Tag: podcast

February 17, 2021 | 27 Mins Read

Where Does Service Fit in Your Organizational Structure?

February 17, 2021 | 27 Mins Read

Where Does Service Fit in Your Organizational Structure?

Madhu Karnani Oza, Director, Customer and Technical Services Asia Pacific at Abbott, talks with Sarah about some of the key considerations around where to place the service function within your organizational structure to achieve the greatest success if you’re looking to evolve, advance, and progress your service focus and revenues.   Sarah Nicastro: Welcome to the Future of Field Service podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Nicastro. Today we're going to be talking about how to structure a company properly to achieve service success. I'm excited to welcome to the podcast today Madhu Karnani Oza who is the Director of Customer and Technical Services for Asia Pacific at Abbott. Madhu, welcome to the podcast.   Madhu Karnani Oza: Hey Sarah, I'm glad to be here.   Sarah Nicastro: Thank you for being here. To kick us off, let's have you tell the listeners a bit about yourself, anything you want to share about your background and your role at Abbott.   Madhu Karnani Oza: Currently I am the Director of Technical Services for Electrophysiology business at Abbott for Asia Pacific. I'm based out of Singapore. Currently we're responsible for all technical remote services, field services, professional services provided post-sales. Most of my career I've spent within this company, within in St. Jude which was bought over by Abbott, in various roles in product development and then over to telehealth operations. That was when I was based in California. We're based here in Singapore, loving it. I have three children, in between that and work and everything, we're pretty busy.   Sarah Nicastro: I can imagine. Similar here. You had shared that you were born in India and then you went to, was it graduate school in the States?   Madhu Karnani Oza: That's right. University of Wisconsin.   Sarah Nicastro: All right. Then you took the role in Singapore. The reason I mention that is because when you and I connected and we started talking about some of the trends in service and the evolution of product companies towards Servitization and things like that, it was interesting because we could talk about those viewpoints from almost a regional level and the differences in where folks are at in that journey. As we talked about that, one of the things that came up in conversation is the topic we're going to tackle today which is as a company looks to embrace service more as a strategic differentiator as a path to revenue growth, what does that look like operationally? Where does service reside in the org structure to have the best chance of success? This is something that comes up these days in a lot of my conversations because people are struggling with trying to figure out what is the best situation for their business.   Sarah Nicastro: I wanted to start with saying there really isn't one answer. It's going to be individualized based on each person's situation. It could even evolve over time but I know it's something that you had some opinions on, based on your experience. I thought it would be really interesting. Before we talk about some of the choices, some of the pros and cons, et cetera, talk a little bit about why this is such an important topic. Why it's top of mind for you, why it's top of mind for a lot of other people in service roles.   Madhu Karnani Oza: Basically, if you think about it, there was a time when product companies were product companies. I think in the last couple of decades, various sectors have moved toward using service either as a differentiator or as you said, as a revenue generator. The fact that companies are going through that change means that now there's something new, something that's traditionally not very well known. That's why, I think, different companies take different approaches. A lot of them are not very deliberate approaches because it's something new, it's just sort of happens. I think that once it happens and then you're moving through the phases of growth, that's when you start to realize, "Wait a minute. Why is it like this? Shouldn't there be another way?" I think a lot of it is just growing pains.   Madhu Karnani Oza: The other reason I think it's also important to talk about this is because I talk to several people about this because it's a dilemma in a lot of our minds. I talked to people about it, it's amazing to me how when people are giving you their response, they give it to you like it's so obvious. But yet, all of them have such different views. I've talked to people who are like, "That's a no brainer, it belongs here or it belongs there." I think because of that, this is, I think, one of those conversations people should have. For some reason it's obvious in a lot of minds but they are very, very different answers.   Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. That's a really good point. The first piece of advice, then, what you said, it's not always deliberate. Companies can start on a path and then find themselves where, okay here we are and here's how we've set things up. Now we're just kind of forging ahead. If a company were wanting to be more deliberate, what are some of the considerations? What's your best advice for how to be a little bit more strategic and a little bit more deliberate in setting some goals to determine what the best structure is?   Madhu Karnani Oza: I think as you said, I really think this is one of those things that people need to be deliberate about. It's okay that I think things have evolved how they have evolved. That's totally natural. You have something new, it sticks somewhere but I don't think it needs to be the answer forever. I think service is very unique because it has a very highly operational aspect to it but also extremely customer facing. It's in a very unique situation as to where it is. I think that's why people really need to be deliberate about this decision. I think that the first thing to do is for leadership, management leadership, visionaries, to step back, take a think, have discussions, agree and then the last piece, which is communicate. I think this is one of those discussions that needs to be happening deliberately. Step back, look at what is the goal of services in your organization. What is its impact to your business? How much of your business is service going to be dependent on. There are direct dependencies, like direct revenue, and there are a lot of indirect dependencies like what pull through is it going to have for your product, for example. Or is it going to be generating goodwill for your company and thereby has some really indirect impact to your business.   Madhu Karnani Oza: I think first of all, it's important for companies to step back and think through, what is the goal of services for your company at that point of time? I do say it does evolve. This is a conversation that needs to be had, honestly every few years depending on how service is changes as part of your business. That's what I would say is first of all, step back, think about it. Have your opinions and whatnot but then come together, discuss, come to an agreement. Now, I can't emphasize enough on the communication piece of it. I do think that a lot of this comes top down. I think a lot of these decisions, these discussions, et cetera, they start top down. They must. But I also don't think that working in silos is a good idea. You have some sort of definition up top. I think it's very important to start trickling that information down, being able to get some of your key people to provide their opinions because you're sitting up here but unless you know what's happening in the real world, your decisions are not going to be fully informed. That last piece of, before it's absolutely set in stone to communicate, communicate up and down and ensure you have all those points of view. I think that would be very, very key.   Madhu Karnani Oza: I think during those discussions themselves; I think certain obvious answers may even present themselves to you by having these conversations. Not just amongst the leadership team but also with customers and with your people who are actually on the ground. That's one thing. I think that also helps to build culture and again, cannot emphasize enough how important it is to build culture. A lot of our companies are extremely large. A lot of it is consolidation and share resources and so on, multiple businesses. It is truly important to set that culture of not only are we thinking this through, we're talking to you. We want to know what you're of thinking and our decision is going to be an informed one.   Sarah Nicastro: There's a couple of really good points in there. The one thing is, like you said, it can evolve. The path you choose isn't necessarily set in stone. You can always evolve and pivot. One of our recent podcast guests headed up service transformation at GEA, the food manufacturer. She actually talked a lot about a 10 year trajectory and how it started as a pretty small, focused team looking at what is the service opportunity. Then it evolved into a formalized group and then eventually as it caught on, it was infiltrated into the business at large to where it isn't its own entity, it's sort of blended in. That's a good point. I think the other thing is depending on the industry and depending on the goals of the business, some companies have an objective to really, truly become service providers. Even if they do manufacture a product, it's almost going to be part of the service. That is the path.   