IFS Service CollABorative - Think Tank Session - Attracting and Retaining Talent
Date of Meeting: 18 April 2023 10:00 AM US Eastern Time
Topics:
- Mindset Shift.
- Recognising rather than continuing to seek experience, companies need to be looking more for ability aptitude. And then take the onus to train and provide that experience. Which sounds simple, but when you think about companies that historically have had to very briefly provide very simple training and on boarding because the workers came in experienced, it's quite different the way you need to structure that. If you're bringing in people that don't have that experience.
- Taking into consideration how the role of the front-line worker has changed and is changing and will continue to change.
- Where service organisations are looking for new talent
- Brainstorming different places and ways that people are finding potential candidates that don’t have experience but have the ability to be successful.
- Changes to consider how you communicate and articulate the job description and employee value proposition.
- As we look to cast a wider net, there could be things in the job description that is outdated, worded a certain way or people just might not understand what the role is if they don’t already have experience.
- Understanding what today’s talent wants
- We need to adapt and become creative to become a more attractive option
- Why it's important to consider the role of management and leadership.
- A lot of times this is an area in this conversation that gets overlooked. But what happens is if you have a big focus on attracting in new quality talent, but managers that are ineffective, unengaged, or frustrated then it’s really all for naught. Because you're bringing these people in and they're going to be reporting into people that aren't the type of people they want to report to, and they're going to be out of here. So, I think thinking about the management and leadership aspect is important.
- We need to put equal focus on retention
- A lot of times in this conversation, we focus so heavily on recruiting because that feels like the most acute problem, but if we only focus on bring people in the door and then the experience is not great or we have existing employees that we're not doing a good enough job, if you’re not nurturing and that sort of thing then we're not really problem solving.
Customer Experiences / Talking Points:
- Growing as a business over 15-20 years, a number of engineers joined us on the journey and we were relying on legacy engineers that were invested in the business because they’ve been on the journey with us. And then when we had people leave, retire, we started to struggle to employee new engineers. So, we had to get creative, and we had to start offering more attractive packages and you can't just pay loads more money and you can't just offer loads more leave and holiday. We had to come up with a pathway. So, what we we've invested quite a lot is in the apprenticeship schemes where we're taking on young graduates, in school leavers and we're offering really good solid apprenticeships that will take them on a pathway through to become qualified in and we don't just qualify them to become an engineer of us, we qualify them in electronics and mechanical engineering skills and things like that and we send them to broad based colleges and stuff like that. And the idea is, that we know that we may only get a few years out of them, some of them leave almost at the end of their apprenticeship. Some of them have worked and carried on because we've given them a pathway to management and things like that. But what it means is that they're engaged in the apprentice knowing that they're getting a blue chip, high quality apprenticeship that they can springboard off to get a better career. And we're getting three or four years of really good service out of them. And because these people are engaged because we got the apprenticeship, they kind of rub off on the other employees, the other teams and they get kind of a collective empowerment and good vibe amongst the team.
The other thing that we've done is because the sum of our work is not massively technical, we've started sweeping up people who are near retirement from higher stress field service jobs and higher stress jobs. Where the pressure of working in the banking industry are perhaps broken a little bit and we're offering them a pathway through to retirement where they can feel valued and work that way. So, we're taking people on the start of the journey and those at the end of their journey, even if we're offering people perhaps less money joining us, it's a quality of life because we offer attractive work environment, the shifts are good. - When it comes to looking for people, we do use social media, we use LinkedIn. Obviously, everyone's using LinkedIn nowadays, but we're using much more of those sort of tools and less agencies and we're relying more on things like the social media word of mouth and things like that. And that's quite an interesting way of getting people because you find that you get connected people who are a friend of a friend of a friend.
