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Announcement

I am delighted to announce that BBA Consulting Group Inc. has reached an agreement with a wonderful training and consulting firm called Take Charge Learning.  Take Charge Learning (www.takechargelearning.com), has acquired our Proactive Service® workshops and consulting business and promise to enhance and expand our programs.

What is exciting about this acquisition is Take Charge Learning itself.  It is a service training company.  The principals, Laura Sukorokoff and Sean Hamilton bring with them an in-depth understanding of the service business and particularly customer service.  Sean knows service from the inside out.  He has worked his entire career in service, first as a field service technician, then sales and marketing management and, more recently, service management and ownership.  Laura’s focus extends to the management team and how to build dedicated teams with a strong service culture.

Take Charge Learning will seamlessly step in to maintain our existing contracts and customers.  If you are participating in the Proactive Service® self-delivery program, you will continue to have access to the videos and program documents without interruption.  In addition, Take Charge Learning will honour any outstanding quotations.  For my part, I will continue to work with Take Charge Learning throughout the transition. 

I have been blessed as a successful business consultant and trainer.  But that success was only possible because of you who have believed in me and had faith in my work and approaches.  Thank you all for your support over all of these years.  As I pass the Proactive Service® baton on to Take Charge Learning, I am confident that Laura and Sean will take our programs to a whole new level.

Thank you.

Jim Baston

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What To Look For in Self-Delivery Training

Looking to Self Deliver Soft Skills Training – Here’s What to Look For 

Last time I wrote about why you might consider delivering your own soft skills training in a blog entitled If You Want Something Done Right.  I realize that delivering soft skills training may not be for everyone, but the rewards of leading your team through a workshop can be significant and long lasting.  It can literally be a game changer.  For those who are looking to deliver soft skills training, here is what to look for when evaluating programs. 

If you are thinking about delivering training for your team, there are two options available to you.  One is to create your own training program and the other is to purchase a program ready made for self-delivery.  For this blog, I will focus on the ready-made option.  What follows are the key factors to consider when evaluating soft skills training programs that are designed for self-delivery. 

Relevance:  There are many excellent training programs out there, but not all may be directly relevant to your needs.  The more the training reflects the reality of the day-to-day challenges your team faces, the more effective it will be.  Therefore, if your team are highly skilled service professionals working in a business-to-business environment, then a program geared for non-technical, salespeople serving consumers in a retail store, may not be as impactful as you had hoped – no matter how good the quality of the training program is. 

Preparation Instructions:  Although not part of the actual facilitation, preparation instructions are important, particularly if this is the first time you are delivering the program.  These instructions should include specific preparation steps, and timelines to ensure that you are fully prepared for the training.   

Detailed Facilitation Notes:  The facilitation notes should provide you with adequate guidelines on how to facilitate the workshop.  If a PowerPoint presentation is included, the notes should be associated with each slide.  The key is to provide step-by-step instructions to minimize the time needed for preparation while ensuring your facilitation delivers the learning experience intended by the program. 

Background Notes:  Since facilitation plays an important role in how well participants grasp the subject matter, it is helpful to have background notes on the facilitation process itself.  Where applicable, it is helpful to understand why it is suggested that you use a particular example or present the material is a certain way.  The notes should also provide additional information on the point being presented that would not typically be included in the facilitation notes themselves. 

Customization:  One of the great advantages of self-delivery is the ability to customize the examples and relate them directly to the content.  The self-delivery program you consider should allow for this and provide the opportunity and instructions on what to customize.   With our Proactive Service® Self-Delivery Workshop for example, we provide templates and instructions for the customizable elements.  

Videos and Video Access:  An excellent way to communicate information and create the learning experience intended.  Although not absolutely necessary, accompanying videos are a big plus if the training you are considering includes them. 

Follow-up:  Perhaps the most important component of any program is the follow-up that takes place after the training.  People learn by repetition and managers would do well by repeating the key learning points at every opportunity once the training is completed.  Anything that the training package you are considering has to enable you to do this easily is important.  In our Proactive Service® Self-Delivery Workshop, we provide ongoing access to view the videos after the training so that they can be used for onboarding and refreshing.  We also provide follow-up emails to keep the core ideas top of mind as well as short exercises that can use during regular service meetings to help participants practice the core skills. 

Making the decision to lead your own training session is not for the faint of heart but the rewards in the form of behaviour and cultural change can far outweigh the effort.  If you are considering leading your own session for your team, evaluate the program to ensure fit with your operations and that it provides what you need to support the behaviour change you are counting on. 

Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn. 
– Benjamin Franklin 

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If You Want Something Done Right

If you want something done right, do it yourself.  I am certain that this old adage is familiar to you, but in this era of specialization, does it still ring true?  Those of us who had to cut our own hair during the pandemic may feel it doesn’t.  And when you think of certain technical disciplines or fields that require specialized skills or knowledge that literally take years to master it doesn’t make sense at all.  

However, there is one area though where doing it yourself can make sense and can lead to a better result.  The area I am referring to is delivering soft skills training to your team.  

Now, you might be thinking that I have lost my mind.  Doesn’t training require a skill of facilitating that is honed by years of practice?  And doesn’t training require knowledge that may take years to learn?  Time is in limited supply and don’t I already have enough to do?  I’ll try to answer each of these, but first, let’s look at why training your own team can be so effective.

The purpose of training is typically to impart new skills that result in a desired change in behaviour.  You may send your team on spreadsheet training to become more proficient at preparing information so that their resulting reports are more accurate and reader friendly while at the same time freeing up more time for them to attend to other responsibilities.  But training in itself is not enough to guarantee you will get the change in behaviour that you are looking for.  Studies have shown that the quality of training is not the most important determinant of behaviour change.  The most important predictor of behaviour change related to training is management and how they talk about and support the training.  Specifically, it depends on what managers do before, during and after the training takes place.  Do they help participants understand how the training will help them in their job performance?  Do they communicate why it is important and how it will impact them personally?  Do they talk about the training in a manner that speaks of this importance?  Do they participate actively in the training itself?  Do they follow up on the training?

When you lead the training on soft skills, by your very actions you are communicating the importance of the training for your employees’ performance and personal success.  In addition, you have the opportunity to ensure that the training is directly relevant to the attendees by including examples and describing situations that resonate with them.  You can make certain that the training speaks to the overall strategy of the organization and your employees’ role in that strategy.  When you deliver the training, you are more likely to follow up and to mention various aspects of the training during future meetings.  In short, by delivering the training yourself, you can help to embed the concepts into the culture of your organization and clearly answer the question of why you are doing this.

Delivering training to your team also provides you with the flexibility to adjust the training schedule to meet the needs of the business.  You can schedule the training to take place all at once, or spread it out over several sessions.  You can create “homework” assignments to allow participants to practice the key concepts by applying what they have learned in the field.  And best of all, you can make these changes literally on the fly.

So, let’s go back to the questions raised previously.  Leading soft skills training for your team has great benefits, but doesn’t it require facilitation skills, subject matter expertise and time?  Let’s consider these in turn.

Facilitation skills:  Facilitation is an important skill that all good trainers rely on and it is true that good trainers have honed these skills over time.  But, with a little guidance, most of us with little or no experience can facilitate effective discussions that get the critical points across.  Remember, we’re not facilitating high-level discussions between world leaders to find the secret to ever lasting peace.  We are simply trying to engage the class in discussions and exercises to help them discover the key learning principles for themselves.

Knowledge: The knowledge required for customer service training is simply common sense.  In fact, customer service training is one of those subjects where everyone already has the core knowledge, including those who are there for the training.  Everyone knows that they should be polite, tuck in their shirts and practice good grooming to make a favourable impression for example.  Therefore, those that don’t demonstrate good customer service skills are typically not ignorant of what constitutes good customer service, they just choose not to apply what they know.  That means that the challenge of getting behaviour change in soft skills training is not a matter of teaching participants what to do, but rather why to do it. (And that is why management involvement is so important).

Time:  By training your team in customer service, you are taking time away from some of the other things that you could be doing.  There is no getting around this.  Time is a limited resource and if you spend it doing one thing, it has to come at the expense of not having the time to do something else.  The question has to be, is my time as a manager well used if I spend some of it training my team in customer service?  To answer this question, we need to consider how we are measured as managers.  Many years ago I was struck by the truth in the statement, “As managers, we are recognized not so much for what we do, but for what our team does.”  While we as managers are measured and compensated for obtaining certain results, it is our employees’ efforts that generate those outcomes.  So, if the performance of our employees determines our success, then it makes sense to do all that we can to help our employees perform at their best.  From this perspective, training our employees no longer looks like a separate task outside of the role of “managing” but rather an integral part of the role.  

So, if it makes sense to lead the customer service training for our employees, maybe we should change the old adage to read:  If you want customer service training done right, do it yourself.

