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Our series of excerpts from the exceptional industry guide 'Mobile Resource Management for Dummies', which has been commissioned by Verizon Connect has so far explored Understanding Digital Transformation in a Connected, Mobile World  also Thinking Outside the Silo and Harnessing the Power of Telematics, and Realising the Value of Mobile Resource Managemen

Now in this latest excerpt, we turn our attention to how field service organisations can avoid Mobile Resource Management pitfalls whilst they drive greater employee engagement.

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If you need to catch up with the previous articles in this series you can find part one here, part two here and part three here.

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As with any new project or initiative, there are some common pitfalls to avoid when deploying a Mobile Resource Management (MRM) solution. In this excerpt, we shall look at some of these pitfalls and how to address them, as well as how to engage employees in every department throughout your organisation using the concept of gamification to coach and improve worker performance and drive a more satisfied, efficient and safe organisation.

You Can’t ‘Set It and Forget It’

MRM is a business strategy supported by processes and technology and used by teams throughout the organisation.

Although technology is a vital component, many organisations mistakenly focus purely on the technology and neglect to consider how supporting processes will map to the MRM solution, and fail to define or implement a strategy to gain user adoption.

 

"The goodwill created through co-consultation will quickly evaporate if people don’t understand how to use the software and how it benefits the company, their team members, and themselves..."

 

Although various teams throughout your organisation may have been consulted during the MRM planning process, don’t expect them to automatically embrace the new system or instinctively know how to use it effectively. The goodwill created through co-consultation will quickly evaporate if people don’t understand how to use the software and how it benefits the company, their team members, and themselves.

The level of personalisation will depend on the workflows and the capabilities of the solution being implemented. User training always needs to be built into any MRM project plan.

As well as covering tuition on software functionality and its benefits, group training is a perfect forum to formulate processes and ensure buy-in collectively from all teams. Tailored training programmes involving the system users or those with a vested interest in delivery – your MRM ‘advocates’ or ‘champions’ – need to be developed.

In this way, the system will be seen as a universal corporate tool and not just one department ‘selling’ it.

A common pitfall (discussed in our article in this series on 'Thinking Outside the Silo') is trying to cobble together your own MRM system by integrating siloed best-of-breed solutions in-house. The ever-changing applications make constant connectivity a difficult, moving target that’s costly to set up and that requires a long-term and expensive commitment, relying on a small team/person with highly specialised knowledge – this can be a very high-risk proposition.

 

Don’t Just Throw in the Kitchen Sink

As the saying goes: garbage in, garbage out.

Spend time cleaning up your data – especially any data that includes addresses. Have you maintained a consistent style or format for data entry? Doing some data validation to determine whether your data is in the proper format goes a long way towards helping to make your data more usable.

One of the fundamental deployment errors in any new system is simply ‘forklifting’ your data from the old system to the new one. Before you begin the process, separate, segment and streamline your data. Work out which segments are relatively clean and which will need additional cleansing. Think clearly about what you want to put in and what will actually be relevant day to day. What data is going to get users to actually want to use the system? Remove out-of-date activities, as well as organisations and contacts that haven’t been touched recently. Relevancy is a guaranteed way to overcome user resistance.

Don’t just focus on addresses – think about time windows, skill sets, delivery days/dates and other common data.

These will all impact the effectiveness of your MRM solution if they’re not accurate and up-to-date. Have a clear, consolidated, centralised database of all your fleet/asset information to avoid delays and frustration, especially at remote locations.

Taking the necessary steps to fix any issues or errors in advance will significantly improve the MRM data conversion and implementation process.

 

Establish Your Mission

While your drivers, technicians or crews may be a subset of a larger business, there’s no reason why that subset shouldn’t have its own mission that aligns and supports the overall corporate mission.

 

"While your drivers, technicians or crews may be a subset of a larger business, there’s no reason why that subset shouldn’t have its own mission that aligns and supports the overall corporate mission..."

 

Once the mission is established, it’s time to break it down to individual objectives that support the mission. For example, the mission may be to operate the safest fleet in your region, so the objectives may include reducing speeding incidents, Hours of Service (HOS) violations or vehicle idle time.