Sarah Nicastro: For others, it's just an area of the business that maybe they want to grow and expand on but not necessarily all the way to that point. Having some idea of where you want to get to, while you're not setting it in stone, having an idea of where you ultimately want to land also prohibits you from taking steps that are going to waste time and energy and effort and resources. The communication part is key. The other thing I've seen is situations where the desire to really emphasize service or expand service is not coming from the top down, it's coming from service. Then that's a very frustrating spot for the person that sees the opportunity but is in a silo and doesn't have the ability to really influence, to the degree they want, the outcome. Very good points. We'll get into some hypotheticals I guess. Let's talk about as a company as considering how to structure, we, in our previous chat, identified three main options. Let's talk through those and then talk a little bit about the pros and cons of each in your opinion. The first is commercial. Structuring within commercial.   Madhu Karnani Oza: First of all, I think before we get into those pros and cons, it is very important to clarify that whether the service organization resides within operations or commercial or whatever you decide on, having a separate entity with its own leadership, meaning service as an organization with its own leadership, I think is first of all incredibly important. Wherever it resides, whatever I'm about to say in terms of pros and cons, there's no doubt that there needs to be a separate leadership with focus on service. Secondly that you need something like a service excellence organization, service transformation, whatever you might call them, the people that are not on the ground providing the operational service but some of the people in the background who are looking how to improve it, how to roll out new services and new tools and things like that.   Madhu Karnani Oza: To me, first of all, that's a given. I don't want that to be in any doubt whatsoever. That's absolutely necessary. But having said that, having formed this organization now, the question is where do they fit in, in a company? That's why, as we said, the first potential answer would be, for example, commercial. First of all, this is something I do a lot which is that the main thing service is about is service. It's customers. In an interview, I will often ask people, in every interview I will ask people what do you think this job is about or what's the main goal or what have you? If the word customer service is not part of that answer, that's usually the end of that interview because you've got to understand whatever your end goal, whether it is to generate good will or generate culture or to generate revenue, it doesn't matter. It is all very customer centric. Keeping that in mind, that service is all about that customer, you've got to have a team structure that enables the company, the employees of the company that interact with the customer to be one team. To appear as one team. To not appear fragmented. To not have separate goals or be working in silos.   Madhu Karnani Oza: If I am a customer and I hear, let's say it's my cell phone and I'm talking to two representatives. One is trying to sell me something and another who is trying to fix my problem. If I feel like those guys haven't talked to each other, or they have separate goals, they're pushing their own separate agendas on me, that's not great customer service. That's a very simplistic, consumer type of example but I think it applies to anybody out there, whether they're dealing with large capital manufacturing equipment or large medical equipment or diagnostic equipment, it doesn't matter. They don't want to have these large companies pushing on two different fronts. They want to provide that one single face of customer service, customer most important, whether you're selling something or you're supporting something. I think it's very important. I think that service being a part of commercial, I think, facilitates that because now people have got the same goals, you're being led top down by the same leadership, the same organization. I think it just makes it a lot easier to have that one team, one face kind of approach to the customer. I think that's absolutely the biggest pro of having service be a part of commercial.   Madhu Karnani Oza: Now, I will put in the disclaimer here that some of this is also culturally made harder. For example, I think in some countries, I have seen where in an organization it was not part of commercial that it actually works okay because they're used to collaborating with each other and the customer sees no issues, they don't see any kind of separation or anything. It does happen. I think when you start thinking about it and I'm more sensitive to this, having worked on different continents, is that there are cultures where there's a lot of hierarchy within an organization. If that hierarchy is such that one of those, either the service guy or the sales guy, one of those feels more powerful or acts more powerful than the other, which happens a lot, then that's going to tilt that one face approach again. It's not that easy at that point in time. At that point in time, you need that organizational structure, the organization goal to allow both of those people to have the same voice with the company. To be able to collaborate and not for one of them to dominate the other. This is honestly just everyday stuff that happens at companies at various levels.   Madhu Karnani Oza: I do think that culture makes a difference as well. Whenever I talk to people from some of the countries that my peers in other regions will say, "Oh yeah but we've never seen that problem because the two organizations still work very hand in hand." I agree, that's true, but it does make it harder in some cultures and so on. Anyway, that's a big part of it is the pro in this part for commercial. Now, the other big piece is hello P&L. That's how all business decisions are made. You have the revenue piece, you have the cost piece and boy, looking at them separately is not a good idea. You can't have one without the other. When you're making business decisions, where should you put resources? Where should you provide better tools or maybe a new tool? Or where should you go to innovate? You've always got to look at both sides of that. When commercial is separate from service, one is looking at the revenue, the other is looking at cost. Then the conversation isn't a complete conversation. Again, it can be done. I can sit here and look at both sides but I can be siloed in one team. It's just not the same thing.   Madhu Karnani Oza: A very simple example would be if you're deciding whether to buy or fund a project that would aid in a decision-making tool. In terms of cost, an operations team is going to think of, "What's the cost effectiveness of that? By adding this tool am I going to save headcount somehow? Remove manual work and thereby save headcount?" That's going to be their focus on it. But, on the other hand, if that tool facilitates decision making, there's no easy way to quantify what that's going to bring in, in terms of revenue, because you don't know. But eventually it should. That's the kind of conversation that needs to be had when you look at both sides of that coin. I think that's what is facilitated when you have service and commercial working as part of one organization.   Sarah Nicastro: Okay. What about cons?   Madhu Karnani Oza: That one, you have to think about that one a little bit. I do think there are a couple of things. There are cons to this as well. One thing would be that, depending on your industry, depending on the customer, there are times when you hear the customer really likes their service guy because the service guy isn't trying to sell them anything. I think some of that may become blurry if the service and commercial lines are not well drawn, if the responsibilities and goals are not well separated. Suddenly, if the customer feels like everyone in this customer is just pushing and peddling for something, we don't want that to occur either. You want a high trust factor. Somehow you do need to make sure that even if service and commercial are one organization, that there is that empathy and that trust factor you continue to grow with the customer and now appear sales-y to everybody.   Sarah Nicastro: Right.   Madhu Karnani Oza: I think that's really it in terms of the cons of that approach.   Sarah Nicastro: Okay. All right. The second choice would be within operations.   Madhu Karnani Oza: Yeah. With operations, I certainly think that, again, it's about the phase at which you are. When you're trying to operationalize something new, I think operational teams are very good at that. Getting the team together, the right people, the right processes. Process is very, very, very big in service. That is something that I think operations teams, their thought process is very well suited for. When you're an immature organization, it makes sense to get that help with operationalizing something new. I've certainly seen that be very, very successful. I think secondly, the other big plus point of being under operations is that as you know, operations is very good at efficiency, productivity, KPIs and then running with those numbers and being very, very good about not digressing. Staying on that track. That discipline I think is very high in an operational team. That naturally works well for services. You have a field team or whether you have a remote support team or you have both, just having those specific KPIs and running through things and never letting your eyes off of that because boy, your bonus is tied to that 0.2% deviation. I think that makes a very big different. It does help the operational side of services in a big way.   