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September 27, 2023 | 30 Mins Read

Creating a Culture of Safety in Field Service

September 27, 2023 | 30 Mins Read

Creating a Culture of Safety in Field Service

Sarah welcomes Franklin Maxson, VP Field Services, North America at Socomec for an important conversation on safety. Franklin touches on what works well in terms of policy and leadership but also why a top-down safety approach will never be enough.

Sarah Nicastro: Welcome to the Future of Field Service podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Nicastro. Today we're going to be talking about what it takes to create a culture of safety in field service. I'm excited to welcome to the podcast today Franklin Maxson, who is the Vice President of Field Services for North America at Socomec. Franklin, welcome to the Future of Field Service podcast.

Franklin Maxson: Hi, Sarah. Great to be here. I appreciate the opportunity to spend some time with you on this topic today.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, I'm thrilled to have you here. Franklin and I had the opportunity to be together in person. What was it? Well, it was last month still. It seems like longer ago, at Field Service Hilton Head. Franklin was part of a panel discussion that I moderated, and so we caught up after the event and chatted about different topics that are top of mind. And safety is one that you are particularly passionate about, so I'm excited to have that conversation today. Before we get into the topic at hand, just tell everyone a little bit more about yourself, your role, and what Socomec does.

Franklin Maxson: Yeah, Sarah, so my background is I'm one of those weird ones that decided to go get a management degree. So have been in the management now for pretty close to 10 years. But really, I have been in field services for the last 20 years. So, I started out my career in telecom and then made a switch to field services with GE Healthcare. Spent almost 11 years with them in a progression of roles from a field service engineer, all the way up through a program manager.

And then I decided to change focus and get out of the healthcare environment, and go work with the critical power. So the last nine, 10 years of my career have been in critical power, primarily focused around data centers, and that type of an environment. So it's been a really interesting 20 years of learning how to operate in a remote environment, long before Covid forced everyone to operate remotely.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, that's great. And so when we caught up after the event, we were chatting about what we might do a podcast on, and you said that safety is a topic that is near and dear to you. So as I explained to you when we were chatting, I always like to ask people first, "What is it that you would like to talk about? What's important to you? What's top of mind? What are you passionate about?" Because to me, those are always the best conversations to have. So can you share a bit with me and with everyone, why is safety a topic that is important you?

Franklin Maxson: Yeah Sarah, and I think safety should be one of those things that all of us are constantly thinking about. For me, it really goes back to growing up with my father.

So growing up with my father, I always knew he was a little bit different, and I remember from an early childhood thinking about it, because his left hand had actually been amputated. His fingers I should say, of his left hand had been amputated. And so he had the majority of his thumb and his pinky, but most of the other fingers had been amputated in an industrial accident.

And so I grew up with that. And it's always very interesting, especially as a young child, seeing some of the reactions from some of your friends of how that happens.

Then later on as I started working, I actually had a close call with a conveyor. I had a tool that was sitting on a conveyor belt, and I was a teenager working on some electronics, probably 18 or 19 at the time. And I had a tool sitting on a conveyor. The conveyor turned on, and I quickly without thinking, reached onto the conveyor to try and grab the tool. And my arm got pulled, got jammed up. And thankfully I was able to jam it up against a piece of metal that didn't cut me, but allowed me to have the leverage to pull my arm out. I had a friction burn and abrasions on my arm, probably about a six-inch by two-inch nasty little spot. That was a really close call for me.

Then along the way, I became a private pilot, and safety is huge in aviation. Whether you're a private pilot, or even more so in the commercial world, but safety is huge, and there is a very strong emphasis and a mindset around safety, around checklists, around how do you remain safe in that environment.

Then as I transitioned and later on went into the leadership roles, we had a couple of close calls with employees that quite honestly could have ended in fatalities, and we were lucky they did not.

So over the years, I've had a long exposure to the results of what happens when things don't go well from a safety perspective. And it has become very much something that I'm very passionate about and that we discuss on a regular basis, almost daily basis with my team.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, wow. I didn't realize that it stemmed all the way back to the accident that happened to your father. And it's interesting because when we were speaking about doing an episode on this topic, it's one of those topics that it's not the flashiest, like at the event you and I were at last month. Everyone's talking about AI. I didn't notice any sessions on safety.

But what we spoke about is while historically I think in certain industries, it's been more of a conversation. You have certain industries, take mining for example, that just by nature warrants very regular, very serious conversations about safety.

What we were chatting about is in the world we're living in today, whether we're talking about navigating Covid and other things like that, or just societal things, etc. I mean, no matter what industry we're talking about in field service, there can and probably will be situations where employees will be at risk in some way. And so it is a very important conversation to have, yeah.

So let's talk a little bit about in the different experiences you've had, and in your perspective, when it comes to the company stance on safety, the official policies, procedures, communication, the top-down aspect, what's your take on what works well? What's important to consider? Let's talk about that aspect of things.

Franklin Maxson: Sarah, I think that's a very important piece of it. Because as we talk, there's different aspects to safety, and right now we're talking about the top down approach for safety. And I think that is very important, because from an executive perspective, we've got to drive the focus, emphasis, and attention that safety deserves.

You're right, it's not sexy. It's not nearly as much fun as talking about AI, or some of the other very cool stuff that's happening out there right now. However, at the core of what we do, especially from a service organization and a service perspective, service is about people, whether it's our clients, or our most valuable resource, which is our employees. So we have to maintain safety in top of mind.

And it was interesting talking a little bit aside with Roy Dockery when we were at the event, and he has a completely different set of safety parameters than I look at, but we're both still very focused on how do we keep the employees safe. I don't necessarily have to worry about some driver not paying attention running into my employees, he does.

But we could take a look across multiple industries and see that this is very much a requirement. And when we're talking about how does management encourage this, and even more importantly within a service perspective, how do we encourage and empower people when we're talking about employees that are often working alone? We are in a distributed environment. We're not seeing them every single day. We have reduced control of our environment, because we're often operating at a client's site. So we don't know necessarily what the safety policies are or how well they're implemented.

And so when you take all of that into consideration, and we take a step back from an executive level, and look at what is it that we're actually trying to accomplish with our safety policies, we have to make sure that it is embedded within our culture, within our vision, and our mission, and that it remains an active part of every conversation so that we can maintain that focus. Safety is one of those things that if you don't focus on it, you become complacent about it.

And so that is one of the key factors to setting the stage for being able to have a really good safety culture within the organization. I think it comes down to that, right? It's the policies, the procedures. The law doesn't really drive safety as much as the culture does.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. So that being said, I think it's a really good point that the role it does play is in keeping the conversation top of mind. Because like you said, it's not a sexy topic. Therefore, it is one that if you aren't intentional about it over time, you can take for granted. Just assume that people understand what the rules are or how they should react in certain scenarios, etc. So it is important from a top-down perspective to make sure you're reflecting on how often and in what ways are we reinforcing the importance of this. That makes sense.

Now, that being said, as you said, the official policy, or rule book, guidelines that the company develops and that top-down focus are not going to be enough. So can you talk about why that is?

Franklin Maxson: Because at the end of the day, we're all humans, and we have to remember that our employees are humans as well. And I don't know about you, Sarah, but I know that when I have to read T's and C's for a long time, yeah, I'm going to want to take a nap. And if we think about our safety manuals and our safety policies, it's just another set of T's and C's that we're all supposed to be out there reading and understanding.

So this is where you have to take advantage of psychology, peer pressure, and a cultural norm around safety. Because if you normalize safety, and that is actually the culture that the organization has, then that peer pressure, all of your teammates in your leadership are all focused around it, and thinking about it, and driving that. And it becomes much more of a grassroots effort.

The other thing that is critically important with this though, is you have to have that open door policy, and you have to be able to listen to the employees without judging. Because the whole judgment part can backfire on you very, very easily in a safety scenario.

And so as you think about a grassroots organization that's going to focus on safety, that is going to be able to do it, we think about, what are the safest organizations out there? And I'll go back to my roots in aviation.

If we stop for a moment and we think about how many people right this minute are actually sitting in an aircraft seven miles up in the sky, it's probably somewhere close to a million people right now, at any given moment around the earth. And if you think about the total number of travelers worldwide, and the fact that the accent rate is so tiny, we don't think about it. We jump on an airplane and we go, right?

But why does that happen? That happens because the entire culture that has been built around that. As a pilot, if you self-report an infraction, you realize, "Man, I just screwed up," and you self-report that, you're actually protected from punishment. Now, you may get some recommended remedial training that you may have to take, but you're protected from punishment.

And if we take some of those aspects, and we take some of these punitive aspects that have generally been found within the companies and say, "You know what? We're not going to focus on that. We're going to try and focus on what is our systemic approach, and how do we identify the systemic breakdowns that led to a safety incident." Then we can start to change that culture and that mindset, and develop that basically bottom up.

The other thing that I think is really important is at a grassroots level, you have to identify the people that are passionate about this. Oftentimes, unfortunately, as people that have either suffered injury or had loved ones suffer injuries. But if you can identify them and identify the folks that have that passion, and you can begin to create those little teams, and to borrow from General McChrystal's book, is eventually create some teams of teams that are focused around safety. They're not necessarily aligned within a normal organizational structure, but you just let that develop so that there's a lot of cross-pollination, a lot of discussion back and forth around what's happening with safety.

Field technicians working next to the factory team members and talking about safety, the factory team members understanding more about what the team in the field does, and the field team providing an outsider's perspective to what's happening inside of the plant. Those things can open up a lot of interesting perspectives that are not necessarily seen. And so when I think about, how do we develop all of this, it's a combination of all of this and creating this holistic approach towards safety.

Sarah Nicastro: I really like the point about withholding judgment, right? Because we know that there's so many aspects that we talk about today in service, where we're creating strategy up here, we're talking about innovation up here, but the reality is happening on the front lines.

And so the same way you would say... Let's say we're talking about technology. Have you gotten input from your frontline workers? What do they need? What are their challenges, etc. We know how valuable that insight is. But in this scenario, if they're fearful of being honest about what the issues are, then they're not going to share that insight, and they're going to keep it to themselves. And that's when you have problems that can arise. So making sure that they're comfortable sharing that.

The aviation example is such a good one. I get so frustrated when... Yes, I mean, everyone gets frustrated when flights are delayed and canceled, etc., right? You get on a flight, you might even be taxiing. "Oh wait, there's a light on. We're going to take you back. You're going to get off."

But there's people literally throwing temper tantrums, and it's like, would you prefer they take off? I mean, I don't know. There's nothing more important than the safety aspect of it. So yeah, it's an interesting industry to think about this topic through that lens.

So I think the idea is, how do you create this openness, this really transparent conversation? And I think you had shared with me when we were chatting, the example of where there are safety policies and procedures. I think we were talking about someone completing an inspection.

Do people around them know what's going on and why, and why it's important? Do people understand some of the situations that field technicians might find themselves in, and some of the risks, so that throughout the organization, that importance is understood?

Franklin Maxson: It's funny, because it becomes such a check the box exercise. And there's a couple of different scenarios that you can think about it. So in a factory setting, regardless of what kind of industry you're in, there are many times the monthly safety walks. And what are those generally comprised of? "Oh, well, let's go check that the aisles are clear. Let's go check that the fire extinguishers are still where they're supposed to be, and that they're within the certificate date of them, that the exits are clear," etc. And some of the things that I have found throughout my career is you go through and you're checking that box. You're doing all of that. For a field service organization. If you look at an NFPA 70E, it requires that you do a annual audit of lockout/tagout. And all of us that work in electrical, know lockout/tagout. We practice it, we can recite it in our sleep.

And so we go through and we start talking about the lockout/tagout, and we're going to do that check. And it can very easily become a check to box exercise. Across the board, that happens. And one of the things... I remember talking to Bob Baker who was my safety partner back at ABB, and one of the things that he really focused and helped to drive was, how do we change that conversation? How do we take it from a check the box exercise to a, "Hey, let's talk about lockout/tagout. What have you been doing with lockout/tagout? What are the challenges to actually implement lockout/tagout?"

And if you think about a field service organization that may be going to many different sites, for me it's electrical. But others may have mechanical, or hydraulic, or other things that have to be locked out, right? Well, there's a variety of breakers, variety of valves, variety of different things that you have to manage and control the energy around. And do we have the right kit to be able to do this? Do we have the right tools and equipment? Are employees having to use their ingenuity to figure this out, instead of actually having a really good engineered process to do this? And actually changing the focus to having that conversation.

Same thing if you're in a factory. If you are walking the factory floor, maybe instead of necessarily just going through as quickly as you can to check the boxes, take the time to actually go spend some quality time with those employees in that area and ask them about safety. How are things going? Not just check the aisles, and make sure that the fire extinguishers are good, and that the exits are clear. But really get to know what they're doing, how they're doing it, and get that feedback. And ideally, get that feedback in a systemized format that can be acted upon.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. I think even asking field technicians, "Is there a time in the last 12 months you've felt unsafe? And if so, why? And what did you do about it?" Not with the idea of, again, from a judgmental or a punitive standpoint, but just to really understand. You brought up the psychology of it. Do they feel safe?

And if yes, great. If not, what are the things that are coming up? So rather than this blanket or generic policy, you can look for the real challenges and make some changes. Yeah, go ahead.

Franklin Maxson: Yeah, I think within that perspective, is how do we empower people to have some quick little checklists of things to look out for, that will put you in an elevated state of mind around safety?

One of the things that I always talk to my team about is when something changes, you're prepared for a certain scope of work when you get to a site. And I'm sure many of your other guests have always told you that you get to the site, and your scope of work is supposed to be A through C. And suddenly we got D, E, and F added to it, right?

Well, when that situation happens, it's making sure that the team is empowered and really focused on, "Let's stop. Let's review our safety procedures. Do I have enough PPE? Do I have the right tools? Do I have the right processes in place to be able to cover the revised scope of work? Not just what I came here for, but the things that have been added to it." Because now there's a change.

And typically, what we find when we do the incident investigations, is something changed. Something went outside of the expected norm, and we weren't prepared for it. So how do we take that moment and say, "You know what? Let's take 10 minutes. Let's review our hazard analysis. Are we actually ready to proceed to do this, or do we have to take a step back?"

And if we have to take a step back, then it comes back to the leadership. We have to be able to support our field team members, because that customer may be upset at us. They may be upset about, "Hey, now we need another visit." On the flip side is, yes, we may need another visit. But going back to your earlier example around the aircraft, that light went on in the airplane as you're taxiing, and you really don't want to take off.

It's the same scenario with our clients. We have an alert, something we're not prepared to do, or we don't have the right PPE. We do not want to cause an incident on your site, or possibly put someone, whether it's our employee or one of your employees at risk, and possibly damage the equipment along the way. So it's being able to have those conversations to support the field team, while they do those types of reviews.

Sarah Nicastro: Right. And I think that was actually the next thing I was going to ask you, because I think empowerment is important in many ways today. But as we're thinking about safety, I think it's a term that gets thrown around a lot. And I would guess that it's a lot easier to empower employees around safety when it's something taking place in your own environment. If it's on a factory floor and they see something, "Speak up, say something, we'll fix it."

When you're talking about a field technician going to a customer site, and for whatever reason, feeling uncomfortable, feeling at risk, feeling unsafe, empowering them to say, "We're going to have to come back. I'm going to have to do this another time." It's a different conversation, and it's one that I think companies and leaders need to be really thinking about and talking through.

Because, I think that culture you want to create comes from how you react in those moments, not the ones that are easy to address. Do you know what I mean? When you're risking customer frustration, when you're risking increasing costs to serve, and you're still choosing safety over those things, that's what tells your employees, "I'm important to the company. This is important to the company."

So I think there's shades of empowerment, right? Because there's situations where empowerment is very easy, and then there's situations where it's a lot trickier, and there has to be consideration for that.

Franklin Maxson: You are absolutely right. I mean, this is a huge important piece of it. And when you said that the culture of greed's created in those tough moments. I couldn't have said that better myself. That is the absolute essence of what we're trying to drive.

So I'll give you an example. I have to protect some names, so we'll go with some generic names here. But a few years ago, we had some employees at a hyperscale data center. And it was in the middle of a construction job. Everybody on that construction job has liquidated damages for delays, etc. Okay? We did. So did the rest of the contractors. Again, this was one of those instances that makes me just to this day, the hair on my arm just stands up thinking about what could have happened.

But I had two employees at the site at that particular data center, in the middle of this project that was going on. One of them realized they had not grabbed a piece of test equipment that they were going to need. So while the preparations were still ongoing for that test by the second employee, the first employee left to go to their vehicle to grab that piece of test gear. On their way back in, they were walking by a lockout gang box.

So in lockout, you might sometimes have these large boxes for multiple teams working at the same time. And so typically, the way that this works is you have a single point of contact that maintains control of the entire lock box, and then you put your individual keys for your locks inside of that lock box.

So as my employee was walking back, he saw another contractor reaching into the box, prying the box open, literally prying it open to reach in there and grab his key. He tried to stop him. The employee was very rude and walked away.

He ran and got his partner out of the building, called his manager. I got a call within probably a minute to two minutes after this happened from their manager saying, "Hey, this is a situation. We really need to report this. But all of the LD's and everything, I don't care. Now people are at risk. I don't care."

I instructed the team members to go to the owner's trailer and find the safety manager there. Meanwhile, I placed some phone calls to some of my contacts. Within 30 minutes, Sarah, we had shut down construction on tens of millions of dollars data center, and the entire place went into a safety standout that lasted almost a week. I can't even tell you how much money that cost. It was probably in the millions by the time it was all said and done.

But at the end of the day, my team was commended by the general contractor and the owner, because they had the willingness to report this. And if we had not reported this, somebody could have died very easily in the scenario. There was a whole lot of retraining that had to happen across the board.

But it's those situations and it's those scenarios when you know what, I could have very easily taken a step back and said, "Well, maybe it's okay. Go find the supervisor," whatever. But if I did that, then what is my culture to my team? I preach safety every day to my team members. And if I can't back them up, then that culture doesn't continue to develop.

And I think that those are the key elements, is we have to support them. And when you said, "We don't control our environment in the field." When you're working in a factory and you have a supervisor right there that you can go to, you're right, that is a much easier discussion. But to empower the team members to possibly have a very upset project manager, a very upset general contractor, to basically put a job and completely stop it from proceeding, it is a different level of empowerment, and you're absolutely right about that. And it is something that quite honestly, takes courage on their part, on our field conditions part to be able to do that. And if they don't feel that they have the support from the executive leadership, they won't do it.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. And this is where it takes top down buy-in as well, right? Because ultimately, you need to have multiple layers of support to be able to do something like that. Right? So yeah, that's a really good example. We also spoke Franklin, about challenging assumptions. So we talked about the rules are the rules based on what you know, what you've encountered, what you've seen. But what about when something outside of that happens, or what about when something at odds with the rules happen?

So this is tied to empowerment, but I'm just wondering if you have any examples of employees feeling comfortable speaking out, challenging assumptions, so that you have more of this working relationship to continue to evolve those procedures, and not just let them get stale or become these checkbox exercises.

Franklin Maxson: So, I think that this is where that open door policy and listen without judgment really comes into play, because we can set up policies across the board to try and cover as many scenarios as we can think of. But you're right, things happen that don't fit a neat little box that we created. And I think it's having the employees be able to bring this up.

I'll give you an example. To this day, I go back and forth and we have open discussions with the employees. So for example, in our line of work oftentimes, we're working inside of a battery cabinet. And you cannot turn off a battery, right? It has stored energy. It's going to be there.

And so when you're having to, for example, check a bolt, or more importantly, put in a new bolt on a battery terminal, and you're having to wear your liners, your gloves, your insulated gloves, the rubber insulated gloves. And then you have your leather protectors over the top of it, you don't have any dexterity left.

And that's always been a tension point that we've had in the field as to how the heck do we do this, and how do we meet the guidelines? Because if you do a strict reading of NFPA 70E, you have to be in the PPE. There isn't a choice. But yet, if we're wearing the PPE, then now we're putting ourselves at risk by dropping the proverbial screw that may cross to ground, or create a ground short, and create a situation there.

So I went back to the employees and I said, "I hear you. Give me options." I'm like, "I don't know what the options are." Bob Baker actually, referring back to him, he and I were working on this together, and we were looking at different ways to do it. And so some of the employees said, "Well, we can lower the working voltage by separating the different trays." So they're built in a cabinet that has multiple trays. "So if we separate and isolate the tray, we can drop the working voltage. Then maybe we can go to a lower hazard standard."

So we looked at that and understood some perspectives. And then another employee said, "Hey, by the way, I found these cut resistant arc rated gloves." And we were like, "Well, okay. In this particular scenario, under these particular circumstances, if we reduce the working voltage, that makes sense." Because now we're still providing the cut resistance, but we're actually able to reach inside the cabinet.

The thing is though, everything has consequences. So now we opened a little bit of a door that we have to trust the employees, that that's the only time that we're going to use those gloves. Because to be honest, it opens up a bit of doubt from my perspective, from the safety leadership perspective of we've given them something else that if it's misused, it could end up in a big hazard. Because that arc resistant glove is great, because if it shorts, if something shorts, your hand will be protected from a burn. But it does not protect you from electrical shock. So you always have that dynamic tension, right?

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. But I think what's interesting to me about that is, totally makes sense. And of course, there's always going to be risk with trying something different. But I think the other thing though is when you really focus on increasing empowerment, I think you also increase trust. Do you know what I mean?

And that's the thing is you've listened. You've allowed the employee to be not only heard, but part of the solution. And you have met their need, and you're trusting them to use it appropriately. You know what I mean?

And I think that because they were heard and they were part of the solution, the likelihood of them respecting that trust and using it the way they should is a lot higher. There's no guarantees, right? So I understand the concern. But I think we do have to understand that the more we can be collaborative and we can empower our employees, there is that mutual trust that grows as a result of that.

Franklin Maxson: And honestly, there's a lot more creativity that you can tap into. Right? So if you're looking for a solution to a weird problem, you've got to find sources of creativity.

So at that time, I had something like 70 field technicians that were trying to figure this out. That's a whole lot more brainpower than just having myself, and the safety manager, and maybe a couple of other people looking at this. It's that collective creativity, and getting them to look at different options, and try and understand how we could possibly get to a workable solution that opens up a whole lot of possibilities.

And again, it goes back to that grassroots team of teams approach of, "Hey, you know what? Let's try and understand. Let's work with different people. Can we come up with better tools?" And I think that there's always opportunities to engineer a better tool.

And some folks were working on that. We never came up with something that was satisfactory to all of us. Some folks were working more about, how do we reduce the specific risk in these situations?

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. I also think it's indicative of a good leader, that they came to you with a problem, you listened. But you didn't know the answer. So you just said, "I hear you. I don't know what the solution is, so let's figure it out together."

There's this, I think really outdated mentality of, "As a leader, I need to have all of the answers." And that just really stifles that creativity, many times over.

So that was a really good example of one of the things I wanted to ask is, so we talked about the top down, and we talked about the grassroots. So you want to have the top down in terms of having formal policies of course, but also keeping the topic itself front and center, top of mind. But then you want to create this culture, and the culture really happens within the ranks. Right? How do you make sure those two are ultimately meshing? How do we make sure that we're all moving in one direction together, and not at odds with one another somehow?

Franklin Maxson: Yeah, that's a great question. And I call it the dynamic tension. It's a dynamic tension that we always have to watch for. And I think that there's a couple of different things. From a top down perspective, we've got to set goals, expectations. And how do we measure that? Are we actually moving towards the outcome that we want to have? Are we still going in the right direction? So we have to be able to measure that.

From a grassroots perspective, I like to always implement a mechanism where we document what is being found out in the field. And as we document those, you should call them hazard reports, or safety observations, whatever you want to call them. But we record those and we bring those in, and it's actually trying to get to what I call a close rate on those, where we're reviewing them all.

We may not be able to implement all of them. To be perfectly honest, some of them may not actually be something that makes sense. And we have to be able to have that candid feedback to the employees, and explain why it does not make sense, and what it was that they missed. And it gives you some opportunities for some really good discussions and some training from that perspective.

There are some that we have to close out immediately. These are obviously a big hazard. It is an immediate risk, and we have to put immediate focus and effort on it, and get it taken care of.

There are some that we're going to say, "You know what? We're going to put a project team around that and we're going to close that out." And there are some that we literally have to say, "You know what? We're going to watch this, figure out where it's going, what do we have to do with it?" And so there is several different buckets and categories.

But I think the important thing is being able to share back with a line team that we're looking at all of them, and here's where some of these ended up. Some of these we may not be able to do anything about because of X, Y, and Z. Some of these, we have a project going on, and it's going to take anywhere from six months to a year to close out. Some of these, we're working right now. And some of these others, we went back and had feedback directly with the employee and we're able to close them out. Don't have to say anything more than that, right?

But if you can create that feedback mechanism... And it really is being completely transparent, it's hard work for the leadership team. Because from the team leader, to the regional manager, all the way up to myself, we all have to remain engaged and focus on these things, and making sure that they don't languish, because it's too easy to let them just sit, because it's not revenue generating. So because it's not revenue generating, maybe we don't have the bandwidth to add to it. But if we don't have that bandwidth, then what I find is the culture begins to rapidly slide back. And I think I mentioned in our earlier conversation, that safety is one of those things that requires constant attention. Because otherwise, we slide back very easily.

Sarah Nicastro: And it's a very, I think important and honest comment, that because it isn't revenue generating, it would be really easy to push it. Because that is the pressure and the balancing act that service leaders are faced with all the time. Right?

But it is important. And I think doing that hard work of making sure that that feedback loop exists is the only way that those employees will continue to engage, challenge assumptions, give input, and be bought into that culture. Because you are showing you care by doing the work, which makes them engaged and care as well.

The minute you guys say, "Okay, well yes, this is important. But it's not as important as the money we're making, so we can't prioritize the time to do this." Not that you would say that, but they know that. And then it just sort of erodes. I mean, to your point, right? So yeah.