Create measurable key performance indicators (KPIs) from the established objectives and keep them as specific as possible. No matter what your objectives are – increasing productivity, decreasing fuel costs, improving the safety of your crews or increasing asset utilisation – the secret to achieving them is keeping them Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time-bound (SMART). You then need to connect your entire organisation to the established goals.

 

Align Your Objectives

Review your objectives to ensure that they align with business operations. For example, if your company puts working as fast as possible first and safety second, then setting an objective to reduce speeding won’t align. Get your company influencers (normally managers or supervisors) involved to review and align to the objectives.

Your managers need to be on board with the new objectives because they play an important role in influencing others, and ultimately help to achieve a successful outcome. After reviewing and refining your objectives, and aligning them with your organisation, you’re ready for deployment.

 

Plan Your Rollout Across the Organisation

If you’re rolling out at multiple locations, draw up a coordinated plan.

Ensure that all parties are on the same page and engaged across the entire organisation – not just in the main office, but at all remote sites. Everyone needs to be aware of the deployment plan and the local champion/team must have everything prepared for deployment at their site on the agreed day/time.

Clear and concise internal communications are critical to ensure a smooth rollout.

Scope the deployment properly first: don’t move the goal posts during implementation. This is very difficult to do, as local variance and conditions means that tweaks are needed but they can cause delay.

 

What Is Gamification

Gamification is the use of game mechanics in a typically non-game-oriented context.

Gamification is used by software companies to build business applications that increase engagement and participation while accelerating learning. It leverages the human instinct to compete with ourselves or others, with the objective of encouraging teams to achieve company-wide goals.

For example, you can deliver greater safety and compliance by giving near real-time data to drivers so that they can track – and eventually improve – their own performance, or improve productivity by empowering field workers to track near real-time performance metrics when completing work orders.

 

For gamification to be most effective it needs to be ‘refereed’. This means monitoring results, providing incentives and celebrating wins...

 

For gamification to be most effective it needs to be ‘refereed’. This means monitoring results, providing incentives and celebrating wins. It can’t just be a new fad or flavour of the month initiative. Instead, it must become part of the fabric and culture of the business otherwise results will slip and workers will return to their old habits.

To monitor the results, you need a scoreboard to help reinforce the KPIs so that your employees know what they’re playing for.

The system takes the predetermined metrics and generates a score, then lets the employee see how they perform against their peers. It’s an opportunity to improve behaviours and perform with pride because they see metrics that show a direct correlation to how they’re helping to make their operation successful.

Managers can compare employee scorecards and the types and frequencies of training content being accessed to different metrics such as the rate of accidents, lost-time injuries and productivity, and draw direct correlations between what moves the needle and what doesn’t.

Done right, gamification can be more than just a passing fad.

The data derived can be a powerful force for change in your organisation – you’ll see more than better business results: you’ll have employees who feel more engaged and appreciated, recognised for good performance on the job and motivated to do their best.

 

Want to know more? The full eBook is available as premium content to fieldservicenews.com subscribers. Access it now on the button below... 

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Gamification is helping fleet and field service organisations to engage and incentivise their drivers to become more safe and efficient on the roads, says John Cameron, general manager of Trimble Field Service Management.

Careless driving can cost fleet and field service companies thousands or even millions of pounds each year. The UK's Institute of Advanced Motorists’ Drive & Survive division report that 86 per cent of UK fleets have experienced an accident in the past 12 months, and that every fleet has had an accident where one of their drivers was ‘at fault’.

Many organisations look to improve driving behaviour by deploying telematics technology across their vehicle fleets. Whilst the technology has proven benefits, organisations often struggle to reap its full rewards as drivers may not always be fully engaged and motivated to improve their driving performance, mainly due to a lack of interest or incentive.

Demotivation is something many organisations struggle with, not just with initiatives for improving driver safety, but with all business aspects. In order to avoid the pitfalls of demotivation providing employees with recognition at work, regular rewards and a sense of competition amongst peers are all strong motivators.

In recent years, Gamification has come to the fore as a solution able to tap into an employee’s key motivators and sustain them. Indeed, organisations are increasingly calling upon the skills of software developers to apply the appealing traits of computer gaming into their business applications as a way to increase employee participation, engagement and accelerated learning in a business programme or initiative.