Madhu Karnani Oza: I think the other thing, also, is depending again on your business, being able to tie back to capital management processes, which is usually an operations process, manufacturing and operations and distribution process, just being able to tie back with that because so much of what service does in a capital organization is capital movement. That's where the cost, honestly, comes in depending on your product and your organization. Usually a big part of services is parts. The exchange of parts, the repair of parts, all that ties in very well with operations. Another very big plus point of being part of operations and I've seen both of these factors really come into play personally as well.   Madhu Karnani Oza: On the con side of the operations piece is that, like we mentioned, you're a separate team from commercial and sales but you're both very customer facing and now it's that difference in goals, difference in mindset make it harder for you to have that one face of the company customer service, that one brilliant experience that doesn't feel like it's fragmented. That piece. Then of course the fact that, again, if you're very focused on cost only as part of operations, then I think you miss out on some of that innovation that you could have in creating a new revenue stream. Your focus is so wholly on staying within KPIs that the innovative spirit is left up to someone else. Neither side is really looking at that piece. I do think that's a lot of con of the whole thing.   Sarah Nicastro: I think that's the biggest one, honestly. Right now, to me at least, that's where the industry is at is that innovation. Customers want different things, how do we meet those needs? We have different opportunities to deliver adjacent, complimentary, advanced services. How do we position ourselves to do that. To me, if you don't sort out how to work that innovation in, you become very stagnant. I think the pace of evolution is so fast right now within services that if you don't prioritize that innovation, you're going to have some trouble.   Madhu Karnani Oza: That's directly tied into right now what we're seeing in the world, which is this digitalization, which has been accelerated by COVID but honestly it was very much a need even before 2020. As you say, then there's no one thinking of both sides and being able to say, "I want to be able to provide this other service or a better service or be on a digital platform and increase throughput or efficiency or just customer satisfaction and ease." Then your service organization just becomes, "Look, I've got a job to do and my goal is to meet these KPIs and that's that." That may be an oversimplification of things but honestly, this stuff makes a huge difference in the culture and the mindset. If the top down vision does not include that innovation and being able to think outside the box and to be able to take very calculated risks, then progress will be incremental only. It will not be making a big jump of progress, I think it's very difficult.   Sarah Nicastro: Particularly when you think about service in operations, what comes to mind for me is, as you said, it's been driven historically by efficiency, productivity, cut costs, minimize head count, all of those perceptions. I think part of the impact of that, then also just generationally with the workforce is they're just, "This is what we do." It's show up, do your job. They don't necessarily think out of the box. They're not, in any way, inclined or incentivized to bring new ideas to the table. I'm over generalizing but I'm saying in terms of some of the drawbacks, they are probably not interested in expanding soft skills and customer facing traits. They just want to show up with a toolbox and fix what they're fixing and move on.   Madhu Karnani Oza: Exactly.   Sarah Nicastro: I think the innovation thing and the evolving the thinking, evolving the culture, you really have to get out of that operations mindset. You need it but you have to, like you said, be able to marry the two worlds together, strike the right balance, those sorts of things.   Madhu Karnani Oza: Absolutely. I think the mindset thing I think is big. As you said, if your job and your goal is to get in there, get your stuff done and get out and that's that. You're driven by KPIs or "How much time do you spend over there at the site? Let's minimize that." The culture of customer relationships is generally a more commercial concept than an operational concept. While again, as I said, absolutely things can be done irrespective of where you belong but-   Sarah Nicastro: Sure.   Madhu Karnani Oza: ... culture is top-driven and it permeates through whatever group you're in. I think the other aspect of that is that it really is difficult to create that culture of innovation and customer service excellence, there's also the fact that the talent that you attract and the talent that you retain can also be impacted by that culture. The people you attract and then retain are the ones who like that operational productivity, efficiency driven work. I think it has a ripple effect, it's not just your culture today, it's your culture for the future as well.   Sarah Nicastro: When you talked earlier about communication, one of the things I think about is in that operational culture, even if you have a vision at the top for this innovation, you can communicate that vision but the goal isn't to drive compliance. The goal is to drive commitment to that. If you don't have the people that have the right frame of mind, personality type, inclination, incentives, too, it does come down to there are some people that have been doing that operational role for a long time. They don't want to sell or they don't want to be a trusted advisor or they don't want to have a consultative relationship with the customer. This is why it's an evolution not a, "Boom, let's make this happen."   Madhu Karnani Oza: Yeah.   Sarah Nicastro: When you really start digging into the layers, those are the things you come up against. You can't just have some super cool, fresh thinking upper management that comes in and is like, "Here's what we're going to do." You could have the best change management strategy but if you don't have the right people, at best they're going to comply. You're not going to have the customer impact you want by just compliance. Then it becomes a longer game of seeding the right talent and thinking about how you want things to be in two, three, five years. It's really cool stuff. I say that because I talk to people about it and not actually do it, which is a little bit different. All right. The third option would be to have this as a totally separate entity. Let's talk a little bit about that.   Madhu Karnani Oza: This one I will say I have less experience in and whether first hand or even further degrees removed. I think the biggest pro for having a completely separate entity I think would be the ability to make change really fast. You want to develop something, a new service and a new model and new everything. You get that freedom to be your own entity, be more entrepreneurial, be fast, be agile. I think if you're that autonomous, surely I think the ability to make that change can be very quick. I do think there's something to be said about that. That's why going back to what you were saying, it's about where you are in that journey. What's right for your company, what are you developing, what do you need it to be? What's that vision? Based on all of that, there may be situations where you want it to be a completely separate entity, which is just doing its own thing. I do think that's definitely a possibility. Also if service is going to be a massive part of what you're doing, then of course I think again, it deserves its own entity as well, perhaps. I think those would be the reasons for being separate. Really it's all about that driving a very big change in a very short time. That's what you need to have. You need to be autonomous to that level.   Madhu Karnani Oza: On the other hand, you kind of get the disadvantages of both the earlier options we talked about. You have a disadvantage of you don't really have KPI driven operational discipline in that case. Again, you go right back to the fact is your commercial group different and you are separated. How do you provide that one face, one name customer support. You do still have those same challenges to deal with as a separate entity. Again, as I said, if it's large enough, if it's a big enough proportion of the business, absolutely it does make sense at that level. Especially if you want to innovate really fast.   Sarah Nicastro: I think the other consideration here, though, obviously it would vary company to company but what does the customer journey look like? I think this also poses the biggest risk of not providing a consistent, cohesive experience. To me, that's another big-   Madhu Karnani Oza: Exactly.   Sarah Nicastro: ... point of consideration.   