher compared to the people that meet each other, that work with each other. So it's very important that we create that bonding, we create that environment for people to meet, share knowledge and help each other.

Sarah Nicastro: And that goes well with the next point I had here which is, treating employees as people, not resources. So I think what you're saying is, one example of, it's an investment, right? You're spending money to get everyone together in the same place at the same time. But it's that human aspect. We are human beings, we need human connection. And if people can come together as humans, get to know one another and meet and engage with the people they're working with day-to-day, and it's not just a face behind a screen, it really changes the engagement. So that's one example. Do you have any other examples when you think about how you focus on treating employees as people and not resources?

Venkata Reddy Mukku: I mean, we try to be very empathetic because everyone is having their own personal lives, people with sick kids to having sick partners and people themselves having to go through surgeries. So we try and be empathetic. We try and make sure we accommodate and we say, "It's okay." People get up. In some countries, people are afraid that if I take a month off because of this sickness or this family member sickness, I might lose my job. So we try and create an environment where we say, "It's okay." We always want to put themselves first. If we say, "You first take care of yourself, your family, friends, then work." Some people says, "I can't take off even though I'm sick because this will go south and this will go bad. Our organization would be mad." So I said, everyone is replaceable, and if we think that we thought us, organization cannot run, that's not right.

So we try and make sure that people put themselves first, and we try and put it in action. Whenever someone is sick, we do try be empathetic. When they come back, they know that my team has been rooting for me when I'm away, they come back with full energy and do their best. So it's not always easy. There is always some challenges here and there. But at a high level, if you really create that environment where people can actually be themselves, take care of themselves, and then take care of their family, they actually can contribute more to the organization than if you just say, you got to do your work. We don't care what's happening with your life or with your family. That detachment is actually not going to help in the long run.

Sarah Nicastro: We had a really interesting conversation in a round table last week about, and this isn't limited to only working moms, but that's the context in which it came up, is, hey, we need to start thinking differently about how we react to a situation where a woman who's been a great employee of ours goes through a period of having a small child and needs more flexibility. Because in the grand scheme of things, that window is pretty small. And when we just say, "Nope, here's the rules. If you can't do what we need you to do in this context, go find something else or stay home," we lose that talent. So when we think about how do we keep high talent, if that's a person that's committed to the organization and adding value, how do we think differently about letting them prioritize what they need while also contributing? So I think that's, to your point, not always easy, but a good lens through which to look at things.

The other one here we talked about, and this is one where I can just imagine some old school leaders rolling their eyes. So let's see what we can come up with as examples, which is creating happiness at work and a sense of fulfillment. So this is one where there was a period in time where this was not on anyone's priority list. And I agree, it should be. I absolutely think that the outcome you are trying to create of having people feel personally invested in the outcomes and the success, of not only them, but the organization, comes from feeling fulfilled and passionate about what they do. But do you have any examples for how you're working toward creating that?

Venkata Reddy Mukku: It's not that straightforward. Everyone has their own goals in life. For someone to come to work and be happy, they see different things, they want different things at work. What we try to do is give them purpose. Because it's not just come and repair an instrument or fix an instrument and install it. Our instruments, our technology helps people to find cure for cancers and to come up with the latest and greatest chips for all the cars and phones and whatnot. Pharmaceutical, medical, biological, a lot of different researchers. So we empower a lot of scientists. We tell our engineers, "Guys, you are not just coming to just fix something or install something. You are changing how we live for future generations." So there is a purpose there and more than anything, you know, are working with a team of like-minded people who wants to come to work, enjoy what they do, and contribute to the organization as well as to the customer success.

So it's different in different regions, but we try and make sure that they understand what we do has meaning, has purpose, and then also try and connect to their personal objectives. Hey, this is what we are aimed to do. This is the purpose, but purpose for you is different and we are open to accommodate that. What's the purpose that you are coming? So we need to make sure we understand their objective as well, and then find a way to meet their objective. So now we have our objective, we have their objective, we work together, communicate, put a plan. Then they are looking forward to work on the project they like. At the same time, they are helping the customer and helping the organization. So it's a very important thing to really have that open conversation, understanding the team member's goal, and then understanding the company's vision and the purpose and then make sure we work together on that.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. That's what I was thinking is, really achieving this as a culmination of some of the other things that we've talked about, which is no one feels that they're at a level of the organization where their voice doesn't matter. They all feel they contribute. Everyone feels that they are a person first and employee second. You're working together as a team by creating these personal relationships and bonds to band together toward goals. You have this purpose and you're showing them not only how their role matters in this purpose, but also that you care about their purpose. To me, that goes back to treating employees as people, not resources, in the sense of if you have someone say, "Boy, I really like this part of my role, but I really don't like this and I think maybe I want to do this." And you say, "No, we just need you to keep showing up and doing what you need to do." Yes, it's more complex because as leaders, you have to stop and think about, okay, how do we backfill this part? How do we map this part? But again, if you really care about people being fulfilled, then you listen and you figure out a solution. So I think that makes sense.

Now, all of these things we've talked about, Venkata, are really coming together to contribute to, I remember when we talked, we really kind of got to a point where if we were to try and articulate the big difference of what you're focused on creating, it's this sense of empowerment and ownership over their roles. And I said, for me, it's about creating commitment instead of compliance. So many companies focus on just having employees that comply, that do work. You're focused on creating commitment to the organization, the outcomes that themselves that makes them feel fulfilled.

So it is hard to give all the specifics, right? Because it's a lot of different things. And I think if we really dug into it, I think what we would find is, it has more to do with leadership mentality and authenticity than it does actual, so our training program looks like this, right? Because that feeling for an employee of, I matter to this company and they care what I contribute, comes from that sense. It doesn't come from any specific process. But if you think about, as I've mentioned today, some of the leaders who know it's important to do more people first leadership, but are struggling with sort of how, or they feel this pressure to the numbers and all of that. What would your advice be?

Venkata Reddy Mukku: I mean, if you want to change, you have to start at someplace. And taking care of the people is by far the best place to start with. Again, it's the people that are delivering those numbers. If you don't take care of people, those numbers will not come. Temporarily they might come, but the people will leave and you have a lot of turnover. So it's really important that they evaluate the priorities, understand the team, understand the goals. If the goals are clear, people would invest time on the right priorities. So if the goal is just financial success, no matter what the goal is, customer success, financial success, it all connects backs to the people. So you got to really make sure your basis is right, you have the right foundation, and that's people. So, I mean, managers, leadership, teams should really think about it.

Again, wherever we have weak leadership, I mean, again, we acquire a lot of organization, wherever we have processes that do not help team to flourish, we see a lot of engagement problems. We see productivity problems, we see result problems. Wherever we have people where they care, they support the organization. Even though we have less resources there, we see better results. So we've learned it the hard way in some places, that if we don't put people first, and you invest more, you get less out of it. So I think priorities are important and people should be the top priority.

Sarah Nicastro: I agree. And I know we're out of time, but that was my last question, which is, have you seen this focus pay off in the sense of customer satisfaction and commercial success?

Venkata Reddy Mukku: Yes. So the immediate success I see is people's engagement and productivity. If people put their heart into anything, they get better. Customers can feel it. And a happy employee, an engaged employee, can make a difference. When they touch a customer, they feel it, and then that turns into business. So you get more productivity, you get more business that turns into a profit. So, yes, we've seen that year over year. The more we engage our team, the more we invest in team success, the more they help us with winning more business.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. That's wonderful. So many more questions I could ask, Venkata, so we'll have to have you back again sometime in the future. But I really appreciate you coming on and sharing with us today. So thank you for being here.

Venkata Reddy Mukku: Thanks for having me, Sarah. Appreciate it.

Sarah Nicastro: Absolutely. You can learn more by visiting us at futureoffieldservice.com. While you're there, be sure to subscribe to the Future of Field Service Insiders so you can stay up to date on all of the latest content. And be sure to register for the future of Field Service Live Tour event nearest you. 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.

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Schneider Electric’s 3 Pillars of Service Transformation

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Schneider Electric’s 3 Pillars of Service Transformation

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Sarah welcomes Ravichandra Kshirsagar, Vice President Digital Buildings, Commercial and Services at Schneider Electric, to talk about how he’s embracing service of today while preparing for the service of the future. 

Sarah Nicastro: Welcome to the Future of Field Service podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Nicastro. Today we're going to be getting an inside look at Schneider Electric's three pillars of service transformation. I'm excited to welcome to the podcast today, Ravichandra Kshirsagar, who is the Vice President Digital Buildings, Commercial and Services at Schneider Electric. Ravi, welcome to the Future of Field Service podcast.

Ravichandra Kshirsagar: Thank you Sarah, and thanks for inviting me. I like your podcast, so very happy to be here.

Sarah Nicastro: Thank you. Yes, we've had a number of Schneider folks on and it was only a matter of time before you got here, so happy to have you.

Ravichandra Kshirsagar: Yeah. It’s a great company. Yeah.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, no, for sure. That's one of the things I always say when I talk to folks is when you have the opportunity to talk to different people in the same company but across the globe and they all feel positively about where they work, then you know the company's doing something right, because it's not just by chance. So that's great. Okay, so before we get into the transformation part of our discussion, just tell our audience a little bit about yourself, your role, anything you want to share about Schneider overall, et cetera.

Ravichandra Kshirsagar: So first of all, Sarah, congratulations on pronouncing my name correctly.

Sarah Nicastro: Thank you.

Ravichandra Kshirsagar: My name is Ravichandra. You can address me as Ravi during this podcast. So my role in Schneider Electric, I lead the commercial and services globally. So which has three main elements, I lead the demand, correct creation and sales effort. Also, our offer launches and prioritization of offers that we want to build for our future. Second, I lead country investments and business plan, especially in our emerging markets where we want to grow our market share, we want to multiply our market share by two. And third part of my role is to accelerate digitization of our services business. So modernize and digitize, which is a key pillar and a massive focus for all of us. So that's in a nutshell my role in Schneider Electric. It's a great business growing at a very healthy space, and we have right market trends out there that tell us that we are in the right space.

On me, I've spent my career across mobile networks, industry as well as energy industry with Schneider Electric. Schneider Electric, now 12 years. Previous to that I was in mobile networks industry, roughly seven, eight years. I've worked in Southeast Asia, Middle East, Latin America, traveled a lot across the globe and learned from different cultures. I'm really passionate about sustainability net-zero, and I'm passionate about this topic of digitization, how we move from tangible to the intangible world and monetizing all of that and bringing value to our customers.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, I love that. And I think those three areas of focus that you have, it sounds like it would keep you very busy, but also really exciting the role services plays across those. When you think about opportunity for growth, when you think about differentiation and when you think about the role digitalization can play in taking so many practices out of service that negatively contribute to the environment, there's so much potential to. Not get rid of field service, but just streamline things in a way that we can do it much more intelligently. So it has to be exciting that you have so much potential to work with in your role.