What is Gamification and how does it work?
Owning a smart phone or a tablet is a staple in many of our lives today and downloading apps, particularly gaming apps, is becoming ever more frequent. The power of popular games such as Candy Crush and Flappy Bird recently captured the lives of people from all walks of life. Students, businessmen, parents all became addicted to breaking the latest high score at any spare moment they could get. This inherent desire to compete, either with ourselves or others, is embedded within all of us.

In 2010, venture capitalists identified the potential for Gamification to incorporate the social/reward aspects of gaming into business software. This would not just make daily business tasks more enjoyable for employees, but would increase their collaboration and motivation at work to directly benefit the business and achieve company-wide goals.

Gamification and Driver Safety
A significant industry where Gamification has proven successful is in helping fleet and field service organisations to manage driver safety and risk. Being able to operate a safe and efficient fleet of drivers directly impacts the productivity and bottom line of a field operation. However, when it comes to adopting new processes, engaging employees is a notoriously difficult thing to do, especially when it is something as sensitive as monitoring their driver behaviour. Many businesses have therefore begun to implement gaming techniques into driver safety mobile apps to encourage drivers to perform better on the roads.

 

A driver safety mobile app typically records any extreme manoeuvres such as harsh acceleration, braking, turns and speed, the data of which is provided directly to the driver and sent to the back office for analysis. Gamification is integrated in the form of a scorecard that employees can use to record their driving performance. Although the recordings can be both personal and impartial it is the direct feedback that incentivises drivers to compete against themselves, and each other, for the best scores.

It often happens that employees are resistant to new initiatives because they don’t see any personal benefit in adopting them. Organisations therefore emphasise the gaming element of driver safety mobile apps to motivate their drivers, offering them positive recognition and rewards for good driving behaviour. Driver conversations inside an organisation therefore changes from gripes about the new technology to new excitement and collaboration around which team and individual has ranked top for the week and which areas they have improved in.

In order to reinforce focus over the long term, many apps also incorporate daily improvement tips based on an individual’s driving performance. For example, if speeding is proving to be a problem, the app will explain that higher speeds will result in longer stopping distances and excess fuel use, therefore negatively impacting their overall driver safety score.

Gamification ultimately offers a plethora of opportunities to fleet and field service organisations in helping them to motivate their drivers to change behaviours and develop their skills. However, the potential for Gamification doesn’t stop at driver safety. Gaming techniques can be incorporated into business applications both business and industry-wide. The pace at which gaming techniques is being adopted is gaining in momentum and market growth is expected to reach $5,500 billion by 2018.

Whether a company is looking to improve customer engagement, employee performance, training and education, innovation management, personal development, sustainability or health and wellness, organisations can integrate Gamification to help guarantee employees stay fully motivated and committed to achieve business goals.

 

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Resource Type: eBook
Published by:  Telogis
Title Gaming the System to improve driver behaviour
Download: Click here to Download the full ebook here

By downloading you agree to the T&Cs listed available here

Synopsis

As a field service manager you might be wondering how gamification can help your business, or perhaps you’re ready to start but you’re looking for ideas on the best way to implement.

This eBook published by Telogis can help you find the answers to these questions and understand how different employees might respond to gamification based on their personalities.

Overview

Gamification is a word that you will be hearing more often, with industry experts picking it as a growing trend in business applications.

The term arose back in 2002 but it wasn’t until 2010 that it started to gain traction. Software developers began using the engaging traits of electronic games to increase participation in business programs. Before long, business applications that allowed users to socialise, collect achievements and be rewarded started to pop up.

Over the years gamification has matured. More real-world testing has helped “gamified” business applications to evolve beyond a simplistic points system. This ebook explores the three fundamental elements of integrating Gamification into your business:

1. Mission
2. Alignment
3. Deployment

Phase 1: Establishing your mission

A business without a mission is like a ship without a rudder. Even if you already have a mission, it’s worth reviewing or updating it to match the current business environment. While your mobile workforce may be a subset of a larger business, there’s no reason it shouldn’t have its own mission, one that aligns and supports the overall corporate mission.

Once the mission is established, it’s time to break it down to individual goals or objectives that support the mission. Keep your objectives as specific as possible. No sport would ever get popular if the goal was vague, moved regularly or unclear to the players.