Madhu Karnani Oza: Exactly. I do think the way you would think about it is that there's a company that just needs to make some innovation and really, really quick. They don't have the time or whatever. I think it could be a good intermediate step.   Sarah Nicastro: Almost like an incubator.   Madhu Karnani Oza: It is exactly that. Go off and do this thing.   Sarah Nicastro: That's sort of how the woman I referenced earlier from GEA, that's how that started. She basically said it almost went through these stages and then it became where there is a chief service officer in each function. They are responsible for driving the innovation, all of those things. But it's really integrated into the business. It started out as a separate small team that was just driving them forward.   Madhu Karnani Oza: Exactly.   Sarah Nicastro: As we said earlier, it could certainly evolve and it very well may. I think there's some good points that you've brought up for people to think through and consider and weigh. To your point at the beginning, I think people find themselves working off of a structure, whatever that originates as and not necessarily being deliberate about thinking if that's the best structure for their goals or if they should even be thinking or working toward something other than that. All right. Here's a good question for you. If I forced you to pick one, what would it be?   Madhu Karnani Oza: I'm going to go the political way on this. I do think it depends on where your organization is at. As I said, if it's going to go to the point where you need to make a fast change, go develop something off to the side and then eventually integrate. If it's just about setting up operational efficiency and discipline, if that's what is needed, absolutely go to that. I would say in a majority of situations that I've come across that, as I said, because customer service is absolutely at the heart of your service organization, being a part of a single commercial organization I think would probably get the most top votes for this particular question because it is important that at the end of the day, your customer service be excellent irrespective of what your end goal is. It starts and ends with that customer experience. If the best way to provide that and to innovate for that is as part of commercial, I think that's the way to go. There's no right answer, there's no one answer. People can do-   Sarah Nicastro: All right. That's fair enough. We touched on these but let's revisit some of the key points of consideration for people. Knowing your end game. You might not have 100% clarity on that but at least having an idea of strategically what is the role of service where you're headed and how does that weigh in?   Madhu Karnani Oza: I think it's important to have some marketing functions dedicated to service. Those are the guys that help you put your strategy together. Where service strategy fits as part of the overall business strategy, it's just important to know why we're doing this. I do think that again, knowing that end game and being deliberate in communicating it is just really important.   Sarah Nicastro: We talked about gaining the trust and optimizing the experience of the customer, I think that's pretty clear. Culture, one of the things you just said is in a lot of manufacturing industries that have deep, rich history it's also infiltrating service into the culture. It's not just this is something that happens after we sold something and something breaks but starting to really plant seeds, even before you want to make any major changes on here's why this is way more important than you may think.   Madhu Karnani Oza: Actually, to tell you the truth, I think one of the things that we will often say, it goes on slides everywhere I'm sure, in all companies. One of the things, when it comes to service is a common theme, that is a lot of the hurdles we face are internal. A lot of the hurdles we face are culture. Internal culture which is the mindset of even the folks within your organization. Do they believe in what service can do? That has got to be a big one. That actually helps you decide where that should reside. If the internal hurdle is high, the internal cultural hurdle is high, then you want your service organization to be front and center. You want that message to be out there that this is important and it's going to be part of whatever is the most central organization for that product. It may be operations and it may be commercial. If you want to send that message that it's important, you've got to put it where it shines and not tucked away.   Sarah Nicastro: That's a really good point. I think that's a struggle that everyone shares that's really trying to make strides here. I think the one we haven't touched on is tying the field to R&D.   Madhu Karnani Oza: Again, that one ... The reason I haven't brought it up so far but it's a consideration is that it just works differently in different companies. Whether which of your groups has a better tie-in with R&D because the people on the field, the people working with the customers, they understand what the issues are. They are the best form of input for future innovation. Again, in most cases, if that's going to be a field organization, which is usually the commercial organization, the customer facing organization, it makes sense to also have service in there because then you can tie it all back in together as one bowl of feedback over to R&D to be able to create in the future. But that's not to say people in operations don't have that tie-in to R&D. In fact, in several organizations they have a better tie-in to R&D. I think that could go either way. It's one consideration. Overall for providing better service is also to innovate using that service team force.   Sarah Nicastro: All right. We've given a lot of advice.   Madhu Karnani Oza: Yeah.   Sarah Nicastro: If you had to summarize or give any final points on weighing these decisions and carving a path forward, what would it be?   Madhu Karnani Oza: I guess I think more of to summarize what we've touched upon already is first of all, be deliberate. Do not let it be sitting by the wayside. It's okay to not make a change but it's not okay to not think about it. Be deliberate and set your vision end goal. That one step of setting your vision and goal and then communicating it downward, it's so important. Look at the life cycle, where in the life cycle you are. Is it to establish a new service? Is it to operationalize? Is it to scale up service? Or is it to drive innovation and to drive revenue or drive pull through of your product. I really think it's important to figure out what you're after and what role does service play in that overall vision and goal. Then communicate. Be deliberate, think through those things, have a vision and goal, communicate those. Then the last piece of it is always have a timeline to revisit. It's okay to make a decision today but know that it's not forever and that you need to evolve. Again, service is unique. It doesn't always have an obvious answer as to where it belongs. Be ready to make those changes as and when needed but have a timeline. Be deliberate. Think about it and communicate it.   Sarah Nicastro: The other thing you said earlier that I really like that I'm going to add for you is take calculated risks. I think that's an essential part of all of this mix right now is to not just stick with the status quo or not just make incremental improvements but look for areas where you really are willing to make some-   Madhu Karnani Oza: I give my own team this example often which is that Domino's, I forget the year of the decade which this was but probably in the 80s or 90s I want to say. Domino's was struggling a bit with their business. There was a lot of competition, their pizza was good but it really didn't set them apart from anyone else around at that point in time. Then they had this thought of delivering within 30 minutes. That wasn't part of their product, it was a service. It required innovation, it required thinking outside the box. It required being able to understand what the customer wants. I always think about that and tell people that's how you need to be thinking. What is the equivalent of the 30-minute idea for us? What do you think we need to really differentiate ourselves? That's one of the main things that Domino's has. Everyone in the world knows about its 30-minute promise or it's free. I think we need to have that innovation and that kind of thought process. I think that's truly important to be able to think outside the box.   Sarah Nicastro: Good. The pizza box.   Madhu Karnani Oza: The pizza box. There you go.   Sarah Nicastro: Madhu, thank you so much for joining me. I really, really appreciate it. This has been great. The audience doesn't know this but you and I have already landed on our second podcast topic. I'll be asking you to come back and spend some more time with me sooner than later. Thank you again. I really appreciate it.   Madhu Karnani Oza: Absolutely. Loved it. Thank you so much for having me.   Sarah Nicastro: You're welcome. You can check out more of our content by visiting TheFutureOfFieldService.com. You can also find us on LinkedIn as well as Twitter @TheFutureofFS, the Future of Field Service podcast is published in partnership with IFS. You can learn more about IFS Service Management by visiting www.IFS.com. As always, thank you for listening. </div> </div> </div> </div> <div class="col-12 col-lg-3"> <div class="form-wrapper"> <h2 class="form-tittle">Stay Connected</h2> <iframe src="https://info.ifs.com/GM-CP-CU-2012-12-FoFS-Newsletter_IFrame.html">

