There is a Tsunami of youth unemployment awaiting us at a time when we face a crisis of an ageing workforce. Surely it is time to join the dots before it is too late writes Mark Homer...

The world has never been more unpredictable, such a statement invites a variety of responses that ranges from complete agreement to denial or a more middle of the road response; possibly augmenting the discussion with words of caution or even scepticism. My own view is the world has always been unstable and unpredictable, but I do think we are heading into uncharted waters.

I suspect the majority of Service Leaders would agree that increased economic pressure, social compliance and even more operational uncertainty is ahead.

Furthermore, this uncertainty in itself is more than likely to have the greatest impact on our futures, our service industry and especially the way we work. Throughout this COVID crisis a large number of our field service colleagues have been quietly continuing to supply service and continued to maintain critical equipment to ensure the continuity of availability and supply.

Many have willingly accepted a greater personal risk to themselves going about this essential work given the potential infection risks they continue to face. We should all take the time to thank, acknowledge and appreciate their amazing contribution throughout this crisis and continue to celebrate what an interesting career it is to be in the service industry. This is exactly the time to promote just how critical the service industry is to our modern society.

 

"During this crisis, I have listened to many service leaders describing how they are deferring more routine maintenance and preventative work. Consequently, increasing their work backlog to record levels, thus increasing future demand..."

- Mark Homer. 

 

However, under the surface brews the swirling currents and early signs of a storm, a skills shortage. For the last few years I have been commentating on the rise of the Service Gig economy, the increased use of third party labour and the increasing reliance on third party contracting firms to help Service leaders smooth the peaks and valleys of fluctuating service demand.

I have been to many conferences where presenters have warned of the potential for increased widespread industry skill fade; largely due to our baby boomer generation now retiring from the global pool of available technicians and allied service trades. The continued trend to also sweat capital assets and eke out just a few more years of operational asset life before eventually total failure, parts obsolescence, lack of knowledge in the field force to service such assets and available options for final asset replacement.

Also, during this crisis, I have listened to many service leaders describing how they are deferring more routine maintenance and preventative work. Consequently, increasing their work backlog to record levels, thus increasing future demand.

I was really struck by an article in the Sunday Times by Kenneth Baker last week. Lord Baker is chairman of the Baker Dearing Educational Trust and a former UK Government Education secretary; he warns of a youth unemployment tsunami. Citing that sadly many apprenticeships that were approved this year have already been cancelled by companies, including Bentley, JCB, Netflix, Rolls-Royce and Warner Brothers.

More cancellations will follow. He makes the call for more technical training and technical skills development, calling on the UK Prime Minister, Chancellor and current Education Secretary to make changes that facilitate more courses to be available and that training is better than unemployment. He illustrates how the Government might fund this change.

As a service industry we are in desperate need of that new talent. Now is the time for us to all get involved with schemes that encourage people to join our industry.

To come together to promote the range of interesting and rewarding careers that will in turn help address both the skill fade and skill shortage that we will all likely face in coming years.

Let’s start promoting our industry, recruiting new talent and in the words of Lord Baker to train, train, train.

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Mark Homer is an independent commentator, who specialises in Digital Transformation within the Field Service Industry.

A specialist recruitment platform initially conceived to help fill the service talent gap took on a new significance as an urgent post calling for medical technicians meant the project was fast-tracked to market. Mark Glover uncovers the story behind ServiceMax's Field Service Finder and its extraordinary five-week turnaround.

 

We are living and working in unprecedented times. All aspects of life are being affected by the pandemic: work, travel, holidays, live sport on TV.

Covid's Impact on the field service workforce

Of course the return of football is rather trivial compared to the health and financial impact this virus is having. As I type, news feeds are reporting Germany’s dip into recession. Indications this normally robust economy is wobbling will send tremors across the rest of Europe and beyond. In the UK, a financial crash is said to be inevitable and in the US the economy is showing significant signs of a downturn, fuelled in part by 26 million Americans losing their jobs as companies take actions to reduce bottom lines.

In service, technicians hardest hit are those in industries locked-down such as hospitality and retail. It means many have been furloughed or made redundant.

It’s another blow to a recruitment pool that has historically always struggled to attract and identify new talent. Field service positions are specialist, they require knowledge across a range of skills and are difficult to fill even without a global pandemic. Service - and I appreciate I’m sweeping broadly here - essentially exists to fix things, but it requires a highly-skilled and technical workforce to do so.