Ravichandra Kshirsagar: And then also if you look at typical industrial companies out there who want to transform, what happens is services are always an afterthought. When you are designing your offers, your products, you design services later, I think that is something we need to change. The offers that you design, the solutions that you design, you need to think about services for your customers at the onset. You need to think about lifecycle, and that really changes the game with how we launch those offers, how we bring value to your customers. And the more we do that, the better we get at delivering services that bring value.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, that's a good point. I was in Denmark a few weeks ago doing a discussion and that was one of my points in my presentation is if you really want to see is the potential that's there, service has to become part of the company's DNA. You see companies that they want to embrace it, but only to the point that it doesn't infringe on the product legacy. It really has to be everything meshes together and it becomes part of the company's identity. So I think that's a really good point. There's no way to get the most out of the things you're trying to do, even if for you it's top of mind, but for the rest of the business it was an afterthought. It doesn't work that way. It really has to be at the table in all parts of the consideration and strategy. And to your point, the customer value proposition, it has to be right there with everything else. Yeah.

Ravichandra Kshirsagar: A lot of these companies out there and the way we have always thought about services as an afterthought, as I mentioned, getting into services and delivering those value added services is rigorous. It's tough. So one side there is a challenge designing those services, deploying those services, delivering value, making sure customers recognize those values and value and pay for it with that differentiation effort. On the other hand, there's a massive opportunity, what you learn with your customers. You really learn how your customers are using your offer, how they're using your technology, what are they doing with it. You go deep into the processes of your customers and that's where you find gold. When you go deep into their organization with their people into their processes, that's where you find gold. That's where you conceptualize the next level of service. That's where digital transformation actually happens, what we are talking about.

You can't just define product which comes out of the box and is going to transform overnight. No, you really need to go deeper over there. And for us, we are lucky. I think we have great customers, we have global accounts that work and deploy their operations across the globe. We have our multi-country accounts, we have our country accounts in certain segments like life sciences or healthcare to the likes of hyperscalers. That gives us ability to innovate, co-innovate with them and bring those services faster to market in a much more agile manner. We do not want to lose that ability. We want to even further fast track, grow with them and build businesses with them. I think that's a massive opportunity for us.

Sarah Nicastro: So that's a good point. So when you think about the way the needs of your customers have evolved over the last five or 10 years, so there was a point where these digital buildings, smart buildings, they haven't been around forever it's been progressing and continues to progress. But when you think about what are the biggest changes taking place right now within your customer base, what does that world look like? If someone on the outside were wanting to understand, how does Schneider enable those smart buildings, digital buildings for customers? What are those customers needing today?

Ravichandra Kshirsagar: Yeah, that's a very good question. Look at the times that we are living in today. You go into the capital markets reports or investor presentation of the Fortune 500 companies. Take the top 100 or take 10, choose any 10. Every company out there is talking about sustainability, net-zero, whichever industry they're in. They're talking about digitization, they're talking about services. Massive opportunity in the times that will live to impact our world positively. And that's what we are working on. So when you come to the world of buildings, 40% of the carbon contribution comes from buildings. 30% of the energy consumption comes from buildings. 80% of the buildings that will exist in 2050 have already been built. And same applies to the world today. So when you look at this need for sustainability, when you look at the world we are living in, there is a massive need to accelerate certain trends.

So delivering on sustainability to our customers, net-zero vision, delivering on hyperefficiency, bringing down those energy consumption. You look at Europe and the challenge that we have on energy today in Europe and across Europe. Third one, resiliency, remote operations, cybersecurity with certain things going around the world, being cybersecurity is so important. And finally, comfort or environment. Delivering to the needs of the people that occupy those buildings, especially to bring people back into offices in the times that we live in, as in when they're coming back and in that hybrid environment that we talk about. So those are the main needs that our customers are putting in front of us. Now, good news is that we have technologies that can deliver to those needs. The question is how we deploy, how we ensure that we deliver those outcomes in the right phase, manner to our customers so they see value, they're able to invest further into those technologies. So that's what is going on in digital buildings, buildings market at this time.

And more and more we are moving from the world of unconnected legacy systems, non-cyber secure, all of those what existed five, 10 years back when the mindset was, if it works well, why replace it? In the world where, no, I want to get more out of this portfolio of buildings. I want to make it carbon-neutral. I want to make sure it's efficient in the way it consumes energy. I want to make it interact with the grids, the microgrids integration. I want to make sure people who are entering those build buildings are comfortable. They also have access to the services. And then in future we'll have buildings who would even look at you as an individual. Sarah, when she enters the building, she enters at this time, she likes her coffee at this time, she accesses this particular space, she likes this type of temperature. The possibilities are phenomenal. We just need to imagine and build a world that both delivers on those sustainability needs and people needs.

Sarah Nicastro: So I have one question and then I'll add one thought. The question is, and I'm sure we don't have time to get too deep into this, but as I'm hearing what you're saying, and I'm just thinking about not only what it means for Schneider, but how it applies to other industries. You said that 80% of the buildings that will exist in, I can't remember what year you said.

Ravichandra Kshirsagar: 2050.

Sarah Nicastro: 2050 already exist and same thing. So to me what that means as someone who's delivering products and services together is when you're designing something new. So I relate this back to companies that I've interviewed that manufacture huge medical equipment or they manufacture huge machinery or what have you, that stays in place for a very long time. It's easy to think about innovation from the sense of incorporating it into new designs. Because that's simple. You're building from scratch. But in this situation, what it means is this importance of figuring out how the products and the services work together is amplified because you're going into existing buildings and retrofitting, redesigning to an extent upgrading the infrastructure to meet current needs and you'll have to continue to do that. So I think about that the same way I think about that when I talk to any manufacturer of a product. You can think about how you design new to make it modern, but that only applies to this small subset that are buying today. You also are left with, to your point, 80% of the buildings already are there. So how do we modernize those and get them to where we need them to be?

Ravichandra Kshirsagar: Yeah, I'm just taking some notes. So I respond to all your points. I think first one design and it's a very interesting point that you mentioned. I was looking at the launch event of the first iPhone by Steve Jobs, an amazing event, and I think I recommend everyone to look at that. Still so relevant. What great Jobs did is he separated the hardware from software device, device hardware and the software and he said the innovation is going to happen at the software level. That's where we are going to launch new features, new things. And that's what is happening with iPhone today. You see them launching software version with new features that are coming. Your hardware could be two or three generations back, but still you are able to access those features.

Sarah Nicastro: The usability, the functionality, the experience, the intuitiveness comes from the software.

Ravichandra Kshirsagar: Exactly. And this is where industries like us have transformed and we are very proud that we are the leaders when you talk about that transformation, software and digital is the core of that transformation. How you separate your hardware from the software, how you innovate on software, how you add new features, launch new versions so that when your customers choose to invest into your technology, they future-proof their investments, that's the whole core of the principles. And you want to give that confidence to your customer that yes, you have invested in the right technology which is open, it'll operate across different systems will bring you new features that will help you extract further value out of that technology. And I will work with the same hardware for a period of time until we have to launch new hardware that needs that processing capacity, we should work with that software.

So that's the overall vision. Then coming back to those 80% building stock, that's the biggest challenge and that's the biggest opportunity in front of us. If you look at 40% of carbon emission and 80% of the building, the equation is same. The biggest opportunity lies in the install base that is out there, the retrofitting, the renovation that you were mentioning. And here you could go with two possible scenarios. One is digital first. So you go at that portfolio, you look at those buildings and you retrofit them with digital. Something in a simple words, a data and analytics software that helps you extract first level of understanding about that asset, how that is used, the consumption that is having, and the first level of impact on outcomes that you can deliver on that portfolio. And that's already being done.

And the second is full modernization in a phased manner. So here you start with software, you replace the software, you keep the hardware below similar if it operates with the same software in most cases we are able to do that. In some cases we need to completely repair and replace the hardware as well. And then you move that building or that asset to the new world and then you track his journey into delivering those sustainability efficiency and then comfort needs. In each of these cases, it depends on the customers. Now, if you are a customer of imaginary real estate portfolio across a country like Australia or US, in that case digital first approach is good approach to start. You put that digital layer on top, you identify all the first level outcomes, you go at it.

And that's all maintenance approach, changing the way you maintain that asset or you take it to condition based maintenance from preventative, ad hoc break fix, two condition based maintenance. And the second case you completely transform that asset to attract new talents, to attract new occupants who are able to pay higher dollar value from what you are gaining on that asset today. And with that investment you can expect 20% more rents on typical buildings. So that 80% is very important to address that first and ensure that technology really brings outcomes to those.

Sarah Nicastro: The other thing I was going to say more of a thought is these conversations get very complex quickly because of all of the different considerations that go into this, but at the end of the day, we talked at the beginning about how services has to be top of mind. It has to be at the table, it has to be part of a business' identity. And really when you think about how to achieve that, really it's this focus on outcomes. We talk about outcomes based service all the time, but I don't know that we really simplify what that means. And I think that at the end of the day, this idea that when you talk about the level of complexity you're talking about in the software and the hardware and the pace at which things evolve today. Customers, they care, but what do they care about?

They care about the outcome. They care about what those changes mean to their goals and initiatives and Schneider's ability to support that. And so I think for a business that's struggling to really evolve, I think if you think about this from the sense of when we talk about outcomes-based service, we're talking about really two things. Stepping away from your mental ties to product and services and looking at those things cohesively as the outcome. And then also to your point, which is so important, you can't deliver outcomes to customers without really deeply understanding what their needs are. I think I'm really super simplifying this, but this people get really hung up for a lot of reasons. You have all of this legacy thinking and processes, et cetera, that keeps people in the weeds at the end of the day embracing this idea of today's customers really don't give a damn about X product and Y service.

They care about what outcome you can provide them. And as a business doing that means really understanding what their needs are because you can't just start ad hoc packaging up your existing products and services and hope that it meets their need. You have to really understand what their business looks like, what pain points they have, what goals they look like, and then that's how you build those outcomes. So I can understand with the advances in digitalization, I'm assuming for Schneider and its customers, that complexity has continued to increase. Which means your customers are relying more and more on you to master that complexity in a way that says to them, here's how we can help you. Your goal is to reduce your CO2 or your environmental impact by X. Here's how we can help you. Your goal is to reduce your energy costs by Y. Here's how we can help you. So can you talk a little bit about, in some ways the commercial relationship, the shift from CapEx to OpEx, this idea of delivering outcomes instead of delivering things and services. What has that looked like with your customers as you have gotten closer to their needs and really worked toward creating value propositions that are outcomes based?

Ravichandra Kshirsagar: So to step back a bit, I would divide the conversation into two parts. So first understanding the customers, then understanding the outcomes. So let's focus on the first part, understanding our customers. So I would divide the whole customer discussion into two main streams. Number one is the segments. Segments means customer is part of the group with homogeneous type of needs that they have. So customers in healthcare, hotels, life sciences, data centers, airports, commercial real estate, all of them in that group would have similar type, similar needs. And you could share those needs across those customer groups called segments. And the second is the type of customer. Is he a global customer, a strategic customer who deploys the same offer across the globe or he builds across the globe? Is he a multi-country customer in specific geographies across countries they're building, or is he only present in a country and that's where he is there. And then you could have the last category, which is the diffused in that country. So just to simply simplify a bit the discussion.

The first thing, whenever you talk about outcomes or digitization, it's very important to understand your customer ecosystem, your customer landscape in those dimensions, having deep understanding of what segments do you serve and what type of customers in those segments you serve. Having those understanding and that understanding in a deeper sense helps you prioritize and focus very important in this type of discussion of outcome based services. So then you have customers who are in data centers, you have the top customer. Their needs are very similar. They want standardized architecture, they want two RSLA or two Rservice on site. They would be very open to remote services with some conditions attached around that. You have life sciences customers who are building vaccine production, medical devices, all of that. Their needs are very similar on environment management and type of services they're looking over there. Likewise for healthcare airports, so you can go on and on.