- One of the tools we use is each apprentice is given a mentor in the business who have a tangible journey through the business and they relate to them on the journey they went through and how they achieved it. And they provide things like political office skills and collaborative skills and the skills to navigate the choppy waters of corporate life and because and the apprenticeship they're learning the hard skills and the skills about the electronics and mechanical or whatever it is. But then the mentor is saying that I started an engineer and now I'm as you say I'm director of marketing and things like that and my journey is this. You've got to take the steps and you got to tick off these milestones and you got to do this and prove it and stuff like that. And they help them with meetings, preparation, presentation preparation, and in all sorts of facets. And they're also a shoulder to cry on and someone that's there for them.
- The best mentors that I've spoken to are the ones that haven't gone necessarily linear part that you would expect. There's been a bit of a sliding door moment in their life when they've jumped off, but they've used the skills they've learned in the business and where they've come to bounce off into a different path and do a different thing. And it's sometimes difficult to understand what skills they were, but you and the mentors job is to show them that it's not a linear path. You won't start off as field service tech and end up as field service director. You can start as field service tech and end up in marketing or you can start off and end up in this and they're the best ones because that's like the world is my oyster rather than I've got this linear path to retirement at that makes sense.
- I like to use the word entrepreneurial even though right within the business, we're not entrepreneurs ourselves, but equating that ownership to a sense of entrepreneurialism that particularly the younger generations want that sense of, hey, I'm building something myself. And a lot of people look for those types of opportunities outside of the corporate world or service tech industries. And so, if you can create that sense within the company, I think that's how you create some of that ownership. And I think it’s all just sort of goes into the conversation you guys are having at that it's not a linear path. You can look in these other functional areas as you progress forward. We've got similar leadership development programs that occur at various stages throughout, for the functions or for our trades people and you get selected into one of them and some of them are very business unit specific. And then as you get a little bit higher up, they kind of broaden out to a little more.
And so, each of those sorts give a better understanding of the of either the business unit as that individual operating unit or the company as a whole. And so, people start to see that opportunity and really that entrepreneurial path start to develop as they sort of work through some of those programs. So those have been positive for us as well. I wouldn't equate that necessarily to an apprenticeship program, but there are more like three weeks out of the year you go and do some really focus dedicated training to give people some financial acumen for example where they might not have had this sort of understanding and it’s just really brought in their understanding of what other areas of the business within ourselves do so that they can go look at some of those other opportunities and feel like hey, I can see this this path and it feels a little bit more like I'm defining it myself, even though like that path has probably already been taken a number of times people have made those transitions. I mean that would be my kind of one thing is I always like to talk with people about, hey, you can make this as entrepreneurial as you want and go seek out your own development for a lot of structure there. And then there's a lot of defined progression upward, but you can also make it your own and take ownership in that way. - And I think particularly when you start talking like high potential talent that may become those director roles like you need them to be moving around every three to five years so that they get exposure to different sizes. But otherwise, you're not going to have anybody to fill those upper level roles. So, you have to be able to operate with them moving around and getting exposure to different sides of the company.
- We've really been exploring the where part of it and I'm talking not only the where in terms of where we recruit and how we recruit, but also geographically where.
And so this is something we learn through COVID and also from our customers we have a lot of restaurant customers, and this is how they get a lot of their people. We've started to do a lot of international recruitment and that's both for technical roles and non-technical roles as we kind of walked into this world of wow, it's a global workforce and how do we embrace that and be a part of that. It started with the easy stuff, right? Some of the administrative stuff. But we've graduated it into where we're actually bringing technicians in from other parts of the world and we are assisting them in getting to Canada. So, advantage in being a in a desirable country to live, but because lots of people do want to end up here, they're looking for ways to get here and they're looking for employers to help them get here, to get here and do that, they need to be skilled. So, we already get to sort of pre-check that box. We've ended up with two technicians. We work in this really weird niche that kind of lives inside of the refrigeration HVAC trade. But it's a very specific subset of it. And to get that exact skills is tough. And so we've been able to get that exact skill. To get technicians that are up and running and ready to jump on board really fast actually get a pretty good commitment from them because the government kind of forces them to commit to us to get over here and that's become a much bigger part of our recruitment strategy and honestly, they've been tremendous technicians. I think there's probably a preconceived notion or a bias that that they're not going to be because they're not from here or whatever, but that has not been our experience at all. So, it's been a big success for us and something we're looking to do more of. Recruiting locally is hyper competitive and that's been a win for us of late. - We get quite a few of our apprentices from some of the socially deprived areas of London and they've recognised there that a way out of that is for schools and local authorities to encourage apprenticeships and things like that. And we've got some fantastic talent from those areas.