Franklin Maxson: Definitely. And I think one of the things... This is something that I was talking to my core leadership team about was, we know that there isn't revenue associated with safety. But if you think about the cost-

Sarah Nicastro: Associated with ignoring it.

Franklin Maxson: There is a huge cost right there. So one of the challenges that I've had, to both my team as well as the finance team, is how could we quantify this a little bit better? If we had an accident rate of whatever, what does that equate to from lost time, from insurance possibly, premiums that have to go up, from a health coverage that has to increase, etc.? And how do we actually quantify some of that?

I'll be honest, I don't have the answers to those yet. And hopefully, there are some out there that listen to this that actually have those answers. We'd love to hear from them how they've done that.

But I think from a leadership perspective, we really got to think about it from it's not revenue generating, but it is avoiding cost. And there is a huge implication. And the worst case scenario would be a fatality, and there's all sorts of things that come along with that.

But even if it's not a fatality, if we lose an employee because of a safety incident, and we have to bring someone new and train them up, in my industry, we're talking basically 18 months and probably somewhere in the neighborhood of $300,000 to get a new employee up to speed. That's a significant amount of cost.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. And I think, again, this is another point you're making that could be translated to a variety of different topics in field service. But this idea that we've historically perceived investments of time, money, whatever, based on making money in a quantifiable way, return on investment. But there is these different areas where there's this cost of doing nothing that is real, and significant, and presents significant risk, that we have to get better at talking about, prioritizing. Because it's relevant, like I said, to a number of different topics. So yeah, that's another really good point. Okay, Franklin. So what would you say is your biggest personal lesson learned related to today's topic?

Franklin Maxson: Do I have to limit it to one?

Sarah Nicastro: No.

Franklin Maxson: So, there's actually two big things that I think over the years, just have solidified in my mind. If you stop paying attention to safety, safety will erode. There is no doubt about it. I have seen it. Unfortunately, I have made that mistake, and have seen the results, and have had to come back from that organizationally. Just quick look away, and the next thing you know, there are things that are changing and that are not going the right way, because we stopped focusing on it. And it didn't take long, just a couple of months, and it started to erode.

And I think the other thing, and I'll credit Bob Baker, who I've mentioned earlier to this, is he once told me this. He said, "For all that we complain about the laws, and the rules, and the guidelines, we have to remember that every safety guideline, every safety law, every rule that is out there was written in the blood of those injured or killed at work." That is a stark reality that we have to understand across the board. It's something that I have shared with my team members.

Because at the end of the day, the question that I asked the team is, "How much are you willing to give for you at this company?" My dad gave his fingers. I think that my sweat and tears are enough. I don't want to shed any blood.

Sarah Nicastro: Right. Yeah, no, that's a really good point. Yeah, very good insight. And I think this has been a really helpful conversation around a topic that doesn't get enough attention. So I'm really glad we chose to talk about it, and appreciate you coming and sharing your personal experiences, and your lessons learned as a leader, and your thoughts on how to create that culture and keep it top of mind. So thank you.

Franklin Maxson: You're welcome, Sarah. It's definitely been a pleasure.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. We'll do it again sometime. But thank you so much, Franklin. I appreciate it.

Franklin Maxson: You're welcome.

Sarah Nicastro: You can learn more by visiting us at futureoffieldserviceref.ifs.com. While you're there, be sure to sign up for the Future of Field Service INSIDER, so that you get the latest content delivered to your email every other week. 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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Transformational Leadership in the AI Era

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Transformational Leadership in the AI Era

Sarah talks with Dr. John Chrisentary, former Director of Global Technical Services and Technical Fellow at Medtronic, about the difference between transactional and transformational leadership, why transformational leadership is so important in today’s service landscape, and how advanced technologies like AI present distinct challenges – and opportunities – for transformational leaders.

Sarah Nicastro: Welcome to the Future of Field Service Podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Nicastro.

Today, we're going to be talking about transformational leadership in the era of advanced technology. I'm thrilled to welcome to the podcast today, Dr. John Chrisentary, who is the former director of Global Technical Services and Technical Fellow at Medtronic. Dr. John, welcome to the Future of Field Service podcast.

Dr. John Chrisentary: Hey, it's a pleasure to be here and thank you for having me. I'm very excited about this opportunity.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, I'm thrilled to have you. So I had the good fortune of moderating a panel that Dr. John was on recently at the WBR Field Service Hilton Head event, and also having the chance to sit in on his solo session that he did on transactional versus transformational leadership. And it was a great session and so I was happy when I reached out. I said, "Hey, can you come and share some of your insights on the podcast?" So here we are and happy to have you.

So at the event, you talked about this concept of transformational leadership, and we're going to get to in our conversation today how that relates to advanced technology, AI and some of the other themes that came up at that conference, of course. But before we get into that, let's go over some of the things that you spoke about at the event. So the first thing I wanted to touch on is how do you define transactional versus transformational leadership?

Dr. John Chrisentary: Wow, that is a phenomenal question. It's like, "Did you make this up, John? Where did this come from?" If we look back about 20 years ago, the thing that people were talking about, and you still use it as people manager, you're a really good people manager, and you have these soft skills, and there were actually colleges that added it to their leadership curriculum to understand this process called people management. But it's really transformational leadership, and this has been around for a while, but it was more or less defined between 1994 and 1997. There are many books about this but the main authors that people are aware of is Bass and Avolio. Now, hopefully I pronounced the last person's name correctly, but they had some documents that they wrote in '94 and '97 that spoke about transformational leadership. So I'll give you the traits.

The five traits of a transformational leader are one, they idolize the idea of influence by attributes and also by behaviors. So this works two different ways. It's what the leader provides and also what the person they're trying to influence has. And then how do they combine the two to make both work together? Those are two parts of it. They're inspirationally motivated, so it's not just, "Hey, let's do something. Let's move on. It's the way to do it. How can I get from A to B because I've traveled that road, so let me show you something shortcuts. Let me inspire you. Let me find out the things that you need that you're looking for and make it more attractive for you to be part of this process." And then they have individual consideration. And this is the hard part for a lot of leaders, you have to start to know your people on an individual basis. And so, this helps the transformational leader become more than just I'm in charge. They have a connection to literally everyone in the organization.

Now, that doesn't mean they have to sit with every person. If they have 200, 500 people under them, that's not going to happen. But there are ways that that leader will connect with their teams. Now, if you look at a transactional leader, this is different. It is a contingent award or reward. And what I mean by that is what I do for you, you give me something and if I give you what I'm stating I'm going to give you, you're going to do what I need you to do. There is no inspiration assigned to it. It's management by exception, which is active and passive. And what I mean by that is I don't have to do what I'm telling you to do, but I'll hold you accountable. So I'm not leading by example. I'm more or less leading by the power of my position.

So if I say, "Go and fix this widget this particular way," and because I told you that way and you followed my instructions and it didn't work, you're still held accountable. Whereas, if we were a transformational leader, you're going to find a way to make sure everyone is responsible from the top down. If the mistake occurs, everyone then addresses it. And it's more or less like a team effort or community effort to fix the problem versus saying, "You did the wrong thing even though I told you what to do." And if you look at these different leadership models, because people say, "Well, how many?" Because I've heard multiple views of what type of leader you can be. There are three key leadership models and then they have submodels. So you have the transactional leader, which we're talking about and the transformational leader. But the third one is the laissez-faire, and that's one... And I have not experienced this, but I've heard about it's the leader just listening. You just do what you need to do and I'll take credit, and if you don't do that, I'll hold you accountable.

And I think that's the worst of all the different leadership models. If you look in transformational, that's when you get into the charismatic, which a lot of people start to talk about and it has a bunch of other attributes that follow under it. But it is more linked to how can I influence change a person's way of thinking about themselves, about a process, how can I encourage them? And then also, how can I get them to move to a higher level? Once again, the transactional leader is, "I need you to get this done. And by doing so, the reward is you keep your job and I'll give you a bonus. You get your salary." It's very cut and dry. I equate it to what a politician does. Politician needs your vote. So they make a lot of promises, you vote for them. And of that list, you might get a half of 1% of whatever you voted for.

Sarah Nicastro: Okay. So then can you talk a little bit about how in the service landscape today, why is transformational leadership becoming increasingly important for leaders to understand, embrace, work toward, et cetera?

Dr. John Chrisentary: It's interesting. COVID, it was a serious condition for the entire world, but for business, it made everyone stop and take a look at how they've done things in the past and now what the future looks like. So everyone's working remote. It created a lot of havoc for a lot of leaders because they weren't used to not having the ability to walk up to someone and touch them on the shoulder and see what they're doing. Being remote made a lot of leaders nervous because it was new. What COVID has then caused is there has to be a new way of leading people because certain things are not going to go back to the way they were. So one is we're still on hybrid schedules, so we somehow have remote, some have a mixture, and there are quite a few people are going back in the office, but it's at a limited basis where they're doing maybe four days versus five. So you still have that remote aspect.

The importance now of leadership is to understand and influence and also come up with ways to drive an organization to be successful in the course of how business is done in the COVID environment or the post COVID environment, but also the expectations of the customer. One of the things we also found out from, especially from services is once we got through COVID, services fell off tremendously. So the customer expectation, it shifted, but now, we're more aware of the issues that we weren't thinking about prior to COVID. So having a leader that can provide this different mindset to get people to understand what the vision is, to live the vision, to make whatever their purpose, make it purposeful. Because normally in the past, the purpose and the vision landed at the leader's table and basically you just provide information to the team to achieve these different objectives.

Now, they need to know why. And creating that why then creates that sense of trust, but also sense of urgency and development. Because if you're telling me, "Oh, if I need to do this because the why is associated with my ability to help or to change the trajectory maybe from a medical device perspective, a patient at the end of this process, now you're giving me a value proposition that's beyond the idea of a paycheck." It is a purpose for why I'm doing my job every day. So that's why it's important to have that type of leader.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. And I think talking about purpose, COVID certainly was a big factor. I think the other factor here that is tied into that is just generational differences in what's important to the workforce, right? And so when you gave the example of COVID of you could go over and put your hand on someone's shoulder, I also think that what that makes me think of is it was a lot easier for leaders to control everyone when they were in close proximity to them, right? And then they found, "Okay, if I don't have proximity and control isn't as simple, now what do I do?" Right?

Dr. John Chrisentary: Right.

Sarah Nicastro: I need to up my game and I need to actually inspire and empower, et cetera. But then, on the flip side of that, you have younger workers where they're not motivated by the same simple exchange that worked for transactional leaders for a long time. So that makes sense.

So I asked a question at the end of your session, which I loved your answer. So I said, "What keeps a transactional leader from embracing transformational leadership?" And it was that term specifically you said it's control because transformational leaders often appear to have less control because they're focused on empowering others versus empowering themselves. I love this answer because we've been talking a lot on this podcast about this idea that the old school command and control leadership is becoming very outdated. And so, your answer was very much in line with this idea of, "I don't know if you want to call it ego or what have you, but these leaders who feel their success is tied to how much perceived control they have versus how much they're willing to give others." So what do you think will ultimately happen to leaders who fail to move beyond that transactional form of leadership?

Dr. John Chrisentary: I think we're in the storm right now. If you have asked me this question back in say 2020, right after COVID was really starting to really bump up, I would state it's going to be a 50/50 type of proposition. The person who's a transactional leader can still ride this thing out for a long time before we see that there's going to be change with the organization. Now in 2023, I see that organizations are starting to lean toward having that diversified leadership that a transformational leader can provide because the roles of a lot of leaders are now not just domestic, they're international. So I'm coming from a global role. A transactional leader doesn't work well in Europe.

Matter of fact, if you're not a transformational leader, you're going to have a hard time working in the international realm because one of the things you have to create internationally is relationships. And this is where that transformational leader really comes into play because they understand that every person brings value to the process. And if they can help the person understand their value, that person has a higher probability of success, not just in the role they're in where they want to go in their career, and it builds a different level of, and I keep using this word trust because it's key of not just the leader but the organization. And you get things done that way. The transactional leader creates a barrier, literally, between he or she and whoever they're leading because their objective is not known. It's not even provided to the person who's joined the work, and the person becomes more of like a widget and I say a widget in the fact of I'll just replace you with another widget. Well, the problem about replacing people like that is you lose the capability.

We also talk about tribal knowledge, right? Tribal knowledge is I think the thing that hurts an organization more than anything else because that person with tribal knowledge leaves and then suddenly you've taken away, let's say, 20% of the knowledge of the organization of how it runs smoothly. On paper, it looks like, "Oh, well, we just got a rid of so-and-so." Internally, that 20% is the difference between a successful rollout or implementation or a non-successful. 20%. And then you say, "Okay, I'll just hire another person to get into that position." Well, the issue is you literally go from say ground zero. When the person leaves, you go negative 50 because you've lost that capability. You hire somebody that doesn't create that same influx of information, that person still has to build expertise in your area. So they're slowly building. So there's a long period of time if you put this on the graph, you literally dropped it negative 50 and it's tracking at negative 50 for months. And as that person starts to become part of your organization, gets the knowledge that the last person had that slowly start to get back to zero.

And most leaders and especially transactional leaders do not look at that time, which could be six months, could be a year of ineffectiveness. The transformational leader understands that each person brings a key component to the process, but the key is the knowledge around the entire organization. You lose a person and you might lose if you do it right, maybe 2% because someone else has the same skillset, maybe not the expertise, and they'll step up into the next role because that is what you're providing, that you're feeding, you're nurturing the organization to do. So it creates a different dynamic than what we've seen in the past with transactional leaders where these common issues of people leaving now are not the detriment of the organization, it's just part of the way an organization will work.

But internally, that knowledge is what's going to keep the organization solvent and keep people happy to trust that leader, trust the organization, and in most cases, then you get to achieve these sometimes more difficult objectives as you're rolling out to make the company more effective and efficient in its vision, using this through the people who are doing the work.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. I'll tell you a quick story that I'm thinking of and it'll segue us into our conversation about technology. But I interviewed a woman, Trine, she leads logistics. So in a global role for a company, she's based out of Denmark, and she is a relatively young woman in a global leadership role. So already, there's layers of diversity more so than a lot of folks. But we were talking about leadership and she said it's very humbling today to be a leader because even when she came up through the ranks, she said the goal was to be the smartest person in the room. And not only is that not the goal anymore, it's not possible. When we talk about the way that digitalization has changed how we do business and everything that goes into those capabilities and leveraging data for business intelligence, it is not possible anymore for any leader to know everything. You are focused on accumulating a group of people that together are able to accomplish great things. No one person can be in that role.

And so she said, "That's a humbling change to go through as a leader and reconcile that it's not my job to know everything or to be the smartest person in the room. It's my job to help this group of really smart people accomplish this objective." So I'm just thinking back to that conversation and how it really parallels in the terminology we're talking through today. Her really witnessing that change from transactional to transformational, and I think it was just powerful to hear her acknowledge that that's humbling, that as a leader, there's some emotions tied to like, "Okay, it's not about me, it's about the team." Right?

Dr. John Chrisentary: Right.

Sarah Nicastro: So yeah, it's really interesting. So then let's talk a bit about the intersection of transformational leadership and advanced technology, okay? So you have all of these sophisticated tools today that are really changing the way we can do business, right? AI, machine learning, augmented reality, and so on, and so on. So it really demands leaders not only accept the change but become a lot more adaptable. So let's talk about how this factors into transformational leadership.

Dr. John Chrisentary: Okay. Well, one, the story you just told of the person overseas, I think that's a great example. The hard I think for leaders to understand is, one, you don't have to have total control. You don't have to have total control from the standpoint of how every gear moves. You just have to have control on when to move the gear. So it's a different mindset. If I have to know how every gear works, there's no way I'll be an effective leader. But if I understand the key components and I start to put people into those positions and allow them to grow and I can help nurture them to be that positioned player to move the gear, then I'm still being successful without having to know every dug on thing that goes on, right? The smartest person in the room is not the one who always is the ones talking. I was told this a long time ago.

Matter of fact, if you want to know who the smartest person in the room is, let everyone talk and wait to see who everyone wants to listen to. And normally, that person doesn't tell you everything that someone has stated. They give you two or three facts and that's it. So I say that before we get into the technology question. Technology creates what I call the agile mindset. And the agile mindset is going back from how software is developed, effective software or effective processes software development, whereas you're developing something for a company. And traditionally, if I told you I want my application to at the end be red, white, and blue, you tell the developer they do what they think you want. At the end, you get red, white, and pink. Now you say, "Okay, I want red, white, and blue." Okay, well, we'll create some updates and we'll get back to where you want to go. So day one, you're not where you want to be.

In an agile environment, the developer is coming back to you and say, "Okay, is this the red you want? Is this the color of blue you want? Is this the color white you want? Is this meeting your standards?" So by the time they give you your last, it's a final process or product, it's pretty close to what you're looking for. Now, does it take a little more time and the processes appears to at the end result, it does it because you're giving someone what they want at the end of the task, not having to fix it after the task, right? As a leader with technology, you're doing the same thing. You're seeing these new technologies come on.

One, you have to embrace them. As I already stated, the superpower of a leader is one, they have to empower themselves first, and then you empower others, and then you empower your community. And why do I state that? Because our technology is changing so rapidly now. AI is creating in the service world, opportunities I'll state like that we're not thinking about. It's also creating, I would call hazards. If someone's using say ChatGPT to write an email, and there's another AI that I just read about, actually I was testing it last week, where it writes your emails in a personal way. You don't know then if you're getting the person's information or an AI version of it, which also means is the knowledge there or is it the machine learning knowledge this person is presenting to you?

These are now new hurdles that leaders have to overcome. Now, as a transactional leader, you don't care. It seems like I'm getting the right thing from person X. We're getting our processes done. I'm meeting my objectives, let's move on. Long-term, you start to see kinks in the armor. The transformational leader wants to understand how are we working to achieve these objectives, but how are people using our tools and are our tools the tools we need for the future? So that leader starts to embrace this as the way to move forward and not a fear of this new skill or this new technology overtaking my capabilities. Now, will new technology affect the workforce? The answer is yes. It always has. If we look back before the use of laptops and even your phones, you had paper and you had people sending paper and we killed a lot of trees. We're still doing that even though with technology, but the process was slower, now you can get everything instantly.

I always equate it to when we really started getting into the internet, we used to use AOL. So everyone had to go through the process of clicking in, hearing the noise, and you would just thrilled to get logged in through this dialogue. And now if someone would provide that same level of service to you, you would say, "This is the worst thing ever had." So we have to look at technology as moving us from that dial up process to this high speed broadband process and to this gig process, to this five gig process. And as we're doing this, we're allowing our organization to move forward. Now, here's the caveat. The leader is the one who gets the team to understand the hurdle they're about to have to overcome preparing them for this. And even in being blunt, you need to do X, Y, and Z to be effective six months a year down the line, letting the people know and being honest about it.

Will everyone take that information and move with it? The answer is no. So you give them a way to move forward. You give them a roadmap that means the leader is the least adaptive. What is going on? They're really listening to what's out there from a technology perspective. And I would say in the service world, I don't know if leaders are really looking at this yet. From our conference, we saw various vendors that use AI. There's a whole lot more in development. Are leaders actually looking at this? And if they're not, their teams are not then being aware. So it's important as a transformational leader to be aware, don't have to be an expert and prepare the team because you're going to have people on your team that can fit these needs that you have, but they don't know they can fit them until that leader exposes them to what changes are coming along.

In my past roles, not just over technology, but even when I was with another company, I would have a six-month roadmap with my entire organization, letting them know where we are and where we're going to go in six months. And then here's what you need to be aware of and plan it out so that people are aware. So if we get to a point where we have to start saying, "Okay, we need these particular skills," and people have not done the work, have not taken the training, have they even asked for training. Then if they happen to lose their position due to their obsolescing themselves, the role of that or the weight of that falls on the person and not the leader.

I would prefer as a leader to at least let everyone know and in doing so, give them an opportunity to make the adjustments. And if they do that, provide them the skills, provide them training, but those that don't, at the end of the day, I can always say, I could sleep well stating, "Hey, I provided you this information. I wanted you to be successful." And you then decided not to make the move to move forward. At this point, we have to make changes.

Sarah Nicastro: Right. That makes sense. So that makes sense. But we know that change, especially when it's continual, is complex, right? It can bring about discomfort, fear, et cetera. So how does a transformational leader address that, I guess, if they're feeling it themselves and within their teams?

Dr. John Chrisentary: Well, you know what, I'm going to give you credit, so I'm going to put this out because this is what you stated during your opening to the conference. The difference of change management to change leadership. Right. Change leadership I think is what we're looking for now or transformational leaders, they have to want to understand and they will, as a transformational leader, they will understand that there is a need to make an adjustment. Now, depending on the environment, the adjustment may not be drastic. In other environments, it may be like a 360, right? They then have to start taking time to at least understand or demystify the technologies that are coming into their world. AI is probably one of the most scariest words, two letters you can tell someone because we've seen different versions of they'll take away the human aspect, but there are products that we use today that are based on AI, and no one tells you that, but you start to really think about how do we get to this certain point?

I mean, look at Google, and I'm not picking on Google, but they use AI. They've been using it for a while. But think about this. If you or me, we say, "Okay, we're looking for a pair of shoes, a pair of brown shoes. Just say, let me Google this." Right? Suddenly you get shoe ads all over the place, right? And you get shoe ads almost to the type of shoe you're looking for, right? It is using that machine learning. We don't think twice about that. It might make us more agitated. How do they do this? But we're not saying, "Oh my God, they're taking over the world." Right? It happens all the time, and you have different platforms that are coming along to offset that. Leaders have to start looking at this as a positive because it's not changing, and they have to then embrace enough to feel comfortable. So if they're using ChatGPT, use it in a way that you feel comfortable, learn how it works, then learn the other AI tools out there and use it to be comfortable.

So if you want to write a note, let me try ChatGPT to write a note. Let me see how it works. Once you start to get that, I would say interest, right? To get your foot in the water, just see if it's cool, if it's warm, if it's comfortable, you're more apt to put your foot in the water and then finally immerse yourself in it. It's like putting your foot in the ocean. When you first step in, it's cold. Stay there long enough, you get comfortable. Next thing you know, you're walking further and further out. Same thing that a leader has to do. It's across the board. If some are doing a really good job of embracing it, others are, "I don't know." And then others are saying, no, but it's a tidal wave that's coming, a tsunami that's coming, and it's coming a whole lot faster than what we're really anticipating. So the faster people get comfortable getting their foot in the water, I think then you'll start to see transformational leaders help their teams to adjust because they've adjusted.

Sarah Nicastro: Right. You're not going to stay dry, so suit up.

Dr. John Chrisentary: No.

Sarah Nicastro: Okay, good points. I think here's the thing. You talked about the fact that at the Hilton Head event, it was AI this, AI that AI everything, right? And I think there's a lot of ambiguity right now around the term, and I think that's one of the challenges, right? To your point, there are ways that AI is already being used in service organizations today and has been, and it just hasn't been referred to in a buzzword type of way, right? Then there are very ready and practical ways that companies could be adopting it today, and then there's a whole future coming that we really can't be certain of, right?

Dr. John Chrisentary: Yeah.

Sarah Nicastro: And so, to me, I think one of the biggest roles of a transformational leader when it comes to AI specifically is to not shy away from the fact that that tsunami is coming, right? And not be fearful of leveraging the attributes of the technology that can help the business, but also to protect the irreplaceable role of the human skillset, right? So figuring out how that puzzle works together in a way that accomplishes what customers need, right? Because we've heard many stories of companies that have gone too far in the direction of automation and have felt the effect of that because they've taken away from the human element that is essential really to service. So what are your thoughts, I guess, on things that they should be thinking about to strike that right balance?

Dr. John Chrisentary: I think we have to look at the demographics of our customer base. If you're looking at the baby boomers, the Gen Zs, the millennials, and Gen Xers, what percentage of your install based... Let's stick to baby boomers who are less likely to really embrace the technology as it's changing. How do you address issues with them? How do you make them comfortable? And this is where that human touch is required because that is something they've expected. If you could talk to a millennial, "Hey." They can get around it because technically savvy, and then if you get into a Gen X or Gen Z, it's not as prevalent as a problem for the baby boomer.

So if you start to customize a way to integrate your processes to address your customer base, knowing it's moving away from the baby boomer environment into the Gen Zs, Gen Xs, and millennials, then you still have that personal touch, I believe, and there's a vendor I deal with, not calling names, but they've used AI as their way of dealing with you, and it's the worst system. If you have a problem, you're literally in the queue for 20 minutes, and I'm savvy on how to work through the process. It still takes me 20 minutes to get to a person. Suppose someone's not, they'll get totally frustrated and not want to use their products. So now you have customer disloyalty to your brand basically. Not that the brand is bad, the service is bad, and so let's... Talking about as generating your revenue, that's a different topic, but it all falls in line and service is very critical.

If you are looking at technologies as ways to bridge the gulf between those that used to having that personal touch in a way to maximize the AI, cloud, virtual reality process, then you should start with the human factor and add tools that will help transition your customers over. This is where that transformational leader is really essential in sitting down of the C-suite to explain the need and also the benefit. There's a huge cost to make these changes and there's a paradigm shift, a cultural paradigm shift for an organization, but that transformational leader will be the catalyst to say, "This is the roadmap to success." So one, 30% of our custom base is baby boomers or how do we migrate them? We need to still have the personal touch, but how do we make our systems open to that person but not starting to shy away from the other generational needs as we're looking at Gen X and Gen Z, and then millennials and build it out that way?

So there is a way to contact me and talk to a live person. There's another way to use a QR code and it links to your landing page on your website, which directs it to a person. There is the AI component that will give you your commonly asked questions and answer those for you, or even give you the voice of prompts because it's assigned to these particular skill sets within your AI module. Each one then provides this level of service that the generational ways of communicating are there. Is it costly in the upfront? Yes. Long-term, no, because now it's going to adjust with your audience. So as you're moving into newer technologies, they will start to become accustomed because you can add components into what their regular world is that allows them to move into the new technology that you're looking for, especially from an AI perspective.