It wasn't always like this however. Post-war optimism and the 'baby-boomers' generation flooded the blue-collar market learning trades that secured a job for life. Now, the US, like the UK, are today seeing a large chunk of their workforce drop off as this generation retire. This decline has left an alarming employment gap that might not be an abyss, but with the advent of Covid-19, it’s looking a lot deeper than before and some sectors are feeling the pinch more than they ever have.

However, for the medical and biotech industries, there are challenges not in reducing staff numbers but significantly increasing them to cope with accelerating service requests.

Medtronic are a medical device manufacturer who have seen a substantial increase in demand for equipment such as ventilators which has in turn increased the need for service technicians to install and fix them. Theirs is a specialist field and even before the pandemic, finding those with appropriate experience and knowledge to service the assets was difficult.

"The site went live on May 4, the result of an extraordinary five weeks of development, testing and refining and more testing..."

As part of a recent recruitment drive the firm reached out on LinkedIn, publishing a post that directed people to their specialist vacancies, hoping it would touch a niche slice of a workforce they desperately needed to engage. The post was noticed by ServiceMax’s Stacey Epstein. “It was something of an urgent plea for volunteers and skilled workers to visit their own internal career page because they were desperately needing help,” she tells me over a Zoom conversation one afternoon, a week after the firm's most recent product launch. 

ServiceMax's Field Service Job Finder is a platform connecting talent with demand across critical industries but even before this pandemic, the project had been in the pipeline for a while, an idea sparked by the aforementioned issues in service recruitment and confirmed following a piece of research from Forrester Consulting, commissioned by ServiceMax looking into the drivers of digital transformation in service.

Consulting 675 decision makers globally the research revealed, rather shockingly, that 97% reported challenges in sourcing talent with 49 % citing challenges identifying candidates who have the required knowledge and expertise. The issue was obvious but how to negate it?

ServiceMax and their customers straddle an array of industry verticals so they already had the audience (or “eyeballs”, Stacey says) for such a platform, however they needed to find the right partner who could provide the infrastructure.

Krios already ran their own recruitment portal. The site is tailored for the gig economy linking freelancers to a range of requests covering graphic design, translation services and web design; a blueprint similar to ServiceMax’s idea but on a different level of vocation. The two firms met, Krios were able to commit and the project quickly spun into action. The site went live on May 4, the result of an extraordinary five weeks of development, testing and refining and more testing. It was much earlier than was planned - but sparked by Medtronic’s post, the relationship the two had anyway (Medtronic are a ServiceMax customer) and the impending pandemic - the site was fast tracked to market. “It was literally seeing that request on LinkedIn,” Stacey explains, “and knowing it was a customer and that we’d already been talking about what we could be doing to help our customers with the skilled worker gap issue, we said, ‘we’ve got to do it now.’”

There are plenty of Medtronics out there, struggling with a challenge the likes of which they have never experienced and conversely, never planned for..."

So they did. To date, traffic has been steady with over 4,000 new users and exceeding 7,000 page impressions and while the majority of users are US-based the site is seeing traction globally being viewed in over 40 countries.

I suggested to Stacey we keep in touch, that I would like to monitor the site’s progress. Beyond the user metrics, I said, it would be interesting to see what comes to the surface after a month or so; to see what service companies are now looking for. It could offer a clear barometer of where service recruitment is, what jobs are available and what skills are being asked for – a glimpse of the new service workplace as the pandemic leaves its legacy.

But for now, this was a project that came from a glance at LinkedIn and a realisation what affect this pandemic was having. Stacey tells me when she saw the post she was pretty sure Medtronic would probably not be the only firm blinking in this new Covid dawn. Sadly, she’s right. There are plenty of Medtronics out there, struggling with a challenge the likes of which they have never experienced and conversely, never planned for.

COVID-19 is unprecedented and changing the very fabric of what we once knew as ‘normal’. For service to survive – and eventually thrive – it needs to pivot and flex; to absorb and react. This starts at the ground - in recruitment and the next generation.

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Further Reading: 

• Read more about recruitment in service @ www.fieldservicenews.com/recruitment
• Read more about Covid-19 in service @ www.fieldservicenews.com/covid
• Read more about more about empowering field workers @ www.fieldservicenews.com/blog/tag/managing-the-mobile-workforce
• Read more about ServiceMax's Field Service Finder @ https://www.fieldservicefinder.com/
• Read more about Medtronic @ www.medtronic.com 

 

 

In a recent edition of the Field Service Podcast, Field Service News, Editor-in-Chief, Kris Oldland sat down with Patrick Jansen, Field Service Manager, VBR Turbines, about why they decided to undertake an in-depth build of their own bespoke IoT solution.