Then in that dimension, you have your top customers who are looking to innovate, who want those outcomes yesterday. They want to go very fast because they have committed to their investors, their employees, their markets. So in that you define your priority. Normally if you want to pilot a service and you want to go fast on outcome based services, you focus on that top of the pyramid. This is where you can pilot, you can co-innovate, you can partner and you can ensure that dollar that you invest to get a return. It's very important when you invest a dollar, you want more dollars coming out so that you can invest more in the technology, in the structure that you build.

So for me, that prioritization is key. When you go to outcome based model, which customer, which segments and what are we going to deliver over there? And then to your point, instead of creating ad hoc packages and going out there and pushing it in the market doesn't work very well. Not all customers are ready for the service of tomorrow. So that's number one. Then number two is outcomes. This also very important. Which outcomes are you going to deliver? If you say sustainability, what is the baseline? What is the level of commitment you can make? What is the commercial conditions are attached around that? Same for efficiency, same for comfort. You need to understand the parameters in which you and your company play. So there are companies out there, they would go and sign some contracts that would commit to the outcomes that we are going to deliver this and we'll go at it.

There are companies who do go other way around. Yeah, we can promise you, but we cannot commit. We can cannot sign the line. So we need to understand that as well. Where do you play in that? What is your strength in that outcomes based services? And then you need to stick to your strength and the financial parameters in which the financial framework in which you and your company work in. For me, that's the second point. Very important. And to educate our salespeople and our delivery people so that we really deliver what we commit to our customers. In this particular play of service, digitization, delivery, customer success is even more important than selling. Because what happens is you start with two or three sides. A customer with a portfolio of hundred, let's say a real estate customer, he says, I want to pilot on two buildings with you guys.

If you deliver over there, then we are going to go at 10, 20, 30, 50, 100. Delivering to commitment is so important. That's why you need to understand your customer landscape, what outcomes you will deliver. And then delivering them actually, that's where you feel like a winner. When you deliver that, you get this sense of satisfaction as a leader, as a team, as a company, that yes, we have done something that gives us legitimacy in this market. That gives you confidence that whatever we have built actually works, it actually delivers. That's why I said technologies exist. How do you make it more relevant, more available out there and accelerate the way it brings impact?

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. So I realize we're going to run out of time, so I want to try and get through a couple more things quickly, but one of the things you said I have to go back to, which is you said not all today's customers are ready for the services of tomorrow, which I think is a really good point in terms of prioritization. But my question for you, and we don't necessarily have to get into the details on this today, but I would love to talk about it more. My question is that triangle, you're working at the top then, the people that meet the criteria for really co-innovating with today, do you feel the work you're doing there ultimately will trickle down as more companies become ready for the service of tomorrow? Do you know what I'm saying?

Ravichandra Kshirsagar: Look, let me correct myself. I mean the type of offer, so if you go top of the pyramid, the type of offer technology would need is very different, could be different from the technology that you need at the bottom, the use customers, small sites across country. So we are bringing those offers to the market as well, and that's the place. So I think you need to understand with this offer and that technology, which part of customers, which part of the pyramid that you are working with. Then on the top of the pyramid, I think we have learned some lessons. We are in this digital journey for few years now. We have accelerated, we have learned our lessons, and what is important is we don't want to learn the same lessons in different countries, want to make sure we have learned the lesson and then we get ahead of it. We apply in a much more rigorous way when we are working with those customers. So here I think your question is on how do we co-innovate or partner with them and make sure that we are delivering on those outcomes, right?

Sarah Nicastro: No, I think you answered my question. It's just that today you have customers at different tiers of that pyramid that have different needs. I just tend to think that the most innovative things you're creating at the top of the pyramid over time will trickle down. I think that that's what happens with innovation is that over time the capabilities become easier to deliver. The people down here start to want what the people up here have, and so those value propositions evolve. 

But okay, so what I want to talk about next is we're talking about all these changes in customer expectations and digital capabilities and what Schneider can offer. So that also then impacts how the company evolves in its own service transformation. And so how you internally adapt to providing these outcomes-based services. So we talked about, when we spoke for this podcast, we talked about three pillars of that and I'm hoping you can just briefly touch on each. So technology people and then the organization. So can you share a little bit just at a high level, the considerations for those three pillars in how they relate to being able to execute on the type of service offerings we've talked about today?

Ravichandra Kshirsagar: Yeah. So overall, our vision and ambition, Sarah, is to deliver 80% of our services in a digital manner by the end of 2025. It's a tall ask. However, we are on track to get there, and these are the three pillars that I mentioned to you. Technology, people, process, delivery model, those are the three me and my team we fully focus on. So starting with technology, one is on the offer side, second is on the deployment side. So on the offer side, what are the technologies that we have and what are the technologies we are incubating, the types of features that we are prioritizing to get to that remote digital service delivery model. So what that means is reducing more work on site and bring it into digital mode of delivery. So that's on the offer side. Also, advent of AI and bringing those AI based service delivery models, which I presented in Amsterdam as well, how we are piloting those and delivering value to our customers.

Second is deployment on deployment side, as I was mentioning more how do we accelerate modernization and digitization of our install base and enterprise customers out there. So that's a massive work that our teams are doing across the globe, working with our customers to accelerate that journey to show them the risks of staying on the legacy system and the value of moving towards the new modern systems, including digital delivery and bringing value to our customers to start first level of digital services with the offer that we deliver today, which is ecostructure for building, which connects directly into the cloud and starts the delivery of services.

The second part is people, when you accelerate your technology, your innovation, you need your people to understand the value of that technology and how it delivers outcomes to your customers and you want them to embrace that technology. So that means lot of support to your people, their competency, development and clarity on how they would deliver services in the new world. One of the things we did as a team is to reimagine the role of service technicians in 2025 and 2030. Reimagine the role of service technician and write it today as a job description and think about how we should be adopting that technology. The technology may exist today and may not exist. So this is the vision we need to give to our people. We need to build competencies to help them understand the new world, which is not only building management system, but cybersecurity, networking, working with data layer, network layer, that's the second part. And helping them to bring more impact to their customers. These guys are very close to their customers which is the best part of it. They would look even better if they use that technology.

And third part is about processes. The delivery model itself, it's not going to be the same. So we need to adapt ourselves. We need to help our customers adapt to that delivery model. How you go from tangible way of delivering service with a truck rule to intangible with digital. So something you are doing once a month, once a quarter, once a year, now you can do every instant of time with digital and that brings so much value. And it's important you define your processes, your delivery model with that, and you work with your customers as well, so they understand that. So those are the three in a nutshell that we have built and we are working with our customers to deploy that. I think that's going to be the next frontier, especially people part, how we accelerate that faster and people embrace technology even at a much faster pace.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, I agree. You probably saw me taking some notes, so I was writing down a couple of other topics that would be great to have you back on to talk in depth about. So digging into a couple of these specific areas because I think they're so super relevant. So be prepared for me to follow back up.

Ravichandra Kshirsagar: I'm very passionate about this topic. I love the topic, what I mentioned, sustainability, net-zero, and this does not apply only to Schneider. I think every company needs to find its purpose in this world and then define your focus and how you bring value to your customers. Customers are looking for, they want something where it makes them look good in their market with their customers, their people. So what can we do? So yeah, I'm happy to join whenever you want.

Sarah Nicastro: And I've been asked, especially when you talk about this evolution to remote service and the tangible versus intangible, that would be a great conversation to have because I think it's something people are really struggling to wrap their heads around. And I've been asked a few times, what does sustainability have to do with service? And I'm like, are you kidding? People have these guys and girls out in trucks showing up, literally going out, driving around, showing up, not having what they need to do the job, going back, going back again. There's an immense amount of waste. So even if the goal isn't to be able to go all remote, if you can just leverage remote to bring intelligence into only go when it's necessary and when you're prepared, there's a massive amount of opportunity. So it's really interesting.

Ravichandra Kshirsagar: No, just to add two data points there. One, you mentioned people traveling back and forth and mean going to site, just going around working doesn't mean you are delivering value. So I think re-imagining and stepping back on that to reimagine the new world of services, very important for every company. Second in our industry, 72% of the onboarded carbon is in the buildings that are already built. So for us, it's critical key, and I can tell you a lot of the companies out there, whatever you are building, there is a sustainability impact of it. Actually, I'm going through my own understanding of sustainability to go into that topic in a deeper way with a sustainability expert certification.

Sarah Nicastro: Oh, that's awesome.

Ravichandra Kshirsagar: Yeah, it's just to understand, you need to understand the topic deeper to really comment on it, whether it impacts your business or not. And chances are it does impact your business and the deeper you go the better you understand.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. Okay. So two more questions. One is, when you think about, not how far you've come, which is fantastic, but where we're going next, when you think about this services of 2025 services of 2030 and beyond, what would you say is the biggest challenge that you expect to have to overcome to really get to where you want to be?

Ravichandra Kshirsagar: I think that's a great question. I would say there are three main challenges that we need to work on to really go faster on digitization of services and to the new world. Number one is people. I mentioned that service business is about people. It was about people, it is about people, and it will always be about people. And we need to really pay attention to our people and make sure we hold their hand and we bring them with us in that world. It's not about replacing people. There's so much work out there, there's so many outcomes we need to do, we need to do it with the same experts and even bring new generation of leaders into this industry. So it is about people to ensure that we address that challenge head on and in a very organized way.

Number two is about technology. Technology is about collaboration. So it's not just Schneider Electric or other company in this ecosystem. We are part of the ecosystem, and that means you need open technologies that operate across different systems, across vendors, across different protocols. We are able to build those open architectures that have independent data layers. So you have applications and outcomes that you deliver today, and you are ready to build applications that you would need tomorrow. Future proofing your technology, that's the key part. And ensuring that openness in your technology is very important. Everyone building their own technology is great, but if it doesn't operate with others, it's a challenge.

And the third one is adoption. Adoption, deployment. We need to move away from this legacy mindset. If it works, I don't need to replace it. It's not just about maintenance. Maintenance, it's a very interesting word. Maintenance means maintain the same performance, like the same line. Today, it's about outcomes. Performance means going up, improving, delivering more than what was asked. So if you stay on that old legacy mindset, you don't move to that world of outcomes, world of performance, and every building out there needs to perform to the best possible level. So here the facility managers, the people who are working with the engineers need to move to that new world and try newer technologies and deploy them at scale so that we deliver bigger outcomes on sustainability faster. I would say those three. People, technology, the open collaboration and adoption, moving away from legacy mindset.

Sarah Nicastro: They're all good points. Last question, Ravi, is as a service leader, you mentioned you've been at Schneider 12 years. 12 years has brought a lot of change, and you are responsible for a good scope of things. So in your experiences, what's the biggest lesson you've learned?

Ravichandra Kshirsagar: Yeah, the biggest lesson I've learned is listen to your customers and listen to your people. Listening to your customers is very important. And listening means active listening, understanding what they're doing with your technology, where they're deploying it, what type of outcomes they want to deliver. And then triangulating that across different customer groups. Maybe one customer will tell you something. Another one tells you something, the market tells you something else. And together that creates immense value if you are able to triangulate and analyze that information to create certain priority areas where you should be investing your energy as well as your resources. And second is about listening to your people. I think our people, especially the technicians in the field, the engineers, these guys have immense knowledge. They know their customers better than sometimes anyone. And I spend a lot of time in the field.