So it's coming with that strategy of developing what fits your current install base, looking at the different generational needs, and then starting to come up with ways. Phase two, moves this component a little further into the AI side. Phase three, we take the human factor of having them answer where say, 40%, we might be down to 20% because mow we're seeing people are using our QR codes and things of that nature. It becomes a definite business strategy that is long-term, it's like a five-year plan to get your customers to ride this new technology or this new way of communicating with me so that everyone's aligned versus just stating, "We're going to change everything on January one and you're going to lose your install base because you didn't think about the generational needs." It's more strategic mindset of that transformational leader, and once again, they're the persons, he or she that goes to the C-suite and explains this logically with evidence. It is out there already how to move your organization from where it is to it will need to be in five years.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. So I think one of the things that I think is interesting is let's say maybe it's the opposite of the leader who is not wanting to dip their toe in, right? I think another risk is for a leader to hope that these technologies can do the work for them, right? So they hope that they can put X, Y, Z in place to solve this huge problem, and that will be that. Maybe even that will take the onus off them to really embrace this transformational leadership, right? But in reality, it is just a tool, right? So what is the words of caution in terms of realizing that whatever tools are in your toolbox, you still have to do the work as the transformational leader?

Dr. John Chrisentary: I like to use analogies, so follow me on this. Every year in the fall, before COVID, and not even this year, we go into what's called flu season, right? And they advise everyone to go out and get a flu shot, right? And there's a percentage of people who get flu shots who feel that if they get the shot, they'll get the flu. There's another percentage that feel if they get the shot, they won't get the flu. And then you have a percentage that says, if I get the shot, it will give me the tools to minimize getting the flu. Right.

To your question, leaders fall into those three categories. Will the technology fix it for me? Others will say, "I need to do some work with the technologies for it to be effective," and others say, "It is not going to even happen. Very similar to the flu shot." I always look at it's human nature of when we're looking at leaders, we have to create or have to understand what is important to them. So if we look at the components of a transformational leader, we gave some of the traits, this idealized intelligence, which is the behaviors and also the attributes. We're talking about inspirational motivation and the intellectual stimulation. We did not talk a lot about that. All of these traits, if a leader has them, they're going to be in the middle ground where they're saying, "We'll use the technology to help us." If they hold some of these, say two of these traits, they may be on the fence of, "This will fix my world." If they have one of the traits, they're going to say, "This is not going to work at all."

So it's getting people to be more aligned with all of the traits, not just say I'm a transformational leader, but to actually live and breathe that mindset, to understand that people want to do a good job if you give them an opportunity, and technology is a tool to make you effective. It is not a silver bullet to make your organization or even your position Kevlar enforced. It doesn't work that way. You're using these tools to make your organization the best it can be, and you're providing opportunities for people to learn to master the tools. It's like another analogy. You buy something from IKEA and you get the schematics, it has like 400 parts to it, and they tell you you only need a screwdriver. And you say, "Okay, I'm going to do this with a screwdriver." And you don't have a lot of wrist strength to tighten each one of the screws, but someone else says, "Hey, I'll use my drill," and do the same work because they understand how to use the drill. They've been taught.

They have a skill, not a master skill, but they understand how to use that drill. They make that job easier. Now, it sounds like this, John, that's kind of bland how you explain that, but I want you to think about it. Watch someone who is not proficient with a tool at all trying to put something together versus someone else saying, "I'll just grab this drill and I'll make the adjustments as I need to and how fast they can build it." This is what we're talking about, these leaders. If a leader is not embracing being a transformational leader, 100%, they're going to pick up the screwdriver because that's what's provided to them, and then they get frustrated in trying to put this thing together. Whereas another leader who is a transformational leader understands, "I have a better way of doing it. I'll still meet the objectives. I might need some help. Let me start to help get some people and advise me sometimes on how to do a really good job."

The burden doesn't fall just on a leader, it becomes part of the corporate or the organizational mindset of solutions are built from one, not just the top, but from the bottom up. This is where that transformation leader really becomes beneficial because they find ways to make that complicated process and simplify it. So it's still using technology as a tool and not as a burden.

Sarah Nicastro: That makes sense. Okay. So if you think about what we've talked about today and then what might be next in terms of this evolution of technological capabilities, human soft skills, leadership, et cetera, what are your closing thoughts on what people need to keep in mind and be thinking of as we move ahead?

Dr. John Chrisentary: One, we're talking this topic of transformational leadership, like you can turn the switch and you'll be one in 24 hours. The answer is not. The answer is no, actually. The answer is you're going to have to work on this. Giving up your power, and now I'm going back to a transactional leader, your power of influencing a situation, creating that basically yes or no scenario, do this and you get that. It's hard, really hard for people to start to give the perceived power to a person. Understanding that we are better as a team when everyone has the skills, when more than one person knows how to do the things we need done and that everyone is going to learn at a different clip, some people are going to have a really great understanding of it and then use that to create the expertise that you need and others are going to be in the middle of the road. That leader then starts to see the value of making sure the community understands that because we're in this dynamic environment, it's going to cause a leader to either become or slowly become obsolete.

Now, I'm not saying it's going to happen in two years, five years, but at the rate we're going, people are going to start to feel it, and I'll tell you how you can tell. Can you adjust to change? Does it hurt you? Do you really go, "Oh, I hate this." Or is it what you feel is the norm? Right?

Sarah Nicastro: Mm-hmm.

Dr. John Chrisentary: If you feel it's the norm, you're going to move very quickly with the change. If you are those that state, "I just don't like change. I want things the way they are," you create your own obsolescence. And the problem is when you go back looking into other opportunities of employment, the things that we're talking about are... You'll see this on all the job boards. They're looking for transformational leaders. People who can drive an organization, influence an organization, create positive change in the organization, these are in job descriptions now. Organizations are currently looking for and not quantifying it as a transformational leader. So if someone doesn't see this as a value in a few years, it's going to be a problem for them. And those that embrace it, I believe it creates the longevity for the leader, but it also creates the positive impact for an organization, which then allows the company to be successful.

When I wrote my dissertation on this in 2013, it was linked to communities of practice and way before COVID about the virtual communities of practice. But the idea of leadership is not something that's new that I created. This has been really talked about since 1964 really put into this transformational mindset in the '90s and now is a way that leaders are looking at how to move an organization. So if it's not the train that people want to ride, you will come to a stop where you're not going to be able to go any further because it requires that mindset of really wanting to influence people in a positive way and knowing that and doing so, you then have a greater impact to the business and you become a great leader. Matter of fact, you'll want your people to grow up in the organization, move on to other opportunities that really then shows your level of leadership versus you're the only one who's in charge and no one grows under you. You have a stagnant organization.

Sarah Nicastro: I agree. And it's interesting being able to talk to different people in different industries, different areas of the world on this podcast week to week, you can see the change taking place, right? So I agree 1000% that it's the writing's on the wall, right? And it's just a matter of folks deciding whether or not they're willing and able to adjust. So really good. Well, Dr. John, thank you so much-

Dr. John Chrisentary: Well, thank you.

Sarah Nicastro: ... for coming to share your insights with us. I really appreciate it.

Dr. John Chrisentary: No, this has been fantastic. Thank you for having me.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, it was a pleasure.

Dr. John Chrisentary: All right.

Sarah Nicastro: You can find more by visiting us at futureoffieldserviceref.ifs.com. While you're there, be sure to sign up for the Future of Field Service Insiders so you get an email every other week with the latest content. We also have one more live tour event in 2023. That event is in Stockholm on October 10th. So if you're in the area, registered to join us for a great day of insight and discussion. 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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3 Pillars of GEA’s Service Transformation

In a session from the Future of Field Service Live Tour in Paris, Sarah talks with Sebastien Garric, Director Service Liquid and Powder Technologies, France and Maghreb at GEA Group, about the company’s focus on mindset, customer experience, and operational efficiency.

Sebastien Garric: Sarah.

Sarah Nicastro: Come on up. Thanks for being here.

Sebastien Garric: Brilliant.

Sarah Nicastro: Go ahead and make yourself comfortable. I will try and do the same.

Sebastien Garric: Thanks.

Sarah Nicastro: I'm always nervous with a tall chair. I'll fall off in front of everyone. Let's hope not.

Sebastien Garric: I will take care of you. Don't worry.

Sarah Nicastro: Okay, thank you. That's good service. Okay, so what we're going to be talking about with Sebastien is GEA's transformation and some of the factors that are most important in that transformation, specifically mindset, customer centricity, and operational efficiency. Before we get into that, Sebastien, can you tell everyone a bit about yourself?

Sebastien Garric: Yeah. Thank you for being here. It's a pleasure and also to be here with all of you. Thank you. So my name is Sebastien Garric. I'm 45. I'm married with three kids, nice kids that I really appreciate. I started my career in a very small company. Its name is Coca-Cola. During 10 years where I'm at different roles, starting from logistics and then moved to production and project management in different plants. So, I had the chance to know a lot about transformation, organization, production efficiency, and what agility means.

So then I started in GEA almost nine years ago, and I'm pretty sure that we have to explain what GEA is doing.

Sarah Nicastro: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Sebastien Garric: So we are a technical company, and we are also producing a line for our customers. What does that mean? Is that we are producing equipment and also solution engineering just to create some production lines for different applications such as in dairy, food, chemical, pharma, and so on. So we've got a diverse customer.

So today, I'm service director for GEA France and also some activity worldwide. Just to understand what we are doing in GEA, I think that we have to think about not doing only equipment for equipment or solution for solution, but we've got a social challenge. We are there to support our industry, to feed people, to heal people, and to make part of the transition in ecology, such as moving to some transformation and the lithium generation and production. So we are part of this sustainability development.

Sarah Nicastro: Great. So, I had the opportunity to attend GEA's Global Services Kickoff in Copenhagen in February, and they invited me to speak. When the gentleman Lucas, who reached out to me to speak there, sort of talked to me about why he wanted me to come, it was this idea that the legacy of the company is very much manufacturing and how he's really passionate about bringing service into the identity of the business. This is a really big challenge for organizations that are trying to embrace the potential of service because when you have this deep, rich legacy as a product manufacturer that's rooted in every aspect of the business, you're asking people to really change the way they think and also operate. So, let's talk a little bit before we get into what that means. Talk about how you would describe the opportunity that you see for GEA around service.

Sebastien Garric: You have to know that into our development items, service is central. We do expect that service roles will increase as high as new sales development. We do see service as a full potential for our customers because we are producing lines, and we are not on the B2B business. We're on B2C business. So that means that we are following our customer, not only as service provider, we are there as a contributor for them. We're there as trainer. We do, and they are doing. They expect to have some improvement opportunity from us, so our production line is made to have a lifetime of more than 17 years. So, that means that we need to contribute and collaborate. This is more a partnership business, and the service is key just to follow our customer production all over those years.

Sarah Nicastro: Okay. So, can you talk about that fundamental piece, which is the shift in mindset for so many people within the business?

Sebastien Garric: Yeah. So, I have the chance to have one experience from Coca-Cola to be on the customer side. This is really important for me because I know how difficult it is when you are under production just to manage what will happen in the next four hours, eight hours, one day, or even one week. So this is really a stretch on time, and you need to focus. The point is that when you are in an engineering company, then you have to think about what will happen in the next 15 years with your equipment. How do you put in place the key points or the key support that will enable your customer just to find a solution for the next 15 years? And you have to mitigate and combine both needs, and it's all about understanding what the customer is requiring.

So you need to be in really close contact with your customer, knowing more their requirements and the technologies in-house, and we'll not change our DNA completely as an engineering company. This is not what we're willing to do. But we have to understand how to support and give the support all along the lifetime of the production line. In terms of change, you have to make people understand what are the challenges of your customer in terms of quality, in terms of safety, in terms of production, in terms of yield, in terms of cost, and to adapt yourself. This is really key just to be able to think about what are your expectations. How, from my experience and my knowledge, can I support you as well, and how do I need to improve?

Sarah Nicastro: So, you mentioned it as what you're working on is combining your culture with the one that's required for your customer's needs.

Sebastien Garric: Yeah.

Sarah Nicastro: So, what do you mean by that?

Sebastien Garric: Customer need, one more time, is really we need to understand and be on the customer side to understand. Understand this is the main point. And to adapt our internal process, doing better every day. Try to develop the according service product that has also enabled us to develop their business. And one more time, this is key about collaboration. We do have to think about what are the goals of our customer, and we need to fix it, support them, and provide the right key service product that is enabling to be much more efficient. Can I just give one?

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, go ahead.

Sebastien Garric: We are wondering if it makes sense, for example, just to send one field service engineer across France with one day travel to fix one issue during one day on one equipment and then to go back. Does it make sense in terms of cost efficiency? Does the customer have also the right experience, the right knowledge to do it by himself, or do we need to support? And how do we need to support? Do we need to stay, as you mentioned, on the standard service level, such as traveling by car, fixing screws, and so on, or could we move to a new remote support service? And this is where we are and what we are doing, and maybe premier info for you is that in our contract in France, we also integrate this remote support into our next contract in the coming days. So really experience and really willing to share with our customer just to propose the best experience and what is the best cost-driven solution.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. That makes sense. There was something I was thinking about when you mentioned understanding your customer's overall objectives, and you mentioned kind of taking a look at the entire customer lifecycle. So there was a gentleman I had on the podcast from Dell, and he gave a really good analogy that, hopefully, I can explain. So he oversees service, but historically, the different functions of service, the call center, field service, were all very siloed. And so what happened is you could have one doing a fantastic job, but from a customer experience standpoint, they were having a poor experience because one silo was succeeding, but it wasn't connected to the others.

So, he used the analogy of think rings, not trophies. If you think about, because this is a sports analogy. If you have a most valuable player, they get a trophy for being the best player in the game. When you have a team that wins together. So, in the US, we have the Super Bowl, we have the World Series, the whole team gets a ring. So his point is we need to stop focusing on being the best in our particular function or our silo and look more at how are we playing together as a team because that's what affects the customer experience.

Sebastien Garric: Sure.

Sarah Nicastro: And I think that's where your point about how much can we do or should we do remotely are the questions a lot of organizations are asking themselves right now. So we know again that the capabilities to do that exist, but how does that fit into your operation? How does that meet the needs of your customers? How willing are they to accept that transformation right now? All of those things are questions that I think a lot of people are sorting through.

Sebastien Garric: Okay. So we are already quite mature in terms of service. We do have some sales engineers dedicated for service splitted in our market areas, and they're already visiting the customer. That's why it's really key as you get the customer voice just to understand expectation. One more time, different type of industry and different type of application, and different type of customer are not expecting the same one or the same needs. Some of them are cost-driven. Some of them are performance-driven. And then we need to understand them, thanks to our sales team, and then provide the according service potential.

So, the key players are the people that are on the ground. Really, this is key just to understand what they're living every day. What are the experiences of the field service engineer? Also, to support them to be a provider of future service as a voice and what the customer is looking at. Being as well-trained as we could to be able to answer to them and make the transition and make them understand what's the customer requirement.

Sarah Nicastro: So, one of the other challenges you and I spoke about is the difference between selling products, which are tangible, and selling service, which is intangible. So what have you found related to that, and how are you enabling your teams to be able to articulate that intangible value?

Sebastien Garric: One more time, this is all about understanding what we could offer from our side. When you are offering one complete installation, for sure, you've got some KPIs to achieve, and then the production is running, and you are not part of the journey from the customer side. What we are willing to change into our mind is to be there on the prefilled sales because being at the pre-sales is enabling to follow the customer journey into their production. And this is also creating a changed mindset into our internal organization. Not being only provider for new installation and then preventive maintenance, corrective maintenance, spare part, and so on, but being there to support.

One more time, this is all about collaboration, understanding, and making the switch to sell the intangible. That means that we will be upfront to the customer and explaining to him just to be confident on us and use advanced service product as we could have such as remote support, but also our technical knowledge. This will be kept into our DNA. We'll not change it, but we will use it to better support and use the right tools and advanced tools to be more efficient.

Sarah Nicastro: We had an interesting conversation at the event in the UK last week. When we talk about the move to delivering outcomes, I mentioned in the introduction customers want peace of mind, and a lot of times, we think about that as the combination of the product and the service to make sure that we're delivering what we say we will, whether that's uptime, what have you. But what we talked about last week is there's a third component to this that I think some people are missing, which is what gives customers that confidence, builds that trust, which is the insight. So customers don't just want what you say will happen to happen when you say it will happen. They also want the visibility to know that it is happening. So, they don't want the intervention. They don't want to have to ask for the service, but they want the insight of what's happening and when.

So I think that's a piece that sometimes companies are missing, and it also helps make that intangible more tangible, in the sense of your showcasing, we may not have been on site, but here is everything that we've avoided, or here are the things that we did remotely, so sort of almost like a business review type of thing. Along with, in particular situations, sometimes the data that you're collecting also has use for them as a business, so you can incorporate that as well. So I think that's an interesting distinction.

So, you mentioned that you were formerly with Coca-Cola. What would you say you learned in that role that's helping you in this role?

Sebastien Garric: One more time, I've been in production for a long time, and what is key is also really true to understand how it is working. Because in Coca-Cola, we are using some gas equipment, so this is part of the bridge. I'm still in touch with some of my colleagues, that I really appreciate because we are really creating links in production, and this is the key point and create the link in between what is your experience and what is my own experience. I've lived during my career just to understand how it is running on the ground in detail. What is the focus? What is the expectation? What is the challenging, every day challenging? And then this B two B business in Coca-Cola it requires really strong agility, a really strong capacity to react really fast, being a quick decision maker, and one more time, taking decisions and risks, but also supporting the teams.

In my actual role, I do think this is really important for me to keep in mind how it is running on a plant, and every day, I'm wondering how do me and my team is serving our customer in the same manner. How do we need to react fast when there is a production stop in between us and the customer? We need to be there for them, find some solution, being a problem solver, trying to find the right people to understand this is how to support. And finding the right way, also sending one engineer or doing by remote.

There is a way, and this is a journey, meaning that from my experience from the customer and providing this experience to my team and my organization is really key. Because we know, when I started in GEA and starting to talk about meantime between failure, this is key standard in the production industry. Nobody was knowing what was that. And for me, it was really important just to make this transition and to change mindset in GEA. Just to understand and make my people understand, okay, you need to know how you support and service your customer, not only going on-site, fixing, going back. No, we need to be there and to know what is happening. After running intervention, call, "Is everything fine?" Collaborating, how to support, what could we propose? Okay, we are a technical company so our customer are expecting from us some technical solutions. So we need to be there on that.

Sarah Nicastro: Makes sense. Okay. So, if you think about some of the trends I mentioned in the beginning and the journey that you're on, where do you see GEA's business going over the next three or so years?

Sebastien Garric: There will be a lot of challenges into this transformation because we are not as mature as we are in all the countries, but we have a really good chance because we've got a full network that is existing, and we've got full of talented people everywhere. And a network is key to work as an ecosystem internally and externally just to ensure that we're providing the solution for the future.

Last week, I was in New Zealand just to collaborate with my peers in New Zealand just to see, okay, how could we combine strengths? And by doing that, then we will move to another step that will go into digitalization, advanced service product such as predictive maintenance. That will be the next step. And one more time, also, in other tools such as moving to what we are calling the GEA-verse by being able to use the digitalization to support our customer on their plant and explaining to them what they have to fix really in details and what and where.

Sarah Nicastro: Okay. A lot of challenges but a lot of opportunity. Right?

Sebastien Garric: Exactly. Exactly. Full of opportunity.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. And last question is, what would you say is the biggest lesson you've learned in your time as a leader at GEA?

Sebastien Garric: It is not only in GEA, but I will say that I think that for the service, we shall enjoy to solve problems every day with passion. I have a former boss that says, "Okay, you have to think into production. Welcome to problem." And this mindset is really key. Welcome to problem, is enabling you to solve problems every day. So you have to support and serve your customer, but you're also learning for you and make the change on your mindset. And one more time, we are more than a supplier. We are a partner. We are a partner. We are there to train. We are there to improve. We are there to fix, and we are there to support our customer into their journey. So, welcome to problem.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, I like that. I think that when we think about leaders or companies that are succeeding most at innovation, it's that they see those problems as potential. So they kind of get past the problem solving, which is the more immediate need, but then look at that problem as an opportunity for how can we change beyond addressing this in the near term, and how can that lead to innovation. So I think that's really interesting. Welcome to problem. I like it. All right, Sebastien, thank you so much. I appreciate it.

Sebastien Garric: Thank you, Sarah.

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In a session from the Future of Field Service Live Tour stop in Dusseldorf, Sarah talks with Jan Helge Bruemmer, Global Field Service Manager, Global Service Operations at Alfa Laval about striking the appropriate balance between investing in the future with what’s required for today’s (short-term) performance, especially when those two things seem to be at odds.

Sarah Nicastro: Okay. So, the real question of the day is, how do we balance today's needs with innovating and preparing for the future? This is the tightrope back to you all are walking. So, before we get into that, tell everyone a little bit about yourself, your role, Alfa Laval, and we'll go from there.

Jan Helge Bruemmer: Yeah. All right. So, Alfa Laval is a Swedish machine building company focusing on heat transfer, mechanical fluid separation, fluid handling. So, that's the traditional way of explaining that. That nowadays comes, of course, with a big focus on sustainability, energy consumption, water consumption, waste, heat recovery, and so on and so forth. So, that's that. I am then responsible for our global field service operations. My background is also a bit from the sales side. So, I've always been in service, but then also responsible for both the commercial side of things, but also the execution. Moved around a bit, lived in South America for five years, then in France for three years plus, sometime now in the new role. But working now centrally for our headquarters.

Sarah Nicastro: Excellent. So, I think everyone here to some degree has the challenge of balancing short-term business objectives, hitting the numbers, reaching the goals of today with thinking ahead what will service look like in two years, three years, five years. And I have a lot of respect for that balancing act, because it's a really, really tough one. What do you feel are the biggest barriers to striking that right balance? What do you find most challenging?

Jan Helge Bruemmer: I mean if you look at a company, a manufacturing company as a whole, I don't even think it is a challenge as such. I mean, we have senior managers everywhere that... I mean you have the macrotrends and so on, and you try to be in advance and I mean be on those sustainability trains, for example. I think the tricky thing with service then, and we talked earlier about service being its own business entity, profit center. Service as such is very profitable. It is then also very short term. I mean, the moment you start investing in service, you add service salespeople, you invest in service capabilities, as such, you have an immediate result. And that, of course, when we look on that as a business, I mean we also go into certain investments with that mindset, that they pay off quite fast. And that maybe sometimes makes us lose patience when it comes to the really long-term service related investments.

Sarah Nicastro: So, what are some of the things that you feel have a faster payoff versus some of the things that are more of a longer term objective?

Jan Helge Bruemmer: I mean, if we split a bit like the service, I mean we have all the spare parts business, like the traditional after sales. And we have maybe then the service execution part, and here we have this huge people aspect that goes into that. So, I think, again, focusing on service sales is normally an immediate payoff. I mean, I know from my times being responsible for commercial things, I mean you visit a customer, you talk about service and spare parts and maintenance and those more standard things. You always walk away with a bag full of opportunities. And I mean the conversion rate is pretty high, the hit ratio is pretty high. So, that's a very easy thing to do when it comes to investment.

I think then building up that backbone, because everything you sell at some point, of course, you have to execute. We talked a bit about spare parts inventory now, but it's also the pure execution. And for a company like Alfa Laval that does rather complex technical things, for us, that is a challenge to really build up that backbone that will then really support that front sales side of things. So, I mean, investing then in field service capabilities, investing in competences, investing in the right amount of people, that is the more long-term a thing that I feel sometimes gets a bit neglected, because we have this dollar sign in the eyes and think about the short term profitability.

Sarah Nicastro: So, what do you think then, how do you fight against that? I mean, what's the mindset companies need to have to make those investments that are more on the midterm, the longterm?

Jan Helge Bruemmer: Yeah. I think it is really about getting away from this services just about fixing stuff for customers to keep the business up and running, but really to make sure that we have the long-term view and that we invest in those capabilities with a much more long-term approach. And that, of course, because services then also to a certain extent, of course, reactive. I mean we have customers calling us and they have breakdowns and problems. So, that already puts quite a big workload on our organization. So, finding that time and those resources to think more long-term is I think what's key and it's probably easier said than done.

Sarah Nicastro: So, one of the aspects of that has to be recruiting and hiring new talent. We talked today about how that's really challenging. So, how do you think doing that needs to change to fit where the industry is headed?

Jan Helge Bruemmer: Specifically talking about field service, I mean I think we all agree. I mean field service undergoes a massive transformation. I mean the way field service used to work five, 10 years ago, doesn't have a lot to do with how we're going to work in the future. So, I think the first thing is being very clear about that in the recruitment phase. And that comes, of course, with a lot of opportunities for those people that you're going to recruit. But it also comes with that clarity that you don't, I mean, promise the ideal world going forward. I mean, field service is a tough working environment in many cases. So, I think it's very important to be clear about that.

That's I think an important factor. And then, also, we talk so much about attraction and being relevant for new talent, but of course, it is also a lot about retaining the people we already have, many of those with lots of experience and coming a bit from the old days. So, how do we take those people with us on the journey? Because I mean the labor market is tough, we mentioned that several times today. So, we cannot, even if we ran by when we recruit and we attract, if we have a leakage, then in the existing organization that's, of course, also something we really have to avoid.

Sarah Nicastro: So, from a retention standpoint, if you think about the technicians that have been at Alfa Laval for quite a while, what do you think you need to be doing in terms of, you mentioned competence building, so upskilling and preparing them for the more modern day service of tomorrow?

Jan Helge Bruemmer: I think also here, I mean there are parts of the organization that has the capabilities to develop further into new roles, into new functions that represent more the modern way of field service, and then there are others that are not. Then we also need to be aware that we will not fully transform a field service, at least in our case. I mean we will always have a certain percentage of jobs that we will do on site, and that's probably, I mean even on the very long term, more than half of what we're doing. So, then it is, of course, about identifying those that want to do more. It's about showing up the career path also for those people, showing them that they have a future in field service.