“As managers, we are recognized not so much for what we do, but for what our team does.”

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Refresher Exercises Announcement

We are pleased to announce a new follow-up program for the very successful Proactive Service® workshop called The Refresher Exercises. The Refresher Exercises are designed as short modules for managers to include as part of their regular service/safety meetings to help maintain focus on business development by the field service team. The modules reinforce the key concepts of Proactive Service® and help actively engage field service professionals in proactive business development for their organizations.

The Refresher Exercises come complete with step-by-step instructions, videos and exercises for the manager to engage the field team and promote discussion on the team’s role in promoting services to their customers. The field team leaves each session with a commitment to apply the principles learned which contributes to the desired behaviour change.

The Proactive Service® Refresher Exercises Include:

  1. Eight individual exercise sessions ranging in duration from 15 to 30 minutes. (Note: Delivery of the exercises can easily be adjusted to increase or decrease the duration of each session).
  2. A concise facilitation guidebook providing helpful suggestions on how to present each exercise.
  3. A short slide presentation for each exercise session to guide the discussion.
  4. Links to streaming videos presenting the key concepts.

The Proactive Service® workshop is a program to help field service professionals take a proactive role in business development for their companies. It does this by helping the field team recognize that making recommendations to help their customers is an important part of the service they provide. Coupled with our post training follow up emails, these refresher exercises will help you integrate Proactive Service® into your service culture.

For more information on Proactive Service® and the Refresher Exercises visit www.jimbaston.com or email me at jim@jimbaston.com.

Jim Baston

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It’s Not Them, It’s You

I just finished a book that resonated strongly with me.  It’s entitled It’s Not Them, It’s You by Laura Sukorokoff.  The book discusses the role of management in employee engagement and I saw immediately how the ideas in Laura’s book would contribute to the success of any service leaders’ efforts to enthusiastically engage their field service teams in proactive business development.

When talking about “proactive business development”, we are referring to getting technicians to take a proactive role in looking for products and services that they can offer to help a customer to be better off.  It might be a product that will improve efficiency and reduce energy consumption or it might be a service that will extend asset life or improve the safety of the operation.  Whatever it is, the key to their proactive efforts is to help customers recognize what they can do to make improvements by bringing the ideas to the customers’ attention.

Our success in getting our techs to enhance the service they provide through these proactive efforts will be largely dependent upon their level of engagement.  A field service professional who is engaged, will be more likely to take these proactive steps more enthusiastically.

Now, there are several things that contribute to level of field team engagement including how the proactive role is described and the processes and systems to support their proactive efforts.  But a critical component, and one that can sometimes be overlooked, is how the manager engages their employees and that is largely dependent upon how the manager is perceived by his or her team.

Which brings me to It’s Not Them, It’s You.  In her book, Laura addresses this issue head on.  Her focus is on what managers can do to build strong, professional and trust-based relationships with their teams to engage them fully and enthusiastically in the business.  She introduces a simple, yet powerful, model that she calls RESPECT.  RESPECT is an acronym for the seven steps she has identified to engage (and retain) employees, namely:

  1. Develop a Relationship with the people on your team.
  2. Have Empathy for those with whom you work.
  3. Support the members of your team
  4. Promote the ideas of your team members
  5. Empower your team members to be great on their own terms.
  6. Have Consideration for their feelings.
  7. Trust them, and be trustworthy yourself.

What really impressed me about this book is that it does more than just explain the relationship between RESPECT and employee engagement and retention.  Laura provides solid and practical advice on how to interact with employees to build RESPECT and attain the desired engagement, all the while cognisant of the realities of management. For example, although Laura believes strongly in the importance of having one-on-one meetings with all direct reports, she acknowledges that this is not always practical to do this when you have large numbers reporting to you and provides suggestions on what to do in this case.  This is particularly important when the field team spends most time away from the office and often in remote locations.

If you are interested in learning more about It’s Not Them, It’s You and the work that Laura does in this area, visit https://www.cchangelearning.com 

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Preventative Maintenance for Business Promotion – Step 2

This series of blogs discusses the application of preventative maintenance in order to maintain our field team’s product and service promotion effectiveness. [1]

Step 2 – Replacing, Refurbishing or Cleaning Wearable Parts and Consumables

In order to help our customers to be better off for having hired us, we must continually be on the lookout for ways that we can help them achieve their business goals.  Our field service team is in the best position to do this because of their knowledge of the technology, our company’s capabilities and our customers’ challenges and goals.  However, in order for our team to be effective in making proactive recommendations, we must have the system and processes in place and working smoothly.  Regular preventative maintenance (PM) of our systems and processes will help ensure that our field service professionals continue to provide recommendations that will be appreciated by our customers.