- Recruiting locally is super competitive and the if you're lucky enough to find the talents, then they are extremely aware of their value today, so it's not enough that you have a good job, they really know their value as well so they expect to get a lot of in terms of payment.
Also you can't expect people nowadays to actually stay in the same role for 20 or 25 years. You need to get them new challenges, otherwise they are most likely to leave. - We had an engineer that talked someone from potentially harming themselves on a bridge. And he went above and beyond really. It was a sort of a personal thing, but it was such a wonderful story that we publicised it. He got an award globally from the company for his outstanding service. Nothing to do with the business. It was a step outside of that he encountered someone. But he was recognized for his empathy and it was shared across the whole company and the videos were shared and everything and everyone applauded him, but it's recognising value in people for what they do as human beings.
- Paternity leave in the US is not really a big thing, but I think if for men now that have had a baby, they have an extra one or two weeks of PTO that they get given that they can use within the first year after childbirth and a lot of people have taken advantage of that. Your spouse may not be working at the same company, but it provides them some flexibility. And then just really simple things like, we're on a site, our projects come to us, we work on them here and all our mechanics on the deck place. But just having attractive lunch options like getting a Chick-fil-A to come on to the facility and serve lunch. You mentioned Chick-fil-A like we have Chick-fil-A come because people really like that. And it's better than the cafeteria that's on site that serves a good meal, but people just like that option to have some choices at lunchtime and it goes a long way and the camaraderie. People go in and stand in the lunch line and just having something good to go.
Insights from Sarah:
- Josh Zolin – He took on his family business, Windy City Equipment. He wrote a book called Blue is the new white and he's really become an evangelist for the opportunity for careers in the trades. If you started thinking about how someone like that could have a practical impact on your business, I'm not saying you do this. I'm just saying, this is where it's important to brainstorm, get creative if you have a really effective, highly engaged, well connected like Power Technician and you had that person start posting titbits of their day on TikTok, etcetera. The impact you could get in interest from that is significant. So, while historically we would think, you sure as hell better not be on TikTok while you're supposed to be working, these are the things that if we really think differently. Is there talent that might not be fulfilled only going into stations to fix things. But if they also became an evangelist for the trade and they could make the job itself more appealing to people because there is this other side of it, right? So these are the things where I'm so passionate about some of these fundamental shifts that are taking place in our businesses right now.
- Culture leadership is big. So, I just did this podcast a few weeks ago with Venkata Mukku Reddy and he's the global head of service for a company called Bruker Nano. It's one of my favourite conversations to date. He'll be presenting in Birmingham at the future of field service event. We get on the phone for our prep and I ask him, “What do you want to talk about if we do a podcast?” And he said, “well, you know what? I'm really focused on is my teams”. And I was sceptical, because honestly, everyone says that right? But then he explained, like he has a formula, he follows in how he spends his time as the global head of service in his company, and it's 60% his internal people, 30% customer metrics, 10% commercial, because he's saying if you take care of your people, they will take care of your customers. If you do both of those things, the commercial will follow. Sounds simple. But so many companies who would say that are still living in a world where all they care about and focus on is quarterly metrics. And the culture is not reflective of the mindset that they're speaking. So, he gets into all of these specifics. And we had a really, really good conversation about how. His real core focus is to empower their employees so that they feel a sense of ownership in their success. Because he's saying if you can just get them to have that sense of ownership, they will do all the right things, it's really finding the people that are built for that and then encouraging them to have that sense of ownership.