I mean, so far, you're a field service engineer, you either become the team manager or the team leader, or you go into a sales role. I mean, that's basically the career path for field service. But with all those new possibilities, I mean we've been talking a lot about remote service, we've been talking about also this more advisory role for our customers. Not just go onsite, fix the machine, leave, but also I mean discuss potential sales opportunities, upgrade opportunities. I mean that is a bit where we are trying to lean into and try to build up that competence accordingly.

Sarah Nicastro: I was going to mention earlier during Nina's session and we ran out of time, when we talk about remote service, I think like you just said, there will always be onsite work. And I think that's true for most organizations. So, I think there's this misperception that when we talk about remote service, we're thinking that we should do all service remote. And I had a podcast interview a few weeks ago with a gentleman from Mettler Toledo. And I found it particularly interesting, because he said the nature of the work they do, it's virtually impossible for them to get to a point of remote resolution. That's not their goal at all.

However, they have invested in remote capabilities, because until very recently, they've had almost every initial visit just as a triage visit. So, it was almost every initial truck role was the technician just going to see what was going on, then come back, get what they need, et cetera, et cetera. So, his point is just I think sometimes we think narrowly about the capabilities that exist and don't necessarily think instead about how to apply them to our own circumstances. So, in their situation, his goal is really not at all remote resolution, it's just to understand what they're getting into when they go on site.

And if you think about the vast majority of their visits being two, just to diagnose, then to go and repair, you're eliminating 50% of those, which is tremendous when you think about resource utilization, cost savings, all of those things. So, I think that's a really important distinction. And then when we think about what could become possible with the segmentation of work, what you're talking about, and we talked a bit in one of our breakouts of with more remote service, then you think about different roles and what that could look like. You think about the trusted advisor role.

Or I've had some conversations with folks that think that it's almost a redefined customer success manager type of role. At our event in Paris a few weeks ago, we had Ravichandra Kshirasagar from Schneider Electric. And we were talking about what the company envisions the role of the frontline worker to be in 2025, 2030 and beyond. And this is going to sound super simple and it is, but it really struck me. One of the things that he pointed out is that they've just recently changed the terminology they use from field technician to service technician. And the whole point of that is because they think that in fairly short order, the technicians are going to be doing some of that remote diagnostic type of work, probably from home or maybe from an office and only onsite part of the time.

So, there's so much to imagine in terms of what these changes can look like for any given organization. I mean, the idea of coming together here isn't that anyone's going to come up and be able to give an overall blueprint. But just to think about these things, talk about these things, and get you all thinking about what's coming and how to be thinking about it, preparing for it, et cetera. One of the things that I find most exciting about how service is evolving, and when we talk about the creation of new roles and how it will shift from being less break fix, less mechanical to more of these other things, it really gives us a lot of potential to bring more diversity into the workforce. Because the nature of the role is changing and it opens it up to people that maybe haven't been a part of it before. I don't know what your thoughts are on that.

Jan Helge Bruemmer: No. And I mean all this remote service has, of course, two aspects, two sides to it. I mean, we actually started thinking about that more from a customer perspective. And I mean, reducing cost of service, travel time, increased response time and all of that. I mean, eventually, uptime, of course, customer satisfaction, but it was really from a customer perspective. And I think the other side of things is actually nowadays, I don't know if I can say more relevant, but it has definitely a very strong impact now on our thinking about going forward with remote services. And that is actually what you say the role of the field service engineer and also how that will evolve even further.

I mean, if we look at our organizations and the people that leave field service, either to external companies or also inside the company. I mean if we look at the reasons for why they want to do something else, there is always the comp and ben issue. But the number one reason for that is actually work-life balance. And I mean, the guy that has been fighting for a weekend job 10 years ago or five years ago because of the extra hours and the overtimes, well, people don't want to do that anymore.

I mean, the younger generation that comes in, I mean this free time, the regular working schedule, again, field service will never be 100% like that. But going a bit from the total chaos, from the not knowing where you're going to work tomorrow, not knowing whether you have to work the weekend to something halfway there, halfway acceptable for everyone, that will already be a big step. And I think that's key also in this ongoing talent war.

Sarah Nicastro: I think it's also important in terms of change management to frame to employees the positive ways we can use technology that will benefit them. So, it isn't just about how we can reduce cost to serve or how we can increase efficiency. We should also be looking for the lens through which we can communicate the positives to them. We had our event in the UK about a month ago, and there was a gentleman there, Adam from Mighty, and they are using IFS's planning and scheduling optimization tool. So, very AI-based, self-learning scheduling tool. And I had never heard this and I absolutely loved it. He said that one of the things that they've done, because the tool self adapts to whatever changes are happening in the inputs.

So, they've allowed each technician to choose their start and end time for each day. Simple thing, but they were saying some people want to drop their kids off at school and they don't mind staying a little bit later in the day. Others want to come in really early, but maybe be done by the time their kids come home or whatever the circumstances are. And he talked about how much that simple thing has lifted the mental health and spirits of the staff. And it's a very practical way of giving them not all the flexibility in the world, not you can work from home every day. So, it's not necessarily on par with what someone's competing against in a different type of job.

But it's taking what we have, what constrictions we have from a customer service standpoint, but also what capabilities exist to make the equation work to everyone's advantage. And I thought that was a really, really good example of framing the technology change in a way that really has benefited them personally and helped with acceptance, but also helped the employee value proposition a bit. So, what about the role of leadership in all of this change?

Jan Helge Bruemmer: Yeah. I mean, of course, as in any change process, leadership is key. It starts there. I think when we look at our landscape and our leaders in service operations, and as I said before, it's very often its former technicians that grow into that leadership role, or at some point they were just the best technicians. And then, I mean, logically they become the manager, right or wrong. But what they're very good at, and this might bring us back a bit to the topic of the conversation, I mean they are really experts in handling the daily activities, all the emergency, all the chaos, everything that's happening. I mean, historically, they're problem solvers, they're firefighters, and that's what they're good at.

What they're sometimes lacking then is, of course, the long-term vision, again. And really, I mean the preparation of the future and looking ahead and try to get on the way those things that we need in order to still be competitive. And again, I mean that externally with customers, but also internally with our people. So, I think then going one level higher, maybe the senior management's responsibility in that sense is that we need to make sure that whatever leaders we have in service operations, in field service, actually can set aside some time and some resources to really reflect about what's needed for the future, instead of just being buried in daily activities.

And whether that's the same person or if we need to bring in other people, also with really an outside perspective, I like the idea to not only have people with a field service experience and a field service leader position, but why not bring people in from sales? Why not bring in people from marketing or whatever area? But we need to be aware that in order to prepare the future, it's not possible to do that in five minutes here and there. We really need to increase the focus on that long-term. And then also, I mean the acceptance that the long-term for field service is investment and mainly in people.

I mean, we're not buying any super machines, we're not investing in R&D, we're investing in people. And that's a number of people. But that's also the awareness that learning curves are long, at least in what we are doing. So, also making sure that we give those people the time to really be prepared, to really be comfortable when they go on site, when they're in the cold water, so to speak. And that is something, again, coming back to the barriers, I mean service, short-term profitability, it's sometimes a bit of an issue there, I think.

Sarah Nicastro: I think when we first talked about this session, what you said is very true and true for a lot of folks I talked to, which is a lot of times what we say we need to do and know we need to do is at odds with what we have to do today or what we end up doing. We know that it's important, but then you get caught back in the day to day or the short term, et cetera. And it can be hard. But I think Nina said it very well this morning, which is to some degree the business case is that if you don't do some of these things, you're just not going to be in business in a few years. So, it's also, I think reminding people of that and making sure that you're not being too shortsighted. It's a balancing act, but also you can't skew too far in either direction.

Jan Helge Bruemmer: And I think here it's really about setting the right structure. I mean, again, we need to take care of the short term, of the day-to-day in service. I mean, our customers, they have issues, they have problems. They need our help to fix that. And then it's more, again, as I said before, we need maybe an additional level, an additional part of the organization thinking then more about the longterm.

Sarah Nicastro: And I've seen companies handle that different ways. I've seen companies that do okay with having their leadership set time aside and not have it be cannibalized by whatever the day's fires are. That can work for some. I've seen organizations that have a parallel innovation function that works alongside the business leaders to take some of that pressure and weight off. I've seen companies that have a center of excellence or that idea where it's more of the thinking happening there and then being communicated out and people giving feedback.

So, I don't know that there's a right way to do it, but I absolutely agree that you can't just allow yourself to be so consumed by the day-to-day that you don't put the time and effort into thinking ahead for sure. Good. And that's it. So, thank you so much. We're going to have some drinks at the bar and networking for the next hour or so. So, feel free to stay and hang out if you can. And thank you again for having me.

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An Organizational Scientist on Building Effective Teams & Managing Change

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An Organizational Scientist on Building Effective Teams & Managing Change

Sarah welcomes Dr. Josh Elmore, Principal Consultant at Court Street Consulting and Adjunct Professor at both Columbia University and the City University of New York, to discuss how concepts of industrial and social organizational psychology factor in to what’s demanded of today’s leaders in building strong teams and leading through change.

Sarah Nicastro: Welcome to the Future of Field Service podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Nicastro. Today we're going to be getting an organizational scientist's take on building effective teams and managing change. I'm excited to welcome to the podcast Dr. Josh Elmore, who is principal consultant at Court Street Consulting, also an adjunct professor at both Columbia University and the City University of New York. Josh, welcome to the Future of Field Service podcast.

Josh Elmore: Thanks so much for having me, Sarah. Excited to be here.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, thank you for being here. I appreciate it. So before we get into the thick of it all, tell everyone a little bit more about yourself.

Josh Elmore: Sure. So, my background is, as you mentioned, organization science and what that entails mostly is social and organizational psychology, which is the application of psychology to the world of work, how people work in corporate spaces, nonprofit spaces. In general, people coordinating their effort and trying to reach some goals together. So I tend to focus on things like group dynamics and performance and motivation and how do we get people moving in the same direction and that can scale from an individual looking to do their career pursuit, career coaching type of consultation, all the way up to a large scale organization change effort. So I finished my PhD in 2020 and I've been practicing since then. I've consulted prior to the PhD in 2018, I started with some faculty mentors of mine and it's been a really interesting trip learning about how organizations change and how they update the way that they work, and it's a constant effort. So I'm excited to chat about all things change management with you today.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, yeah, that's really interesting. So one thing I learned when you and I connected to prep for this session is that the social organizational psychology was born of industrial psychology. Okay. So how has the evolution from industrial psychology to more modern forms changed the way that organizations and leaders manage people within the business?

Josh Elmore: Yeah. So early days, early 20th century, there was a group of folks, and among them was Frederick Winslow Taylor. And he was applying psychological ideas or ways of coordinating people's efforts through things called time in motion. And so he would go onto factory floors and work with those folks in the factory and try to optimize how many motions they took to do a given task, maybe around assembling something or working on some larger scale production. And at the time that whole space was thinking around productivity and getting to reduce the amount of effort that had to go into any given task.

And over time what you had was different forms of psychology coming out of academia, out of basic research where things like social psychology grew up in the '50s and '60s and were then applied to the organization setting. And organizational psychology became something where you look at the whole system itself as opposed to just individuals. Today we have a field that's called industrial organizational psychology and we call it IO psychology for short. And we, and I say we, I mean my colleagues in organizational psychology world, they tend to use the I and think about the individual. And so when we say industrial, we're thinking about individuals, and organizational, we're thinking about systems. And so I'd say that industrial psychology began with a focus on individuals, how do you select the right person for the job? And that exists today where we look at selection or job analysis, but it's expanded into other domains.

Sarah Nicastro: Okay. Very interesting. Okay, so if we were to take a look then at what is the modern focus? So if you were to get people up to speed that are listening to the podcast on what is being taught today, I think about this, I got my MBA 13 years ago and it's like you don't always think about how much has changed, what the core focus areas are, what the best practices are, what new discoveries or topics or themes or teachings have been uncovered, et cetera. So when you think about the industrial organizational psychology realm today, what is the modern take or what's most important for people to be aware of when it comes to teams, systems, and groups in the workplace?

Josh Elmore: So I think speaking back to that evolution and the gradual drive towards our understanding, and it began in this psychology research, but it quickly became something that management was talking about and using, and folks from organizational psychology were coming and helping consult to organizations and apply. And you had things like for instance, like the Hawthorne studies, which was an experimental design where they tried to, some researchers went into a factory to learn what effect lighting had on the output of factory workers. So they would change the lighting. And what they found was actually the factory workers produced high output no matter what. And the researchers were confused, they were thinking why was there no change when we changed all the lights? And what actually mattered was the fact that these folks were being paid attention to. And so that's when we learned that attitudes matter.

And so over time when we go into these organizations and you learn that, oh wait, people have different motivations. They need to be given incentives, they need to be given opportunities to grow and stretch themselves, and these are more modern takes on, we use them a lot. You see them everywhere where folks are talking about learning and development and performance management. But these are relatively new ideas. And I'd say that those are the things that A, we take for granted. And B, are the indicators of the evolution of the field in the regular world where HR is an advanced people function. And I'd say people like Peter Drucker talking about management in the '50s, '60s, and throughout the 20th century, how he talked about knowledge workers and he talked about what we call the future of work. He was always talking about the future of work.

And I'd say there's pieces that are still held onto to this day that are very important for industrial psychology, social psychology, organizational psychology. But those speak to those three levels that you mentioned, right? Industrial psychology, thinking about people, individuals, how do you put them on the right track, social psychology, thinking about teams, how do these groups work together? And then organizational psychology, how does the system work and how does it interact with other systems? A lot of times you live in... We spoke about the field service industry where you have lots of different organizations that are interdependent and have to coordinate their efforts together. And so that is similar from an organizational psychology perspective because you need to coordinate your efforts. And so I'd say that in general the thinking around social psychology is an idea of scaling from the individual perspective to the team perspective to the organizational perspective. And we call that levels of analysis.

Sarah Nicastro: And they're obviously all very interconnected. So that makes sense. It's interesting because when you spoke about the roots of industrial psychology and talking about really a focus on maximizing productivity, which obviously is important, but I think I shared this with you, in our space in field service, if you go back 15 years ago when I started interviewing service leaders, that was really the focus. There was not a whole lot more to it beyond just managing costs, maximizing efficiency, maximizing productivity, et cetera. And obviously a lot has changed including, and maybe most importantly, the recognition of service as a potential profit center for businesses and as a integral piece of the customer experience.

And so with that happening, then a lot of other variables have become important and things that leaders and businesses have to weigh and prioritize. And that also brings about then different skills that the employees need to have if they're playing a role in a profit center versus just executing a task in a cost center and then different skills that leaders need to have to be able to draw that out of folks. So it's really, really interesting. Now taking the team piece of this, okay, so you mentioned a lot of the work that you do when you consult with organizations is on team facilitation. So can you just talk a little bit about when someone wants you to come in and do team facilitation, what does that mean? What does that look like? What are some of the common areas of focus? What are maybe some of the common pain points in making sure you have engaged and empowered teams? Can you talk a little bit about that part?

Josh Elmore: Yeah, I'd love to. And just briefly, I want to speak to that earlier point that you were making around this idea of the evolution of field service from cost center to profit center. And it's a really interesting idea around this idea of having to push down costs versus how do we develop new opportunities to build business. And when you're doing that, you can look to analogous industries that are seeking to grow and build. And tech is one very clear analogy of organizations being born and then evolving and growing and scaling. And in those cases, you look at the practices from a Google or any of the tech firms that are huge and numerous, not necessarily today because they're cutting back a lot, but in not so long ago they had all the tech perks, they had everything you could think of, never leave our campus, always be here on site.

We're going to do your laundry for you, we're going to feed you. And what does that give you? It gives you the ability to have your basic needs met, but then also it might give you the sense that this place caress about me, I'm going to care about it in turn. And so you can get a really rich dynamic between organization and the folks who are actually bringing the work to life for them when you leverage all of the psychological experiences that feed into self-actualization, right? If we think about Maslow's hierarchy of needs, basic needs are just at the very bottom, but self-actualization is at the top.

And so if you're thinking about how you want to get folks on board and moving in one direction towards some big large goal, how do you help them self actualize? Is it learning? Is it giving them the ability to test out stretch goals or making sure they don't burn out by giving them enough vacation time or checking in with them, giving them mentorship. So all of these holistic practices that you can use that are also speaking to the idea of more indicative, more modern human resources and people practices. Right. Makes sense. I just wanted to speak to that idea.

Sarah Nicastro: No. That's good.

Josh Elmore: And so from my team perspective, for me, I really love working with teams because we talked about that individual perspective, the team perspective, the organization perspective. And I like teams because when you work with a group of people, you can make high impact because working very closely with them, not one-on-one, but you're working closely enough with them to where you can have a pretty direct impact around how they're doing their work, helping them check in, helping them check in with their team. And when you do that with a group of 15, 20, 30 people, they go off and do that. If they learned something and enjoyed the work, they go off and do that with their teams. And so all of a sudden you have a huge intervention with a very quick or bite-sized engagement. So I like working with groups because water falls down and upward and it can permeate the system.

And so the way I frame those engagements right now is there's a lot of changes in the way that we're working today. Remote hybrid organizations are constantly having to reevaluate how they've arranged themselves, and that speaks to larger change management challenges. But it also speaks to on the ground, how are people dealing with the new policy of how we work? How does your team come together and do its work? Is it remotely? Is it hybrid? Is it full-time in person? And if so, how do you pursue your work given this new paradigm we're in? And so that's what I do with leaders and managers. I help them bring their people together and check in on how they're doing, how are they communicating, how are they making decisions? Are roles clear? Have they grown or changed shapes or maybe their mandate has changed?

And if so, have they talked about it? Does everyone know what's the plan? How does the team's goals align with the organization's goals? Right? Giving folks the ability to have space to talk about the things that are not necessarily every day work topics that get discussed over and over. Oftentimes that space needs to be intentionally developed, and that's what I'm focusing on right now is helping teams develop an intentional space to work on the more foundational challenges and opportunities.

Sarah Nicastro: Now, would you say that the need for that work typically surfaces due to a problem or simply because it's recognized as an opportunity?

Josh Elmore: I'd say it depends, right? I think lots of times folks that are managing a team have some level of view into what's going on with everyone, depending on the configuration, how are you working, how much contact do you have? Is everybody getting to do things on their own because maybe they're a bunch of experts and they don't really need to coordinate their effort very much. So oftentimes it might be around a lack of knowing what's going on and things may be popping up. Oftentimes I talk with leaders around symptoms, right? They'll tell me that there's conflict on the team, and conflict can come from a lot of different places. So sometimes it's like, okay, well let's understand where that's coming from and let's talk with folks and get on the same page. I call it building a shared understanding. Let's build a shared understanding of what's happening because everyone's realities are different.

And so it could be what's perceived of as an issue. And oftentimes maybe a leader's been given a new business unit, maybe they have to bring something to life and drive a whole new direction, which is great. And it's an opportunity and it's hard. So having some support and having the ability to get folks together and start coordinating your effort and building that continuous practice of just checking in and making sure that everyone's on the right boat and you're all heading towards the same destination, and also creating space to where people can think creatively and bring up challenges as they come along so it doesn't build up.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, that makes sense. Now, obviously the work you would do in that process is quite individual to the organization you're working with, but that being said, I'm wondering are there any commonalities that typically arise in terms of the root of some of the conflict or the challenges or the best practices that you end up helping these teams create as they go forward?

Josh Elmore: Yeah. At the end of the day, it always comes down to the most fundamental features of a team. Are we coordinating our effort together? Are we communicating enough? Are we giving each other feedback? Are we making sure that I'm doing what we've agreed upon, that it is that I should be doing, that you are doing what we've agreed upon that you should be doing. And no one is feeling that too much work is landing on their back and things aren't distributed enough. And so it comes back to just team hygiene, really. In the same way that you build a relationship with a friend or a colleague and you have this rich, very healthy dynamic, if you can think about that dynamic that you've created with that person, how did you create it? Was it that you have frequent conversations? Is it that you're tuned in to the same challenges of maybe your industry?

And if so, how did you get there? Do they have the same education as you? Did they take a class that you've also taken? How did you get to a place where you're both on the same wavelength? And so you can think of these simple terms of same wavelength and use them as a barometer of, all right, are things going well or not? And if not, start to figure out, okay, look at good examples. To your point, there's a lot of uniqueness between everyone's challenges, but from the reason that there's a whole science of social psychology is because there are some rules. And so I'd say because we are all different individuals, the way that we have healthy relationships with people is different from anyone else.

How we build relationships with folks is different. So you need to look at examples of where you've been successful at building strong relationships and take those lessons and then apply them in other circumstances to more or less, and getting feedback from whoever you're working with as well. Because what works here may not work there, but there are general principles around just good hygiene, good communication, good checking in.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. Okay. So then if we think about change management or change leadership, which as you mentioned earlier, closely intertwined because one, obviously it impacts teams, but also it seems ongoing and constant at this point. So it's something that folks are always navigating. So when we talked about change management, you mentioned there's sort the model and the mindset. So can you talk a little bit about why both are important?

Josh Elmore: Yeah, and I think speaking to the idea that you mentioned at the outset of framing the question where you mentioned I change management or change leadership and change leadership and those, you can use those as similar analogies to the idea of change management, the model, change leadership, the mindset, and why would we make this dichotomous of view? I mean, definitely go hand in hand, but if we wanted to pull them apart and say, okay, I'm a leader. I've been handed this new business unit, we have a whole new mandate, I got to turn it around. We need to work towards some new set of goals and metrics and everything.

How do you do that? You have two, three, four or 500 people working for you or coordinating effort in the unit that you have. And it could even be just a small team, but at the end of the day, you need to have vision. But your vision should be rooted, not just in start with, what do you see? How did you get here? You're working with some other set of leaders, you've been given some authority to do some work, and you have context. So what's your context? What are you seeing? What needs to happen? And then how do you share that with everyone else and get their feedback on the current state of things so that you could build a shared vision? So change leadership is taking your context, taking your vision, knowing what needs to happen, turning and getting feedback from the system, from those folks that you're going to be relying on and saying, okay, how do you think we should go about this?

Start the conversation. If you go all the way down to the team, it's seemingly simple, right? Six, five people, 10 people. You can have everyone in the room and you can have a conversation. You could write notes and you can say, all right, this is generally what everyone's thinking. But at hundreds of people you need to build in the practice of continuous listening. That's like working with people analytics and feeding back. What are you saying? What are you hearing back? And that's the leadership piece. That's you projecting vision, but also listening and not only listening, but taking it to heart, integrating it, and then feeding it back to the system like, I heard you, this is what we're doing to address it. Actually, I might bring you in to help us address it. And as you start to do that, that's when you're getting into change management.

Some of those techniques that I was talking about are models of how you produce change, how leadership shows up and listens and gives folks the ability to feed back to them. That's part of change management. And it's iterative. The more you do it, you're managing this continuous shift, steering the ship in this new direction. And so that's why we call it organization development. I haven't mentioned that term yet, but the broader field that encompasses change management, change leadership is organization development. Why do we use the term development? It's because what do you do as an individual if you're learning, you develop. And so that's the same thing you have to do for your system. You need to develop it by helping it learn, understand, and get motivated by whatever it is it's heading towards. And that's by involving people and stepping forward together.

And leaders have to head that up, but in doing so, they're helping to manage a process which is change. And that's when you're building in mindset, you're building in this conversation, people are getting on the same page. Okay, what we're doing, we're engaging in this shared pursuit towards success. However you frame your change management initiative, you're always going to have pushback. And you need to do from a model perspective, stakeholder management, where are you going to have resistance? Where are you going to have folks that are on board and championing the change? And as you build out this apparatus, this scaffolding for the organization, which is out of your leadership in change, you can test ideas, what we call interventions.

You can intervene, you can hold an all hand meeting and get questions. How did that go? What did people say? What did they talk about? Where are people at right now? Let's not jump ahead 10 steps to the ending of this change engagement. Let's listen to where people are right now, meet them there and step forward together. So that's how change leadership manifests to produce managed change and can create a shared mindset of change. For those that are navigating very hard things, change is not easy.

Sarah Nicastro: So I have a couple follow up questions. One is in the mindset model relationship or surrounding it even, where do things typically falter? And I'll explain why I'm asking, right? I have been interviewing people in this space for 15 years, and when I say what went wrong, what would you do differently? 90 plus percent of the time, it is related to change management. So I always say it's one of my favorite and least favorite topics simultaneously because it just always baffles me that it comes up again and again and again and again as the sticking point. Yet it doesn't seem so far. Okay, I think we're getting there, but it doesn't really seem like people are getting it and getting ahead of it. So I'm just wondering if you were to generalize about companies that get it wrong, that don't get it right, where are the most common missteps? What is the missing piece?

Josh Elmore: So, we say changes the process, it starts and it proceeds. And if you think about entropy, the idea that everything, the whole universe is expanding all at once, and things become more chaotic as everything expands. We can say we feel that in the world of work, because it's a process, you have to examine where are things starting? How many components do you have involved in this network of support resistance in the organization? How complex is your organization? At the end of the day, if you think about change, I like to think about it as just one person. You're one person and you have one brain and you have connections in your brain and you make a decision and you can go off and do the action that you've decided on doing. It's very easy or it's easier than working between two groups of or multiple people.

So if we think about going between people, there's a lot that can get lost in understanding between a couple of different people, between functions, between whole systems, and you have to be continuously examining what you're doing, right? Edgar Schein, one of the early thinkers in the world of organization development, said everything is an intervention. So every single thing that you do is an intervention. Every email that gets sent off by leadership, every behavior that seems in contrast or not aligned with this new direction that an organization is heading, people see it. They think, oh, maybe I don't have to go that way. Maybe I don't need to work so hard. Or there can be feelings of not being included. A lot of times from a strategy perspective, you can go to an offsite with your leadership team and get together and make a whole bunch of decisions about what's going to happen in the organization and then just communicate it down and expect it all to happen, as opposed to having that offsite with the whole organization.