I spend time going to sites with our engineers, and those are the best journeys where they're telling you how the customer is using it. They'll even tell you something better than anyone has thought on the offer roadmap, I can tell you that it's amazing. So that's listening to your people is very important. I would add a third one, I think the lesson, this applies to all the leaders in every industry is executing, delivering on commitments, delivering on performance. Because when you deliver, then you get more investment in your business. In a group like ours or anywhere else, you need to ensure that performance is moving and you are able to attract investment to your business in the group. So those three things, I would say, customers, people and execution is a priority. Third one I did later, but yeah, it's always on my mind. Executing as well.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, well, like you said earlier, when you're talking about moving to outcomes, you are only as good as your execution. So it's a very important point. All good points, Ravi. Thank you so much for coming and sharing with me and our listeners. And as I said, I took some notes, so I'll look forward to having you back again in the near future. But appreciate your time and appreciate you coming on.

Ravichandra Kshirsagar: Thank you, Sarah. It was a pleasure to have this discussion. And yeah, I would be happy to join you whenever you want. Thank you.

Sarah Nicastro: I appreciate that. You can learn more by visiting us at futureoffieldservice.com. Please be sure to make sure you subscribe to the Future of Field Service Insider so you can stay up to date on all of the latest content. Also, check out the dates for the 2023 live tour. 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.

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On IWD, Sarah welcomes Kristen Nowak, President of Field Service at Unlimited Service Group, to talk about her journey, learnings, and why it’s time for us to get creative as an industry. 

Sarah Nicastro: Welcome to the Future of Field Service podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Nicastro. Today we're going to be talking about the reality that what got us to where we are in service is not what will get us to where we want to go. I'm excited to be joined today by Kristen Nowak, who is the President of Field Service at Unlimited Service Group. Kristen, welcome to the Future of Field Service podcast.

Kristen Nowak: Hi Sarah, thanks for having me.

Sarah Nicastro: Thanks for being here. Kristen and I met at the Field Service Connect event in Austin last fall, and we were both participated in some different conversations where I could sort of tell, we would hit it off and reached out after to see if we could connect and of course ask Kristen to come on the podcast and share some of her insights and opinions and experiences with you all. So Kristen, before we get into the talking points that we have today, tell everyone a little bit about you, your role, the company, et cetera.

Kristen Nowak: Sure. So like you said, I'm the president of Unlimited Service Group, which means that I look after our 30 unique brands of service companies that have 119 locations across North America with just over 1300 technicians committed to servicing commercial kitchen equipment for our manufacturer partners and customers in the market that we serve. I'm also very blessed and lucky wife to Ed and mom of four, CJ, Megan, Jerry, and Katie. So that's just to say that at any point of the day I'm probably worrying about one of those technicians and definitely worrying about one of those, at least one of those four kids. So if you should just use this time to take a nap. Because that's a lot and I'm sure you understand that Sarah too.

Sarah Nicastro: I do, I do. Yes. A mom's work is never done, that's for sure. Whether you're at work work or anything else you're doing, there's always someone on your mind, that's for sure.

Kristen Nowak: And service never sleeps, so all the time.

Sarah Nicastro: For sure. Yes. So let's talk a little bit about your journey into field service. Okay. So we talked about that you started in public accounting, so completely different. And I've talked on this podcast before about how when I started writing about field service, I had no idea what field service was. I mean, I didn't know that it was a group of industries. I thought, wow, this is going to be so boring. I didn't know that there was actually so much going on. And part of what we're going to talk about later on in how do we get people into this space? Part of it is I always say there's a branding problem. People don't think or don't necessarily know what field services the first time you hear that. And so I'm sure when you were in public accounting, you weren't sitting back thinking I would really love a career in field service, but here you are. So tell us a little bit about what that journey was like and how you progressed from where you started to where you are today.

Kristen Nowak: So I was recruited out of public accounting into the private sector and just like you, and maybe even worse, I started working in field service and I still had no idea what field service was. So I was recruited into a director of finance role. So it's just a little bit different than what I was doing when I was in public accounting, but right when I entered the business, I started seeing the kind of busy, chaotic, messy world of field service and coming from a very structured world and I just fell in love with it. And I was really fortunate to have great leaders, inspirational leaders who gave me opportunities to learn more. In fact, every time a project came up, they said, hey, here's an idea we have for the business.

I raised my hand and back then we were just one service company located in Chicago. So to look back over that 13 year span, the time that I've been in the industry, I raised my hand a lot and it was like I said, really fortunate to have leaders and mentors that gave me opportunities. I quickly moved into an operational role within six months of being in the company. So moved out of finance and became director of operations, and I finally started learning what the heck field service was.

Sarah Nicastro: By immersion. Right. Okay. So you went from finance to operations and then what was the progression from there?

Kristen Nowak: So like I said, we were just one service company at that time and I was still learning so much. I mean, I would venture to say I'm still learning so much, but I started riding along with technicians and kind of learning what their world looks like. I started leading our organization just in that company in Chicago, and at that time our parent organization was starting to look to acquire and I thought that sounded really cool. And so I raised my hand and said, hey, can I be a part of that first acquisition that happened to be out in the Boston area? And they said, yeah, sure, you can come along. And from there on, we kept doing acquisitions a couple every year, and I was fortunate enough to be a part of them, but every spot along the way, learning about the technicians in that market, the customers in that market, learning what the team in the office did to make service work, I just kept sitting with different roles and taking on more and more as I learned more and more about business.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. So 13 years ago when you joined the company, it was one business in Chicago and you said today it's how many?

Kristen Nowak: 30.

Sarah Nicastro: 30 across 119 locations is what you said, right?

Kristen Nowak: Yeah.

Sarah Nicastro: So immense growth.

Kristen Nowak: So Canada all across the US. Yeah.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. Which is just really interesting to think about how you've grown along with the business. So I'm sure that's been really fulfilling. And also to your point, given you a lot of opportunity to learn different things. When you think about, I always say when you come across people today that have been with one company for 10 years, 15 years, 20 years, it makes me think that either they're someone who loves complacency, which typically that's not it, right? Because even if they did, that might not be what the company needed, but more so it makes me think that they've had a lot of opportunity to continually learn and grow. So because if you hadn't had that where you are, at some point you probably would've felt you outgrew the opportunity at the company and you would've tried to go find that somewhere else. So it's really cool that you've been on these parallel tracks of the company growing and you being able to grow right alongside it.

Kristen Nowak: Well, I think it's interesting because when I first started, we were a very small company. We had less than 50 people in our organization, and I was the person in charge of trucks. I was the person that onboarded the technicians and other staff members. I was the person that reviewed payroll. I was the person that talked to customers. I was the person that dealt with the employee problems. And as you've proven, you can't do that. You can't be everything to everyone. And so you start bringing in team members that are experts in that area. And I have learned so much one about all the things I did wrong in the beginning, but learned so much about each running those areas of the business.

We have to great HR partners, great IT partners that I should not be setting up people's email accounts and fixing their printers, but we have great marketing partners and I'm still learning so much. So as the business has grown and I've grown along with it, I've just had exposure to people that are experts and just wonderful in the areas that they focus on. That's been a great opportunity for me.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. Okay. So here is my next question, which is I can't remember what the overall statistic you always hear is, but you hear that women will only apply to a role if they have, I think it's like 100% of the qualifications and men, it's like 60% or 50% or something. And so we know that there is a real difference there. But what's interesting to me about your story is how you say you kept raising your hand. So I'm sure some of those things that you were raising your hand for, you weren't super experienced in, you wanted to learn about them. So there's two tracks to this.

One is the way, and I think we tend to, as women that have achieved a certain level of success, oftentimes I hear us defer to the one path which is, oh, it was great because I was given so much opportunity or I lucked out, et cetera. And so that is one side. There's sort of situations where you find yourself in the right place at the right time, or there's people within the organization that saw something in you and wanted to say yes when you raised your hand and give you those opportunities. But what I want to talk about that I don't think we talk about enough is what made you raise your hand? What made you have the confidence to do that or the desire to learn?

Kristen Nowak: And it's the best piece of advice I ever received in business. And it was from my boss at the time. And before you become a leader or a manager, you generally are portraying the qualities that are needed. So you're generally doing part of the job before you actually get the job. And so when the position for director of operations came open, my boss at the time said to me, what do you think about it? And I said, I'm not ready. I don't know enough about the industry. I'm going to break the business. My kids are too little. I had a hundred excuses of why I wasn't ready for the role, and it was a male leader. And just the great advice he gave me is he said, yeah, you're not ready for it, but when you're ready for it, somebody else will already have it.

So you can learn on the job, have the confidence to jump in, ask questions, and be continually learning. But don't wait until you're ready because when you're ready, it'll be gone. And that really motivated me. The other thing that motivated me was it actually has the name, he actually has the name, I have a son, one of my sons is special needs. And I knew that I've always known my why, and I knew that I was the one that was going to have to support and care for him long term. And every time I wanted to have kind of a crisis of confidence, I looked at him and was like, nope, I've got to do it for him and I've got to do it for my other kids. And so it was those two things, looking at my family and knowing that I had to protect them into the future.

And then hearing this, the best advice ever is don't be there when you're ready. Those two things forced me and it was way out of my comfort zone, raising my hand was not a natural to me. So yeah, it was a lot of internal pushing myself saying, remember those two things and that's what did it.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, I was just reading something in the last few days, and I'm not going to be able to think about where I was reading it or anything, but it was talking about this idea of most people that you see doing these things that you may sit back and admire or think, wow, look at that journey. It isn't comfortable for them. They're not doing it because they have some innate absence of fear or some right superhuman confidence. They're pushing through that fear, they're pushing through that discomfort to really put themselves out there. And I think in a lot of ways it's growing a muscle. That first time that you raised your hand you're probably sweating and I mean it was so hard.

But once you do it a couple of times and you see that nothing bad happened, maybe some really cool good things happened and you're learning, and then the next time it's a little bit easier and a little bit easier. And I think sometimes the only way to grow your confidence is through action. I can't just to that person's point, sit around and wait until you feel ready, because that might never happen. So I think that is really good advice. And I also think it's commendable that you took it and you did the hard work of pushing through your own discomfort to be able to take the learning opportunities that you did.

Kristen Nowak: And I remember October 4th, 2010, my first day at this job, I sat in the parking lot 10 minutes before I was supposed to walk in and said, okay, Kristen, you're going to go in, you're going to be different. You're going to talk to people. And it was so far out of what I was used to, and I'm so glad I did because having just that push of that of courage, that 30 seconds of courage really changed my life.

Sarah Nicastro: And I think it's really powerful for you to talk about that today because as Kristen who's the president, there are people that are coming into their careers that wouldn't know you had those feelings if you weren't genuine about it. And so sometimes that's so helpful to someone because they see the current version of you and think, oh, she's probably always been confident or courageous and knowledgeable on X, Y, and Z. But no, you had to give yourself a pep talk in the parking lot, just so many other human beings.

Kristen Nowak: It's the power of vulnerability, I think. When you're willing to be vulnerable and tell people your story, it brings them along with you on it.