And when I say like foundational shifts, I think we all grew up in a world where leadership was about command and control. Like you are in charge, you tell your employees what to do. Employees are viewed as assets/resources and not humans. And it's completely changing, but it requires a lot of thinking about do we believe in the right things as an employer? But then are we putting those beliefs in practice in the way we're treating our people every day? - So, my biggest philosophical question is how can you as much as possible, bring these new people onto the journey? It's this idea of how do you make them feel connected into a purpose, a mission of community? What are the ways that that you can recreate some of that with the new employees that you bring in.
- You're investing in this apprenticeship program knowing that they might not all stay and I think this is an important point because I think companies that are really doing well with this huge challenge are understanding that it can't all be self-serving. They need to do things to advance the industry as a whole and not only fill their specific roles. And when you can take that sort of parallel mindset and find a way to make both sides work, I think that's the best case.
- Making sure that in terms of retaining as much of that talent as possible, they want those career paths, so it's bringing them in as an apprentice. It's giving them the opportunity to get these qualifications etcetera. Even if they go into sales or they go into HR or they go into marketing, you're still retaining that talent, you're just not retaining that talent as a field technician. But people may not want to stay in that role forever now so we need to start looking for ways to farm other areas of the business.
- One idea would be to have a story on social of each of the mentors, but also you can use this for your recruiting and have some videos of them talking about their journey and what it looks like so that you can use that to get the interest of new people.
- One cool thing I saw at a conference a few years ago was an agency who did some really cool visualizations and illustrations for a bunch of different brands and drawn these different career paths. It can show different options, different tiers but again resources to use in your recruiting where you're not just telling people, yes, you can advance, and you could do these different things, but you're letting them see the opportunity and here's what it would take to get to here, here, or here. So that they know you can't just come in and then six months you have run to the top. You have to hit these benchmarks, but it gives people an actual image of some of the opportunity that exists.
- We talked a lot about breaking down silos within the business. So, we think about that from the standpoint of service in, in product businesses service not being siloed from product and creating a holistic value proposition. We talk about the challenge of silos when it comes to digital transformation and that being a reason that so many things fail, but this is another area where I think it's also becoming important to break down those silos from the standpoint of, if you can almost use the entry level roles as a way to farm talent through to other areas of the business. You have to look at it differently, right? Because again, it's not just bringing people in, expecting them to stay in place for 10-20-30 years, but overall big picture holistically, it can be a good strategy to bring talent in and keep it within the business, even if it's in other functions.
- I think some of the notes I have are nothing new. Obviously there's the idea of working with schools at different levels and creating these sort of apprenticeship programs. Military tends to be another sort of hotbed for recruiting. If you think about going back to not expecting experience, but just looking for people that could potentially succeed, there is a gentleman that I've interviewed that said they actually started like recruiting people from Chick-fil-A, which sounds crazy, but because they're known for customer service, or if you just think about it from the idea from a soft skills perspective, if they can exceed in a customer service role and you can give them the training needed for these roles that could be a an idea.
And then there's a woman named Stephanie Peters who's with Hobart that presented a while back at WBR about how they have set up an entire program nationwide to work with underserved communities. And get people aware of the career opportunities and to bring people in apprenticeship type positions as well which I thought was really interesting and they had some great examples of success from that. - I wrote an article a long, long time ago about like field service has a branding problem, but it's this idea of if you post a role and its for a field technician or field engineer, people either don't know what that means if they're not from the industry, or they think they're not qualified. But if we're getting to the point where we're providing the qualification and we're doing the training, then we might want to think about the wording we're using so that we're not scaring people away just by title. So again, that's where from an HR perspective and with recruiting teams, you must have the right layers in place to cast the wide net and then start to filter through, but I think we want to create better awareness of the potential in our respective industries, and sometimes I think just the historical terminology we use prevents a lot of potential candidates from thinking it's relevant to them.
- The companies that seem to do well on the diversity front or because they really want to evolve as a business, and they value the diversity of thought. So, it is good to have measurements because it keeps you accountable, but the mission itself isn't like, let's try and check this box. It's we will be better. We will be more innovative, more creative if we have different perspectives and insights.