What does it look like for leaders to say, these are the broad directions we want to head? How do we get our people working in that direction? So I'd say that change management as a field has a lot of great practices to the extent that organizations put them to use in full force. It's a challenge, right? Because oftentimes when a consultant or a change management practitioner gets called in, it's halfway through the change exercise, they've planned some change, or they decided at a leadership offsite, we're going to do these things. They've sent out the memos, nothing's happening, or it's not going as planned. And okay, we need somebody to come help. And by the time a practitioner comes in and can help, you're halfway through and you got disenchanted folks in the organization. And so it's a process and it's always happening, and it's like a muscle.

It's like you have to use your change muscle. And that's the mindset. If we live in a time of constant change, Bill Pasmore, one of my mentors at Columbia wrote a book called Leading Continuous Change, and he uses the metaphor of a roller coaster. And so if you're always on the roller coaster, then you need to have the ability to think clearly in these very hard times, but also show people how to think clearly or to build a coherent narrative out of what's happening. And so there's a common refrain. I'm not sure how much, and I've looked this up to find how some solid research around it, but there's a common refrain in the organization change world that 70% of organization change efforts fail. And anecdotally, you, it seems like you're hearing that, and in a lot of ways it has to do with how easy is it for us to change as individuals?

It is pretty hard. Now think about doing that in a group and then in a whole organization. And so you have to be very thoughtful. You have to be very deliberate. If you want to pursue a new direction, you got to plan it out and you have to track it, and you have to deal with setbacks and then pivot in and of itself, that's where the leadership idea comes in. It is a full-time job. And oftentimes organizations, they'll find a consultant or two, or they'll have a small organization development function in their organization that work as internal consultants, which is great. Having some folks that can be there to help out and give some insight is wonderful, but you have to treat them as real partners and think of the way that you're going to change as something that doesn't just end.

You've already started it just by nearly thinking it started because you probably told somebody about it. And so especially if this is a subordinate of yours, it's on their mind because you mentioned it. And so what are they doing differently? And so very simply by mentioning something that needs to be different to a subordinate, you could check in a week later and ask them what their thoughts are on that. That's the very beginning of the intervention of trying to change. It's the same way that you reflect on if you got a new job, you would reflect on how's it going, right?

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. No, I think that makes sense. And I think it's the leadership piece or the mindset piece is where historically folks in this space at least have faltered because I think it's been viewed a lot as a checkbox. We know we need to do this, so let's make sure it's on the plan. Does somebody have it on the plan? Is it in the budget? Okay, wait, our budgets got cut, let's just cut the change management piece. Do you know what I mean? It's not a mindset, it's not a part of the leadership skillset, it's just something that is on a list because they know it should be on a list type of thing.

Okay, so the other question I had on, you've said a couple of times about the fact that it's continuous. I think another trap is and tied to the mindset of, okay, well, let's just get this over with. Let's do the change management and be on our way. And obviously, as you've mentioned a couple of times, as we know, change today is constant, right? We're in a state of continually evolving and innovating. So with that though, comes change fatigue. So how do we handle that?

Josh Elmore: Yeah, I've thought a lot about this idea, and sometimes I wonder to what extent we are poorly framing what it means to be at work. What does it mean to have a job? If you are at will in your employment, then technically your job is precarious because you can be fired at any time. And yet, we have benefits. We build entire lives around the fact that we have what we consider a stable job, but if there's any evidence that we don't live in, that paradigm is living in continuous layoffs. You look at the way that people who are at will find themselves without a job, they may be moved for that job. They built an entire life around it. And so in some ways, the way we frame how work looks is a little bit misleading. And because we're framing work as this very stable thing, which the evidence signals that it's not. In the past, in the 1950s, people could have a career at a single organization, and some people still do.

There's very large organizations that are embedded and massive, and you can go in and build your entire career there, right? GE, PepsiCo, very large systems. But in general, across most organizations, that's just not the case anymore. You can't build entire careers. And there's some conventional wisdom that says you should jump around to different jobs because that's how you get a raise, right? That's an idea because you move from one job to the other, you get experience, you get more opportunity, and maybe you get a little bit more responsibility. And so looking at the way that jobs work for individuals is an indicator of how organizations also are operating, and it's in a non-stable and evolving process at all times. If you just took a look at an organization and tracked it for a year or two and watched all the things that happened to it, and maybe read its quarterly reports, what did they do? They're constantly doing things. Why? Because they're seeking to make a profit, or if they're a nonprofit, they're trying to pursue some mission. And so they're super energetic.

Organizations in and of themselves, the term organization is a verb, right? It's energetic. And so I think by framing systems and jobs and everything that goes with it in a way that seeks to hold onto this idea of stability, it produces some misleading idea of what actually is happening. And so if we were to shift that back to the mindset that, and that's an idea, I don't have research to support it, but I think it doesn't necessarily make sense to frame things as stable if they're not, it makes more sense to frame things as being fluid and dynamic and agile. And if we do that, then we are coming to terms with it and we can lean into it. What happens when we frame things in a way that it's like we're constantly moving, right? Organizations, startups talk about this all the time, we're innovators.

And so if they're innovators, what does that mean? It means they're moving fast, they're breaking things, they're disrupting, and they can do that because they're small, and everyone has the mindset that things here are constantly changing. And if you don't, so we also have analogies in these nascent organizations, and we've talked about field services or field service, and that's coming out of an established industry, it's becoming something new, but it's embedded in something much more evolved and much more mature as an industry. But it needs to be given some space to have the ability to evolve and to do some change work just like a startup might, right? Especially if they're becoming a profit center. How do you inject some of that opportunity to become innovative and thereby changing, adapting, and infusing in everyone else that this place is making moves. Things are happening here, and it can be exciting. It could be a motivator as opposed to something you should be afraid of.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. No, that's a really good point. I've never really thought of it that way, how with your idea are almost fueling that sense of change fatigue or even resistance in a way, because it's seen to be at odds with what is, but is it really right? Is it really? Yeah, that's interesting. Okay, so you recently contributed to a book on data science in organizational change. Okay? Can you talk a little bit about what you covered there? How data is being leveraged to better understand the psychological behaviors, the impact of change, and how do you see the use of that growing or expanding in the future?

Josh Elmore: Yeah, it was great. It was really nice to be included in this handbook, which is generally a handbook of organization change research methods. And so I was part of a section on leveraging big data in organization change research, and a lot of my research when I was doing my doctoral work, I used advanced analytics like R to analyze larger data sets. So it'd be statistics, but it would also be just taking large amounts of data and examining some insight that could be drawn from, for instance, when I did my dissertation, it was on letters of recommendation, and I examined 1,200 letters of recommendation and did content analysis on them, but from a natural language processing perspective. And I was able to look at to what extent were men and women described differently in the letters of recommendation. I was able to find that men were described as researchers and scientists and women were described more as teachers and students.

And so you can really draw out huge insights from a lot of data by leveraging the tools of data science. And unfortunately, when I gave the topics that I found in the letters of recommendation to 250 faculty members in the geosciences who would've read these letters of recommendation and ask them to rate the topics in terms of how important they are for making a hiring decision, unsurprisingly, they rated researching and scientists as more important than being a student or teacher. And in such a way that they rated topics more expressed more frequently for men as more important for making a hiring decision. And what you get from that is not just one way by which you see the inequalities in an organization setting for the university in this perspective, but it gives you that big picture view into what's happening at the foundation of the way that we do our work, among all of the materials that we use to produce our output.

What are the trends? What are the deep insights that we can draw on and use to learn and update how we work? And so that's the idea of leveraging data science, which I believe is going to be a tool for every scientific field. Every scientific field in the future will figure out a way to leverage data science. It's the modern use of statistics. And so what I do in the chapter is I produce a framework for examining continuous change. So for instance, if you were to send, say you have an organization of a thousand people and in the chapter, I use this example of you are a brick and mortar store and you have stores in various locations, but you want to become an e-commerce store as well. No, excuse me. It's that you're an e-commerce store and you want to become a brick and mortar store.

And I got mixed up there because in general, the idea not so long ago was for brick and mortar to become e-commerce, Barnes and Nobles trying to catch up with Amazon. All of these different organizational changes going on Blockbuster trying to be Netflix and way too late. But if you are, say you're an e-commerce store and you say, I need to open up brick and mortar because I think brick and mortar is important. We're living in a new era where people like to go and experience things, not just on the internet post-COVID, they're going to the mall again. So we're going to open up our stores and malls across the country. How do you do that? Your entire organization are used to being e-commerce? How do you get them to shift to supporting a whole entirely new way of working, which is brick and mortar, that's retail and having real estate and leases and all of these different new things that you have to do.

And so leadership has to get together. They have to think about it, they have to bring people in, and they have to start talking about it. With data science, for instance, you could measure, for instance, say you built a dictionary of all of the words that were associated with the change that you were pursuing, like retail, clothes hangers, lease, right? All of the words that would be included in discussion around this new direction your business is heading. And you looked at a, maybe a department level, look at all of the emails being sent around. So the change starts and you start tracking what is the language that's being used across all of my different departments? Are people talking about this new change? And if they are, what other words are they using to describe it, positive or negative? And then you can start look at positive sentiment around the language people are using related to the changes that are going on.

And you can look at negative sentiment and you can say, okay, it looks like there's some challenges here at a high level. So how do we help this part of the business to manage the change? And what's the big challenge? Let's bring folks together, let's hear from them. So when you start to look at large aggregated data, you can start to see trends across your organization to say, okay, here's where we have some challenges, here's where things are going great. Maybe how do we get the folks that are doing really well based on the sentiment of the slack and email that is being sent around to meet with the folks that things are going poorly? How do they share practices? So the things that you probably would've done anyways can be rooted in evidence. They can be rooted in the actual real things that are happening on the ground.

And so that's what the chapter is about, is taking measurement and then updating it and continuously building what we would call a listening system, a way of gathering a sentiment, gathering taking what we call a pulse people. Analytics is a big element of this, but it's like if you have a people analytics team and they partner with the organization development team or organization change management team, and you bring their forces together and they can start to build a listening strategy around the change, and leadership has a dashboard to say, okay, this is how these things are going. Let's put together some all hands meeting where, because this moment, it feels critical, especially if it's real time. If you can get real time data about what's happening, next week, let's have an all hands meeting so things don't start to get stale, and people start to feel like we're not actually changing. This is not actually happening. Right?

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. Yeah. No, that's really interesting because you mentioned obviously it's evidence-based, but I think it's also being able to get ahead of the time it would take for those sentiments to surface without looking at that data. So if you have this pocket of negative sentiment here, if you're not utilizing those data streams and looking at that input, it might take a lot longer for that to surface and for you to have the opportunity then to go and address it. So very interesting. Okay.

Josh Elmore: Thanks.

Sarah Nicastro: Josh. What, if anything, we missed, I mean, I'm sure there's a lot we could dig more into, and probably some of these topics could be a podcast in and of themself, but anything else I guess for today that we should touch on in terms of team building and change management?

Josh Elmore: Yeah, I think you shared where the field service world is right now, and that it's going through lots of change and having to produce new outputs given new sets of goals and new mandates for how things should be going. And I'd say, I've already said this, but the more that you can involve the people that you rely on to do that work, they're out there in the world. They're putting the technology to use, they're deciding whether or not they're going to leverage the new practice that you're hoping will streamline efficiency, or they're just going to digit for some old ways of working because it doesn't necessarily make sense to them. Learn from your people what doesn't make sense to them? Why might they not necessarily adopt the new direction that you're heading? And the more that you can listen to them and bring them into the conversation, the more you're going to learn, do things in a way that is appropriate given the constraints, and it gives them the feeling that their input matter.

And that's going to build a lot of rapport with your people. So I just wanted to share that. I think being in that process of evolution is not easy. And if it's not easy for you, it's not easy for everyone else. And so if you're a leader, how do you make it easier for everyone else, or at least make them feel bought into the process?

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, no, that's really good advice. Where can folks get in touch with you?

Josh Elmore: So I spend a lot of time on LinkedIn. I think it's a great platform for sharing ideas. So you can find me on LinkedIn, just Dr. Josh Elmore. I have my website, courtstreetconsulting.net, and I am planning on doing a podcast pretty soon on team effectiveness.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah.

Josh Elmore: So if you're listening to this in 2024, then check out, look for the Team Effectiveness Podcast where I'll be talking about all things teams and yeah, always happy to chat about any challenges you're facing. It's my pleasure to learn from the challenges other folks are facing with this work, and I like being helpful.

Sarah Nicastro: Awesome. I love that. Well, thank you Josh, so much for coming and spending some time with us today. We'll have to chat too about podcasting, it's fun. I'm excited for you, but appreciate you being here. So, thank you for your time.

Josh Elmore: Yeah, totally. Thank you so much, Sarah. It's been great. I love talking about this stuff. So happy to be here. Thanks.

Sarah Nicastro: Awesome. You can find more by visiting us at futureoffieldserviceref.ifs.com. While you're there, be sure to sign up for the Future of Field Service Insider so you can stay up to date on all of the latest articles and podcasts. 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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Field Service Hilton Head 2023 Recap

Sarah Nicastro: Welcome to the Future of Field Service podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Nicastro. I am here in Hilton Head, South Carolina at Field Service Hilton Head. I would say Sunny Hilton Head, but it's a little overcast at the moment. But here attending Field Service Hilton Head this week and wanted to share a little bit of a recap of what's going on here at the event. So I had the opportunity to open the conference with a kickoff session, which was a really interesting experience and a little bit of a practice in thinking on my toes. They somehow did not have my slides, so it was really uncomfortable for probably the first 45 or 60 seconds when I was trying to figure out if they were going to just pull them up. Once I realized that they truly didn't exist, it was a little bit better because I just accepted that reality and improved.

So that was interesting. That presentation was on five ways that I see companies working smarter to excel at service today, as well as prepare for the future. So I'm actually not going to share a recap of that session specifically here, because I think it would take too long to do that and also share some of the other highlights of the event. So I will save that for a future episode. So I had the opportunity to share that content. I also moderated a panel conversation yesterday on how centralizing and connecting your product can help your service organization maximize profitability. On that panel was Craig Bruns of Crown Equipment, Franklin Maxson with Socomec, and Dr. John Chrisentary, who was formerly with Medtronic. And we had a really good conversation. We spent some time talking about sort of the foundational elements and infrastructure of centralizing and connecting products to really be at a point where you can leverage them as part of your value proposition.

And within that, we also talked about the idea of centralizing strategy and sort of creating some standardization among locations, teams, regions across the globe, et cetera. So the idea of breaking down silos, creating that central and common strategy to make sure everyone's working toward the same vision, et cetera. But I think what was most interesting about that panel discussion was the aspects related to creating and communicating a new customer value proposition. So each person shared their own experiences of course, but we talked about the idea that when you're creating new service offerings, something that's focused on guaranteed uptime or as a service, not all of your customers are going to be ready straight away to just embrace and adopt the new way of working. So being selective about working with those who are a bit more open to doing things differently, some co-creation, co-innovation. And focus your efforts there first and get some wins that you can use to then not only refine your value proposition, but communicate it to customers that are in that next tier of readiness.

So I thought that was really good advice. With that, obviously we talked about changing the narrative and the dialogue. So when we start thinking about these advanced offerings, it's a different conversation. It's not transactional, it's value-based. So making sure that you are factoring in that narrative, making sure that sales teams understand what the focus is and how to articulate a new value proposition. Also, the reality that a lot of times the person within the customer base that you're going to be selling this new value proposition to, is most likely different than the contact that you sold the earlier value proposition to. So accepting that and preparing for that as well. We also talked about the idea that a lot of customers value this feel of customization, personalization. But how to offer that in a way that it feels customized, it feels personal but really you're working off of some standard set of parameters or offerings, because obviously customizing and personalizing everything for every relationship isn't scalable.

But if that feeling is important to your customer base, how do you provide that in a way that is scalable, that is standard enough but personal and custom feeling? We also talked a bit about determining what objections from customers are overcomeable, and what are maybe not worth prioritizing spending the time on. So there's somewhere it's just new, it's different. Those sorts of things I think are all things that you can work through if you put the effort in. Franklin specifically talked about how in their work with defense organizations, there are just some objections related to security and data exchange that right now are not really overcomeable or not worth the effort and time it would take to overcome. And so that's okay. They just segment that appropriately and focus on the areas that are possible to work on today. And know that things will continue to evolve in relation to security and those objections. So really good session. Dr. John Chrisentary who was on that panel then also did a solo session that I really enjoyed, talking about the differences between transactional and transformational leadership.

I thought it was a really, really good session and very timely in what folks here I think need to hear and be considering when we think about the talent landscape and also the way that the industry is evolving. So a really good talk. One of the things that he pointed out is sometimes this sense of control, really perceived control, keeps a leader in this transactional phase because it can feel when you move to a transformational leadership type that you're relinquishing control because you're distributing it more. But in reality, you are in a lot of ways maybe have more control or control isn't the right word and I don't think should be the goal. That's kind of an outdated objective, but I guess influence. When you're able to empower your teams to make decisions, to share in the journey of evolution and innovation, you're really in a lot of ways having much bigger impact than if you are maintaining this sense of control. I attended a workshop put on by David Bishops, who was formerly with Johnson Controls and now is doing some consulting with Twin Bishops, him and his twin brother which is interesting.

And that workshop was on the risk of shiny objects. So getting distracted by technologies that get a lot of buzz, obviously here it's certainly AI. And getting distracted from the real objectives at hand. That point was kind of reinforced in a conversation I had today at lunch where we were essentially talking about how AI is the biggest buzzword here for sure. But there isn't a lot of grounding of the concept in business value and real business use cases. And just talking about why that is and how sometimes the terminology itself creates the shiny object syndrome. So someone was sharing that the executive leadership had said to them, "We need ChatGPT, go do it." Without really understanding what they're talking about and what the intent might be. So really good point.

I think there are a lot of very practical applications for AI today, and certainly those will continue to expand and grow. But just making sure that you're looking at everything through the lens of how will this benefit our customers, serve a need for our customers or our company. And also keeping in mind the viewpoint of your employees is really important. I also attended a workshop put on by Roy Dockery of Flock Safety. I would say it was my favorite session of the week so far. The event isn't over yet, but it was talking about, is self-care in field service a myth or a reality? And really talking about this idea of burnout, mental health, making sure that employees and teams feel cared for and are taking care of themselves. And it was a really interesting and I think also very important conversation.

Now, there are some challenges that came up in the conversation that I think are incredibly valid. When you have a lack of talent, you're already struggling to hire and there's this amount of work and this need from customers that you have to respond to, it's really hard to create the space to introduce some of these concepts. So I don't want to make it seem as though there aren't some very tough realities that make the intent complex. But Roy, I think also does a really good job of pushing back on some historical thinking and preconceived notions and just default processes, systems, et cetera. So we talked about are people taking time off and if not, why? And as leaders, how do you do that and therefore promote mental health and wellbeing? We talked about different opportunities in service to transition employees.

So Roy talked about how when he was in his former role, he would transition employees sometimes from field service to tech support if they were really struggling with the demands of travel. Pointing out the fact that yes, they made more from a salary perspective than traditional tech support did but they also had much higher resolution rates. So again, thinking differently and challenging some of the historical norms. Another point that he brought up that I'm sure raised some eyebrows is in his former role, he changed the SLA from a two-hour SLA to an eight-hour SLA. And usually we think about that in going in the other direction. But his point was, in our industry two hours isn't the norm. It is a standard we've put upon ourselves that now we are beholden to in a way that is causing a lot of angst among our teams and putting a lot of stress on the field force.

It isn't something that is necessary. And so if we change that, yes, we have to communicate that change to customers. But it brings a lot of value in terms of the mental health and the self-care of the teams. So really good examples. Again, things that a lot of people might baulk at, but I think when you really start reflecting on your own circumstances and where can you push back in support of your people, it becomes really, really interesting. So it was a great session. It might be worth having Roy come back on the podcast and talk about some of the things that he's done historically and some of the considerations related to that topic. There was a guest keynote from Dave Delaney who talked about retention essentially. And really good points reinforcing the importance of really an employee's early experiences with an organization. So he shared some statistics that are concerning.

Some of those were it costs six to nine months of salary to replace someone who leaves. 20% of new hires leave within 45 days. 32% of new hires don't feel a sense of belonging at one year of employment, a fifth don't feel valued and two fifths don't feel appreciated. So he spent his time really sharing some insight and perspectives on how we can change that. Really good reminders of how important it is for employees to feel heard to even something so simple as be properly introduced within the organization, so that people know who they are and know that they've joined the company. He talked about the practice of writing weekly thank you cards to folks and the impact that that can have, again, something very simple that can easily be overlooked.

The importance of onboarding and he gave seven tips related to onboarding. Made me think of a session with Venkata from Bruker Nano when we were talking about that. He mentioned that, I can't remember the period of time if it was 30 days or something like that, but a certain period of each employee's onboarding when they first come on board it's really just an introduction. He called it a welcoming period. So there isn't this immediate expectation of learn, do, learn, do. It's welcoming them into the organization, getting to know them, having them get to know their teams and the people within the other functions. And just making it feel a bit more personal, which I think is really good advice.

And another thing that Dave spoke about that was also a part of Venkata and I's conversation is fostering relationships and connection outside of just who you are and what you do at work. So looking for those opportunities, whether it's social interactions, whether it's team building type interactions. Or Dave today shared the example of using the Kiva platform, which is where you can support entrepreneurs in different global startups around the world, using that as a way to give teams the ability to pick together what they would like to support. So sort of a philanthropic thing, but something that teams can use to get to know one another a bit better and to do something positive together. So really good input as well. And Dave Delaney is with Futureforth. So those are just some of the sessions that have taken place here at Field Service Hilton Head this week.

It's been a good event so far, and hope that gives you a little bit of perspective on what is going on here. Plenty of AI talk as well, and I certainly haven't had an opportunity to attend every session but wanted to share some tidbits from those that I have. And hopefully some of these folks can come on to a future podcast to share a bit more detail. And I can also share a little bit more on the session that I gave as well. So that's all for now. Stay tuned to futureoffieldserviceref.ifs.com. For more, be sure to subscribe to the Future of Field Service Insider so you can stay up to date on all of the latest. The Future of Field Service podcast is published in partnership with IFS. You can learn more @ifs.com. As always, thank you for listening.

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How Can Service Leaders Nurture Empowerment?

August 16, 2023 | 33 Mins Read

How Can Service Leaders Nurture Empowerment?

Christine Miners, Managing Director of Verity International and Rick Lash, President of Rick Lash Consulting, co-authors of Once Upon a Leader: Finding the Story at the Heart of Your Leadership, join Sarah to talk about some of the challenges today’s leaders face and provide some practical advice for avoiding common missteps and mindset traps that work against intended impact.

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 service leaders can nurture empowerment among their teams. I'm excited to welcome today to the podcast Christine Miners, who is the Managing Director of Verity International, and Rick Lash, President of Rick Lash Consulting, who are both co-authors of the book, Once Upon a Leader: Finding the Story at the Heart of Your Leadership. Welcome to the Future of Field Service podcast!

Christine Miners: Thank you, Sarah. Thanks for having us.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, I'm excited to have you both. So Christine and Rick gave a keynote presentation at Field Service Palm Springs this year, and unfortunately it was on day one and I was delayed coming in, so I missed it. But I heard rumblings of how great it was throughout the next few days, and so I reached out and said, Hey, I'm really sorry I missed your presentation. I heard it was great. Can we talk about some of these things on the podcast? So lucky for me and for you, they agreed to join us and we're going to have a great chat today. So before we get into everything, can each of you just tell everyone a little bit more about yourselves.

Rick Lash: Christine?

Christine Miners: Oh, sure. Gosh, what can I say? I'm a mother. How about that? I'll start with that. I'm a mother. I have two kids and a super busy life outside of work, I think as probably most people do, but work wise I started my career in the nineties. I actually started at Dell Computers working in the operation side of the business. So I was in sales for a number of years, got my feet wet in my first leadership job in my mid-twenties at Dell and learned a lot, definitely fly by the seat of your pants the role and opportunity. And since then I've really grown up in this field of leadership development and talent management. So I've worked in industry for a number of years and I've now been in professional services working with literally thousands of leaders over the last probably 10 or 12 years or so. So that's a bit about me.

Sarah Nicastro: Awesome. Thank you, Rick.

Rick Lash: So I'm also, I'm a father, so I have two lovely daughters in their twenties who are just starting off their careers, which is interesting to watch as a dad. And my background is I'm actually a psychologist by training, so I did my PhD here at the University of Toronto in educational and organizational psychology, and I've been a career consultant. So unlike Christine, I didn't grow up in a corporate environment, I grew up as a consultant. I've worked with Fortune 500 organizations both here in North America, but also globally. I've worked with large global consulting firms such as Korn Ferry and the Hay Group, and serving as a senior client partner. I ran the North American practice for Hay Group a number of years ago, and I'd also like to write in the field as well.

So prior to roping Christine into writing this book together, I've published in the Harvard Business Review and other mainline journals, and most of my work has really been around leadership development. I've always been interested in how leaders become leaders and how to accelerate their growth as they move into leadership positions. And I have lots of hobbies. I have my telescope behind me, so I've been a lifetime astronomer, and so just always intellectually curious about a whole bunch of things.

Sarah Nicastro: That's awesome. I love that you have the psychology background and the corporate background coming together to look at this topic. I think it's really interesting. My undergrad is actually in psychology, and I think that that has influenced the lens through which I look at a lot of what's happening in the field service space over, I've been doing this for 15 years. So a lot of the evolution and change that's taken place when you talk with service leaders about what are their biggest challenges, it's almost always related to somehow to the people. So that's where the psychology piece comes in hugely and plays a big role. And, of course, within leadership itself, we've seen so much evolution as well, and we'll talk about some of that.

So you both obviously engage and interact with leaders across a big variety of industries. And so I'm curious, when you were at Field Service Palm Springs and you gave that keynote and you had an opportunity to listen to some of the other sessions and connect with some of the people there, what stood out to both of you about the service leaders and the state of their mindsets or our industry as it is just given the perspective you both have?