Sarah Nicastro: Absolutely. Yeah, I'm a big fan of vulnerability. I think we're all human beings doing our best and trying to contribute. And the more we can share those experiences, I think it helps us and it helps others. So very good. So I want to talk about when we spoke to prepare for this, we talked about the fact that in the beginning, especially in 2010, you were very often the only woman in the room. And so I want to talk about two sides of that. So one is what did you find hardest about that? And then the second is, was there anything you liked about it or any part of that that you felt that gave you an advantage or an opportunity?

Kristen Nowak: So I think what was hardest about it, and it still happens a lot because it's a very male dominated industry that I'm in. And I think what I struggled with a lot and still do some days is feeling like I deserve to be in the room. Whether it is a room with our manufacturers and customers and other leaders in the industry, or if it's a room sitting talking with our technicians and our dispatchers, when we talk about the leaders in the industry sitting in that room, I didn't grow up through the industry, I was an outsider. So feeling like the piece that doesn't belong in there has always been something that I struggled with. And in the same way, sitting and talking to technicians and dispatchers when I've never done that job, I always struggled with that too. And the thing is that struggle is all on me.

Nobody really made me feel that way. That goes back to feeling like I didn't have the skills and the qualities to do that job. So nobody really made me feel that way. I can't say that the men in the room looked at me like what is she doing here? So that was more a confidence thing for me. But if you flip that over and say, okay, what opportunities did that bring to being one of generally the only woman in the room? And I think bringing the perspective, the unique perspective that I have of being a woman in a male dominated industry, being a wife and a mother, being an accountant, all of those different skill sets that I bring into the room offer a different perspective generally from the people that we're already sitting in that room. So I think that just level of thought diversity really made the companies better, brought different ideas to the room, brought that different perspective that I think as we continue to evolve as an industry is really, really important.

Sarah Nicastro: And that's where I kind of pushed you in the direction when I asked you about raising your hand to talk about within you, what did that take? But this is where we have to give the company credit as well because one, they were receptive to allowing you to have those learning opportunities and probably seeing that if not the pep talks you had to give yourself, recognizing that not everyone has the drive or the initiative to want to raise their hand and always say can I learn this? Can I do this right? Because there are situations, and I've had conversations with women that have been in similar situations as yours in those early days when they were the only woman in the room and they were treated in a way that reinforced that internal dialogue of I don't deserve to be here. And so this is where it's a combination of both.

It's a combination of pushing out of your comfort zone, but then we have to as organizations recognize that value of the diversity of thought and be open to hearing different opinions, perspectives, experiences. Because if they had been at all closed-minded to that, it would've shut you down and you would've probably ultimately went somewhere else or whatever would've happened, but they were open to it. So it takes that teamwork of being more open to things that are different than the historical norm and then forcing yourself to build that confidence of, no, I deserve a seat at the table just as much as anyone else here.

Kristen Nowak: So I am fully aware that there are so many women that went before me that didn't have the kind of support that I had. I had the support of the men that I walked into the room with from our organization, bringing me along and exposing me to those opportunities. Without that, I don't think as many doors would've opened for me, but because they brought me through the door with them, I was able to learn and grow. And now I sit at a place where I am not afraid to give my opinion, I am much more confident and comfortable to have those discussions and to walk through the door by myself. So that's not the case. I'm very fortunate to be in a company that had that level of support.

Sarah Nicastro: But they're very fortunate as well. And that's the thing is this isn't about, we're going to talk in a minute about diversity and different types of that, but this isn't about them bringing you along for the ride. It's about them understanding the opportunity to grow through involving people that were different than the historical norm. And the other thing is being in that situation, that mutually beneficial situation where you had the opportunity to grow, they had the opportunity to gain new perspective and skills, and you're also now sitting in a position where you can help others walk through that journey. And that is also really powerful thing.

Kristen Nowak: I think there is a piece of this conversation that you have to do that deliberately, you have to deliberately think of I want different perspectives and different ideas in the room and while combining that with the best person for the job as well. And so bringing those two together, always requiring that people are hard workers with high levels of integrity and commitment, but looking outside the box of what does that person actually look like?

Sarah Nicastro: I think we're at a point going back to the title of the podcast, what got us to where we are today is not what will take us to where we want to be. And I think we're at a point where there's this discrepancy in some cases of companies saying, and I'm not even talking about diversity necessarily right now. I'm just talking about overall, right? Saying they're open to change but not really meaning it. So in your situation, if we look back, that could have been you had an opportunity to sit at the table, but when you brought a different perspective, they could have very easily defaulted to, oh yeah, no, that's interesting, but we've always done it this way. So we just want to keep... So there's kind of this disconnect between recognizing we need to change.

But then really what does it mean to commit to getting uncomfortable and looking at just because it's always been done this way doesn't mean that's how we need to keep doing it, et cetera. I think a lot of people have some of those feelings you had of am I cut out to be here? Do I have the same right to having a voice and stuff like that? I know that today when I speak at a conference or give a keynote, I usually have people come up to me after and say, I enjoyed that so much because it felt so authentic. And that's for me, part of my journey that took building confidence and courage because early on I also was often the only woman in the room presenting to a room full of men. And I would let those feelings get the best of me to where I felt like I had to pretend to be something else.

And it took me some time to realize, no, I mean we're all smart in different ways and we all have different areas that are just not our strengths. And if we can just be ourselves, that's what brings something special to the table. And as soon as I started just letting go of what I felt I should be or needed to be or feeling like I needed to pretend to be smarter than I was in a certain area and just started focusing on being me, that's when I feel like I started actually being able to have an impact.

Kristen Nowak: Well, it's distracting and time consuming to try and wonder who you need to be that day to please the masses. That is incredibly time consuming. So when you just decide to be yourself, it just opens so many more possibilities and for you to focus on what's really important and what needs to get done.

Sarah Nicastro: But to your point, and going back to this parallel track, I have been a part of organizations that did not like for me to be myself or to have opinions that were outside of the accepted consensus. And when you find a place that really values that diversity and thinking and respects different perspectives and opinions and wants to blend that to figure out the best way forward, it makes an immense difference. So that kind of leads us to this next point, which is one of the topics of conversation that we experienced at the Connect event in Austin was around one of the biggest topics of conversation on this podcast, which is how do we bring in new talent to field service and to these roles? So we'll talk a little bit about this, but to start, can you just talk a little bit about how this challenge is impacting your organization specifically?

Kristen Nowak: Yeah, I mean this is something that I talk about every day, tends to keep me up at night. We are so far behind in recruiting and retention of technicians into this industry. It is a really scary thought of to see what 3, 5, 10 years down the road looks like if we don't change our way of thinking about this. To put it into some data in generally, we are eight days out on service if somebody calls now, that's not what happens in reality, we move things around. But if you just do the math problem and say the number of calls we get done in a day versus the number of technicians in our world, this is how long it's going to take us. This is how much of a backlog of work there is. And that's not me just speaking for unlimited service group. I have talked to leaders across our industry that are experiencing the same thing.

So we are never going to have a great customer experience if we can't tighten up those numbers a bit. And the other challenge is that when we are successful at bringing people into the industry, we are really bad at keeping them in the industry. We're not doing a great job of retaining talent. So there is so much we still have to learn and change about what we think technicians. And I'll expand that beyond, and what employees want today because we are not going to be able to serve the customers in the way that they expect and that they need in order to keep their kitchens up and running if we don't at least take a step towards solving this problem. And the ways we did it 13 years ago when I started are not the ways that work today.

Sarah Nicastro: So going back to the title of the podcast and thinking about what got us here versus what will lead us forward, what would you say about how diversity factors into that?

Kristen Nowak: Yeah, so I think there's a practical way of it. There's the practicality of we need to reach more people regardless of race, gender, any thought, we need to reach more people in order to educate them in order for our success to continue. That's just the practical nature of it. But there's also a thought around it that what worked attracted people into the industry, the type of people into the industry then is that type of person doesn't exist as much anymore. So back when schools used to have shop classes and people were attend to move towards that direction, it was much more accepting kind of back when I started and beyond when I was in high school as well. It was moving into the trades was not a default for someone that couldn't get into college or didn't want to go to college.

It was an acceptable, really sought after valued role. And then we went through this phase of, and we're still going through it where college was the only acceptable role, moving into post-secondary school that was college and now it's caused us this problem where we don't have those people that like to fix things anymore that are more inclined and well, they still like to fix things, we haven't taught them anything about that. And so we need to create those people. We need to teach those people that this is a really valuable industry to go into. It's what keeps the world running. We don't have people that can fix stuff. How do all the things around us happen? So we have to teach people again how valuable these roles are. And that is across gender, across race, that regardless of that, we need people to understand how valuable this is.

Sarah Nicastro: And I know you mentioned to me a book you had read recently on generational diversity. And so that's another area, again, I think the companies that are making the most progress are making that progress because they're not looking at diversity as one flavor of it. And they're not looking at it as, okay, well we have to do this either because society tells us we should or just because we need bodies in the door. We need to do this because we can learn so much. Not only because it's what it will take for us to continue to be able to meet customer demand, but also we can be a better business if we value diversity of thought and what that looks like for all of these different types of people.

Kristen Nowak: So it's really interesting, the book that you referenced was a book called The New Diversity. And what it was about is the diversity of generations. So what baby boomers value is not what millennials and Gen Xers and Gen Y, that's not what they value. And so when I got into this business, what the people coming into our industry valued from what their career looked like is totally different than what those coming into the workforce now look for. And we haven't adjusted what we're giving them. We're still basing our benefits, our pay, the structure of our job on what has always worked, and it doesn't speak to a new generation of employees. And so if we are stuck in that way of thinking, if we get somebody in the door, they're not going to stay because we're not valuing what's important to them.

We're not giving the benefits that's important to them. And so bringing a more generationally diverse thought diverse team into the company from a leadership level all the way down is going to have you start realizing what things that the new workforce coming into the industry values. It's so important if you want to start building for us the next generation of technicians that's going to stay 5, 10, 15 years.

Sarah Nicastro: And I think sometimes what happens here, when we spoke to prep for this, we talked about the fact that even within field service, there's a lot of different types of field service. There are field technicians that they do need to have a college degree or they are working in this type of environment, et cetera. And we talked about how for you, it is very much the traditionally viewed as more blue collar type service work. It can be dirty, it can be grimy, et cetera. And so sometimes I think organizations that fall into that category, and I hope you don't take offense to this, but almost use that as an excuse to not get creative because it's kind of like, it's this self-fulfilling prophecy of, well, this is already a challenge for everyone. And then you have these organizations where they're going to work in an IT environment, and of course they would just pick that and we're doomed.

And it's not to ignore the realities of those challenges, but it also can't detract from the responsibility the organization has to adapt. And I think that what I try and push or say to people is, no matter what your circumstances, there are ways you can evolve and improve. There are ways for you to change and make these roles more appealing for the candidates you have today if you want to. You just can't come at it from a mindset of, well, that would never work.

Kristen Nowak: That never works for us. And it was kind of a light bulb moment sitting in that conference with you, we were all talking about this challenge of bringing new talent into the industry, bringing into service. And I remember sitting there thinking, well, thank goodness it's not just me and everybody's struggling with this. There's comfort in numbers. And then I was like, oh, wow, everybody is struggling with this. We are all competing for the same group of candidates. And I did, I had the thought you just said the limiting thought you just said, wow, I don't have the best story to tell. We are working in chaotic, dangerous situations in sometimes dirty kitchens and at all hours of the day and night on holidays and on weekends.