"It all started about 6 years ago. We are an MRO (maintenance and repair organisation)  so we do own anything, we don't produce anything, our business is service. We saw that our market was changing. There was knowledge drain, changes in the labour market and more." Jansen explained. 

"So we started to look at what our service deliver should be like ten years from now and alongside that how could we overcome the challenges that we face in the labour market and how could we address the knowledge drain with our customers. There were a couple of things that saw needed to be done.

"One of the main drivers for us was to create an additional tool to facilitate remote support for the customer but also do diagnostics on the assets. This is because in the energy market within Europe has changed significantly." he added.

One such change has been the shift within the energy sector is that the traditional way of working with a predictive maintenance schedule was to base the schedule on running hours, but this is no longer an appropriate methodology as the amount of running hours has reduced. 

However, there were other benefits that Jansen and the team at VBR Turbines were able to benefit from - including the reduction in training time for new engineers. 

"The remote solutions can help people to get trained faster, the time to training a field service engineer really dramatically reduced." Jansen added. 

 

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Want to know more? Check out the Full Podcast in our Premium Content Library by clicking the button below or subscribe to the podcast on iTunes 

 

The effects of the skilled labor gap are being felt throughout the field service industry. So, how do you fill the gap? By improving the Technician Experience. Astea’s Emily Hackman explains more...

Across recent weeks here on fieldservicenews.com we've published a series of features analysing an exclusive research project run in partnership with Si2 Partners, WorkAmmo and Service People Matters.

Previously we reflected on Si2 Partners founding partner Nick Frank's initial commentary on some of the headline findings of the research which were first aired in a recent episode of the Field Service Podcast.

Now in the final part of this exclusive research analysis, we dig deeper into the findings and see how the trends the research has revealed support Frank's Si2 Partners initial hypotheses...

 

The Key Characteristics of a Service Manager

So, to begin let’s explore what the key characteristics field service organisations are looking for when recruiting new service managers.

We asked our survey respondents “What are the key attributes you look for in a service manager” with a list of 14 options to select as well as the option to submit additional information - and we asked respondents to list any options that were applicable to them.

Interestingly, and very much in line with Frank’s comments, the most common response was leadership capability in which 86% of respondents stated was a key attribute they sought within their service managers.

This in itself is a particularly intriguing insight given that as Frank alluded to, leadership capabilities may not be particularly evident based on past performance if organisations are promoting from within and selecting their new service managers from a pool of their highest performing field engineers.

This is not to say that they won’t necessarily exist within that pool, however, the skill set of strong leadership is as we have mentioned in the introduction a different skill set to what makes an excellent field service engineer.

 

"The most common response was leadership capability in which 86% of respondents stated was a key attribute they sought within their service managers..."

 

Yet it seems indeed that leadership is absolutely viewed as pivotal within the role of service management today - something that is surely a reflection on the strategic importance of service delivery as a growth driver that Frank refers to.

However, whilst the research findings reveal that whilst leadership skills are the most commonly sought after trait when recruiting service managers, it seems that many service organisations continue to seek out similar attributes within their service managers as those that are often highly valued within field service engineers and technicians.

Specifically, field service organisations were commonly looking for potential service managers to show technical knowledge and application (77%) and be good problem solvers (50%) both key traits often sought after in field service engineers and technicians.

Additionally, both an ability to fight fires and demonstrated performance delivery were both identified as key traits by just under a third (30%) of field service companies look for when recruiting new service managers - again highlighting how the roles of service managers are seen as being a linear progression from field-based roles.

However, given that this number is relatively low, it could also be argued that this could indeed be indicative of a changing tide and that this is part of the evolution which Frank described as service becomes a strategic growth drier rather than merely a cost centre.

Yet, when we look for the skills and attributes that are more firmly in line with what Frank describes as business management skills, again the data sits very much in line with his hypothesis, that perhaps not enough service organisations are showing the levels of ambition that one might expect given the large shift towards service as a profit centre we have seen in recent years.

