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Jan van Veen, Managing Director, moreMomentum continues his exclusive series of articles for Field Service News on ‘4 Winning Habits of Long-Lasting Achievers in Service’ this time turning his attention to the second winning habit: Dialogue...

A Common Mistake: Paralysis By Control

Recently I had an interesting conversation with a Service Leader from one of the leading printer and copier manufacturers about how to empower co-workers to drive change from the bottom up. They had already abandoned their outcome-oriented performance review system but nevertheless, their teams still find it difficult to drive change at a high pace.

An important reason is that dialogue between different management levels and operational specialists is rather infrequent and even then, most conversations are still about outcomes and targets. Even this informal pressure for results preserves feelings of insecurity and low confidence which blocks attempts to adopt and drive change.

Traditionally, many business leaders assumed that they needed strong control mechanisms to manage performance, a dated belief that is still common today. During the last few decades of relentlessly growing markets, the name of the game was rationalising processes and keeping the ability to scale up quickly enough. One of the challenges was control and predictability.

In today’s world, these traditional planning and control mechanisms do not work anymore. They limit teams’ ability to think and act collectively, to innovate their business and drive change. Planning & control mechanisms punish poor performance and setbacks. Employees sense a default unsafe environment and are pushed into a defensive, survival mode. It is safer to keep aspirations low, externalise challenges, blame others and limit ownership.

This results in a strong force to do more of the same and stick to the status-quo.

The solution: A forward-looking and constructive dialogue across all levels and functions

Our recent research clearly shows that winning and dynamic manufacturers have embedded practices and habits which empower employees to drive continuous, easy change from the inside. These modern mechanisms for dialogue across all levels and function are:

• Forward-looking objectives and priorities which drive change and collaboration
• Constructive reviews
• Forward-looking interventions

1. Promote change and collaboration with the right objectives and priorities

Continuous alignment of objectives and priorities: Winning companies focus on strategic objectives that build strong organisational capabilities for performance and continuous business innovation. Building and maintaining a fit and healthy organisation is the focus of (top) management. The most important objectives and targets are about the organisational capabilities, small changes and bigger innovations.

Aspirations, objectives, strategies, limitations, opportunities and pre-requisites are frequently discussed and adjusted when needed to ensure coherent and aligned actions and initiatives across all individuals, teams and departments.Aspirations, objectives, strategies, limitations, opportunities and pre-requisites are frequently discussed and adjusted when needed to ensure coherent and aligned actions and initiatives across all individuals, teams and departments.

Shared outcome targets: Teams and individuals share the same common objectives for results in operational performance and innovation. Their bonus schemes are based on the same indicators. They are all in the same boat, trying to achieve the same objectives. Each team and individual will be open and looking for ways to contribute to the overall targets. Instead of resisting or getting complacent, they all collaborate where needed.

Individual contribution targets: Each team and individual has full clarity on how they are expected to contribute to achieving the outcome. Think about maintaining and developing organisational capabilities, building personal competencies, collaborating with other teams and the level of effort required. For example, the financial department could contribute to the customer experience by improving invoicing (speed, accuracy, transparency, responsiveness to inquiries).

2. Build confidence & safety with constructive and forward-looking reviews

Positive feedback: Colleagues are open to candid feedback and provide constructive feedback to each other. Feedback is not about performance, but approach, activities, priorities, opportunities and threats and is intended to encourage them to adapt and improve. It is related to aspirations, the vision, the strategy.

Forward-looking: The focus is not on the fact that something went wrong, but on how to get it right. What can be learned from setbacks or issues, how can the approach be adjusted? What are new ideas and approaches? It doesn’t make sense to argue about the past.

Multiple stakeholders: Best practice is to include other stakeholders and experts in the reviews, by collecting their feedback, sharing feedback and asking for their view on the problem. This prevents unnecessary bias, reveals many more opportunities for improvement and will get more active support to easily and rapidly implement the interventions.

3. Solve from 1st principle

Root Cause Analysis: Leading companies make it a critical organisational habit to perform a root analysis for pretty much every issue or set-back. As many issues or opportunities affect more than one team or department, it is a good habit to follow through with a diverse group of people and teams who can contribute to the analysis as well as the solution.