It doesn't feel like a great story to tell, but it's our responsibility as leaders of the industry, those that are tasked with growing our companies to find the story that's compelling and I know this is a great industry. I know that they're great people in this industry. I have to tell that story instead of saying, hey, you want to come work for me and work on a fryer? It's got to be a better story than that, and that's our responsibility to your point, we can't just sit back and say, this is too hard.

Sarah Nicastro: And this is the intersection back to valuing diversity of thought generational and otherwise because if you're willing to move past that initial uh oh, like we have a hard challenge here, which again is true, but if that's the challenge you have, then if to move past the emotion, figure out how to start solving it. If you really value different perspectives, then it gives you the ability to go out and start engaging with different groups of people that you could potentially bring into this space and just initially do so with the objective of understanding what do they think of it? Maybe you start there, not even what do they want out of it, but what do they think of it and what narratives do you maybe need to work on shifting or telling the story better?

And then what do they want? What's important to them, what would make them stay at a job or not? And that's the insight that if you're open to it can help you start getting creative internally about what you can craft into something that is compelling to the people that you want to bring in. And yes, it's a lot of work. I mean, there's no way around that, but to your point earlier, your success in three to five years depends on doing that work. So it's hard work, but it's important work.

Kristen Nowak: And I think to your point, I think the most important thing that we can do to get past this is to listen. And then the second most important thing that we can do is to act, to go out and do the next right thing that speaks to our team members and starts giving them the things that they value and changing our organization so that it's attractive to future generations and sustainable for future generations.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, I always think to me, one category you always hear people really value today is flexibility. So I've heard plenty of service organizations say, well, we can't offer that service is 24 hour a day business, okay, yes, but are we picking this apart in the right way? Yes, it's a 24 hour a day business, but that doesn't mean every employee you have needs... And this is what I mean about people get very set in well, for the last 20, 30 years, we've had a team of people that worked this schedule and they just don't necessarily think, well, what if we did this? What if we did a rotation? What if we did whatever? And that's where I urge people to, you got to get creative. I mean, if the game has changed, you have to change with it. And it's not about continuing to where's Waldo find the people that will fit into the mold we've always had.

Kristen Nowak: Break the mold.

Sarah Nicastro: Yes, exactly. Are there other things that you think about when you think about figuring out the story you need to tell or figuring out how to accommodate what people value today? Are there things that come to mind?

Kristen Nowak: Well, I think you just hit on it a little bit. When I first started, I could not give away enough overtime for an example, everybody wanted the overtime hours. When I hired somebody new, they were like, well, what's that going to do to my overtime? Everybody filled the on-call schedule right now. I can't get anybody that wants to work, be in an on-call schedule or work overtime. And so it just shows that at one point they valued the saving of money and earning as much as they can, and now they're valuing more time is more their currency. I mean, you still have to have a great pay and all the benefits that go along with that, but you have to be able to listen to, okay, now time is more valued. So to your point, what is the end state? What does service utopia look like for a technician?

And then start working backwards to the small steps that you can take. So in order for me to have, if a flexible schedule is the end state, in order for me to have that and offer that, I've got to have this number of technicians, this volume of technicians, then I've got to develop what those shifts are that we can still meet the customer need, and then I've got to find people that can fit into them. So just do the next right thing to find what could get you there. Because you can't get there overnight. You can't say, tomorrow I'm going to offer flexible schedules, or I'm going to offer zero cost insurance or unlimited PTO, or anything like that. You have to start at what's the next right thing that I can do to start working towards that and bring those team members along with you in that conversation so they know what you're working for working towards for them. That's going to build a lot of value and a lot of loyalty, them seeing the process and the progress that you're making towards making their work environment better.

Sarah Nicastro: No, that makes perfect sense. If you think about how we started this conversation, what got us to where we are today isn't what will get us to where we want to go, are there other areas that you feel leaders need to be really thinking about and reflecting on?

Kristen Nowak: Well, it's a great question, and I think it all comes back to value. It really all comes back to what your team members value. So is it time, is it benefits? Is it pay? Is it work environment, work from home or work from the office? I think the pandemic it was such a challenging time for so many people, but it also taught us so much about our team and that we really can trust them to know what is best and to do the hard work for our organization. So I think what we have to do better as an organization, as an industry, and I would say for everybody, is listening and asking people what would make a successful work environment for you?

What is it that keeps you sticky to a company and staying around? What do you think we need to do to grow? I mean, all of these people have great ideas. We just rarely ask them. So invite others into the room with you and listen. And that's where, back to my early days where I was the payroll person and the HR person and the customer person, you don't need to be that anymore. Invite these people along to have the conversation with you, and you're just going to get better from there. More is better, together is better.

Sarah Nicastro: It's just like we said in the beginning, it's about valuing different perspectives. And to your point, I think if you're really open to listening to those different perspectives, it will guide you toward what the things are that you need to get creative about and work on changing. All right. Kristen, last question is 13 years in field service, and what is the biggest lesson you've learned as a leader in field service?

Kristen Nowak: Oh gosh. That I'm always learning. That I'm always learning, and that you can never have enough good people around you. There's no room for ego, there's no room for arrogance, and you're better together than on your own.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, I think that's great. And I think that mentality of not only mentality, but hunger to always be learning. I mean, that's what keeps people relevant over a long period of time. The worst thing you can do is feel like you've got it all figured out, right? If you know don't, and no one ever does, then you just continue that journey of soaking up the different knowledge and experiences.

Kristen Nowak: It's hard because you just like, okay, I know this. I'm just going to get this done. I'm just going to move forward. I'm just going to make this decision. When you don't bring people along with you, the unintended con consequences that you can alienate them. And while we always have to, as leaders, we're in the business of making decisions and setting strategy, and so sometimes you have to be the one that makes that final call, but it's always better when you brought people along with you.

Sarah Nicastro: Absolutely. All right. Well, thank you so much for coming and talking with me. I really appreciate it.

Kristen Nowak: Yeah. Thank you so much for having me, Sarah. I enjoyed it.

Sarah Nicastro: Absolutely. You can find more by visiting us at futureoffieldservice.com. I want to make sure you are aware that we have recently introduced the Future of Field Service Insider. If you subscribe to the Insider, we will make sure that every other week we deliver the latest Future of Field Service content to your inbox, along with some exclusives for our community. We also have announced the dates for the 2023 Future of Field Service Live Tour. We will be in six countries between March and September. So have a look at the schedule and register for the event nearest you. 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.

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Macro Themes Making Service More Strategic

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Macro Themes Making Service More Strategic

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Sarah welcomes Curtis Novinger, Regional VP of Service, P3 Services to discuss the trends he sees when evaluating businesses for investment on how companies are embracing opportunities to innovate and make service more strategic.

Sarah Nicastro: Welcome to the Future of Field Service podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Nicastro. Today we're going to be talking about some of the macro trends that are involved in making service more strategic. I'm excited to be joined today by Curtis Novinger, who is the regional Vice President of Services at P3 Services. Curtis, welcome to the Future of Field Service Podcast.

Curtis Novinger: Good to be with you Sarah.

Sarah Nicastro: Thanks for being here. So before we get into our topic for the day, tell our listeners a little bit about yourself, your role at P3 and your sort of journey in field service.

Curtis Novinger: Sure. Well, currently I'm Regional Vice President of Service for P3. P3 is a family of companies across the United States. We have HVAC, plumbing and electrical businesses, primarily in the plumbing space right now. And my job is to support those companies and help them grow and provide services that help them get better. So prior to joining P3, I was Vice President of Service Operations for Comfort Systems USA. That's about a $3 billion business. They have 40 companies nationwide, about 140 locations. I worked with teams in sales, operations, and then the last three years I was there, I was doing a lot of equipment as a service development, developing products and remote monitoring systems that allowed us to offer services, full service agreements. So prior to that, I got into the industry while I was in architecture school, I worked as a plumber nights and weekends. And when I got out of school, instead of going into private practice, I started a plumbing company. And then I sold that company in 2008 to Comfort Systems USA. I've got three kids, two of which will be driving next week.

Sarah Nicastro: Wow. Next week.

Curtis Novinger: I was doing parallel parking last night in the dark with trash cans as cars because we hit some trash cans. So I'll have a lot of extra time on my hands, but my insurance rates are definitely going to go up.

Sarah Nicastro: Wow, that's exciting and scary all at the same time. Okay. So when we were preparing for this podcast, we talked, you have quite an interesting background in terms of your experiences growing up and through school and how that, we talked a little bit about how maybe that impacts your viewpoints and how you look at things going on around you. Can you share a little bit about that?

Curtis Novinger: Well, I never thought that I would be a plumber. My dad and family, we worked on apartments that we purchased when I was a kid, so I would follow him around and fix air conditioning units and that kind of thing. But my mom was an opera singer. She passed away here a few months ago, but she was, had a master's degree in opera from Columbia University in New York, and dad was an international banker. So my parents got divorced. My mom said, business is evil, you should either play the violin, do something else. And so I went to school at McGill University and studied philosophy for four years, which I realized unless you don't want to be a lawyer, it's very difficult to get a job. And I had that same struggle. So kind of went back to what I did with my dad as a kid and started fixing houses and that's how I supported myself and until I went back to school.

But I think I studied philosophy partly just to try to understand some of the patterns behind how people think and what drives them. And I do that at work. That's just kind of naturally how I think and definitely enjoy identifying patterns in how the businesses operate and just how in general the market works mostly to identify biases that give people, if you recognize you have a bias and give you a competitive advantage if you can address it. So that's sort of what I've done over the last few years, both identifying ways in helping customers in unique ways, but also to build business strategy in a way that you're working in the blue ocean rather than staying in the red ocean with all the rest of the competitors.

Sarah Nicastro: And maybe that's how we got on that topic. My undergrad was in psychology. And I mean similarly, I feel like it leads into everything I do because I'm just very interested in understanding how people are thinking and how their mind is working. We had a podcast last week with an author who is a neuroscientist by trade and talking about change management. And it was so interesting to me to put that context to a lot of the challenges that the people we talk to regularly here have in terms of, well, we're trying to change X, but we're facing so much resistance. And then look at picking apart what's behind that. And I do think it's really interesting and it's a level of examination that maybe the average bear doesn't bring to those situations. And so having those conversations, understanding those perspectives can be so helpful in then working through some of those challenges. Or to your point, developing strategy or understanding biases, etcetera.

So, yeah. But then to your point, you know, you end up places you didn't really anticipate being and life unfolds and takes you in wild directions. But that's cool. Very good. Okay, so in your role at P3, you're helping evaluate a lot of different investments in service businesses. And so, kind of taking a look at not only to your point, how can we differentiate or how should we set a strategy that that's in the blue ocean, not the red ocean, etcetera, but really just taking in what's going on in these different organizations that you're having a look at or evaluating, etcetera. So, when you think about what you're seeing and also the experiences you had at Comfort Systems, so inside of the business, where do you think we are on this evolution of making service more strategic? So moving away from the very tactical break, fix, transactional type of service to what I know, you and I both have opinions on what it can be.