Christine Miners: Yeah, I guess I can start, because I think we probably both have a perspective. Listen, that in truth, that was my first business trip since the pandemic. So we are still in this interesting time. And so spending three or four days with a group of literally hundreds of leaders almost felt foreign to me in a weird way. But I also craved it and truly enjoyed it. I think what stood out, number one, relationship completely rose to the surface. So not sure I expected that quite truthfully. I think I expected more strangers coming together for a conference. And what I experienced was far different, it was very clear that there were strong networks within this group, really strong relationship, a real desire and authenticity around connection and leveraging one another and learning from one another.

And that was incredibly refreshing to see. And as I sat through the sessions and listened to the speakers, one thing that comes to mind is innovation and just how innovative and creative leaders are in this sector in particular in resolving the challenges that they have. So those are the quick thoughts around what rose to the surface. Rick, what do you think?

Rick Lash: Yeah, I would completely agree. For me also, it was the first time really traveling from Canada to the US for business. But just being in a room full of hundreds of people took you a bit aback and you are rusty, just learning how to interact with people who in a large setting was exciting, but also, I wouldn't say anxiety provoking, it was just it was fresh and it was new. But the other thing that I was struck by, because prior to the pandemic, like all of us, we traveled and went to conferences and attended business meetings. I have to say that I was taken back just by the warmth and the welcoming nature of the people at this conference. Every conference has its different feel and every industry has its different feel. But I was really just struck by just how kind and generous people were and how very much, I think Christine used the word maybe you didn't, but down to earth and genuine and authentic people were, which I really appreciated.

To me, there's nothing worse than having to pretend that you're somebody else for three days and putting on that kind of business space, I didn't feel you had to do that at all. I felt everybody that we met with, there was this instant connection. You felt that you were connecting with people as individuals. And I just thought that it was lovely. I truly, I mean this quite genuinely, I truly enjoyed the three days that we were down there. It was just not that we made friends, but I felt that I just spent time with just really nice people.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, it's so interesting to hear that because when I try and explain to someone how I happened upon a career in this space, because it was never my intention. People on this podcast have heard the story before, but I happened into it with really not the intent to stay for a long time or certainly for my whole career, but fell in love with it. And so it's interesting to hear your perspective because that's a lot of why, that I got hooked and became very passionate about the opportunity in this space and the connections, the community, et cetera. I was also nodding with the points you were bringing about it being your first trip since COVID. I've been traveling now significantly for the last two years, but I distinctly remember the first event I went to after not traveling for a long time. And I remember walking into the room and thinking maybe I can't do this anymore, just because I loved it so much before, and it felt, like you said, so foreign and I did feel some anxiety.

I was just like, I don't know if I can do this anymore. And obviously I came around. But yeah, so I'm glad you had a good experience. Now, when we connected to prep for this podcast, I spoke with you about wanting to focus on the topic of empowerment because in field service, and I'm generalizing for the sake of our conversation, but we're coming from a period where the frontline workforce had very technical repeatable work, and they were generally speaking, folks that were happy to come to work, do the same job every day for 10, 20 years at a time, and leadership was aligned to that and very much management, if you will, versus leadership.

And now we're at a point where that frontline role is changing significantly to be one where we're expecting in different ways, but folks to engage a lot more with customers. And that brings about a lot of different needs and I think demands leadership versus management. Okay. So that's why I wanted to talk about that topic. But before we get into that specifically, I know that part of what you both spoke about at the Palm Springs event was the overall shift in leadership since or as a result of the pandemic. So can we talk a little bit about what you've seen and what you've shared?

Christine Miners: Yeah, I think Rick and I talk a lot about this. In many ways, the pressures and the demands on leaders I think are higher than ever before. So it's returning to old service levels, but with fewer resources, talent resources are narrow and hard to find. People are working in weird environments, hybrid environments that they've never had to work in before. I think it's complex. And I think one of the quick and easy observations that I would say is leaders seem to be back into the weeds as a result. And I think that's normal, and I think that's natural. I think what happens when we feel like we're in a crisis, kind of a, oh my gosh, how do I get out of this sort of an environment? And it is a normal leadership style. When we're in a short-term crisis, we tend to get a little more command control or we tend to get a little more directive in our leadership. We tend to get more involved and more engaged to keep our arms wrapped around things and to keep it moving forward.

I think the challenge right now is that environment has become almost a permanent state of operation. So where crisis used to come and go, and we could shift into that style and back out of it. Now it's just here and it's just here. And I think the word that we used when we were at the conference was permacrisis. We didn't invent that word, it's the Collins Dictionary 2022 word of the year. But it captures the state. I think the challenge for leaders is they've dipped back into these back in the weeds, short-term leadership styles and truth, it's just not sustainable. It's not sustainable for them, it's not scalable for a business. And then when you talk about the shift that's happening at the frontline, which to me when I hear you talk about the shift, what it says to me is frontline people need to be more empowered to draw on their capabilities and exercise sound judgment and make better decisions and connect and learn new skills. And I think if you've got managers that have gone into crisis mode, it's like this vicious circle.

So we're not able to bring people along and we're experiencing this sense of burnout all at the same time. I don't know, Rick, if you would add anything. You and I have this conversation constantly because we're constantly talking to leaders.

Rick Lash: Yeah, no, absolutely. And I think that as you pointed out, Christine, that one of the consequences of living in this permanent state of crisis is that people don't get the opportunity. There's a number of consequences. One obviously is burnout and exhaustion, but I think that prolonged periods of stress, from a psychological standpoint, prolonged periods of stress are just bad for you. They're bad for you physically, they're bad for you mentally. And I think that one of the things that we also see is that not only are people exhausted and feeling a sense of burnout, but they're feeling a disconnection from themselves. They show up every day, they go through what they need to do, but there's this incredible sense, I think, of people feeling just drained and disconnected from who they are and what it is that... Why it is that they do what they do. They're just always in this execution mode.

And I think that one of the challenges is that increasingly people, no matter where you are at an organization and no matter where you are in your life, at some level, you have to have a sense of purpose. This is funny, we just recently moved my mother into a retirement home. I know this is going to go off to the side, but this is actually an important learning point. And yesterday I was there for dinner and there's a woman there who I've met a couple of times before who is, she's 86 years old, she is just full of beans, full of so much energy, and she wanted to read to me a speech that she's going to be giving to a local synagogue on the power of resilience and the power of having a purpose.

She used to be a clown, that was her, part of her profession, which is quite amazing. And what was very clear to her is just the days to me just don't seem long enough. I have so much that I have to do. I feel there's so much that needs to be done, and I just love every day that I wake up and full of energy. And I thought this is the living embodiment of living with a sense of purpose. And I think that in the work environment, living in a sense of permacrisis is that it's corrosive on our sense of purpose and on our sense of ability not only to connect with ourselves, but to connect with others. And I do think that one of the things that we are seeing is that in this current state of permacrisis, people are just, they're starved for stuff that feeds their soul.

And as leaders, leaders play a critical role in creating the context of the environment whereby people feel that they can operate with a sense of purpose. And I think that that is the major shift, that shift. But I think the major challenge that this creates for leaders is on the one hand management, the word management has its roots in using your hands. Management is about task and it's about getting things done. But the roots of leadership is about a focus on the future. And no matter where you are in an organization, you got to manage the task, but you also have to focus on the future. There was one individual that, I can't remember his name, but he talked about his approach to working with his staff of instead of setting annual goals, what they do is that they establish resume building objectives.

So what people are working on is, is it's not just about the tasks that you have to accomplish for the organization, it's about seeing how these tasks that you're accomplishing fit into the broader purpose of your life and what it is that you're trying to achieve and how engaging and energizing that is for people. So I think helping leaders to shift from, it's not just about the hands, it's not about managing the task because that in and of itself isn't going to get you what you need in the long term in terms of engaging people and driving productivity forward.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, there are so many points you made there that really resonated. So one thing I just thought of though is just recently I recorded a podcast with a gentleman named Anthony Billups who is with Comfort Systems. And we were talking about some of these things and just really we were reflecting on some of the outdated thinking that can exist in our industry around talent, around leadership, around what customers want, a variety of things. And when we were talking about leadership, I just love the way he put this is what we need to realize is leaders shouldn't care about their people eight hours a day. They should care about the 24-hour person.

So this idea that... And what you're saying with what made me think of that with the resume building versus goal setting is it's not about what you can do for the company, it's about how can we make you better and more of what you want to be more fulfilled, et cetera, and trusting that if leaders do that, it will also help the company. So looking at it less from the context of just their own agenda and more from the genuine place of care. So I think the other thing I loved that you said is about the idea of people want more of what feeds their soul. And I think one of the learnings that I hope people take from this episode and other content that we're creating is in service, there's so many opportunities to give people that, it's just not the context through which we've historically looked at what our goals are or how we're interacting with our teams.

It's because it has been very transactional or very, we had people that were happy to just go fix this, great, come back, go to the next job. But today we have people that want more purpose, they want more fulfillment. And service is a world where there's so many opportunities to give them that, we just need to look at things a bit differently. So I love those points. There's two other themes that came up in your presentation that I want to make sure we touch upon and maybe we can split them up and one of you can take each, those are personal clarity and mindset traps. So can we talk about how you define those things and what it means to the work that you both do?

Christine Miners: Yeah. Rick, do you want to talk about personal clarity? I have some thoughts that I might add, but I know that's a topic of passion for you.

Rick Lash: Yeah. So the idea about personal clarity that we spoke to is that all of the research from the last probably 60, 70 years into what drives successful performance is that we talk about this notion of organizational climate. Climate is the feel of the place, and there's tons and tons of research on the dimensions of organizational climate and how creating the right climate as a leader helps to drive performance within a team, however you measure that performance. And one of the key dimensions of climate is this dimension of clarity. And clarity really is about two things. It's about, first of all, do people have clarity on where they fit in the bigger picture? So how does my daily contribution align with the goals of our team and the goals of the organization, and how does that contribute to society at large?

So having clarity and having that line of sight is important. But equally important too is having clarity on lines of authority. Who do I go to? Who are the key decision makers? How do I get things done? And clarity is the most important dimension of climate. If you're lacking clarity in a team, nothing else matters because you've got just people who are showing up every day but are operating in a vacuum. The old adage of, I just feel like I'm a cog in a wheel, that's really what it is. That's what lack of clarity gets you. And so-

Sarah Nicastro: I think also that ambiguity creates anxiety for people.

Rick Lash: Yeah.

Sarah Nicastro: So then when you layer that we are in this permacrisis landscape, it's creating, it's fueling this sense of anxiousness.

Rick Lash: Yep, because you can't predict what's going to happen next. Christine talked about the word that we used around permacrisis is, is that you're constantly, it's the old psychology experiments of putting a dog in a cage and then shocking the bottom of the cage, and eventually the dog just lies down and just waits for the next shot to come because they can't do anything to control their environment. But the important aspect of clarity is, is that as a leader, your number one task is, is to create the context, to create that clarity for people. Sometimes even in the absence of having clarity yourself, just not having clarity because your boss isn't giving it to you, doesn't excuse you from not creating clarity in your own team. And that's why leaders get paid what they get paid, because your job is to create clarity for your team.

But before you can create clarity in your team, you as a leader have to have clarity yourself. It's the old adage, you're putting on the oxygen mask for yourself before you put it on for other people. So as a leader, you got to know, you've got to be able to answer the question of who am I as a person and why do I choose to lead? And what is the impact that I choose to have through my leadership? If you can't answer those questions, you can't hope to create clarity for others.

Sarah Nicastro: Okay. So I have a follow-up question, and I'm trying not to come up with too many of these because I don't want to get us off track on time and everything. So relating this back to the topic of empowerment. Okay, so first of all, I absolutely agree with what you're saying. Like I said, I think a lack of clarity just fuels this discomfort in people or anxiety in people. But what I'm curious about specifically when we're thinking about empowerment is knowing that, like you said, the number one objective needs to be creating this clarity. How do we make room within that clarity for creativity? Because I'm just thinking another aspect of empowerment is that we aren't so rigid in our expectation or our defined clarity for people to not have that sense of ownership, to be themselves, to weigh in to the extent that it's feasible and realistic to solve problems on their own, to do things in what feels like their own way. So I'm just curious, when we talk about the importance of creating clarity, how do we also as leaders, leave room for and even encourage creativity?

Christine Miners: I have a thought on that, and I feel like Rick, we've talked about this before, but I think there's a difference between big picture clarity that creates parameters for people and guiding principles for how we make decisions and helps people understand in a clear way the context in which we operate and what's important to us and what value we're trying to create for our stakeholders, usually our customers. That's clarity to me. I think sometimes though, in a leadership capacity, we confuse that with creating task clarity for people, which is much more directive and much more prescriptive.

And I think when we confuse that and we start to think that creating clarity for people is really about creating task clarity and being directive in that way, then we start to drive empowerment, innovation, creativity, being nimble, agile, having people who know how to think and make decisions, that starts to go away because we teach people that if you wait long enough, I'll tell you exactly how to translate this big picture clarity into actions. I think it's important we set expectations for people that people have clarity around what good looks like in their role and what functionally they're accountable for and what's important in their role. But I think we can't cross the line and invest all of our time in task clarity. That's where we get in trouble.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. So maybe part of it is that leaders can get confused or blur the line between parameters and prescriptiveness. That makes sense.

Christine Miners: And I think Sarah, it's a challenge in this industry in particular because I think in this industry, not to say I hate generalizations, and not to say this is true for everyone, but I think many folks in this industry have risen through the ranks into leadership roles. And the challenge with that is for most leaders in this sector, they're already expert at the jobs of their people. And so it's very easy then to fall into this is how it needs to be done, and into that task clarity is they actually know how to do the jobs, they've done the job. And so I think it's an extra big challenge and an extra big self-management opportunity for leaders in this sector to stay up and stay up in the purpose clarity as opposed to task.

Sarah Nicastro: I think that's a really good point, and I think it's a totally different conversation, maybe one we can have you back to talk through, but I know many leaders in this space who have risen through the ranks that are phenomenal leaders, phenomenal. But we also, I think as an industry and really just in general across the board, have to be very careful of the go-to way to acknowledge someone's excellence as an individual contributor is to make them a manager and a leader. And not everyone is built for that.

So I think when we're talking about a landscape where leadership is equally important or in some ways maybe more important than management, we need to make sure that we're not promoting just anyone to those roles. And also that we're putting the time, effort, and money into training and ongoing development of our leaders because we acknowledge how critical that role is. But it's a really good point that when they know the job intimately, they might be more inclined to say and do this, this and this.

Christine Miners: Yeah.

Sarah Nicastro: Okay. Rick, can you talk a little bit, or wait, who was going to talk about mindset traps? Sorry, I got us off track.

Rick Lash: It's Christine.

Christine Miners: Yeah, no, it's okay. I can talk to mindset traps. I feel like it's my favorite topic of conversation probably because I get caught in them too. But you know what? There's some common ones that really stand out and I know Rick and I, we work with leaders in all capacities. So whether it's one-on-one coaching, we do Intacct team coaching for executive leaders, and then we do leadership development programming. And it doesn't matter in what context we work, there's some mindset or thinking traps that tend to rise to the surface that I think are problematic. One of them is actually just that very simple mindset of I'm only adding value when I'm getting stuff done. And I think that, that is problematic, because if I'm only adding value when I'm getting stuff done, that's management at the most, but it's certainly not leadership.

Leadership is, yes, it's about driving results, but it's not about checking things off a list and bringing things to completion. And I think where that gets leaders in trouble is when they've got capacity to actually sit and think and reflect and do the kind of thinking that would allow them to create clarity and empower people in their environment. They have this feeling often of guilt or not knowing what to do with that time, because it feels like I'm not creating value for the organizations. That's one that rises to the surface. One of the other ones that rises to the surface, and it's funny because I just had a conversation with a CEO yesterday about this in a different sector, but it's this notion of I get something from my people. It's not really the way I wanted it or it doesn't quite meet my expectations.

And it's this mindset trap of, well, I give feedback. It's just faster if I do it myself, and surely they ought to know, after I've done it myself and shown them what it was supposed to look like. Surely they ought to know how to do it the next time. And surely I've created clarity around what my expectations are, and I think that is, it's flawed thinking. I think it's a common mindset trap, and I think it gets us into this place where people start to take shortcuts in their work because they become dependent on their leader to fix it and bring it to completion. And it's problematic for a bunch of reasons, not the least of which it erodes role clarity. So people at the front line start to believe that my role is to bring it 70% of the way there and my leader will bring it the other 30%, and it continues to pull leaders back down into the weeds. It feels good-

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, I was also thinking about empowerment again, that could create resentment in the sense of, okay, well you want me to do this, then you step in and do it, so just do it anyway. Do you know what I mean? It's like you said, you trusted me, but so rather than a teaching moment of let's try this or have you thought about this or whatever, it's when you just step in and finish it or redo it or do it yourself. It's working against the idea of empowering people to improve and have that sense of ownership.

Christine Miners: Yeah. And I think we leave a lot to implied. If I think of the CEO that I was speaking with yesterday, the individual said to me, actually gave me an example and said, I have this stuff that somehow ends up on my desk and I'm at eight o'clock at night after dinner with my family I'm like, I'm editing it. And I said, well, why do you do that? I can't imagine as the CEO of a large organization that you are creating value for the organization by actually editing grammar and spelling and how things are written at eight o'clock at night. And the individual said, well, I'm not, but it comes to me with all these mistakes. I said, well, have you ever actually pushed it back to people to say, I expect by the time it lands on my desk, it's 98% of the way there that I'm not editing. The only value I'm creating is more around point of view and her response-

Sarah Nicastro: I think too... Sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt you.

Christine Miners: No, her response was, well, I send it back to them. Surely they ought to know. That's where the mindset trap is. It's in this implicit feedback that we're giving as opposed to explicit. And explicit resetting expectations around what you're accountable for, what right looks like as opposed to just taking what feels like the faster road to getting the result we want, which usually the faster road is, I'll just fix it myself-

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, that's exactly what I was going to say. It's not only a mindset trap, but it's also just habit because it's like-

Christine Miners: Totally.

Sarah Nicastro: ... it is faster and easier a lot of times to fix something yourself or do something yourself than it is to teach, enable and empower people to do it. But yeah. Yeah.

Christine Miners: And I think these thinking traps do create habit. These thinking traps become deeply ingrained. We believe they're true. We never challenge whether they're true or not, and they just ingrain habits and almost belief systems of what's true as opposed to challenging it, really challenging, putting the mirror back on ourselves and saying, if I'm not getting what I need here, what aspect of how I'm showing up and what I'm reinforcing or not reinforcing is getting in the way of bringing people along. And oftentimes I think if you just told people what you needed from them, I think most people are experiences, they rise to the occasion or they at least try. People don't wake up in the morning and think, how can I mess up my job today? So, those are the big ones for me. I don't know, Rick, if you'd add anything to that.

Rick Lash: Yeah, the only other thing that I would say is that there's a very big emotional component to all of this that tends to drive behavior that we tend not to pay attention to. And I think, as you said earlier, Christine, that many folks in field services did rise through the ranks and they rose through the ranks because they were good at getting stuff done. In our language, we say that they're very achievement driven. They get a lot of satisfaction out of being able to set goals and solve complex problems and then to be able to get things done through their own efforts. And that's deeply satisfying.

The challenge is that when you move into these leadership positions, is that you have to draw upon a different well of emotion, which isn't so much driven out of a need for achievement. It's more driven out of what we would call a need for power and influence. So it's not so much that I get satisfaction out of getting things done myself. I get satisfaction out of being able to elevate others to get things done. And that's actually, that draws from a very different motive. And it's hard for leaders often to make, not just make the intellectual shift, but make that emotional shift. Because part of it is, is that habits are fueled because they feel good. We keep feeding them because it's satisfying just to roll up our sleeves and get things done.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. We don't have time to get into this. So I'm going to say this question, but we're not actually answering it. But then I think about what you just said, Rick, and power and influence sounds, especially power, sounds very risky to me because then I think you go in the other direction equally risky for empowerment of ego. So then it becomes not taking satisfaction in achieving, but taking satisfaction in telling people what to do, but also not empowering them or really leading, which seems like it would be also a big problem. Again, we'll have to come back to that because... Christine's like, no, we'll not.

Christine Miners: I know. I'm like, no, we won't. We got to come back to it now in 20 seconds or less, just because I don't want to leave you hanging on the word power because I think Rick, you did the short version. The slightly longer version is there's two different kinds of power. One is socialize, the other is personal. So when we talk personalized power, that's a little bit more, I think what you were talking about, Sarah, around ego and status and where do I stand in the system? Socialized power is different. Socialized power is that desire to create positive impact for others because it empowers them to be more capable and creates more. That when Rick talks about power and influence, that's the version of power that he's really talking about, is drawing on that component of ourselves.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, no, that makes perfect sense. But it just reinforces the importance of people having the education and the coaching because if you just say, well, you need to exercise more power, and that's left to interpretation. Some people, even when the intent is good, can think of that as, okay, I need to be more directive versus I need to build better teams and et cetera. Okay, there's two more questions, at least we'll say two. Well, two more questions I want to make sure we get to. The first is thinking about empowerment, we already talked about why that's important for a lot of leaders in our space. So empowerment, nurturing, a sense of ownership among teams, what works?

Christine Miners: Okay. I don't know. I have a strong perspective on this one in terms of what I think leaders can do, and it's going to sound like a little trite, but I think if you're going to empower people, so we talked about a bunch of things like clarity and big picture and make people understand the context and what's important. I think the other missing ingredient that we haven't really talked about is leaders need to have an incredibly strong learning and growth orientation and mindset around that, and that has to be part of the impact they seek to create in terms of the climate and the environment they create for their people. Because I think what happens is most of us are wired, it's like instant gratification. So you assign me a task, I got my task done, great, and now I'm moving on to the next one.

And so people bounce back and forth, check this one off the list, I'm going to move to my next task. I'm going to check that one off the list. I'm going to move to the next one. And that is the opposite of a learning and a growth mindset. And when we lead in a fast-paced environment and we're driving for performance and results, that can sometimes be really attractive. I've got people who get stuff done and they move on. Where leaders I think can be stronger on empowerment is being more patient around learning and creating, I think you actually have to actively create the learning environment. Do you know what I mean? So it's almost like, I hate to use the word imposing, but it's still early in the morning and I can't think of a different word right now, but you've got to impose reflection on people.

And there's some real simple questions. It's quite systematic, it's reflect back on the experience, what worked, what didn't work, what can we do better next time? That's not rocket science. We're not reinventing the wheel. It's just leaders when we don't do that, our people don't naturally do it on their own either, and so they don't get smarter and more capable and they're not improving their judgment and decision-making skills. And then how can you be empowered if you don't have those skills?

Sarah Nicastro: I think it's prioritize and protect, because it's prioritizing it because we know it's important, it's protecting it because everyone's busy. And so it's really easy to let those opportunities slide and just get consumed with moving on to the next thing. But when you brought this topic up, Christine, what it makes me think of is we talked about permacrisis, which for better or worse makes me think it's dynamic, it's constantly changing. So when we as leaders or with our teams allow ourselves to become static in a dynamic environment where we're not evolving along with the continually evolving landscape and circumstances, it's a problem.

And so I think it's a really good point that leaders need to be taking that time for themselves, as you mentioned earlier, and not feeling guilty for it or frozen with what the heck do I do with this white space I put on my calendar? And then making sure they do the same with their teams. So Rick, anything else you want to add? Or also the other question is looking at what are the common missteps that leaders make when they're aiming for empowerment, but then what happens when they're maybe falling short? So you can weigh in on either of those or both?

Rick Lash: Yeah, well, maybe a little bit of both. I think that the point around creating an environment for learning is absolutely critical. And I would say that as leaders, one of your roles is to push people out of their comfort zone because if you are not, people aren't developing new capacity and you're not increasing capacity within your team. So I think some of the best practices that we've seen are leaders who actively are thinking about what are the stretch opportunities that they can provide for their people, but also providing a safety net so that people can learn from their mistakes. And I think that in permacrisis environments, leaders are more and more reluctant to do that. But in fact, you have to do it if you ever want to increase capacity in your team, but you have to do it for yourself as well.

So learning how to be uncomfortable, if you're not uncomfortable, you're not learning. And I think that creating that as a value within a team is important. So I would say that for leaders to think about how they can create an environment whereby people can feel supported in their own growth and development, I think is key. And I would say in terms of missteps, one of the biggest missteps is first of all for leaders not to be pushing themselves to be growing and learning and experiencing new things, but also not encouraging an environment where people can use failure as an opportunity for growth.

Sarah Nicastro: Absolutely. Yeah. And I think when we think about the changes in talent, and again, it's hard to do that without generalizing, but I think going back to Rick, some of the points you made earlier about a sense of purpose and experiences that fuel someone's soul, for a lot of today's workforce that is tied to those opportunities for growth and learning and not feeling that they're stuck or staying still. So in a lot of ways, when we can figure out how to get it right, it's mutually beneficial because it's good leadership, it's serving a purpose for the organization, but it's also helping those people ideally be more satisfied in their roles and hopefully stay part of the team longer because they're getting those opportunities with your organization versus feeling complacent or bored and wanting to go seek them somewhere else.

So on the flip side, some of the more long-term workers where you might be pushing them a little bit more, you might also have team members who are very welcoming of that, and you have to strike that balance. Okay. So in terms of missteps or best practices or really anything else, any final points or thoughts before we close?

Christine Miners: For me, I guess my final thought is overcorrecting, that's a misstep. So sometimes we make a decision, we want to change our leadership in a certain way, and it's almost we overcorrect, we swing the pendulum from one side to the other and it's too drastic, it's not sustainable, it's hard. I think it's leadership comes from these small new actions and habits and really taking the time to embed those new habits and understand their impact and iterate them as we go, as opposed to making these broad reaching massive goals in our leadership that are just hard for us to swing to that other side.