What we see is that the winning companies have developed a routine and structure to document, communicate and decide on root cause analyses and interventions.What we see is that the winning companies have developed a routine and structure to document, communicate and decide on root cause analyses and interventions. Root causes and the success of new interventions are standard topics of meetings and conversations. “No time” is not seen a valid reason to skip the root cause analysis.

Structural solutions: Based on the root cause analysis, managers create long-term interventions that define the fundamental solutions and sustainable decision-criteria. They do not step into the trap of short-term, cost-oriented decisions that would let them fall back from fundamental solutions to symptom fighting.

Phased implementation: For complex and time-consuming solutions they define a phased implementation, where first steps can be low-hanging fruit or quick workarounds when the criticality is high. In such cases they ensure that the phased implementation continues after the first steps, to prevent falling back into symptom fighting.

Benefits

The big benefit of this ongoing and forward-looking dialogue across the entire organisation and all levels is to build an environment where everybody feels confident and safe. They feel they can take the initiative to solve issues and pursue opportunities, to come up with interventions when things go differently than expected and ensure coherence between all initiatives.

In psychology, it’s a well-known phenomenon that too much pressure on outcomes and performance kills learning and change.Employees are open and transparent about their successes and struggles, raise risks and problems, ask for help, provide help and simply do what is needed to perform and move forward for future success. Not because there is pressure from a burning platform, but because they want to.

In psychology, it’s a well-known phenomenon that too much pressure on outcomes and performance kills learning and change.

The Essence

We believe that this is not about better articulating the burning platform and creating a sense of urgency. It is about creating a constructive and forward-thinking environment where your colleagues want to, can and do take the right initiatives and bring them into practice.

Magic happens when you bring together business innovation on one hand and employee development and empowerment on the other.

Are you interested in these 4 winning habits and how to implement them?

Follow our articles and case studies over the coming months and join us for one of our Momentum Impulse Sessions through Europe. Reserve your seat @ http://fs-ne.ws/WQih30gRcev

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moreMomentum organises several Momentum Impulse Sessions in Europe and the USA. Executive peers from various manufacturing industries exchange practices, challenges and ideas how to accelerate the business innovation and change and drive success into the digital service economy...

Rapid changes

It has never been a better time to be in the manufacturing industry than nowadays. New technology like big data, algorithms, augmented reality, artificial intelligence and many more are rapidly being adopted by people and organisations.

How to thrive in such a disruptive world

No doubt there exciting opportunities for manufacturing companies. With the new intelligence from the massive amount of data from connected devices and equipment they can create new value for their customers. They can enhance their value propositions and adopt new business models.

However, it’s not only the manufacturing companies that pursue these opportunities. New business are entering the into the market. These new entrants do not have metal, electronics and mechanics in their DNA, but data, algorithms and turning this into value. Besides the well-known companies like Amazon and Google there are many smaller companies moving rapidly. This is changing the competitive arena big time.

When we look at how manufacturers innovate their business and drive change, we see that many encounter 3 key problems which cause them to fall behind competition.

• Change is slow, whether it is small change or more radical changes, there seems to be a lot of energy getting lost in resistance and fighting resistance
• They are stuck in “business-as-usual”. Most innovations are about incremental improvement of current products, services and capabilities.
• Leaders and employees who see the opportunities, threats and lack of progress in their company experience they have no influence to accelerate change.

4 winning habits for momentum

It is mission-critical for manufacturing companies to accelerate business innovation and change for future success. Our research in 89 companies in 2016 identified 4 winning habits for momentum.

• Direction: Everyone shares a clear and succinct picture of changes in the industry, where the company is heading and what needs to change over the coming years. They all understand how they can contribute to the change, and ultimately, fit in.
• Dialogue: Across all teams and levels there is a constructive and forward-looking dialogue on performance, progress, priorities and aligned actions. Everyone feels secure and confident to adapt and try new approaches.
• Decision-making: Everyone has the power to make decisions within their role, to adjust, perform and improve. There are adequate guiding principles to ensure coherence and alignment of all decisions.
• Discovery: Everyone is aware of (potential) trends, opportunities and threats and the best practices available. They spend time in exploring, testing and learning. There is more focus on new things which go beyond the current core business, which is imperative for future success.