 

No matter what your objectives are – increasing productivity, decreasing fuel costs, improving driver safety or increasing asset utilisation – the secret to achieving them is keeping them Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time-bound (SMART).

Phase 2: Align your mission objectives

To make sure you stay on track to achieve your objectives you need to check your alignment.

This means reviewing your objectives, to check they align with how you operate as a business. For example, if your company puts more emphasis on working as fast as possible without respect for safety, then setting an objective to reduce speeding won’t align.

Get your company influencers (normally managers or supervisors) involved and review your objectives with them. They’ll let you know quickly where they think alignment is lacking. It’s important that your managers are onboard with the new objectives – they will play an important role in influencing others and ultimately help achieve a successful outcome.

After reviewing and refining your objectives, aligning them with your organisation, you’re ready for implementation. It’s time to deploy.

Phase 3:  Deployment

The size of your organisation will determine the scale of your deployment planning. In the case of using Telogis Coach mobile app, small companies may only need brief training that includes a quick-start guide to explain how it works and instructions on how to download, install and log in to the app on their mobile device.

Large enterprises would benefit from the tailored implementation provided by Telogis Professional Services. Their expertise and deployment experience can help avoid common pitfalls and roll it out right the first time.

 

Monitoring results

First of all, you want to make sure everyone in your organization knows what your objectives are. If one of your KPIs is to reduce speeding by 50% then let the whole team know, not just management. A team wins when it knows what it’s playing for.

You’ll also need a scoreboard. Telogis Coach includes an enterprise dashboard that shows real-time results for specific KPIs - you can log in from anywhere and get an up-to-date score, either across the entire fleet or individual crews.

Celebrating wins

You don’t need to do cartwheels in the office every time a driver gets a perfect score but there should be recognition and reward. In most cases the size of the reward is not important; it’s about making sure they know you know, and it means something to you.

Recording the game time

Decide on how long each “game” lasts. Employees will soon tire of a game with no end in sight. You can choose any reasonable period but in general, for achieving fleet KPIs, a period of 90 days is most common. At the end of each period, results are tallied, players rewarded and recognised and the game starts over.

Gamer types

Not only will you have some of each gamer type personalities in your organisation, there’s also a little of each type in all of us. You should remember this with your gamification program and make sure you’re keeping each type happy.

Killers need sufficient competition. Achievers need plenty of recognition and rewards. Socialisers need lots of interaction with other players and Explorers need the opportunity to be creative with the game. Check from time to time that you have the balance right.

Give your team time to adjust to the new gamification approach, be generous with recognition and rewards and stay focused on your mission.

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Want to know more? Click here to download the full ebook

 

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We've already run a number of  features that have looked at the trends that might be emerging or appearing on the horizon service this year. However what about the trends that have already emerged that will move beyond concepts and firmly take root? Aberdeen's Aly Pinder, takes a brief look at the trends which won't fade away this year... 

Trends come and go in our lives, and field service is no exception. But not all trends are alike. The five field service trends below have and will continue to bring valuable change to service and I expect they will not fade into our dusty history books:

Gamification:

Game mechanics is not just about a consumer trend to ensure that companies can better track and market to customers. Gamification can be used in field service to create a new and very visible incentive structure to help technicians evolve with the changing service model. No longer is field service solely expected to meet a schedule, technicians must now work with customers to resolve issues, create value partnerships, and help drive future revenue opportunities.

Internet of Things:

This may have had the most buzz in 2014. IoT in field service has the opportunity to play a major role in transforming how organisations capture data, what types of performance data they can gather, how they can resolve issues in a predictive and proactive manner, and find the next solutions for future problems.

BYOD:

The bring your own device initiative has run up against some skepticism recently. Like all trends a clear strategy to maximize the value of BYOD is necessary prior to rolling this type of change out to the field. Organisations Aberdeen sampled which adopted some level of a BYOD strategy did not see a drop off in key metrics, and in many cases they actually achieved improvements.

Techs as Partners:

No longer is the OEM the only company that can provide service on a given piece of equipment. The service model has begun to require that companies not only provide customers with the option to get the closest technician, but sometimes if they like get the technician they want to work with.