Rick Lash: Yeah. And I would say that the building on that is a big misstep is not creating the spare capacity for yourself and for others because learning and growth can't come when you're a 120% over capacity. And so it's a bit of a red herring to say we simply don't have the time. You never have enough time, but you have to be, I think, intentional and deliberate about creating that space where you can take the time to breathe, you can take the time to push people to learn and to grow and take the time for yourself for that important self-reflection to help you to continue grow and develop as an individual and as a leader.

Sarah Nicastro: I think what might make for a really interesting follow-up discussion if you guys were willing to come back is this idea of, Christine, you mentioned overcorrecting, and I think also sometimes people think it's one or the other. So to put it simply, I'm going to say management or leadership. We talked about those things being distinct or directive or empowering, however we want to define it, but having a conversation around the fluidity between those things and knowing the appropriate times to transition or switch or what that can look like for different leaders, I think that would be really interesting. But I could go on forever. I've already taken more of your time today than I was supposed to, so really appreciate that. Can you tell our listeners where they can find the book and also connect with you if they would like to?

Christine Miners: Yeah, so it's super easy. The website is just onceuponaleader.com. So onceuponaleader.com and you've got information about the book and it's also a way of reaching out to me or Rick. And then, of course, the obvious one would also be LinkedIn to reach out to us directly.

Sarah Nicastro: Excellent. I'll make sure to link the website in the show notes and everyone, please go have a look and get the book, have a read, and then would love to have you both back again in the future if we can. So thank you so much for your time and for the great conversation.

Rick Lash: Thanks Sarah.

Christine Miners: Thanks Sarah. We'd love to come back, so we look-

Sarah Nicastro: Thank you.

Christine Miners: ... forward to that.

Sarah Nicastro: That sounds good. You can learn more by visiting us at futureoffieldserviceref.ifs.com. While you're there, be sure to register for the Future of Field Service Insiders so you can stay up to date on our latest content. We also have one more Future of Field Service live tour event left for 2023 in Stockholm on October 10th. So if you're in or near that area and would like to join us, please register for that. 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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Smart Care’s Tenets of Scalable Service Success

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Smart Care’s Tenets of Scalable Service Success

In a session from the Future of Field Service Live Tour stop in Minneapolis, Sarah talks with Gyner Ozgul, President and COO of Smart Care Equipment Solutions about the company’s approach creating scalable success, particularly in a highly acquisitive business. From customer experience and digital transformation to company culture and talent development, Gyner talks about the factors that Smart Care prioritizes in creating growth that meets the needs of the business, its customers, and its employees – not only today but into the future.

Sarah Nicastro: Come on up. Hello, welcome, welcome.

Gyner Ozgul: How are you?

Sarah Nicastro: Thanks for being here.

Gyner Ozgul: Thank you.

Sarah Nicastro: Last but certainly not least, my friend Gyner Ozgul, President and COO of Smart Care Equipment Solutions. We've been talking a lot today about service differentiation, innovation, transformation. We've talked about some of the challenges the pandemic brought, some of the now growth and new initiatives that have come out of the recovery from that, et cetera. We're going to talk about the tenets of scalable service success. Before we get into that, tell everyone a little bit about you.

Gyner Ozgul: Gyner Ozgul, as you mentioned, President and Chief Operating Officer of Smart Care Equipment Solutions. We are the commercial side of kitchen repair. You had Matt up here earlier talking Whirlpool, that's residential. We do similar on the commercial side. We service commercial kitchen establishments. Typically, people equate those to restaurants, so there's a green check mark there.

But our bigger end markets are actually non-commercial food service spaces. If you think about hospitals and universities and educational facilities, those are much larger end markets for us than the restaurants we all think about. We certainly service them, but the commercial food space is much bigger than just the restaurants.

Sarah Nicastro: Good. We have talked quite a bit over the last few years about the journey that Smart Care has been on, highly acquisitive organization, rapid growth, and working to keep pace with customer expectations and demands and also keeping pace with digital sophistication, et cetera.

A lot of things you've been at the helm of. What I want to talk about today is you're very focused on scalable service success. As you grow, how do you scale the customer experience? How do you achieve repeatable success in what you're doing? Obviously customer experience is a huge factor in that, but what goes into that for you? What are those foundational elements?

Gyner Ozgul: We start with the customer need assessment, and each customer's a little different. Each of these end markets has different needs. If we think about quick service restaurants, so your McDonald's of the world, that customer's needs is speed, because they're serving a lot of customers and they're moving through it, so any equipment down or outage impacts their ability to produce product. Speed is really important to them.

Whereas in an educational facility, harsher procedures around food safety and temperature checks and things like that on their menu are paramount because they can't afford anyone to get sick, especially when one of the school district service does 40,000 meals a day. That's more important than the speed, is I have to make sure that all the food that I'm putting in these children's mouths is safe to eat. We start with the customer, and then we build our processes back against that, and then we use our systems to support that.

If I take the McDonald's example again, we'll build a SLA or a service level agreement with the end customer based on their pieces of equipment that they want to see repaired within not only response time, but also how long it takes to actually fix the piece of equipment. We build that into our process and then put that into our system. What we try to do from a scalability standpoint, and we partnered with IFS back in 2019, was we wanted a system that as much as we could take our process and systematize it so that we could get scale out of it.

We take essentially the air of human interaction of whether or not the SLA should be met or not be met away and let the system drive the expectation because what the process is we should be doing.

Sarah Nicastro: Jorge, you spoke this morning about the work you're doing to set that foundation. That's really the work that you did in 2019 essentially, right?

Gyner Ozgul: That's right.

Sarah Nicastro: We talked at one point about the fact that step one is setting the foundation, getting everyone on a platform from which everyone has access to the same insights. You're taking some of that non-automated friction out of the process. And then talk a little bit about what you see going forward in terms of now that you've done the foundational piece, what will come next in terms of better leveraging now the pool of data that you have and what you can do from that point on?

Gyner Ozgul: There is thousands of service providers in our space across the country. Not many of scale, but many service providers. The differentiation of service itself... I give our technicians a lot of credit and I like to say we are as good or better than our competitors in terms of delivering that last mile of service. But the points of differentiation when you get really good become harder to delineate between yourself and the competitor. So then for us it's how do we take that next step? Well, the next step for us is data. At our scale, we have tripled the business in five years in terms of revenue and customers.

We continue to do that year-on-year. What that enables for us is roughly half a million to three quarters of a million work orders completed a year. That type of data aggregation and helping customers who this is a major capital investment for them, they are spending somewhere between 25 and $200,000 for a piece of equipment. It's really expensive. We can use that data then to help guide them in their buying process and repair, replace decisions on predictive or prescriptive maintenance versus reactive maintenance. Data enables and unlocks a lot of that to happen. I always get to ask the question, well, that all sounds good, but it can be snake oil and vaporware and is this all real and does it work?

The answer is yes. We did a pilot of a couple of markets two years ago. Took all our data and said, if we put it into an AI or machine learning environment, what would it tell us about predictive or prescriptive breakage? We used ice machines in our case study, because everybody has an ice machine. All ice machines need to be cleaned. It's something that was consistent across all market segments and customers. We didn't clean any of the data, so we didn't do any of the scrubbing or the governance. We just said, we're going to put it all in and see what this machine does.

Over three months in two states, Texas and Florida, because we wanted to pick states where the ice machine breakage was high because the usage is high, it accurately predicted seven out of 10 ice machines being broke the next month in the location. And within the seven out of 10, five out of 10, it actually produced part failure as well. And that's, again, without cleaning and scrubbing and actually building process around it. It's a long way to answer your question to say we really feel that there's a lot of power in data differentiation. That's just one use case. The second use case besides the... There's three use cases.

One is the customer that I just described. The second is really driving efficiency back to the business. We've talked a lot about efficiency today, so very aligned with that. The third is using the data to help drive back that knowledge to your technicians. How do you create knowledge based tools that add scale? Your senior technicians have their little nope notepad here in their pocket and it's 20 years of knowledge that they've written down. How do you get it from here to somewhere in a centralized database that you can share with the technician that just got released out of training two months ago? We're really focused on that.

Sarah Nicastro: Now, with the acquisitions you do, you're kind of multiplying or compounding change management. Because you introduced a new system a few years ago, you got everyone on the same page and you're good, but then you're bringing new people on, bringing new people on. How do you handle that on an ongoing basis so that it isn't too disruptive to the business or to them?

Gyner Ozgul: We have a dedicated integration team, which helps because you have resources assigned to a specific task. But on that specifically, we put a lot of work and effort into understanding the businesses that we acquire before we integrate them into our process in our system. We begin with process first. The reason is is some of these businesses actually have best practices that are better than our own. We set aside the we're better than everyone that we buy approach.

What we say is, hey, if they're doing something that we should be doing, let's take that on, build it into our process, and then ultimately put that into the system as we integrate them. And then we get immediate buy-in, right? Because now we've centralized their process. One of the first businesses we bought was in Birmingham, Alabama back in early 2018. They had a really good defined dispatch process, even better than our platform businesses. We have taken probably half of their best practices and incorporated them in the last couple of years into our process just because it's so good.

They're a larger entity, so we haven't put them on our system yet, but they are scheduled for mid next year to go onto our system. We feel really good that because we've been on this recognizing their best practices and bringing them into our system, the cutover of bringing them into our system should be smoother because now they have immediate buy-in that we've recognized and respected their culture and what makes it special.

Sarah Nicastro: No, I think that's really good and looking at it from the perspective of having the ability to learn from these businesses, not just automatically put them into. When we talk about scalability, another huge topic has to be talent and talent development and a lot of the themes that come up there. What does that look like for Smart Care? What are some of the trends that you're seeing, challenges you're working through, et cetera?

Gyner Ozgul: Our biggest workforce at Smart Care is our technicians. They make up two-thirds of our entire workforce because they're what we're putting in front of our end customers every day. I'll speak to them and then the general. For the technicians, our biggest challenge has been the onboarding and training process, I was talking about this a little earlier with somebody, especially in that year one. Because as we were coming out of COVID, we had this hockey stick that happened.

Everyone thought it'd be a gradual recovery, and then actually promotes commercial businesses, hockey stick. Our managers were rushing to get technicians in the field to accommodate the volume pickup. We had a lot of turnover on year one technicians. They were leaving because our onboarding and training experience, frankly, wasn't very good, because it consisted of some qualitative view of some local manager or dispatcher saying this person is ready to go and run service calls. We've walked our way...

Sarah Nicastro: Because we really need them today.

Gyner Ozgul: Because we really need them right now. Last year we spent a lot of time and energy building and onboarding and training process and pulling in the technicians for that. Each of our markets has what we call district field trainer, which is a seasoned technician. That technician is the buddy of that new hire. But more importantly, they're the one that's going to release them to be able to do work or not, not the manager, not the dispatcher, not anyone else, not even myself in the organization. That technician is driving the accountability of that.

We get the buy-in then from the technician group that this person's ready and the specificity of the feedback the technician can also give, like they can only work in these three pieces of equipment and do it well. We follow that and our technology tools help us enforce that, because we assign skill competencies within our dispatch tool, within PSO. We can actually only assign the skills that they have and they can't be dispatched to anything else. It creates a little bit of a good blocker. We have improved our technician retention rate of year one technicians by almost 50% this year.

It's astounding, even to me. I'm very skeptical. Our CPO and I have one-on-ones and I always say, we should double check that number because I'm a little worried that it's a little overstated. And with the general population, it's been pay them what they deserve to be paid. We all have this trepidation to pay people what they deserve to be paid. Pay them what they deserve to be paid and set the expectations very clearly for them for success and enable their success. If they don't deliver on the pay that you paid them, then that's a separate conversation of accountability.

I am not one for the carrot. I will give you $1,000 and I'll give you another $1,000 if you do something right. I'm more like just give them the $2,000 and help them be successful. If they're not the right person, then they're probably not the right person at $1,000 or $2,000. They're just not the right person. I say compensate them well because it's hard to overcome culture if the compensation is right to begin with because that person feels they're undervalued immediately. That's something really important for me. For the rest of our group, we really focus on that.

I drive a fair amount of push of intercommunication of those groups. One of the first questions I always ask when something comes to me, whether it be a steering committee meeting or a process improvement meeting, is I'll say, well, did you communicate with finance, or did you communicate with supply chain and get their input on this or sign off on this if it's applicable?

If the answer's no, I say, well, then I don't really have a lot to add because if your coworkers aren't aligned with you, then my alignment is irrelevant. My alignment is the team is aligned, this is a solution, and I support that and help them be successful.

Sarah Nicastro: The other thing we talked a bit about, the onboarding and training, which is obviously having a huge impact that you are wanting to double check. But the other thing we talked about is the idea of career progression in service and how that might be evolving going forward. I fully agree with you on pay people what they're worth.

At the same time, we know that for today's talent, it isn't just about dollars the way it once was, there's these other elements and one of those is some want the ability to progress, they want to know what that progression could look like, et cetera. What are you doing to keep pace with what things look like today, but also start mapping out the evolution of what the role is looking like going forward and what those progression steps may be?

Gyner Ozgul: For our technician base, the way I think about it is the progression for them is two buckets. One is the bucket of technicians that are happy in their current roles and they really don't want to do something else, but you can't forego them either. You have to think about what the answer is for them. And then there's the progression for the technicians who want to be more in the organization. For the first bucket, what we do with them is, hey, what is a training path to help them hone their skills and feel energized every single year?

We work with their managers on a development that's customized that we track in our LMS systems for that first bucket of technicians that every year we're improving their skills, because they want that, right? They're like, just because I only want to be a technician, and I correct them when they say only, I'm very clear with them to say we need to still train them and make them the best technician possible in the business and make them feel good about coming to work every day. With the other technicians, we've created a number of different career paths.

You can obviously grow in your technician career all the way to this district field trainer that I talked about. You start as an apprentice and you can grow to district field trainer. We also have a training group primarily made up of former technicians that does classroom and field training specifically with technicians. They feel good that they have this training path they can join. We have allowed technicians to become district field sales representatives. I mean, they know the product, they know the customer.

We teach them the sales skills that they need to know and how to present them well. And then finally, there's a subset of technicians that just want to go into field service operations. They can start off as a service manager and then work their way up in the operations group. We've been very clear to map out each one of those for our technicians, so they feel that this is an organization that no matter what path they take, they can feel supported and get successful.

Sarah Nicastro: And they have choice.

Gyner Ozgul: And they have choice.

Sarah Nicastro: Which is important now. When Matt was up, he was talking about how they work to nurture that entrepreneurial spirit that the independent service providers have. It made me think of a conversation you and I had about how you look for and figure out what to do with talent that you or others think has very high potential. People that are maybe more innovative, maybe higher drive, et cetera. What should leaders look for in recognizing that? And then how do you maybe put them on a different path or fast track them in some way or make sure that they don't get bored or that sort of thing?

Gyner Ozgul: Yeah, it's fun, there's this group of individuals in the organization that I like to keep my eye on with my direct reports. Al is my VP of IT standing over there and he knows that... We talk about this with my direct reports. Who are the bright star, I call them in the organization, or who are the ones I should be on the lookout for? And then I proactively like to reach out to them and just talk to them. Sometimes not about anything specific, like just what's their experience like, what are we doing in the organization I should know about.

And then sometimes in those conversations they give you something, a little spark. We should go improve parts this way. And then you say, well, tell me more about that. And then you have a little more conversation on it and you're like, they have a pretty interesting idea. Then I take them and I'll put them in a little bit of a discovery special project and empower them to go do that. They may be or may not be in that work stream function and that's less relevant to me. I just want to give them an opportunity to go do something and shine.

If it works out, it could evolve to something a little more permanent for them. If it doesn't work out, I just like the fact that I'm giving them an opportunity to show us what they have, a competency of creative thinking that they have, and bring it more broadly to the organization. I do keep track of those. I mean, we had a very young talented woman who left because her husband moved to Iowa because he got a job out there a couple years ago. She recently moved back to the Twin Cities and now she's working for the Alan's team again.

I kept my eye on her, and it was a fun conversation. Because as soon as I learned she had moved back, I sent Al a note and I said, "Hey, you should reach out to Kathleen. She's got a lot of potential. She left the organization on good terms. She had to move. I'd really like her back in the organization because she was one of those sparks that we had." Of course, Alan interviewed her and calls me the next day and says, "Wow, yeah, we're bringing her on board." I feel really good about those folks.

I mean, they need an opportunity. One of our VPs of service on the specialty side, which handles coffee for us, I hired him as a materials planner in supply chain 10 years ago, and now he's running all of service on our specialty division. It's really cool to find them in there and work with them.

Sarah Nicastro: It's also a fun part of rapidly growing. There's a lot of opportunities for you to watch for those shining stars and help them progress. How would you describe the importance of culture in scalable success?

Gyner Ozgul: Very important. You said we do acquisitions. We spun out of a company here in the Twin Cities called Ecolab back in 2017. We were part of a corporate environment for roughly 20 years or so. We spun out to be independent, and we immediately started doing acquisitions to scale our business up. Of course, the culture we had was a culture that was very Ecolab, and there's nothing wrong with it, but it wasn't our culture. It was an Ecolab culture. What we learned in our first few acquisitions was our culture will always be evolving.

As long as we continue to do acquisitions, our culture can never be stagnant. The scalability of our culture has to be, here's what our culture is today. We just bought these two or three organizations. What does that do to our existing culture? How does that move now as we bring these organizations into our own? It's an ongoing resolve to revisit that culture and that statement for us.

But there are tenets within that, things like safety that we're very resolute on, integrity we're very resolute on, quality of service is something we have a lot of passionate on. There are tenets within that, but we allow ourselves the flexibility to evolve our culture as we buy more and more businesses.

Sarah Nicastro: You mentioned really just in passing one of the things that I know you value a lot, which is not only communication but listening. I think that's really important because the leaders that are doing the most to stay in tune with, here's not what I want our culture to be, so let me just assume that's what it is, right? But we have these objectives.

How do people really feel? What is it? Is it hitting the mark? What could we be doing better? The people that are having those conversations have the most opportunity to get the transparency, make the people you're talking to feel valued, but also course correct and continually improve.

Gyner Ozgul: Yeah, lots of questions. I have to watch it a little bit of my blind spot too. In one of our breakout groups I mentioned that. That sometimes if you're the leader that asks a lot of questions, it can intimidate people in the room. I have be a little careful. But a lot of times I ask questions because I want to learn a lot about the organization because that really drives the decision making process for myself. What you said is right, for me, that's really important, really utmost important. Listen to the teams and hear what they're saying.

Oftentimes you might think you're hearing them, but you're not. I do a lot of playbacks for myself. Here's what you said and here's what I heard. I'll even say it like that just to make sure the person's acknowledging that that's correct or not correct. You said we do a really bad job of stocking parts. What I heard is we need to probably think about what our planning parameters should be, because you're giving me the output and I'm giving you the upstream of where we should go work.

If they agree, then I feel like I have good direction. If they disagree, it's good because then I can get to what they're really trying to say. I like to get them there so that they feel like I'm hearing them.

Sarah Nicastro: And so you know what the real deal is. We talked recently about the fact that like everyone, you had your challenges during the pandemic, and now you're at a point of stability, which probably feels pretty good. But also you mentioned that puts you in a position where you need to be looking at organizational structures, the quality of the people you have in each of those structures, and making sure that with that stability you're not getting complacent and that you are continually improving. What does that look like for you and for Smart Care?

Gyner Ozgul: Yeah, I'll give you an example. Last summer, right about this time, we had gotten to a scale in the recovery, where my old operational leadership structure was showing some fractures. The fractures were showing up in lapses in customer communication and service delivery and some of the culture and turnover I talked about earlier. Those to me were all outputs and indicative of a scale problem we had. Not necessarily that the leaders I had in the organization were bad.

Some of them had some opportunities, to be quite frank, but more so that I hadn't stepped back to the organization and say, okay, this is an organization that now has twice the volume that it did at the onset of COVID, and yet it still retains the organizational structure of what it did during COVID. I stepped back and reorganized the service teams and really add two objectives in doing that, which is how do we personalize our connection with the technician and how do we personalize our connection with the local customer?

I wanted to bring local field back to the organization because we had the stretch during COVID. We redesigned the organizational structure in the fall, brought on two new VPs of service externally. I needed some talent, some new talent in with some ideas and some thought process. I also aligned the acquisitions to the service leaders. In the past, they were aligned to either an integration manager or myself.

I didn't feel like I was giving those acquisitions the time they needed to feel like they were part of the culture. I align them to a service leader who could be more observant, give them the time, meet with them, help them understand their needs, and bring them into the organization in the right way.

Sarah Nicastro: I'm thinking about the fact that after a period of time where there was so much change that we weren't choosing, now that things are a bit more stable, we run the risk of avoiding change because we're tired of it, which could be detrimental to forward progress.

Gyner Ozgul: I agree.

Sarah Nicastro: How do you navigate that yourself?

Gyner Ozgul: In recent months specifically, I have taken an approach when there's what I'll call a really big problem usually shows, we all call them that and we know what they are because they suck up a lot of our energy. If you start seeing lots of conference calls and phone calls on something, it usually means the process itself is strained for whatever reason. I've taken the approach for myself to step back. When I start getting pulled into a lot of meetings on something, now I might pause at some point.

As opposed to just going to all those meetings and doing the firefighting, I'll step back and say, okay, can we get the right people in the room and have a more holistic discussion about this? Because all these meetings are telling me there's some other problem in this, whether that be scale or culture, and we're not stepping our way back to go solve that problem. And that has been with intent. I've been asking the team to do that a lot. Look, I'll just give you an example. I showed up in one of our product sprints.

Our finance team had been trying to accommodate a work in progress accrual problem we've been having for almost a year. I don't know, we've done six sprints on it, and I just felt like we kept putting the fire out on this thing. And finally, I called our CFO and I called our leader of finance and I said, I'm putting the brakes on this. The team needs to come together and understand what is the solution they want, what is the output they're looking for, build those requirements, and then come back to the technical team so we can solve this.

Because otherwise, doing it iteratively with failure in perpetuity never really gets you the solution, but it also frustrates everybody with the time it takes. I mean, that's something I have a lot of conviction around recently, like that continuous improvement.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, that's good. Going back to the first thing we talked about with the data, you're also at the early stages of not only having that, but looking at all of the ways you can leverage that. That frontline role is really shifting not just to be a mechanical or a hands-on role, but a knowledge worker role where they're going to consult with the restaurants on maybe it's usage scenarios, maybe it's peak times and how to better... There's a lot more to it that fits that experience story than just the machine itself and is it or isn't it working.

Gyner Ozgul: Yes. We've seen in the data, as an example, some customers have undersized the equipment that they purchase. They know that they need a lot of ice because they're a bar and they've gone and bought the smallest ice machine and they're always constantly running out of ice.

Sarah Nicastro: Go get a bucket of ice. Go get a bucket of ice. I worked in the restaurant industry for a long time.

Gyner Ozgul: More importantly, the ice machine is running so hard that the breakage happens more often. If you teach them the buying behavior of, hey, what do you expect a business volume for you to be? I expect it to be this. Okay, you should buy an ice machine that fits that. Not go to a dealer and say, well, that's $1,000 less than the step up. Literally you save on the front end on the capital purchase itself, you're more than going to pay for on the repair because you've undersized. We like the fact that we can help them provide value for that.

Sarah Nicastro: You can report to your same stations as the morning in four minutes. Okay, thank you so much.

Gyner Ozgul: You're welcome.

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Is the Soft Skills Gap Growing?

August 2, 2023 | 30 Mins Read

Is the Soft Skills Gap Growing?

Sarah welcomes back Lauren Winans, CEO & Principal Consultant of Next Level Benefits, to discuss the factors that are contributing to service organizations’ mounting concern over finding and nurturing soft skills and sheds light on what steps can be taken to ensure the soft skills gap doesn’t widen.

Sarah Nicastro: Welcome to the Future of Field Service Podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Nicastro. We talk a lot on this podcast and across industry resources in service about the importance of soft skills, and the increasing challenge of finding new employees with soft skills, upskilling and reskilling existing employees to grow their soft skills. Today we're going to be talking about, is the soft skills gap growing? I'm excited to welcome back to the podcast Lauren Winans, who is the CEO and principal consultant at Next Level Benefits. Lauren, welcome back to the podcast.

Lauren Winans: Thanks for having me. I'm very excited, a great topic too. I'm looking forward to chatting about this.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, me too. For anyone that doesn't recognize Lauren, she was on the podcast for the first time, episode 132. I will link that in the show notes for everyone. That episode, we were talking about building a compelling employee value proposition. Lauren is I would say, in the nature of people I interview on this podcast, close enough to call a neighbor. She's in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, which is where my husband is from. So just two hours or so down Interstate 79. Lauren, before we get into our topic for today, just tell everyone a little bit about yourself, your background and Next Level Benefits.

Lauren Winans: Sure. I kind of grew up in the HR industry. I was in HR leadership roles for about 20 years. Worked at a variety of different companies like General Nutrition Center, American Eagle Outfitters, Consult Energy. When I left the corporate world to start my consulting business about four years ago, I really had the intentions of focusing on employee benefits projects. But we quickly have scaled, and now are focused on projects related to all areas of HR. Next Level Benefits is really a resource to you for any sort of HR expertise.

We staff a variety of different HR experts that have at least 20 years of corporate HR experience. We can really be tactical as well as strategic advisory, or really just jump in and help you accelerate projects. That's what we've been doing lately. I'm really happy to say that I'm coming up on a four year anniversary here, and it's been wonderful. I always love having a chance to talk with you, Sarah. I'm super excited about our topic today, because it's a good one.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, I'm excited as well, and happy you're back. To your point, even though you started with the focus of employee benefits in mind, you really have not only practiced in the corporate world, but in your consulting firm work with companies across really all sorts of HR and talent issues.

Lauren Winans: Yes.