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Sarah welcomes Bobby Lincoln, Supervisor of Customer Care Onboarding at Sysmex America, to discuss how to make onboarding personal – particularly in our now virtual world, how to train without creating overwhelm, and how to retain field service talent by offering career progression paths.

Sarah Nicastro: Welcome to the Future of Field Service Podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Nicastro. Today we're going to be talking about tips for successful onboarding, training and retention. We know that with some of the challenges that exist in obtaining and training and retaining talent, these are topics that are very, very important to the vast majority of our listeners. I'm thrilled to be joined today by Bobby Lincoln, who is the supervisor of customer care onboarding at Sysmex America. Bobby, thank you so much for being here, and welcome to the Future of Field Service Podcast.

Bobby Lincoln: Well, thanks for having me, Sarah. It's a pleasure to be here.

Sarah Nicastro: Absolutely. So this is Bobby's area of expertise. And I'm excited to have him here with us today to give us some tactical advice on how to have effective onboarding and training. Onboarding is obviously the very first impression a new employee gets of your company. And with talent that today has many, many options on where they spend their time, it's a very important first impression. So Bobby, before we dig into some of the things we want to touch on today, just tell our listeners a bit about Sysmex, yourself and your role.

Bobby Lincoln: Well, thank you. Yes. My name is Bobby Lincoln, as Sarah said, I supervise customer care onboarding for Sysmex. I'm also responsible for managing a group of field service technicians, which we'll discuss those later on this conversation. In brief it's a national group of field service technicians that we hire to support districts as they get trained to do installations and eventually move into a permanent service engineer role. But I do supervise the onboarding process for everyone in the service organization, I've handled this responsibility for going on little over a year and a half. So pre-COVID and after COVID experience going on. I've been with Sysmex now in year 16, which I hear is unheard of in modern world, everybody switch jobs from every three or four years. But no, I'm a lifer as they say. Sysmex is a medical device company at its core. We're a Japanese based company.

Bobby Lincoln: We are the global leader in hematology diagnostics, we are now broadening our year analysis portfolio. And yeah, it's been a wild ride. When I started with Sysmex, we were... I don't know the exact market share number, but over the course of the last decade and a half, it feels really weird saying that by the way. We've become number one in the United States and the world.

Sarah Nicastro: Awesome. And I agree with you. I think after 2020 everyone should have survived and led through COVID on their resume. It's-

Bobby Lincoln: Absolutely.

Sarah Nicastro: It's a whole skill set in and of itself. All right, so we're going to talk today about onboarding, training and retention. And I kind of lumped them together in the introduction, but they are really three different and three very critical areas. So let's take them one by one. So we'll talk about onboarding first. So to start, just tell us a little bit about what your onboarding process looks like.

Bobby Lincoln: Well, I would like to discuss because it has morphed over the last year. Pre-COVID we would have... We'd spend interviewing. We spent a lot of time on the interview process, which I anticipate most other organizations do as well. We would come into the office, in our United States offices located... Well, there's a couple now actually. But we'd send everybody to Lincolnshire, Illinois, Northwest Chicago, and we'd come in and we'd spend day one just getting to know each other. And then throughout the course of the week, we'd have different presentations, discussions, we would do a tour of the building, we'd literally get to meet the CEO if he was in his office that week, which is pretty cool. A lot of people on day three don't get to meet the CEO of their organization. But really, the big thing about our onboarding process is, the goal is two things. We want to acclimate our new employees to our organizations or better yet our culture, ultras big from where we are.

Bobby Lincoln: Also, there is a few things that we have to hit, certain metrics that every employee needs to go through and all the corporate things, the human resources, presentations, all of those things that many, if not all corporations put their new employees through.

Sarah Nicastro: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Bobby Lincoln: Yep.

Sarah Nicastro: Okay. So one of the big areas of emphasis for you is making the onboarding experience personal. So why is this something that's so heavily prioritized? And I guess, more importantly, what are some of the ways that you accomplish that?

Bobby Lincoln: As I was thinking about this, two quotes come to mind. I'm a big quote guy. It drives my wife crazy sometimes, but you think of the godfather quote, it's not personal, it's strictly business. Well, I like to subscribe to... He's a buffoon in many ways, but I'd like to subscribe to the Michael Scott version of business. And I wrote it down to make sure in case our listeners don't quote me saying it wrong. So I did write it down, where he says, "Business is always personal, it's the most personal thing in the world." And you fast forward a little bit in that episode and he goes, "People will never go out of business." And I really subscribe to that, we subscribe to that at Sysmex, we believe we are in the people business. Why wouldn't we make it personal?

Bobby Lincoln: We hire folks to come in as service engineers, we hire them to do a technical job, but at the end of the day, that's only part of it. Our customers are going to require some fixing as well. So we spend a lot of time on making it personal to welcome them to our family. Really a family. That's our view. That's how we approach it. And when you bring someone into your family, Sarah, you've probably had folks sit down at your dinner table before, and thought, "I don't know. I don't know." We spend a lot of time on the front end so that when we bring folks in, they fit into our family and we want to acclimate them to that culture.

Sarah Nicastro: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Okay. So when they start the onboarding process, do you have any examples of things that you guys do to make it feel personal to them? So that it's not just employee one, two, three in onboarding session number whatever? What are some tips around creating a more personalized experience for those folks?

Bobby Lincoln: So much of this conversation, I'm going to tailor it more to where we are right now virtually, because in the office when I would host this onboarding process, it's similar, but it's different. So for example, we log in on day one, everybody comes in and I intentionally start our meetings about 15, 20 minutes before all the production starts, if you will. We get to know each other. One of the fun things that we do during this process, is every single class we challenge them with icebreaker questions. And it's no fancy science behind it. I literally Sarah, go to Google and type in icebreaker questions. For example, one of them was what superhero would you want to be and why? My personal favorite is if you could upload one skill to yourself via the Matrix, if you could become Neo about anything what would it be? And we challenge them and talk to them.

Bobby Lincoln: It just naturally generates conversation. And to make it personal, this might sound crazy to some out there, but I want to create the environment of we're sitting around the dinner table where you feel virtually comfortable talking to anyone at that table. That's the atmosphere that we hope to create in our onboarding process.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. Now I have to assume being successful at that is more challenging in a virtual environment than it is in person.

Bobby Lincoln: It is especially challenging for people like myself that when I give presentations, I feed off the room. I love the energy in the room, you can look and see it's harder I think, especially using certain platforms where now our new hire classes range anywhere from four to eight individuals. Seeing them on a screen, reading their faces for how they're receiving the information is way more difficult this way. Whereas when you're in the room, you can see it and feel it. This way, you kind of have to... I don't want to say put on more of a show, but make it a little more entertaining, if you will. And that's how I have... I've seen it work very well thus far.

Sarah Nicastro: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah. And I think that not everyone can control, I guess, size of onboarding class, but when you're doing it virtual, I think considering how many people you have in a group is important, because if it's still not as easy as reading the room in person, but if you have to keep an eye on four, or six, or even eight individuals, energies and reactions on screen is one thing if you were doing a class of 20 or 25, or any more than that, it would become very difficult to give anyone that individualized attention.

Bobby Lincoln: Yeah. We had... This was right before COVID hit last year. The November prior we had a class of 18 people in our room. There's no way we can do that in this format. In fact, we have made the decision based on occupancy levels of the buildings of local in Illinois, of what they allow, our new hire classes can only be a certain size, because of the restrictions that we have at our training center down the line. We have more frequent classes, but they're smaller.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. Which in the process you walked us through in terms of how you try and create more of that dinner table dialogue and really get people engaged, if you have four, six people, that type of interaction is feasible and easy to encourage. You don't want them to be able to hide behind the numbers, I guess. Okay.

Bobby Lincoln: Yeah. And I have folks that work with me. We have people throughout the organization that come in and help. And we always have one of the new hires, one of their direct managers is tasked to assist with the process. And a lot of times, depending upon the presentation, or I've got two or three screens going and they get tasked with monitoring faces. That's their job. They got to make sure the room's awake, nobody's falling asleep.

Sarah Nicastro: Right.

Bobby Lincoln: Yep.

Sarah Nicastro: It's important.

Bobby Lincoln: It is.

Sarah Nicastro: Okay. So you mentioned this a little bit, but you have these folks come in and you... How long is the onboarding program?

Bobby Lincoln: We have it broken down into three segments. It's onboarding week, which they spend day one that first week, that's onboarding, that's where we have human resources, we briefly get into anything technical in week one, it's a lot of application building, giving them the tools. "Hey, this is what you use this for, this is what you use this for." That sort of thing. Week two is our foundational class where we dive deeper into various processes and then they get put into our technical training curriculum.