In terms of women in frontline roles, I think it's a universal challenge. I think a couple, a couple points come to mind. - If you're not getting the applicants, that's where I would start reflecting on the job descriptions and the way they're worded and could there be things that are ostracizing women candidates and/or are there things like maybe you have there because it’s always been there. I'm just saying some companies have found they've had things in there that have just always been there, that when they reflect, do you really need to lift 75 pounds or has that just always been part of the wording. So, things like that, It's just that's a good starting point from there.
- I think the way you would want to increase the awareness of those roles for female candidates may be very different from how you would want to increase the awareness for male candidates. I mean like different things could be appealing. So, that kind of leads into one of the biggest things that today's talent wants is flexibility and I think that I will not say it's especially important for women. It's actually the more we can provide flexibility to employees, the more it can balance the responsibilities in the home, but historically speaking, any family related tasks are seen more as the woman's responsibility, so a lot of times women need more flexibility in their careers. I'm saying though my husband has flexibility which helps me not need it as much. So, it all kind of levels out. But I think regardless of whether we're talking about getting more women in or people that have children. In general, even if it's younger people, they want flexibility, right? And so, this is a topic that I think is important to touch on because I think as Service organizations who are responsible to customers, often on a 24/7 basis, work has always been structured in a in a certain way, and I think this is a part where very beholden to feeling like, well, it just is what it is. We can't offer flexibility because people have to be there, and they have to be there at these times. And this is an area I like to challenge people on because the work is what the work is, but that does not mean you can't get creative about how you schedule or staff or rotate so that you can provide flexibility to your employees. This doesn't work in every business, but I'm saying it's a desire among talent that isn't going to go away. So as much as we can force ourselves to get creative about what can we offer and it could be anything like just spit balling. It could be, thinking about parents. It could be in terms of incentives, it could be child care assistance. It could be home help like meals. You could get really creative about incentive packages and things that would appeal to certain categories of people. But this idea of flexibility being important is one that I think we really have to contend with. So, my point specifically how this relates to women is sometimes it's culturally, still even more important, so if the role is one that they feel they don't have, that could be a potential challenge.
The other thing is I think it's an area that if you could just get going a little bit, it could snowball in a very positive way. There was another podcast, It's with a woman named Shannon Tymosko. And she was in childcare for a very long time and then at 28, she decided to become an electrician. And she talks about a lot of these things like how lonely it is. But why? She is very passionate about the opportunity for women. And she again, going back to this idea, she has a huge social media presence and she is like an evangelist for getting more females into the trades. It takes a very strong person, but if you could find 1 Shannon Tymosko to come be at your business and then have that social media presence, think about the number of women that would see that as a potential career path.
I think that idea of getting creative is important and not staying stuck in.
Here's what we've always done. Looking outside of your industry, your geography for ideas of, oh my gosh, it's really cool how they're recruiting people in this. I have nothing to do with you. But if you can try different things, you may have some great success. - This idea of empowerment is really important one in the sense of it's something that is often at odds with the structure of the historical business, like you might think you want people to be empowered, but then are you from a management and leadership perspective really prepared for what that looks like? Like as someone who admittedly speaks my mind and pushes boundaries and doesn't follow a lot of rules, there are a lot of environments that think they would want that, but they don't. They want a whole team of yes men that are bought in. I spent 11 years at a company that.
- When you think about wanting to empower workers, does the culture allow for that? Are you actually listening to ideas and do employees have a voice and do they feel like the very valuable role they play on the frontlines of your business matters to the company. Do they feel respected for the work they do? And do they feel valued? I think people demanding high pay, that is a reality. And I'm not taking away from the challenges that presents. But, I think you said earlier, it's not just about the money, and there are a lot of other elements of what is going to make people engaged and stick around and I think a lot of those things are quite simple, but just not often executed. I mean acknowledging people's contributions and making them feel appreciated and that their opinions matter. Those aren't things that are hard to do. They just don't always happen. And I think, those are areas that are like low hanging fruit to focus on because it isn't solving the world's problems, it's starting internally on things like, when's the last time I called the field technician and personally and said good job or when's the last time we took an idea from a frontline worker and not only put it in action but gave them credit for it. Little things like that. Are you asking yourself those questions and honouring the work that they're doing.