Last time I wrote about conducting a high level assessment before getting into the details of the PM.  This time, I would like to focus our attention on the parts of the initiative that wear and need refurbishing or replacement – the opportunity capture and management systems and processes.

Opportunity Capture and Management Systems and Processes

Opportunity capture and management systems and processes are the backbone of the business development initiative and are the parts of the overall initiative that is most subject to wear and tear.  If the systems are not working smoothly, then opportunities get lost, field professionals get frustrated and customers become disappointed.  Failure to maintain the processes and systems will be a sure way to bring the entire initiative to a grinding halt.

Capture Opportunities

To keep systems and processes operating in tiptop condition, check to ensure that there is a clear and simple process to capture opportunities and that the process is clearly understood. Look for any opportunities that may have fallen through the cracks.  Identify opportunities that are in limbo and the clarity and effectiveness of the process to follow-up.

Feedback Loops

Look at the feedback loops. Check to ensure that the feedback loops are working properly so that the field service professional is informed on opportunity status when visiting the customer.

Response Times

Ensure that management is responding quickly to address any anomalies when problems in the process do occur.  Failure to address concerns about the processes and systems will communicate to the field team that you are just not that serious.

Simplify the Efforts of the Technicians

Speak with the technicians to explore for improvements in the process that will simplify their efforts.  They are the ones who live and breath within the system and irritations, no matter how small, will slow down their efforts and discourage the desired behaviours.

Taking the time to check and address worn parts and consumables will ensure that the core of the initiative is working smoothly.  Next time I will discuss checking alignments and readjusting if necessary.

Let’s Connect

As always, I welcome your comments and questions. You can connect with me via telephone or email or leave a comment right here on the site. If you are reading this blog post via email, you will need to locate this post on my website by clicking here. Scroll down to the bottom of the page where you will find the comment section.

Jim Baston

“If I had six hours to chop down a tree, I would
spend the first four hours sharpening the axe.”

– Abraham Lincoln

 

[1] This series of blogs is based on an article published for Field Service News – https://www.fieldservicenews.com

Preventative Maintenance for Business Promotion – Introduction

This series of blogs discusses the application of preventative maintenance in order to maintain our field team’s product and service promotion effectiveness. [1]

Preventative Maintenance Pays Off (But You Already Knew That!)

As service providers, we spend much of our time helping our customers realize the many benefits of preventative maintenance (PM). Improved uptime, reduced operating costs and increased asset life are just a few. Although hard to pin down an exact number, experience shows that the return on PM programs can have a significant financial impact. One case study by the Building Owners and Managers Association in 2000 suggested that the return on investment of a PM program can be as high as 545% [2]. A rule of thumb is that corrective maintenance is between two to five times more expensive that implementing a PM program. [3]

We Can Benefit Too

If preventative maintenance programs provide such benefits for our customers, would it not make sense to apply the same logic to our own business and specifically to our efforts to engage our field service team in business development activities?  When was the last time you applied the components of a PM program to improve the effectiveness of your field team’s business development efforts?  If it has been a while, maybe now is the time to revisit your efforts.

Components

To achieve results, a typical PM program will include a number of components including:

  • Checking for overall mechanical condition and wear
  • Replacing, refurbishing, or cleaning of the wearable parts and consumables
  • Checking alignments and readjusting if applicable
  • Lubricating moving parts
  • Checking and updating spare parts inventories
  • Updating software to maintain currency

A PM of our initiative to engage the field team in promoting our products and services could include similar components. Over the next few blogs, I will look at each of these and what steps within each component that we can take to maintain our proactive business development efforts by our field service team.

Let’s Connect

As always, I welcome your comments and questions. You can connect with me via telephone or email or leave a comment right here on the site. If you are reading this blog post via email, you will need to locate this post on my website by clicking here. Scroll down to the bottom of the page where you will find the comment section.

Jim Baston

“An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”

– Benjamin Franklin

[1] This series of blogs is based on an article originally published for Field Service News – https://www.fieldservicenews.com

[2] http://cdn.ifma.org/sfcdn/docs/default-source/default-document-library/determining-the-economic-value-of-preventative-maintenance.pdf?sfvrsn=2

[3] https://www.plantengineering.com/articles/preventative-maintenance-the-cost-of-maintaining-equipment/