Wearables:

Will all technicians be outfitted with augmented reality glasses in 2015? Probably not. But wearable technology will continue to evolve in cost, value, and practical improvement for the field. Each technology advancements struggles with what is flashy and what helps get the job done in the field. Wearables are no different.

 

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ClickSoftware have created this great infographic looking at the uses of Gamification within businesses and how it has evolved throughout the years.

Some key points highlighted include:

• By 2015, 40% of top 1000 companies by market value will use gamification as the primary mechanism to transform business operations
• IBM, AutoDesk and SAP are some of the companies who have successfully adopted Gamification
• Gamification is a key element In consumerisation of enterprise strategy in companies such as Cisco, Pearson and Salesforce

 

Click Software's Gil Bouhnick, Vice President of Mobility looks at how how companies can use gamification in their organisations to improve efficiency....

Gaming has become a core part of our daily lives. Whether we’re sitting at home playing Candy Crush or trying to break that unbeatable Flappy Bird record on the way to work, people from all walks of life are beginning to play more games, ever more frequently. All you need to do is sit on a train and see men in suits, parents after the school run, teenagers, or people just enjoying a day of leisure – most of them will have a gaming app on their phone, and more often than not, will play it on a regular basis.

We work best when we are happy, and so smart companies are looking into how they can use the surge in popularity of both games and the smartphones they are played upon. Is there some way you can blend the two to make work that little bit easier? The answer is absolutely.

Gamification is a term that has been around for a while, but now we are really seeing it adopted by companies of all varieties for things such as helping them increase employee collaboration and motivation, to providing training and supporting change management. Essentially all the tasks that you know you have to do, but don’t always enjoy doing can have an amount of gamification woven into them. And in a way, this can be turned into a reward for employees who do these tasks on time and accurately. A small badge here, an unlockable picture there, small tokens that can make staff feel better for doing the administration.

Engaging employees of all levels and functions is a notoriously difficult thing to do, especially when it comes to adopting new processes. It often happens that employees are resistant to changes because they can’t understand the new processes nor do they see any personal benefit in adopting them. But having an engaged and motivated workforce is a crucial ingredient to a successful company, even more so when that company has a dispersed workforce.

In businesses where there is a core back office function and then a field team carrying out the tasks, it’s very easy to become split between these two fault lines. Unifying them and making sure they are all following the same procedures can be much more difficult than a business that is self-contained or less diversified in the roles and responsibilities of the staff.

Yet tapping into a common ground can be a great way of bringing a company together. This is where it’s hoped gamification will come into its own. Think about some of the tasks you need to do as part of your job – timesheets, expenses, logging tasks. It can be pretty boring stuff. But what if you livened it up a little bit and made it more compelling by adding a competitive element to what you are doing? And if you made your employee feel appreciated for doing such tasks?

We have begun to see businesses doing just that. Company-wide league tables charting who is best at one task, or which division is doing something better or faster than another. A little healthy competition goes a long way to bringing people together.

You can also apply this to customer service too. If the end customer has the option to directly feedback via a smart device, then suddenly it is even more critical for the technician, engineer, or salesman to make sure they do the best job possible. It provides a way to show how well they are doing by comparing the best in your company with each other and it also allows companies to reward their top employees for their outstanding results. It’s like the old sales charts companies used to have where at the end of the month, a salesman of the month would be announced. The concept is exactly the same, just digitising it and making it something that people from across the business can take part in.

At the foundation of any good gamification model is the goal to reward staff. This doesn’t necessarily mean holidays abroad, mountains of cash etc., it’s more about appreciation that they are doing a good job and are recognised across the business as such.  A good gamification model should be easy to embrace. The moment it becomes as complicated as the tasks it’s trying to replace, then you’ve lost sight of the reason of employing it.

Make it simple. Make it compelling. And make it as fun as possible. If you stick by these rules, then you should begin to reap the benefits pretty quickly. Benefits, such as a more engaged workforce, more accurate reporting and completion of administrative tasks, and ultimately a better customer experience. We are still in the early days of companies adopting true gamification policies, but with no end in sight for the adoption of smartphones, the technology is finding its way into more people’s hands, and that’s an opportunity businesses should be seriously considering in the years to come.