Sarah Nicastro: Okay. I like the one thing you said though, about the goal is an onboarding for them to have a foundational understanding, but not an overwhelming amount of detail.

Bobby Lincoln: Right.

Sarah Nicastro: So you want to give them the critical overview that they need to be able to move into the training program, but you don't want to overwhelm them with too much at once. So talk about why you think that that concept is important when it comes to onboarding?

Bobby Lincoln: Absolutely. Are you a sports fan? Do you like football?

Sarah Nicastro: Yes, I have given up watching football since I had children so that my husband can do so because it's one or the other not both.

Bobby Lincoln: Very nice. I get the television, I've got three children, and daddy gets TV on Sundays. That's it. Four months of the year, daddy gets TV on Sunday. But I like in our training program to... All right. On day one of training camp, if you were to give your quarterback the entire playbook on day one, there is no way we could have the expectation that they could accurately and precisely execute that playbook in its entirety after that day. Impossible. If I could upload a skill like I mentioned, I would do that. But we can't, we're human beings. We have to absorb information, learn it and implement it. And so I like how we approach training to that. We have a certain progression. Once you can do A, let's do B. Once you can do B, let's challenge you with C. That's The goal.

Bobby Lincoln: Because if we overwhelm individuals on the front end, they're going to get burnt out. We're all human beings, when we get burnt out, we don't like what we do. I don't want that, I never want anybody to feel that overwhelming burnt out where they just want to quit. Any manager, or anybody in charge of any program should not want that for their folks. But it's step by step. And I liken it to the NFL playbook, you cannot expect them to do everything on day one, you have to work in steps.

Sarah Nicastro: Now have you seen a difference, Bobby, in terms of, I guess, bandwidth for consumption? Is that different in person versus virtual? So pre and post-COVID? And how has that changed?

Bobby Lincoln: I think in person I can connect and get more information through in a shorter amount of time. This platform allows, it's just too much distraction. I'm looking outside my house right now, I've got my kitchen there, I've got to say no to all the snacks that are there, or the phone might ring or... I've had folks where their kids are home, my kids have been home. It's challenging right now. It really is.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. And you get the Zoom burnout, right? So when you're doing onboarding in a physical location, you can say, "Okay, we're going to do the first two hours in this room, and then we're going to move to this room." And you can change scenery, you can work in activities, or breaks, or what have you when it's, "Hey, show up for your eight hour day and we're going to spend the whole thing on Zoom, and I'm just going to crush you with information." You'll start to get blank stares after so long. So I would think you've had to be strategic about how you pace things so that you can keep people engaged as well.

Bobby Lincoln: Absolutely. We've had a certain strategy for onboarding for the last six, seven years, and it's just day one, day two, day three, and so on. With this format, we've rearranged it because we don't want to overload their brain on information on one day, because by three o'clock in the afternoon, you can see it, they're done. We only really schedule out of the five days for week one, we're on Zoom half days on three of those days. And so we give them more autonomy to do some of the corporate training stuff that's online and the virtual training that we have everyone do. We give them the time to do that and do it at their own pace, because this is tough. This is tough.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. The last thing I wanted to talk about in terms of the onboarding experience is the emphasis that Sysmex puts on teaching the human side of the business in addition to the technical stuff. So tell us a little bit about that conceptually and then in practice, how you balance that within the coursework.

Bobby Lincoln: Sure. We understand that our customers are... We're in medical devices, that's what we do. Our instrumentation or analyzers, they are what our doctors and our healthcare workers use to save lives. The end of the day, that's who our customer is. It could be me, I don't want it to be me anytime soon, but I know that I will be a customer per se. We work really hard to understand that the end result of our instrumentation is a human being. And you can't do this job effectively if you don't have a passion for people. You just can't. You can fix things, you can do a great job fixing that analyzer, but if you're not good with your customer, that personal side of it, that human side of it, it's just not going to work. And there's a reason why we win so many awards year in and year out. Is because we focus on that. One of my favorite moments in this whole onboarding journey that I've been on camera, and if you ever listened to this, I'm calling you out.

Bobby Lincoln: We were in training and going through what our customer service model and how we approach it. And he raised his hand and he's like, "I thought you hired me to fix instruments, all we've done is talk about people all day." Right, that's what we do. That's what we believe. We firmly believe that if we take care of our customers and teach how to fix instruments, as well as down the road, making sure our employees are happy, it's just a natural circle of success.

Sarah Nicastro: Mm-hmm (affirmative). So what are some of the topics that you touch on in onboarding specifically when it comes to the human side? So obviously, you're touching on the technical side, but on this human element, what are some of the things that you start the conversation on in the onboarding process?

Bobby Lincoln: We employ a model and I don't want to give away too many secrets. But we work on human interaction, specifically how to defuse negative situations, there's everybody listening to this that deals in service, most calls from customers are not happy once, there's something that we need to fix. Something we need to resolve. Sometimes it's the instrument, sometimes it's the person, it depends. And so we spend a full day learning, teaching and every time I've given this presentation, I've thought of something new or how to interact with people. You can use it in your personal life. And it really centers around listening to others and having empathy for their situation. And we have been doing this for many years, and we just believe that if we focus on the people and we listen, and we acknowledge them and we hear them out, we can get to a successful resolution on both the technical side and the personal side of things.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. Yeah. And it's interesting, this is a topic that comes up more and more in terms of the emphasis on soft skills and the need to focus on that in training and talent development, because we're really beyond a world in field service, where mechanical or technical skills are all it takes to do the job. So to your point, whether you're talking about a break fix type service situation, where you might have a customer who's frustrated or upset or stressed out because they need resolution on that, or whether you're talking about even more advanced services and what it takes in terms of relationship building and being consultative and being viewed as a trusted adviser.

Sarah Nicastro: On any end of that spectrum, it becomes critical to have really good soft skills and people skills and communication skills and relationship building skills, in addition to being able to fix whatever you're there to fix, right?. And I think that that trend in my opinion is only going to continue as we look at the automation of certain tasks using technology and just the changing world of what service is demanding. I think that those skills are only going to become more important.

Bobby Lincoln: Yep. And one of the things that's really neat too, and it took me a while to learn this when I was new in field service, my background is in clinical laboratory science. I worked in a hospital lab for a little over four years and then moved into field service. But you as someone in field service, drive future sales more than you ever imagined. I didn't realize that, I just thought, "Oh, our salesperson came in and did a fantastically good job." And they're like, "We sell because of our team." And we've had customers that have been competitive takeaways, they're... Let's give some props words too. Some of their engineers, they had such good relationships that they worried about what was going to happen to them and vice versa. We don't want to... If you're my service engineer, what would happen to Sarah, if we jumped ship? That's why relationships are so important. It's so important all the way down the line. And that's why we start off with that, because at the end of the day, business is the most personal thing in the world.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. Okay. So let's talk then about training. So the onboarding process happens and they go through the two weeks of initiation and then they transition into the training program, right?

Bobby Lincoln: Yep.

Sarah Nicastro: Okay. So tell us what the training process is like at Sysmex.