Interactive Momentum Impulse Session

moreMomentum organises a series of Momentum Impulse Sessions throughout Europe and USA. During these full day sessions, executives will discuss the 4 winning habits for momentum, their practices and challenges with business innovation and change and will identify opportunities how to accelerate change in their business.

Key-topics:

• Winning habits and strategies which make a (continuous) business innovation easy and quick
• Key obstacles and typical pitfalls for rapid business innovation and change
• Strategic priorities to accelerate business innovation and change and maximise chances for success

You will get valuable input for further developing the right innovation and change strategy and boosting your service innovation!

Upcoming sessions are:

• January 24 in Birmingham (UK) - £375
• March 21 in Munich (Germany) - €425
• May 14 in New York (USA) - $595
• May 23 in Eindhoven (The Netherlands - €425

 

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Field Service News readers receive 30% discount. Enter FSN as promotional code to secure your discount.

Book your seat for your preferred session now.

 

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About moreMomentum:

moreMomentum is an international consulting, training and coaching company which works with manufacturing companies to get more momentum into their ongoing business innovation and change. They exists to accelerate the transition of industrial manufacturing into the digital service economy.

 

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As part of his ongoing research what makes successful companies tick, Jan van Veen, co-founder of moreMomentum, has begun a series of interviews with proven managers across the globe who are successfully implementing the 4 Winning Habits to lead innovative, energised and engaged teams.

This time around he talks to Ashley Weller, UK Service Director, Mars Drinks...

Mars Drinks is one of the world’s biggest and most successful vending machine companies and a part of Mars Incorporated. It operates globally, supplying and maintaining machines in workplaces such as offices and manufacturing sites in North America, Europe and a growing business in China and Japan. Although the sector is in decline in the UK, Mars Drinks is beating the market trends by knowing their customers and playing to their strengths, and has now been keeping us all going with our favourite hot drinks for 45 years.

Ashley Weller took over as UK Service Director in 2015, with 20 years experience in the service industry, a degree in History of Art and a passionate but empathetic leadership style.

He came in as the business was starting to see intense competition from coffee shop chains embedded in offices as well as on the high street. Ashley took the visionary decision to challenge his people to elevate their role, transforming themselves into Brand Ambassadors and adding even more value to great customer relationships.

Now, the staff are energised, their customer satisfaction is way up and the company is supplying a much wider range of products than ever before.

The challenges facing Mars Drinks UK Customer Service

Apart from the general food industry trend to coffee shops, the UK Service Department also had its own challenges for Ashley.

After many years, the service engineers had become somewhat disengaged with the role they were playing within the company, and although they were highly engaged with their regular clients and maintained great relationships there, their role was solely to fix broken machines.

Furthermore, the company had been focusing its investment on sales and marketing, leaving the service department, with its good customer feedback, to continue operating with minimal investment. There was a feeling that that their impact wasn’t as valued as other departments and that the great work they’d been doing wasn’t getting the recognition it should.

The Strategy

Ashley wanted to bring the Service division back into the fold of the company and use the engineers’ knowledge and excellent client relationships as a USP to build more business. To do this, in a 3-year plan, he created a supportive, safe environment free from blame that enabled the engineers to be the drivers of that change, supporting them all the way along their journey to become Brand Ambassadors.

The service leadership team would be vital to the process, being the first to experience the new environment, supporting it from day one and learning first-hand how the new dialogue would work, so they could pass on their experiences to the teams.

 

Here we will show how Mars Drinks demonstrated each of the 4 Winning Habits in the implementation of its plan, creating Momentum for long-term sustainable success in its UK Service division. The strategy shows that Momentum can start anywhere when the 4 Winning Habits are employed. They soon spread to other departments when they see the positive impact.

 
 

Direction – the common cause that everyone can get behind

The main aim was to build the engineers up to be brand ambassadors, strengthening their strong client relationships even more but in a way that added value. Up to that point, the engineers were the customers’ white knights, fixing problems but not always recognised for the full value they could bring to the company.

The engineers feared they were being asked to sell and that this might harm their existing, genuine relationships, but in fact found customers love it when they talk to them and tell them about new products, and also then provide more feedback. It’s a win/win when the customer feels valued and provides information that improves the business.