- So WBR is having their 20 year anniversary. My presentation is like 5 lessons we've learned in the last 20 years that we should keep top of mind in the next 20 years, and my last point is we're all humans first, and I understand there are cultural differences, but I think COVID really changed things in how we treat other people and want to be treated. And I think that part of this idea of company culture and employee engagement and that sense of purpose comes from feeling that we can be humans at work. I think that it is related, I mean you are still who you are when you're at your job and looking for ways that feel natural and right to connect with people on a human level to recognize people on a human level. I think that's important. Across the board, looking for the opportunities to recognize the good in people as employees and their contribution at work. One of the things that came up in that podcast with Venkata, he said, they really prioritize a culture where the employees are people first. And I said, well, what does that mean, though, like, give me an example of how you put that in practice. And he said, well, it's really hard because it's really accommodating a lot of different personal situations, but, he said like if someone sick, we don't want them to feel worried about only having X amount of sick days. We want to create a culture where they know that they need to take care of themselves or their family 1st and their team will step up and take care of things while they're gone and those sorts of things. So I think those points of human connection and humanity at work are important to consider as well.
Questions / Answers:
- Q: How big of a focus increasing diversity is and any sort of progress or wins you have there?
A: Very, very big. It's one of our strategic goals as a whole corporation. Diversity is up there front and centre and we have we have several diversity committees and people like that who are who are pushing it and you're encouraged to join the committees and things of that. So, diversities are incredibly important and not just from a recruitment standpoint but there are certain cultures where they're not as forefront as putting himself front and centre. For example, we have quite a few Sri Lankans and Sri Lankans have like a cast system and if they feel that they're subservient to other members of a different cast, they weren't put themselves forward and we have to encourage them to put themselves forward and give them mechanism tools to do that by being by offering those tools and allow them to have a voice. Just irrespective of their personal casts, which is incredibly powerful. So there are certain areas where we've had to encourage them to have a voice and not feel that they have to work within their own sort of thing.
A: We just did a culture survey and that was one of the categories that our team scored us the highest on was diversity. So, we're really proud of that and it's very encouraging. A lot of it has sort of happened organically over a very long period, but the challenge that I would love for us to get better at solving is that in the field, although we were very ethnically racially diverse, we have very, very few female technicians and so it feels like we have a sort of immediately removed half of the population from the applicant pool because we'll occasionally get a few female technicians. But boy, oh boy, it's rare. And then when we do get them, it's so rare that you kind of like a I empathize with them because there's no female cohort of people that you can just go and spit ball with and have the group of where you feel safe, you've got to do that with guys predominantly and so that's one that is still out there. I wish I had better answers for it. We haven't totally figured it out yet, but our team still thinks we're very diverse. I would love for us to be more diverse in that specific area.
A: What you have just said is quite important because we tried to take on 50/50 apprentices because of diversity and because as you said, it's 50% of the population. But the first group to drop out and move on to a more diverse career path while the women. We find that the that we retain the men longer into the career path for the engineer, as the women, they'll bounce off after the apprenticeship and skip off earlier into other careers. And what you said about that cohort and that thing could be a big part of it and we are we are struggling to retain them.
Podcast Links:
- Venkata Reddy Mukku
https://futureoffieldservice.com/2023/03/22/my-recipe-for-success-using-service-as-a-competitive-advantage/
- Shannon Tymosko
https://futureoffieldservice.com/2022/02/16/how-shannon-tymosko-is-taking-the-skilled-trades-by-storm/
If you are an IFS Customer and would like to watch the recording, please email jessica.foon@ifs.com
Next Meeting: 31 May 2023 10:00 AM US Eastern Time
IFS Service CollABorative - Think Tank Session - Remote Service Strategy
If you are an IFS Customer and you do not have the next meeting invitation to this CollABorative and would like to join, please email jessica.foon@ifs.com