Bobby Lincoln: We spend a week on onboarding, they come in and we acclimate them to culture and build them up and talk a lot about the customer service side. That's week one. Week two, is a foundational training, a lot of the tools that we set up week one, we learn how to use. We get involved in them. We do some introductions to the various analyzers in our portfolio. What's really neat about that particular thing is it's used to be an onsite demonstration, or an onsite thing. Now it's virtual, we're doing this virtual. And what's neat is we've used our various tools and we've got a world class center for learning that does a live stream. So they can live stream this class. It's really neat to see. Then we mix in, it becomes a mix of technical training on site in the classroom style teaching and on the job. And so our philosophy is let's get them in the field, let's start learning who their customers are. Let's hook them up with folks on their team that we trust to be a good mentor and then keep teaching.

Bobby Lincoln: And it's a good six to eight-month process to get through all of the various training that we have. And even at that point, we're very upfront. We expect, you're not going to feel comfortable until you're about 18 months to two years in this job. That's just normal. That's normal. Now everything is a bell curve. So there's some on the front end, some on the back end, but for the majority, 18 months to two years is a fully functioning service engineer.

Sarah Nicastro: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Okay. So I know you touched on this earlier when we talked about the football playbook analogy, but talk again about, within that six to eight month training program, how you phase in work. Because from what I'm understanding, you do that in an individualized way. So you expand on tasks as they become ready for more challenges. Am I understanding that correctly?

Bobby Lincoln: Yeah, that's correct. We don't want to take somebody two weeks into the job and say, "Here, go walk into the Mayo Clinic and fix their instrumentation." That's not fair. That's obviously not fair for our customer and it's not setting anyone up for success. It really is a... Now there's an unwritten number of time or a tenure with which we gauge. Like, okay, we have to take any job, we have to be able to check the boxes. Some people check them faster, some check them a little slower. But it's really a relationship. Training is absolutely a relationship between our center for learning that gives feedback on the individual. The individual has to take ownership and perform and then their direct manager has to navigate them through their journey of training to start saying, "Okay, you know what? Bob is ready to go out and do some preventative maintenance, let's give it a shot. Go ahead, you have all day to get that done." And we see how he does. Or an installation for example.

Bobby Lincoln: We know a certain analyzer takes a certain number of days on average to fix. Excuse me, to install. Let's see how they do. Get them out there in the real world. We can train, train, train, but eventually you've got to go out on the field and play the game. And so it's incremental for a reason because we want to build knowledge, we want to provide information and then start seeing how the performance is.

Sarah Nicastro: So you build from really simple tasks to harder tasks, both to build their knowledge and expertise, and also to protect the customer experience obviously. Like you said, not having someone brand new go into Mayo Clinic to do this job. And then you pair them with mentors. And how do you determine... Does everyone have a mentor? How does the mentor process work?

Bobby Lincoln: Oh, in a perfect world, we'd all have assigned mentors and that sort of thing. What's really neat about how our districts are structured is that we have entry level folks all the way up to high performing award winners. And each team within your own organization Sarah, you probably have somebody that doesn't have a mentor next to their job description, but you know that you would send someone to work with him. That's our mentality. We know if someone needs some technical training within our group, we know who to send them to. When I was in the field, I was what we call our lead service engineer, which was directly below our district service manager. And I focused a lot on customer skills, administration type things. Technically, I was never the best at it. I'm a solid B+, solid B+ technically. But I excelled where my... I was really high performing in the customer side of things.

Bobby Lincoln: So I would mentor our new folks in that regard. So it's more of a... In the world of unlimited budgets, we'd have this fancy mentoring program, I'm sure everyone listening would love to have that sort of thing. But the real world is we know who we can trust, we go to those people and just because of the type of culture we have, they want to see their teammates do well, because that makes their job easier, it makes the customers experience better. So it's a little bit of both.

Sarah Nicastro: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Okay. Now, how do you sort of monitor performance throughout training to determine, I guess, both when to add new duties to folks? And then also, when they're ready to graduate from training?

Bobby Lincoln: There are some official documents that we have that are designed to lead a manager to gauge their service engineer’s performance. So there are some boxes they have to check. But I can't look at a team in California and say, if I'm not working with them day to day. Like I focus on my team, I know what I should expect from people as they progress. I'm not dodging the question, that's just the honest answer, it's not something that's they have to do this, they have to do this. They have to obviously, but it's more of... You just know it. It's like watching your kid learn how to ride their bike. They go for a few feet, they go for a few feet, and all of a sudden, they're riding down the street and you're like, "Hey, where did you go?" They pick it up. You know. It's feeling.

Sarah Nicastro: Correct.

Bobby Lincoln: And that's the mentality that we have. We know when our service engineers are ready, you can just tell. And we introduced them based off of the maintenance tasks, to installations, to the full blown troubleshooting job that it is.

Sarah Nicastro: So when they're ready to graduate, what happens next?

Bobby Lincoln: Oh, we throw them a big party, we send them out to dinner, and the CEO gives them gift cards. We have this really neat... Well, it's like I said, pre-COVID, we had a full graduation week which was really neat. So they would come in and there would be specific, but we would bug the analyzers in the training department and they had to fix it, they had to go in and pretend that our technical trainer was the customer, we'd have to go through the entire experience. And they had to do it unsupervised, using only their team, their tools, the resources that they had. And at the end of the week, it was, you get a little certificate and we do... I wasn't joking, we would have a very nice dinner and celebrate. Because it really is a journey. It's something that we should celebrate. I just recently finished a master's degree not that long ago. And-

Sarah Nicastro: Congratulations.

Bobby Lincoln: Thank you. Thank you. I went out for Baltimore's best crab cake and celebrated. It's fantastic. So you should celebrate your successes.

Sarah Nicastro: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Absolutely. Yeah. And that makes them feel acknowledged for their hard work and appreciated. Now when they graduate from training, this is going to kind of segue us into what happens next but what sort of the path from training on?

Bobby Lincoln: Then you get... So on onboarding, we're going to acclimate you into the company culture. From there on out, it's a slow acclamation into your specific territory, your customer base, that sort of thing. Once training is done, then you're going to be on your own more, you're going to slowly get your own territory. And as you perform and as your successes begin to mount and you prove that you can indeed do this job, then we're going to continue to expand it until we get to where we consider a fully... Not fully functional, that's not the right word. We have a certain number of designated instruments that each engineer is expected to service and carry and maintain that sort of thing. So full work load, if you will.

Sarah Nicastro: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Okay. So after training, they come into your team as a field technician. That's what you referenced earlier in terms of the team that you manage?

Bobby Lincoln: Yeah. So we've got the entry... We have two levels of entry into our service organization. One is entry level position. It's what we call our field service technician, and I'll use the acronym FST. The other way is the service engineer, which I'll call the SE. So the FST, the field service technician is an entry level position. These are folks when I'm hiring for them, I'm looking for fresh out of college graduate, folks that want to get into field service. Like right now in my team, I've hired people that had previous experience, I had somebody that had no experience in field service, they had an electronics degree, clinical lab folks, shout out to all the med techs in the room. I have someone that went to college for sales that's on our service teams. So we really have a broad scope of individuals that we look at for the FST position. The next transition to that is service engineer. So I like to describe it to use another sports analogy.

Bobby Lincoln: The FST is almost like the minor leagues. When a service engineer position arises anywhere in the country, that my team, my pole of FSTs will be the first place that we look at for, "Hey, we've got an opening in Baltimore," which is right down the street from where I live. We have an opening in Baltimore, are there any FSTs? Before we look at... We obviously open up a job wreck, but we have folks that are trained, that are ready to go, that can graduate, if you will, into that promotion of a service engineer. But we also hired directly into that role based on experience.