Curtis Novinger: And I think I can speak to my industry specifically. I think we're way behind a lot of the adjacent markets like aerospace, for instance, they're way ahead of us in that regard. Our industry is still very fragmented, which is partly why there's so much interest from private equity. There's about a hundred thousand plumbing contractors nationwide, give or take. And it's going up. It's becoming more fragmented even though there's a lot of consolidation. So what that means is that most of the businesses are small. They're run by a service plumber that struck out on his own, kind of like me. And he's not only just the plumber, he's the accountant, he's the bookkeeper, he's dispatching, and there's not a lot of time in a business like that to work on a business. So strategic thinking, if it didn't take place before he started and got in that gauntlet of meet and payroll every week and collecting money, then it maybe doesn't happen for quite a while.

But there's certain things going on in the market right now that's changing that at that level, that million to $5 million business, which makes up the majority of the market. Then there's the field service management software that's out there, Service Max, Service Titan, is doing much better job not just providing dispatch and routing, but they're offering workflows that allow you to structure a business in the most economical fashion. They have much better financial reporting. A lot of the dashboards give you insight. And once you have that system set up, that kind of strategy, working on the business, just becomes a natural part of how you do the work. So that effort, by and large, has been done by people outside of the business using processes from other adjacent markets to apply them to the plumbing industry.

The other thing that's happening, or I guess one of the things I said about, unless you start the business with a specific strategy in mind, a lot of times you're just being a generic plumber. So I look, when I'm looking at plumbing companies, I like to see a company that has a unique offering. Lots of businesses, you see the trucks on the street, they say they do everything. They think that that's a positive thing. They do residential and commercial, they do drain cleaning, they do boilers, they basically fix everything. Well, if you're working on everything, it's hard to be good at any one thing. So companies that start out, at least with a unique offering or a unique tool or a service that's provides them a competitive advantage, oftentimes they're built strategically from the get-go.

But as far as transitioning from break fix model to equipment as a service, we're a long ways away from making that happen globally in the industry, probably because of the fragmented nature of the business. And so a few of the companies that start out offering equipment as a service, and they evolve very slowly. I think the pressures in that regard are coming from outside the industry. So you have first tier distributors that are getting into equipment as a service and they're becoming direct competitors with their customers, the subcontractors. But that's becoming more commonplace. And I think that that's happening up the food chain.

So before that quote, say you're building a high-rise apartment complex before the actual construction documents get sent to the subcontractors, the equipment rooms are being pulled out of the scope of work and being given to a first-tier distributor. And so the subcontractors don't even see that scope of work. So they don't even know that their customers are, or their vendors, are actually a direct competitor. We have a lot of that here in central Texas with central plants being offered as equipment as a service and plumbing construction companies, they're putting in the piping, they, they're excited about doing the work, but the reality of the fact is that the highest profit scope of work in that high-rise building is the central plan.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah.

Curtis Novinger: So I don't know if that answers your question about strategic versus tactical.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. No, it makes sense. So in plumbing, specifically, there's a long way to go. And it sounds like with what you're telling me is happening, that the progress that is being made is starting on the commercial side. Right? I mean, it's talking about building these new developments and that's where this concept that is likely mutually beneficial for the people that are building the infrastructure versus the suppliers that are offering the equipment as a service, even though I know they're leaving the contractors out of the equation. If you just take it a step up and look at how that relationship is developing, the people building these buildings know that there's value in being able to consume the equipment as a service. And the suppliers of that equipment are recognizing that even though they're not, the plumbing contractors aren't always recognizing that those suppliers are becoming a competitor. Right?

Curtis Novinger: Correct.

Sarah Nicastro: Okay.

Curtis Novinger: And 10 years ago, if we came up against, say, a train distributor in a new construction job and we realized they were also bidding the equipment, we'd call them and say, "Hey, we're a bid on this," and they would back out. Now, they're not in that situation because that scope of work isn't even offered to us. And so we're not in a situation where we can ask them to back out because we're not competing with them. They already have the work.

Sarah Nicastro: Right.

Curtis Novinger: That's how they're dealt with it. And that was 10 years ago. Now it's just a generally accepted practice. And I think, in some ways, subcontractors haven't realized how much work has stopped coming to them.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, that's interesting. So let me rewind back for one minute and then we're going to come back to talking a little bit about the as a service. So when you're looking at different organizations for P3 to potentially invest in, I want to talk about what stands out to you in terms of indicating that they're a good candidate. And then, on the other hand, what are some red flags that make you think, "We'll stay away from these organizations?"

Curtis Novinger: Well, when we do our market analysis of businesses before we even call the companies, we're checking the size of the business, the financials to a certain extent, and identifying whether it fits our investment model. But once we get to a point where we're doing site visits, if I'm going on a site visit, I'm looking for things like a lot of trucks in the parking lot. If there's a bunch of service vehicles that aren't out on the road, they're sitting there, that tells me about how the business is being run.

If I'm meeting with an owner, if they answer their phone every five minutes and they can't take an hour away from the business, that tells me about the fragility in some ways of the business. When we look for a company, we're definitely looking for businesses that have some kind of succession plan. They have a strong second that's working in the business, and the owner is in a position where they can step back and the business will continue operating without him or her. Things that concern us, believe it or not, rapid growth over the last year or two is something that we worry about. Sometimes it takes a while for growth like that to be absorbed into the natural processes of the company, and it can put it at risk of falling back to reduce in size once we purchase it. So we like to see regular sustained growth over a number of years as opposed to rapid growth over the last couple.

Sarah Nicastro: That makes sense.

Curtis Novinger: We look at employee retention, got great employee retention, says something about the culture. And then, of course, once we start getting into the due diligence piece of it, we're looking for any kind of legacy legal issues or high risk safety, OIR ratings, that kind of thing.

Sarah Nicastro: Okay. All right. Okay. So let's go back to talking then about some of these macro trends that you're watching, that others are watching, that are going on. So going back to the conversation around as a service. So, we started talking about where things are today, particularly versus 10 years ago, and what's kind of going on right now at the equipment supplier level versus the plumbing contractor standpoint. So, what I'm interested to hear your thoughts on then is, what is the untapped potential? How can this play out? Because I obviously don't know a ton about the plumbing industry, in particular, and so I'm thinking, I'm interested to hear how this is going to evolve or how you think it could evolve in the most positive way. There's obviously a lot of opportunity, and so whether it takes 10 years, 20 years to really see that opportunity land, what do you think is going to happen?

Curtis Novinger: Well, so I think of that in two terms. So in terms of what's keeping the brakes on growth and then what are the opportunities for maybe a different strategy or some kind of new business, new growth and it's no secret that the skilled labor shortage is causing an issue. So I feel like companies that can solve that problem better or faster or uniquely are in a competitive advantage and then have the opportunity to grow. It's 47% of the workforce is female, but less than 2% of the workforce is in our actual trade. And even smaller number is physically working in the field. They might be in dispatch or in accounting, but they're not working with their tools. That is a huge miss on our part. And you shouldn't be talking about a labor shortage without addressing that opportunity to fix it. How do you reach out to women and get them excited about working with their hands in the field?

One of the effects of having a bunch of small businesses in the plumbing industry is that the people with the financial decision power come from the field, because the companies aren't large enough to go hire a CPA and put them in a position where they're an operations manager or a CFO. It's a small business of maybe 10 employees. So if the majority of your industry is made up of small businesses in the one to 3 million revenue phase, then, and most of the decision makers are men because they came out of the field, then, the industry as a whole, has a bias against just seeing the world through a male lens. So not only is it an opportunity to solve this skill shortage by bringing women into the industry, but you bring in a whole new perspective of how to run a business, how to treat employees, what kind of strategies to use.

And in the residential space, 85% of the decision makers in the home are women. And so, why wouldn't you have women running the company so that they can communicate with their customer in a way that men just don't know how to do? So I think that's one opportunity. One of the, I was thinking about this, and of course there's a whole bunch of obvious answers to this question, but one of the things I've seen happen just in the last two years not only in Texas, but throughout probably the world, is two weeks ago we had an ice storm. I didn't have power for eight days, didn't have water for a while. It's not a good thing for your wife to say, "You're a plumber and you're the only one on the street that doesn't have water. Go fix it." But what is that? And two years before that, in Texas we had this massive snowstorm.

So within the space of two years, we've had two storms that were worse than anything else that's happened in the last 100 years. What's happening right now is the insurance claims are finally hitting market two years later. And so premiums are going up and people that are building high rise buildings have risk management programs and they're saying, "Look, unless you have a smart pipe system or this project, your umbrella coverage is going to be 10 times less or your premium's going to be more, or your deductible is going to be a lot higher." We just started construction on a 53-story high-rise apartment in downtown Austin, and the umbrella for leaks was $40 million. But then when they started doing the risk management program, they said, "Well, no, we're going to reduce, unless you have some way of shutting the water off if there's a leak, your umbrella coverage is $4 million."

Our personal deductible was $50,000 prior to the storm two years ago. It's now $250,000. So what's that mean? Where does that, what's that do? I don't think that trend's going to change. We're going to continue to have unusual storms that are going to cause wide scale damage. Insurance premiums will continue to go up. And so where's the opportunity for plumbing? Well, obviously, applying technology to piping to predict failure is an opportunity, and that's something that we've gotten involved in pretty heavily. We're installing systems on our construction sites that allow us to turn the water off at night if sensors, and we're also metering the water to determine whether or not there is a leak. And then we have a whole team of people that are monitoring those systems remotely. And we're offering that service as, that equipment as a service. So we're offering that as a program where you hire us for X number of dollars per month and we'll take care of the security of your water system while the construction is in service.

So other trends, ChatGPT, I'm going to throw it out 'cause it's all over the market right now. So how does that apply to plumbing? Well, a lot of decisions are made online right now, and when we hire a marketing company, unfortunately, they tend to create organic content that is just rotten because they have to throw in all these keywords and it has very little value. And what I see happening is that content's going to get better, but it's also going to become more common. So organic search is going to change rapidly over the next few years and figuring out how to be successful in that space is a limiter to growth. If you can't figure out how to be one of the top 10 search results for a new customer, then you're going to, you're not going to have a growth opportunity that you should have otherwise.

So I still think that there's space for true content and not only just to increase your results in Google, but to build culture and build family, build rapport with your employees and coming up with a program to generate that kind of talent content, celebrate your employees, document your potlucks and show people that your training opportunities is increasingly important. But ChatGPT is going to make it easier. We were just writing bios for our guys. So one of the opcodes when we dispatch the technician that sends a picture of the technician that's going and then a brief bio of who they are.

We use ChatGPT to do that. It took us 10 minutes. The bios are amazing. It was written by someone, one of the dispatchers where that would have taken all kinds of time going back and forth and editing it then. I mean, they're good. So, another thing I think that's going to happen is flat rate pricing is ubiquitous in the residential space. I see it going, I see it happening in commercial service really soon. It's already apartment complexes, multifamily businesses, they're already asking for it. I really think that that's going to expand into the commercial market, which means that the hourly employees in commercial service will be given the opportunity to work on commission. I think I see that expanding.

Sarah Nicastro: And how do you think that will change, not change, but impact the recruiting of new talent?

Curtis Novinger: It definitely increases the compensation for the employee. It takes the uncertainty from the employer away from paying an employee a lot of money. So it's, a lot of times there's a risk to paying an hourly employee a lot of money because it's not directly tied to revenue or to gross profit. Whereas in a commission based model, it's directly tied to profit. So if you set it up properly, if your plumber is making money for the company, they're making a lot of money and everyone's happy. And to a certain extent also the customer's getting better value because they have someone that's talking to them about their options. They're getting pricing before the work is done, and they're in more in control of how to spend their money. Whereas in a T and M model, the customers are buying a state not knowing what the market price is and they're sitting having to pay for it even if they don't like the state.