Sarah Nicastro: So there's a lot of different things we could talk about. When Lauren and I chat, we end up, we could brainstorm 10 podcast topics. The reason I wanted to focus on soft skills today is because, in the conversations I have at the different Future of Field Service events that we've had across the globe, it's kind of a growing concern among service leaders. On one hand, the need for soft skills seems to be increasing still, right? It's I think on an incline starting a number of years ago, but continuing still to increase.

Being able to find those skills among employees, whether that's existing employees, and looking for ways to nurture that in people, train people, upskill people, or whether that's looking for soft skills in employees that are coming into the workforce. It just seems to be that the demand is growing, the ability to find or create those skills is increasingly challenging. So I think it's a good area to focus on, because it's a pain point that we're hearing about a lot. First, what I want to talk about is, in the HR or talent world, how do you define soft skills?

Lauren Winans: It's a good question. I think everyone kind of comes at it from a different place. I kind of look at soft skills as almost like the intangible pieces of someone's skillset. How good are they at communicating? Do they have any sort of emotional intelligence that they can deploy in a certain situation? How good are they at problem solving? Are they adaptable? Do they work well with their team? Can they resolve conflict? These are all kind of examples of soft skills. It's really, it's not just about tactically can they do the job. Technically, do they have the skill, the experience, the degree, the certification.

It's really around, can they provide more of a well-rounded experience to customers and other employees, coworkers that they're working with? How good are they at that? That is what I look at as soft skills. It's those intangible talents that not everyone necessarily has, because they're harder to teach. Some people just innately and naturally can incorporate them into how they work, and others really need a little bit more of a prescribed roadmap of how to incorporate that into their daily professions.

Sarah Nicastro: Mm-hmm. I think that intangible nature is part of what makes it so challenging. When you're thinking about, do they have this certification, do they have this much experience? Those are things that are very easy to assess. Whereas soft skills, the fact that it is less black and white makes it a lot tougher. In our industry specifically, part of what's kind of creating this growing need or gap, if you will, is historically a lot of the jobs... And I'm generalizing for the sake of conversation. There's obviously industry-to-industry differences, but in general, a lot of the jobs historically were very technical in nature. The work that was being done was very much, a customer calls with a need. The technician is deployed to go and do that technical work, and resolve the issue.

Today with the digital nature of a lot of the assets and equipment that people are working on, in many industries, the technical aptitude is actually, the need is decreasing. It still has to be there in the sense that they are able to do what needs to be done, but it's a lot less programming or really these super deep skills. However, service is also evolving to be more predictive, proactive. A lot of times subscription-based, where the importance of relationship, i.e., soft skills, comes into play and is increasing. So you have the challenge of these existing workers that were really good or are really good at that technical piece, but not necessarily good at, or maybe even interested in being good at the soft skills piece.

Then the other part of that we're hearing a lot of is that companies who are recruiting in younger workers, they're lacking some of these soft skills. They don't want to have real conversations. They would rather text or whatever. So it's kind of a challenge that is being created from many different angles. All right, so I think one thing is companies need to think about, while these traits are less tangible than some of the qualifications or certifications that they're looking for related to the industry, they probably need to work on putting language to it to some degree, or defining what it is that is important for their roles, I would think. Right?

Lauren Winans: For sure. I think what's challenging about today's job postings it is very, "Hey, this is what we're looking for." It's a very measurable attribute or characteristic, or piece of experience or certification that they're looking for. Then what is expected is, once you bring that person into the role, then the expectation is, "Oh, okay. Well here's all the things you said you can do. Yep, that's part of the job. Now we want you to also interact with the customer in this way." Or, "Now we want you to manage this team of people." What's happening is-

Sarah Nicastro: It's almost like an afterthought.

Lauren Winans: Yeah. The articulation around the expectations from a soft skills perspective is really not incorporated in the job posting. Therefore, then there are leaders and/or other folks within an organization that then get disappointed with someone's performance because they don't necessarily have something that was not articulated during the recruiting process to begin with. I wholeheartedly believe that job postings are really that first step of ensuring that you're getting the talent that you need, you want, you deserve. If you don't fully articulate what it is that the job entails, and what you need to be successful in it, then you're naturally going to end up with someone in that role that's not going to fit the bill.

I'm very much a proponent of being very clear and upfront about incorporating soft skills as a part of the job posting. I've even seen some that show hard skills, soft skills, experience, and then also what does it take to be successful in this position. I think most people out there are realistic about their shortcomings, and what they're willing to do and what they're not willing to do. I think if you lay it out there, you really are going to weed out the folks who probably are not the right fit. You might find some folks that are kind of on the fence, but that's really what the recruiting process is for, is to fully vet them out and then determine who rises to the top.

That being the starting point I think would make things so much easier as you bring on new talent into the organization. That doesn't explain away some of the upskilling that might need to happen with some existing talent, which I'm sure we're going to talk about today. But I think when you think about new talent coming into an organization, you've got to be clear about what your needs are. That means, as an organization, you have to know what you need out of this frontline technician, or even your leaders. You need to know what you need out of them in order to articulate it, in order to find it.

Sarah Nicastro: Mm-hmm. I should have thought to look this up before we started chatting, because I'm not going to remember who to attribute it to. A while back, I think I actually wrote an article on a post I saw on LinkedIn. It was a video, and the person... It was an author, I think, I just don't remember who it was. It might have been Adam Grant, was saying, "We need to stop calling them soft skills and start calling them human skills." I think it's interesting, because the point you're making is that we have this need for these skills. We have this challenge of the need increasing, and the ability to find them becoming more complex.

Yet we're probably not prioritizing articulating that in the job postings. So we're continuing to allow it to be an afterthought, because it wasn't a need before. It's similar to when we talk to companies who are putting in place a new technology. The biggest challenge they always have is change management, always. I've been doing this for 15 years. That has always been the answer. It is still the answer, yet we're not getting ahead of it. Do you know what I mean? It's the people part that is always complex, so we need to stop letting it be an afterthought, and start putting more focus on it from the beginning.

The other thing I wanted to ask about is in the recruiting process. As companies are bringing new talent in, we talked about making sure that we are articulating appropriately the expectations in a job posting. I could ask you 20 more questions on that, but I'm going to not let myself do that, for the sake of getting through some of the points that we wanted to get through. In the recruiting interviewing process, what are some of the questions, tools, tactics that companies can use to determine if a candidate either has the soft skills they're looking for, or would be successfully able to be trained and equipped with those skills?

Lauren Winans: There's a variety of different tools out there, and I'll just kind of lump them all together by calling them assessment tools. There's ways that you can assess someone's just natural personality, as well as what they deem to be important, and an important part of their job, by asking them a variety of questions in a survey format. If you do that during the hiring process before you've even extended an offer, it does make it easy to kind of identify. This person is really technically sound, and they will be able to do this job with their eyes closed. However, based upon our assessment, they might not be a great leader. So if we bring them in, we need to know that upfront. And we need to know that the career development path for this individual is going to include leadership training, if they do indeed want to move forward in the organization.

These assessment tools, I mean there's a variety of different ones. There's StrengthsFinder, there's DiSC, O A D. There's so many different ones that you can deploy. Really, they all ultimately end up doing the exact same thing. They have a different delivery method, and of course, there's different ways that you can interpret the results. As an organization, I would recommend if you're not using one of those assessment tools, it's absolutely worth it. Do you need to use it for every single open role? You don't have to. You could, and it absolutely is helpful in determining right fit, and what blind spots that you might run into with that employee, should they be part of your organization. But you could even just focus it on a particular role or position, that you want to ensure you have a balance between that technical and those human skills that are really necessary to complete the job.

Those types of assessments I find are probably the best tools out there, but there's also different things you can do in the recruiting process. You could do some sort of role play or simulation, where you can determine how would this person act in this particular situation. You can even go through different types of modeling and training that would help to kind of show... There's something called storytelling modeling, that can really help inform exactly the thought process that a person goes through during a certain situation. If this person is a tech who is installing a certain piece of equipment in someone's residential home, you present these different problems that might occur. And really assess problem solving, communication with the customer, all these different things that you can kind of incorporate into that model to see how they do.

I think that there's just, we want the hiring process to go so quickly, because we're all competing for talent. We don't necessarily take the time sometimes to find out if that person is the right fit for us. So we want to put that offer out there before it's too late, before someone else has snatched them up, before they've accepted another offer. While I can understand the competitive nature of that, I do think that is a really big risk to organizations, who then end up on the flip side of this. Which is, now I have these people as employees, but they're not necessarily performing the way I want them to. Now what do I do?

Now how do I get this person who's technically sound, but has no interest in having a dialogue with anyone, whether it be a coworker, a leader or customer? It's interesting, because the tools are helpful to a point, but you as an organization need to develop a process and an understanding around them, that then allows you to take what you've learned from the tool, and then decide what you're going to do about it, and who you're looking for. Because you're never going to find the perfect candidate, but you can always find someone who's almost there. And who just needs that little extra bit of training or coaching to get them to the place that is helpful for the team at large.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. On that point, the next question I wanted to ask you is, are there I guess best practices, or suggested programs, methods that are known to be effective in training and developing soft skills?

Lauren Winans: To be honest with you, no. I think that's part of the conundrum that we're in. There's a variety of assessment tools out there, like I mentioned. I even mentioned a few names. I feel really comfortable that, given the right circumstances, you really can use those assessment tools in a way that does help you kind of read between the lines to leverage it for soft skills. And identifying what soft skills may be there, may be present, may not be present. But I have yet to come across a tool dedicated specifically to soft skill assessment, and have it be something that is really an effective means of making decision making for recruitment, and even for identifying areas of training that's necessary for an existing employee.

Because of that, it doesn't mean they're not out there, it just means I haven't come across them. I haven't had the experience of using them, of leveraging them, or having a client that has done so. That's part of the problem. What I always recommend, because of where we're at in this whole conversation, is leverage the tools that you have and make sure that you have some talented individuals. Whether that's in your HR team, or whether it's someone in your recruiting process, maybe it's someone, a consultant contractor, maybe it's a vendor. That you can put in place in that process that can help take the tools you're using and be able to read between the lines to create something that is important and integral to identifying soft skills, presence or not.

That is probably the bandaid that we are all going to have to operate within until there is a really great model out there, a structure or tool, what have you that is doing this better than everything else that's out there. Also, you can think about soft skills as being, it's hard to measure. It's more of an art than it is a science. We all know, I mean at least in my opinion, humans make the best art. I do think that it's going to be a while before there is a soft skill generator out there, that you could just type in your profile and figure out which soft skills you're great at. It does take a little bit of teasing and pulling, and assessing and analyzing to really come to the right conclusion. Particularly when you're deciding whether or not to hire someone, or whether or not to put them through training.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. Now what about the training itself? Are there recommendations on soft skills trainings that work, in terms of whether it's a new hire or continual improvement or upskilling existing workers?

Lauren Winans: Yeah. I'm always a proponent of identifying your internal talent. Sometimes people are just in the wrong job. There's opportunities to provide them with a development course, some career coaching, emotional intelligence training, or some sort of management around mindfulness, stress management. Sometimes all it takes is a little encouragement, a little coaching. A little bit more of an exchange with them to identify what really is the roadblock to their success, or to them being able to rise above their peers. I believe that through partnership with human resources teams that you have at your disposal, there can be a great internal push for identifying talent. Maybe the first line of this is reaching out to all leaders within an organization to identify that technical talent.

Who's best technically? Now, can we take this a step further, and identify who might need a little bit of coaching and/or training to get to the next level? What does that look like? Is it, these four individuals need some conflict resolution training, and some training on how to lead a small team. This individual needs more open communication skills, and so let's send them to training related to communication. I know that takes a lot of time and effort. It really, really does. But if you're dedicated to really creating a culture that is inclusive and supportive and focused on career development, you can make that work. It does. It can be done.

That's usually my default is, can you promote from within? Can you meet with these employees that you've identified as high potentials or strong stars, and identify maybe some areas of opportunity, that you can then really isolate what the training would be that would be helpful and impactful to them? That's what I believe is probably, well I shouldn't even say probably, because I know it is the best way to elevate the talent you already have in the organization. It's also the less costly way to do it. Because with turnover, and the more people you're having to bring in, and then find out they're not the right fit, and have to separate them and rehire more. It ends up being actually more costly and more challenging than to just upskill your people.

When it comes to training, though, some things that I really rely on when we're working with clients is some of the things I mentioned around role playing. Emotional intelligence training is something that's really starting to take off in the training space. It's just a trend that is something that people are looking more for, not only to be great leaders, but also to know how to interact with either clients or customers, regardless of what industry you're in. That is something that, if you're not already offering something like that, that can be something that's very beneficial. Because that really does incorporate how to assess a situation, identify your own emotions, identify someone else's emotions, and quite frankly, it leads to conflict resolution.

It also leads to better understanding your role in a process, which allows you to know what authority you have and autonomy you have, and what you can bring to the table. There's so many different things you can explore, but I am definitely of the mindset of trying to customize it to the different employees that you've identified as talented individuals. Then I know I'm probably going off a little bit on this, because this is one of my favorite topics. I also feel that, if you have a larger workforce that is all doing the same thing, creating some sort of mentorship program is also a great way to start to bring some folks along through the process, without having to invest a ton of training dollars in them immediately.

I also think developing some sort of, I'm going to call it like an internship program, but that's not really what I mean. I mean more of like a development type program. You can also create stuff like that, that allows employees to maybe kind of round-robin and understand, here's what my job really is, and this is how it interacts with this person. Okay, now I'm going to go over for a couple of weeks, and act like I'm doing that job. How does that interact with me? What would be better for me to be doing with that person to get a better efficiency in working on this project, or this client or this account or what have you? There's so many different ways you can take it. It really just takes some time and effort to develop a game plan, and figure out how you're going to execute it, and what's the best way to position your employees for success.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. No, I like the point you made about individualizing coaching or training of high potential employees, that you want to upskill based on their specific strengths and areas of opportunity. I know that companies in the service space, a lot of them are starting to offer soft skills training proactively and regularly. But I'm thinking maybe it would be interesting to sort of poll them and see what are they using? Are they doing it themselves, and if so, what sort of methods or whatever? The round-robin point you made is interesting too. At our event in Paris this year, Culligan was one of the speakers. The conversation was around the partnership between business and IT. But we ended up talking about how, in service, it's so important for everyone to understand the perspective of the customer.

Which obviously that understanding is part of soft skills, having empathy, et cetera. I think they set a customer centricity month, where employees from all different functions and areas of the business spend time with, shadow, work alongside customer-facing roles. It might even be interesting, I love that idea. It's a way to, I think, give those frontline employees some recognition of their importance, but also give people perspective of what comes up, and the scope of their jobs, et cetera. You could even do that within the service function, though, as a way to expose people to different things and that sort of thing.

Yeah, I mean there's certainly no easy answer or one-size-fits-all approach. But I do think that the takeaways so far, thinking about not allowing the need for this to be an afterthought when you're posting jobs, when you're in the interview process. Using some assessments, but then not only training at whatever degree you incorporate training for all employees, but the career pathing essentially. So finding ways to really maximize the value of the employees who are inclined to do more and advance and grow. Yeah, it's interesting.

Lauren Winans: It is. I wish there was an easier answer to all of this. I'd be so curious to hear what those who might be using some soft skill training are doing. I would venture to guess most of them are probably doing some sort of hybrid version. Maybe leveraging some assessment tools they're already using, and maybe some training partners that they already have, and building a bridge would be my hunch. I do know that some of the assessment tool providers are starting to dig deeper into the soft skill space to incorporate more questions related to that into their surveys.

Then also to train those who are facilitating these surveys to dig deeper and to analyze that information in a more thorough way. It's on the doorstep. It's so close, but unfortunately this is all about critical thinking in terms of piecing all of these parts together to develop something in the immediate that's going to be useful for your company.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. It's interesting. One of the reasons I mentioned the decline in the need for this really advanced technical capability, and the increase in the need of soft skills, a lot of that has to do with technology. And the fact that as different equipment and areas that service organizations are working in have become more sophisticated, the need for those deep technical skill sets in some industries has reduced. I also think that evolution is why the need for soft skills is so, so strong, because we have to somehow balance out the use of technology and AI with humans.

I remember a few years ago being at a conference with a woman from IBM who shared a lesson learned, in terms of they went too far with automating in customer service, and really learned the hard way that they needed to pull back. It worked, but customers weren't happy with it. I don't know. What are your thoughts on how technology and automation are maybe growing or exacerbating the soft skills gap?

Lauren Winans: I mean, it's definitely playing here. It's definitely a factor. It's definitely something that, if we don't kind of get a handle on, it's going to maybe get out of control a little bit. I feel pretty passionately that particularly when it comes to the service industry, it's so important to treat people with the respect that you feel that you should receive. There's certain companies that I've had wonderful experiences with, and I will continue to frequent them because I feel good when I'm interacting with someone who works there. I think that is naturally going to be the competitive edge that's going to start happening here. Because the competitive edge is not going to be who has the best AI. It's going to be all the same.

It's going to all be relatively the same tools we're going to be able to solve for some of those issues that we're really struggling with now that we're spending a lot of time on. So you're going to naturally have to figure out, how do I compete, and how do we set ourselves apart? I think what has been a learned trait for decades, but particularly probably became more apparent especially over the last handful of years, has really been a customer is not going to have the same level of loyalty that they may have had in the past, because they just have too many options. They're looking for something that fits with their lifestyle, with their schedule, with their price point. What can you do to set yourself apart? I really do believe soft skills is going to be important, like really, really important.

If you're not able to find ways to get ahead of what technology... I mean technology might leap up way too quick, and we might be having to play catch-up regardless, but I think now is the time to think about what type of soft skill training do we have? What type of gaps do we have? Can we do something that's even a little baby step towards getting us towards a bigger goal of training everyone within this particular position with this type of emotional intelligence training? I just feel really, part of me is scared. Part of me is nervous, with the evolution of technology and AI, that even some of the most loved brands and companies that I frequent are going to fall behind in treating customers with the utmost care, because it's going to be too hard to juggle all of it.

But I feel really compelled to believe that there are leaders out there, there are companies out there that are intending on getting ahead of all of this. And intending on thinking about even younger generations as they start to enter the workforce, and the type of training and necessary development that's going to be required. Because we're going to be bringing in generations into the workforce that have known nothing but the technology that we have today, and the AI that we're going to have tomorrow. It's natural that we're going to have to evolve. We've done it before. We'll do it again. It's not like it's going to be a hurdle that's going to be insurmountable, but I do think that now's the time to start thinking about it, and putting some game plans in place.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. No, that's a good point. I mean, we've gone through an era where technology was the competitive advantage. But as it reaches functional parity and things sort of equalize, the human piece will likely be the competitive advantage again. So not losing sight of that. No, it's a good point. A few months ago, maybe not even that long, I wrote an article about an experience that I had traveling with United. I waited a few weeks before I wrote the article, because when the situation happened, it would've come off a totally different way. I try to be fair. I try to be fair. I've been flying United for a few years. I'm the highest level of United status, so we know I fly a lot. I started by talking about the fact that the work that they've put into the intelligence in their app is tremendous.

I remember what it was a few years ago, what it's like today. Genuinely in most scenarios, waiting in line at an airport to speak to a United agent at this point is a waste of your time, like 90 plus percent. If you have the app and you use it, they've probably already texted you the solution to the problem you're waiting to speak to someone about. It's really, really good, really good. Baggage, all of it, it's great. But in this situation, things escalated to a point where I really did need actual human customer service, and it was horrendous. The fact that, if the AI and the app is that good, and I've gotten to the point where I actually need someone, I've gone through quite a bit. I mean just the lack of empathy. I mean, it was just atrocious. It's a really, I think, storybook example of exactly what we're talking about.

They've put so much effort into this piece, but then maybe at the detriment of paying attention to, well when someone does get through to an agent, how are we treating that person? Yeah. I think it's definitely something to be cautious of, because the reality is you have to be good at all of it. You can't pick or choose. I mean you really have to do it all, and that's just the way it is. When I reached out to you to do this podcast, I shared with you a study that I thought was interesting. It was about how more and more companies are using AI in their hiring process. That made me think, "Well, interesting." If we're talking about soft skills, i.e., human skills, how would that work? I was just curious. I'm interested, are you seeing a uptick in the use of AI in recruiting and hiring? What risk is there in that, I guess related to soft skills specifically?

Lauren Winans: I'm seeing a lot of intrigue as it relates to using AI in the recruiting process. Not necessarily anyone fully deploying it, or leveraging just AI to source candidates or get interviews taken care of. None of that. It's not to say it's not happening. I'm certain it is happening. My position on that is really around, I can see AI being helpful to take out the mundane tasks that are part of the recruiting process. Which would then free up the recruiter and/or hiring manager and/or interview team to really focus their time and effort on vetting the employee that's coming in. That is what I envision to be the dream scenario, but I know that's not necessarily going to pan out for every organization.

They're going to use AI to maybe cut some corners, to get offers out faster, and potentially to even reduce their recruiting staff in order to do it. I don't think that there's a lot of companies that have jumped in both feet at this point. But you have to also think about some of the applicant tracking systems that we're using today are even kind of weeding out some really fantastic candidates, just simply through keyword search. A version of it's already existing within our recruiting processes today that could be really overlooking some talented individuals that you would want to be in that process. I'm hesitant with using AI in the recruiting process, but I do feel that if used and deployed in the right way, it will actually provide you, you meaning whoever's a part of the process, more time to fully leverage.

"Okay, let's get this person taking this tool. Here's what their results were. I have four follow-up questions now. I want to go back and schedule some more time with them. Oh, look. They might need this additional training. Let's incorporate that into their first 60 days within the organization. Let's update that in the onboarding process for this particular person." There's so many ways, when you free up that time, that you could be using it in a better way. I just hope that the right tasks in the recruiting process are tackled by AI, and not necessarily the human components that should still exist.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. Which I think very much parallels what we would say about service as well. I mean, it's an incredibly valuable tool that companies are using. There's many, many areas that they could grow in their use of, all with the goal of automating the mundane. Not even the mundane, but the manual non-value add tasks that really don't warrant a human's attention or time. All in an effort to give those frontline employees more time to spend with customers to do the things that people care about. I guess it's the same sort of idea of balancing where can it help, while still allowing us to achieve our outcome? Where does it crossover into diminishing the result of what we're trying to do?

Lauren Winans: As for anything, especially technology, I would venture to guess that we will go too far on the tech side, and learn the hard way and pull back. It's probably just something we should expect. But if we're in a position to be able to affect change in that way, I hope people take the opportunity to do that.

Sarah Nicastro: It's interesting that you say that, because this is why... Again, this would be a separate conversation. This is why leadership is so important, and soft skills and empathy, because it all comes back to the eye of the person that is driving the strategy. If it's, can we cut our recruiting staff by 50%, you're going to get a different outcome than, could we use a tool to vet our job descriptions, and make sure that we're casting the widest net or we're doing X, Y, or Z? It makes me think. IFS has a planning and scheduling optimization tool that is AI based, and it's really cool to see how it works. It takes into account all of these different factors, and just runs all the time to get people to the best possible place given all of those criteria.

But at our event in the UK in May, there was a gentleman there from Mitie Fire & Security, who they had just recently put the tool in place. I had never heard this come up, but he said, "Oh, one of the biggest benefits we've seen from PSO is we've used it to allow our technicians to set their own start and end time every day. Some want to drop their kids off at school, and they might want to start at 9:00 or 9:30, but they want to be done at this time. Others want to come in earlier, be done..." He was like, "The impact it's had on their mental health."

I just thought, what a positive use of that technology, to put power back in the hands of the employees. To use it in a way that still allows the company to achieve its outcome of efficiency and productivity, but gives them the ability to say, "Yeah, I want to start my day at 9:00 and end at 5:00." Or, "I want to start at 7:00, end at 3:00," whatever. I just thought that was such a good example of technology used well, because the person in charge has that human lens to it. It's not just about, how can we get two extra trips out of every person per day? Also, how can we use this in a way that helps our employees and makes their lives better? I just thought that was such a good example.

Lauren Winans: Mm-hmm. That's the perspective too of a leader or a strategist who is focused not necessarily on driving the top line, but is focused on minimizing expenses. Because the turnover that you will have if you don't think about employees as human beings is going to cost you so much more than if you just look at each tool, each piece of technology, each process, each policy, and think with the lens of, "Will this help or hurt the employee?" Because the employees are what's going to drive your business. They're what's going to be there to provide whatever support is necessary to your clients or your customers.

Until further notice, there's no robots walking around. So it would be in your best interest to leverage technology in a way that is going to get you the most out of your employees, while providing them with something that makes them want to stay, that makes them want to be there every day working for you. It's really something when someone's doing it right, it's really an aha moment. Hopefully, more people will take advantage of using the tool just like that.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. Yeah, for sure. All right. I know we are just about out of time. Anything else, any final thoughts for companies that are concerned about the soft skills gap growing?

Lauren Winans: My encouragement here would really just be, start the conversation, if you already haven't. Make sure that this isn't something that catches you by surprise. It needs to be something that's talked about, so that it becomes an organizational goal, so that there's more cross-functional partners that are working together to realize, "Hey, we've got to make some changes. We need to be prepared to deepen our skillset when it comes to soft skills, in addition to maintaining the expertise on the technical side."

If you take anything away, I would say, start the conversation if it's not already been started, and deepen it if it's already been started. There's so much to do in this space, and it's going to take time, effort, and energy from a variety of different sources. Not just an HR team, but HR should be able to play a very valid and competitive role in helping you determine the best way to tackle this.

Sarah Nicastro: Mm-hmm. Good advice. All right. Well, Lauren, thank you so much for coming back. I appreciate it. It's always a pleasure to talk with you.

Lauren Winans: Thank you. I appreciate you inviting me. Always willing to talk about something people related. I love it.

Sarah Nicastro: Absolutely. We'll do it again sometime.

Lauren Winans: Awesome. Thank you.

Sarah Nicastro: You can find more by visiting us at futureoffieldserviceref.ifs.com. While you're there, be sure to sign up for the Future of Field Service Insiders, so that you can stay up-to-date on all of the latest articles and podcasts. 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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