Sarah Nicastro: Mm-hmm (affirmative). So it's like your farm team.

Bobby Lincoln: Yeah. I like-

Sarah Nicastro: Just trying to keep the sports analogies.

Bobby Lincoln: It works.

Sarah Nicastro: I'm doing my best, Bobby.

Bobby Lincoln: That's good. That's good, I like it.

Sarah Nicastro: Okay. All right. So I can see how that benefits Sysmex. So now we're kind of talking about a few different things. I think that if you listen back to some of the podcasts that we've recorded on the topics of retention and talent and things like that, we've had a number of conversations about the fact that if your only strategy is to hire based on experience, and you think that you can continue to do that indefinitely, you're mistaken, because you're just going to run out of it. So this idea of... I like the examples you gave of all of the different backgrounds you have in your pool of folks right now, right? So they don't have to have that experience, but they have an interest, they have an aptitude, they have some abilities to develop in this role. And you bring them on at that level and you work with them to develop all of the experience they would ultimately need to do that as a role.

Sarah Nicastro: So I think that's a really smart approach from the Sysmex perspective, because you're giving yourself a source of talent by working a step or two back in the value chain, rather than just expecting to be able to hire people that have done the job for X amount of time. But the flip side of that is, it gives an opportunity to foray into field service for folks that wouldn't have the opportunity to join Sysmex that they didn't have that experience. So as you're bringing these people into the fold, talk a little bit about how an organization can structure and offer that career progression and why that's important when you're hiring younger people.

Bobby Lincoln: Oh, gosh! My immediate response would be who wouldn't want to go to work for an organization where they didn't have the opportunity to advance? I certainly wouldn't want to go into a role that had no opportunity for growth or advancement, or there are people that do. God bless them, there are people that are looking for the seven to 3:30 punch in, punch out and that's okay. I think the younger workforce that we have coming out of college, there's a few things. They want to make an impact. Everyone wants to make an impact, how does what I do today affects somebody tomorrow? What's really cool about this particular job in field service in healthcare in general, especially now, is I've taken instruments out of laboratories that had somewhere in the neighborhood of five million cycles through them. That's five million people that I helped indirectly, but I helped them. That's cool. I like that. That was neat. What I really enjoy about what we do is we not only hire people that are ambitious and fit into that culture, it is a culture, we look for folks that want to do that.

Bobby Lincoln: One of my favorite questions asked on an interview is, "Are you looking for a job, or are you looking for a career?" And it's okay. I want career people. And we have various levels of hierarchy within the service organization. So you start out as an FST, or an SE and then the natural progression is to the next level and up. And what's really fun about working at Sysmex, it's in our mission statement by the way, is we challenge each other. We challenge each other. So my boss will sit down with me and he'll say, "What do you want to do? Where do you want to go?" You'd be reasonable, you don't say, "I want to be CEO next week," that's not going to happen. But I want to go here and here and here. And so we go, "Okay, well, here's how I can help you get there. Here's been my experience that got me to where I am."

Bobby Lincoln: And so I like to do that with the folks that work for me is, I ask them, "Where do you want to go? What do you want to do?" And that opportunity, just having the opportunity to work for an organization that provides that, that pushes it, that in some ways incentivizes that, along with the impact of knowing that my job every day is going to effectively save lives, what's not to love about it?

Sarah Nicastro: Right. And those are good points. I think that in the conversations I've had with people about managing an older generation versus managing the younger generation, those are a couple of key points. One is I get your point, I'm built the same way like, who would not want to progress in their career? But if you think about a lot of tenured field technicians historically, we're happy to do the same job for 20, 25, 30 years. And they didn't have that same... I'm over generalizing. Some people do, some people don't. But if you look as a group, at the older generation of field technicians, I think you had a greater likelihood of people being happy to just do their job if it was a good job and not necessarily have that burning desire for continual evolution. And I think that's something that the younger generation looks for in an employer. And then your other point about playing to the impact and communicating the difference that your employees are making in lives, is something else that has some real appeal for folks.

Bobby Lincoln: Yes. What I like also too that we do, and it's not just... Even I had a conversation with someone who will just leave it as they're a seasoned service engineer, the PC way, right? We were having a conversation a couple weeks ago about him playing out the string, if you will. "What do I want to do?" But yet, he also called me to talk about how can I improve this specific process that my team manages? So even though we have people on the twilight side of their career, it's still a constant... There's no way to describe it, other than you got to live it and feel it. It's an innovative group that we are. And whether you're day one, or year 35, it's really the same goal. And I think we do a good job of hiring the right people, but also protecting our culture of who we are, that fosters that type of environment.

Sarah Nicastro: Mm-hmm (affirmative). That makes sense. Okay. So in terms of your evolution from the medical lab, to field service, to heading up onboarding and managing a team of field service technicians, what's the biggest lesson you would say that you as a leader have learned?

Bobby Lincoln: Oh, good grief. Don't expect me from you.

Sarah Nicastro: Okay.

Bobby Lincoln: That was a tough thing to learn moving into management, if you will. I have a certain way of doing things, I have a long track record of performance of processes that I've particularly employed, ways I handle customers, way I talk to customers. Not everybody does that. And so I learned very early on that I can't have my own expectations for my team. I can set them, I can put the bar, "Here's where I want to be. Guys, here's where we are, here's how we're going to get there." But everybody is going to do it a little differently. And so for me personally, that was one of the toughest lessons to learn. And to step back, when you're in field service, you measure success very differently than you do in managing field service. Every day you walk in, "I fixed that, I did that." When you're working with people, it's different, it's a longer game. So that's my biggest piece of advice for any new leader, is don't expect you from other people.

Sarah Nicastro: That makes sense. I like that. Any final thoughts or closing words of wisdom for our listeners on the stuff we've talked about today, onboarding, training, retention, anything related?

Bobby Lincoln: The virtual nature of everything we do now, I have found the greatest success thus far has been a couple of things. And this might sound a little crazy, because we're in corporate world, but when I say make this process entertaining, make it entertaining. However, that needs to happen. Some things that we like to do is ask silly questions or play videos during... I've restructured half of the week with entertainment in it, click on YouTube things, that sort of thing. Just because, gosh-

Sarah Nicastro: I will say Bobby and I were exchanging some messages real quick this morning on LinkedIn in preparation for our recording today. And at the end, you sent me a meme and it was just such a little thing, but it made me laugh out loud. And it's a small example. But to me after what we've been through as a world in the last year, there's no reason to not introduce a bit more levity and just personal connection to exchanges. So, yeah.

Bobby Lincoln: Make it fun. Gosh, we're doing this for eight, nine, 10, 12 hours a day, some of us. Gosh, have fun. Life's too short. Have some fun with it.

Sarah Nicastro: Yes. That's a very good point. All right. Well, Bobby, thank you so much for joining today and for sharing. I really, really appreciate it and hope you will come back and visit us again soon.

Bobby Lincoln: I would love to. This has been a blast. Let's do it again.

Sarah Nicastro: Absolutely. You can check out more of our content by visiting us at www.futureoffieldservice.com, you can also find us on LinkedIn as well as Twitter @thefutureoffs. The Future of Field Service Podcast is published in partnership with IFS, you can learn more about IFS service management by visiting www.ifs.com. As always, thank you for listening.

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