Sarah Nicastro: Makes sense. So one of the other things we talked about when we were chatting for this session was around leadership. So how does that factor into all of this?

Curtis Novinger: Leadership, in what context?

Sarah Nicastro: So we talked about plateaus caused by leadership. So what that makes me think of is that there's some really traditional old school leaders in place that aren't maybe as willing to see some of the potential or try new things or think differently, etcetera.

Curtis Novinger: Yeah, that maybe I'll get at it. We can probably get at this a lot of different ways, but one of the things I think about is when you grow a business, there tends to be revenue plateaus. There's a plateau at a million dollars, at $4 million, at $8 million at 15, 30, 50, 100, 150. And a lot of times each of those plateaus require, in order to get through a plateau, it requires the leader to evolve and develop new skills. So the $1 million plateau to the $4 million plateau is that leader has to get out of his truck and trust other people to do the work and take care of his customers for him.

For the $4 million to $8 million plateau, the leader needs to find someone in the office he can hand, or she, typically he, right, can hand off control to. So they can focus on marketing, growing sales, developing technicians. Oftentimes the reason $4 million businesses fail is because their business, they're not being run as a business. When you get into the eight to $15 million range, it's about bringing in multiple trades, multiple offerings. There's a different business strategy. You have to, over $4 million, maybe you're offering HVAC as well as plumbing or you're moving into a different market.

So being able to structure an org chart that's that much more complicated requires another skillset. But as far as leadership goes, I think some of it, leaders that can make that transition that can grow are leaders that are willing to spend time being ignorant, really, really being spending time going, "You know what? I don't know how to do this." Reaching out for help or just genuinely some reflecting and saying, "Man, I just can't seem to get past $4 million. What do I need to do differently?" And that's not an easy skill to develop, right? No one wants to feel ignorant, and yet being able to lean into that space is one of the main limiters to growth.

So leadership, in general, what does it mean? I think one of the struggles with transitioning from traditional break fix models to equipment as a service is having the guts to act on a very risky, scary transition. And we've talked about swallowing the fish and how do you deal with drops in revenue and cash flow issues when you're growing a new business? I think in our market, really, that's why I think that work will go to adjacent businesses or companies that start out with the goal of being in equipment as a service business and having backing perhaps from private equity. I don't see as many transitions taking place in the smaller fragmented market that makes up most of the plumbing industry.

Sarah Nicastro: And that was kind of a point I was going to come back to because when you were explaining what's happening right now with the suppliers starting to take that on and the plumbing contractors not even necessarily being aware of that competition. I was going to come back to that and ask, so can that even change, right? Because it kind of seems to me like that will only snowball. I mean, the more those suppliers see the benefit and the value of those partnerships, the more then they're going to do. And I don't see a plumbing contractor being capable in most senses, of taking that on. You know what I mean? Like winning that competition. But maybe that's just limited view. I don't know.

Curtis Novinger: No. I think of, like when you look at the, I'm trying to figure out how to unpack that. I guess I agree with you. I think in general that's going to happen less in a lot of equity money that's been hitting the market for decades now has been focused on aggregating fragmented business, showing value by buying a lot of companies. That's what Comfort Systems started doing in '99. So it's, I'm sure there's MBA terms for this, but you're essentially aggregating a bunch of fragmented businesses. I think the money that's going to change and help us transition to equipment of service is going to come almost from venture capital, angel investing where they say, "Look, let's start this whole new platform. We're not going to buy an existing platform. We're going to give you money to go play in equipment as a service and grow the business from the ground up."

And it might be that you take an existing company that's been doing distribution, you say, "Look, let's start and build a service business, but instead of just doing break fix, we're going to use your warranty team and we're going to do new installs as a service." I think that's where the main change is going to happen, unfortunately.

Sarah Nicastro: Do you feel the demand is there?

Curtis Novinger: Yeah, it makes sense.

Sarah Nicastro: It does.

Curtis Novinger: It just makes sense.

Sarah Nicastro: It does. And so much else in our world has already moved to a subscription model. I mean, it does make sense. Same the example you gave about the pipes and offering that as a service monitoring, etcetera. I mean, it's just, to me, consumers, whether those are individual consumers or commercial consumers, want the simplicity of just saying, "Yes, we will pay you if you worry about just making sure this works." You know what I mean? "If you can just tell us our building won't flood and that X, Y, and Z will happen the way it should tell us where to sign up, we'll pay you monthly for that and all is well." And there's obviously, in the examples that we've talked through on here, there's a lot of ways that that setup is equally valuable to the provider of said as a service, if they're understanding the opportunity for what it is.

And that's the challenge with what we're talking about is who's capable of transitioning or is it more, to your point, new entrant. If you think about just a couple of the stories we've had on this podcast, we did an podcast with Care in Singapore, and they have over, I think it's about a decade, converted their entire business to as a service. Really cool story. We did a podcast with Baxi in the UK and there're earlier on in that journey, but doing something similar. Now, there's some differences though in the sense of there being nudged significantly by environmental regulations. So it's like there's this additional pressure to react where if you strip that out, would they still be where they are on that journey? But then you think about, another one we did was with Koolmill. Now different industry. They're a rice milling company, but they are a disruptor in a very traditional industry who came in to your point, and Alec from there, and I even talked about the fact that he has it a lot easier not having the legacy to overcome.

I mean, this is how it was begun. It's different. He's not saying it's easy, right? Because he still has to navigate the existing way of doing business with the people he's selling to, right? It's still different for the customer, but that's one battle. Instead of being a company that's transitioning who's battling that plus a whole internal battle of, "No, this is different than what we do, we do this." That sort of thing. So, I guess I've seen examples on both sides. Care is one that did a good job of transitioning a legacy business to as a service. Koolmill spoke about the advantages of being a new entrant and not having to do a lot of that evolution. But I think what's clear is the demand is there and will only continue to increase, and the opportunity is there for someone to take, right? It's just a matter of who and how.

Curtis Novinger: No, I agree. I think there's another way of going at this. Well, first of all, a lot of the money going into our industry from private equity particularly, is being invested in that aggregate model as opposed to coming up with a unique business strategy, like equipment as a service. And there's still a whole lot of good work to be done there and efficiency and the better training, better safety, there's a whole lot to be done there. So I think that will continue.

If you step back and you ask yourself from a customer's perspective, what conversation do you want to have as a customer when you have a broken system? Do you want to talk about the plumbing? No. Most people don't care about the plumbing. And yet, back to the whole fragmented nature of the industry, most of the people coming to talk to the customer want to tell you all about the experience because they're proud of it. That's what they want to talk about. And so there's this natural disconnect right at that interface between the customer and the technician, between what the customer wants and what the plumber wants to talk about. That's why I think the solution's not going to come from our industry, it'll come from an industry that knows what the customer really wants and what they care about, which is for their air to have cold air.

And it's not even cold air. They don't care about cold air. They care about the conference room being the right temperature for when they have visitors come in or they want their plumbing to work when Aunt Melba comes over and they're having Thanksgiving. So I think, and just to give you a concrete example, about five years or so ago, we had a national program to increase the full service agreement sales at Comfort Systems. We had this major effort. We spent a lot of money, Comfort Systems spent a lot of money training sales staff.

We took a bunch of sales staff that was used to selling preventive maintenance or scheduled maintenance and brought them in and trained them on all these new tools about how to sell full service, which is the first step towards equipment as a service. It was a complete flop. It did not work. And because it was fundamentally a different conversation that had to take place about financial benefit and not taking care of the equipment and just checking off the task list that the manufacturers recommending you do. So how do you make that transition? I don't know. I honestly don't know how do you do it inside the industry for those two reasons.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. So we definitely don't have time to get into this today, and it may be a bit too deep, but when you were talking about how this may evolve, and you said about how customers don't care, they don't want to hear about the plumbing details, they just want it to work. And how, ultimately, we could find ourselves at a point where it is as a service, it's just, "I need this thing to work. I will pay you to do that. I don't care about any of the details." What I started thinking about is, and this is deep, so bear with me, is how does that compound the challenge we already have getting people into the trades?

Because you're essentially taking a situation where historically, and maybe even currently, you have trades, usually men or women, running these companies that take a lot of pride in what they do, but the less interest the customer has in that trade, and the more it becomes this kind of just high level, no, you just make it work conversation. Does that exacerbate the challenge we already have today to get people in? Because at the end of the day, that work still has to happen. You know what I mean? You can include remote monitoring and even remote resolution and you can modernize it, but there's still going to be a need for a plumber that goes to a building and fixes X, Y, and Z. So, the less interested the customer becomes in the details, does it become harder to get people that want to do this invisible job? You know what I mean?

Curtis Novinger: Yeah. That's such a good question. I love...

Sarah Nicastro: Like I said, we might have to park on it and come back, because we are almost out of time. But that just got me thinking about the path this will all take, and maybe it's worth thinking about and coming back and talking about how do we solve for that, right? What's the answer? I don't know. But it's interesting. And this is how someone with a degree in psychology...

Curtis Novinger: I was going to say, it's a psychological question.

Sarah Nicastro: For sure, for sure.

Curtis Novinger: But there's opportunity there.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. And it's just something I guess to be aware of. I mean, it's one of those things that we might not be thinking about all of the implications of what I think is a huge opportunity, don't get me wrong. I think as a service is one of the coolest opportunities that exists for companies that are installing and servicing things. Because when it works, it's so mutually beneficial and it's really, really cool to see it come together. But I'm just wondering if, from a marketing perspective, I always say we have a field service branding problem, and will that branding problem be amplified as we get further down this path? So.

Curtis Novinger: I have one comment, it's a psychological comment, so maybe I appreciate. When a plumber arrives on a job site and there's something broken and they're able to fix it, they get an emotional charge. I mean, it is so much fun to be, and I could tell you stories about it, right? So if that system doesn't break, how do you give that same employee that same self-satisfaction? There is no, he's not the superhero coming in to save the day. And I think that's something that should be acknowledged.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yes. So good food for thought. All right. Okay. So Curtis, we've talked a lot about your viewpoints on the industry and what's happening and what will continue to happen, but if we just look inward for a moment and think about your own experiences, what would you say is the biggest lesson you've learned from being a leader in service?

Curtis Novinger: I think ultimately, and this is my hope, but I think there's some truth here. People genuinely at their core want to help other people. And I saw that with the ice storm. All the people helping each other get trees out of their houses in their front yards. They genuinely want to. And fundamentally, that's what the service industry is all about. It's providing, showing up, and being of service. And if you can, as a leader, maximize the amount of time people can focus on that and minimize the amount of time that they're worried about politics and detail fixing processes, then you'll have a much happier company and much happier customer.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, that's very good advice. I like it. Well, thank you so much for coming on today and sharing your thoughts with us. I appreciate it.

Curtis Novinger: Thank you.

Sarah Nicastro: You can find more by visiting us at futureoffieldservice.com. Make sure you subscribe to the Future of Field Service INSIDER, which will make sure that you get the latest content we've produced, delivered to your inbox every other week. You can also now view the schedule for the 2023 Future of Field Service live tour dates and register for the city nearest you. You can do all of that on the website. The Future of Field Service Podcast is published in partnership with IFS. You can learn more at iffs.com. As always, thank you for listening.

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