Weller explains: “At the kick off conference, named ‘Stepping Out of the Shadows’, we created a platform of 3-S’s for our future vision: Service, Strengthen and Stimulate. They were built upon leveraging our service strengths by improving and standardising our operating practices, learning from the best in class to strengthen all aspects of our customer relationships, and then using these relationships built on trust and performance to then stimulate the conversation to create the ‘wow’ for our customers by being able to help them gain more from Mars Drinks.”

 

Now, it’s very important that new joiners are brought into the service culture so it can continue. The level of success achieved can only be maintained by ensuring new people can work in this type of environment so the onboarding process is very thorough.

Dialogue – open discussion at and between all levels to encourage new ideas

The team began by recognising they had to remove the fear of failure for suggesting or trying ideas and then include the engineers in the solution planning process. The message was “You want to be part of business and the business wants you”. It takes years to earn this level of trust however.

Ashley started by playing a video which the engineers had made about their work at a company conference. Suddenly, the engineers were given a stage – people around the company started talking about service and the engineers felt pride that the business was noticing them and their contribution.

The next step was to ask them their opinions. Throughout the 3-year plan, it was anticipated that there would be mistakes and course corrections needed, so the engineers were encouraged to say what was working and what wasn’t. The senior management team also bought in to the process and gave their support.

The engineers had great relationships with their clients, but how could they add more value to the customer and the company? This led to a long series of suggestions, one of which resulted in the creation of an iPad app to enable easier maintenance. The feedback was “You’ve given me IT that I can use!” while also enabling them to provide better service.

 

Of course, there were early adopters and laggards. With support and attention from the company comes accountability, meaning some couldn’t hide any more. Strong people managers helped staff on that journey and some became exemplars for the new role. The proof is in the practice: “people need to see it delivered to understand that this is now the norm.”

Personal objectives are an effective way to include people, and in Mars Drinks they waterfall down from higher company goals, helping people to see why they matter. People aren’t only measured on targets, but also on trying new ideas, adding value and learning from other colleagues or learning from failure. Of course, this also means you can’t give bad reviews if an experiment fails.

Decision-making – local decision-making empowerment

Engineers saw things on a day to day basis that they wanted to improve and many, it turns out, had already started working on small improvement projects in their own time. These hadn’t been shared due to a fear of failure. Once more trust had been established, implementing some of these ideas across the UK saved thousands of pounds and many hundreds of working hours. Now, the engineers are keen to make more suggestions and so far, 30% have been implemented.

Another approach was to get the engineers to compare working methods between teams and analyse the differences. As a result, standardising some processes has led to improved machine reliability. They also moved from 30 to 90-day reliability targets and started seeing new trends in the data about certain parts that then enabled new processes and product improvements.

The company is supporting the engineers in their new role, including training them to spot opportunities for new machines on site. Customers are more likely to engage with them as they have a high level of trust, and the conversion rates for leads originating this way is higher than from the sales team.

Discovery – Looking for new external trends, opportunities and threats

Everyone in the Service Department is now keenly involved in looking for new innovation opportunities that will benefit customers, but more than that, they are open to new ideas and ways of working, because very often they have been suggested by one of their own.

Weller comments; “If we kept the customer at the very heart of what we were trying to achieve, the person the engineers wanted to serve the best, then we’d always have a central pivot point to navigate by. That’s been critical”

Business Outcomes

As a result of the team’s work over several years, the new processes are now a living, breathing animal and are running smoothly under the control of the regional managers. The new brand ambassadors are a true USP for the company and are loved by their customers. The engineers are proud that they’ve achieved all this – it’s what their customers wanted.

The new culture has translated into more machine orders and wider ranges of drinks being supplied that customers want to consume. Comparing 2016 to 2017, there’s been a 33% increase in new products added to machines and a 150% increase in leads for new machines compared to inbound or outbound sales, with higher conversion rates too.

 

Next Steps

Next, there is going to be a stronger focus on building discovery capabilities to enable the service team to connect more with customers and back with the business, putting them in control of demand, not the other way around.

Learning from other industries, technology such as Internet of Things and cashless payments generate rich streams of data to provide much deeper understanding and help predict requirements. The engineers will be highly involved too, being given the ability, for instance, to offer contract renewals on site within their trusted relationship.

The future is looking bright for the Mars Drinks Service team.

 

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