 

"A third of companies (33%) who stated that a good head for business is something they look for in a service manager, whilst slightly more (40%) stated that an important trait they look for in service managers is for them to be analytical and metric driven..."

 

In fact, again it is a third of companies (33%) who stated that a good head for business is something they look for in a service manager, whilst slightly more (40%) stated that an important trait they look for in service managers is for them to be analytical and metric driven - another attribute that is perhaps more aligned to business management than the traditional requirements of service management.

What these findings to appear to reveal is that we do seem to be in the midst of an evolution within the role of the service manager, with some companies still leaning towards selecting the best performers within their field service teams, whilst others are adopting a slightly more ambitious approach to selecting their service management personnel in looking for traits that are more aligned with the strategic business aspects of the role.

There are of course merits in both approaches, as Frank points out, however, there are also a number of traits that are fundamental to being able to ensure that field service operations are delivered optimally and this was also evident in the research findings.

One big attribute that was commonly cited as important for field service companies to seek within their service managers was a customer-centric outlook - which was, in fact, the second most frequently cited of all the options within the survey with 80% of companies stating this is something they look for within a potential service manager.

Alongside this, a large percentage of companies felt that potential candidates for their vacant service manager roles should ideally have a good operational understanding, which two thirds (66%) cited as well as a good rapport with their service engineers which over half (55%) cited.

Whilst both of these latter two attributes could, of course, be developed by an external candidate these are both areas where an internal recruit would certainly have an advantage.

 

Service Manager Development

So, based on the research findings around the desired attributes of service managers, there remains a strong case for hiring from within, yet at the same time we are certainly starting to see a developing appetite for and a gradual shift towards the more business focussed service management role that Frank describes.

So does this mean that field service organisations are looking to recruit within and then develop the layers of business acumen required for managing a service business as a profit-generating entity?

The research would appear to suggest that this may not yet be the case and the role remains to be seen as being both technical and supervisory rather than being focused on business performance and strategic thinking.

Having  asked our respondents ‘What training do you give to your service managers?’ we found out that indeed, leadership training was the most popular response being cited by just over half (53%) of respondents, whilst technical training was also cited by half (50%) of respondents.

 

"Less than a quarter of our respondents (23%) stated that they gave their service managers any financial or business acumen training..."

 

In addition to these attributes ‘coach-the-coach’ style training and also ‘soft-skils’ were both cited by 30% of companies, is another attribute that fits more within a supervisory focused service manager role.

In contrast to this, less than a quarter of our respondents (23%) stated that they gave their service managers any financial or business acumen training.

This would certainly suggest that whilst aspirationally many companies may be beginning to see service as a driver for revenue growth, in reality, the majority of field service organisations still see the role of the service manager as being one firmly rooted in the operational side of the business.

Of course, one answer for this could simply be that many organisations see the more business-focused aspects of service management as belonging within the realm of the service director, rather than the service manager - but that begs the question as to whether we are developing the necessary characteristics within our service managers to make the necessary step up to become highly effective service directors who can drive both a service operation and business growth forward simultaneously?

Could it be that as field service delivery continues to becoming increasingly interwoven within business strategy - particularly as the trend towards servitization and outcome-based contracts become more prevalent that we are seeing demand outstrip supply in terms of service managers who are equally comfortable being operationally efficient, business savvy and who also have a natural proclivity to customer-centricity?

 

"Over two thirds (70%) of respondents stating that they didn’t feel there were enough candidates to meet demand for service managers roles..."

 

The research would again certainly add weight to this argument with over two thirds (70%) of respondents stating that they didn’t feel there were enough candidates to meet demand for service managers roles given the fact that field service has become increasingly important operation within many companies wider business strategies.

This lack of suitable candidates again asserts the validity and importance of being able to recruit from within - in essence, to be able to grow your own service management leaders. However, if companies are to do so and to do so effectively, then it would appear that many need to rethink how they approach their management level training programs to incorporate more focus on the business aspects if they are to truly align the role of service manager, with the premise of service as a profit centre.

Yet it is by no means an impossible task and the fact that just under half (44%) of the field service organisations who participated in the research involve their service directors within the recruitment process would suggest that these concepts may well filter down over time.

It seems that there is a small portion of field service organisations who are one step ahead of the pack in terms of developing their service managers to not only be able to deliver operationally but also strategically. The question now must be how long before the rest catch up? how long before the rest catch up?

 

Executive Findings: 

 

• 86% of field service companies state that Leadership Capabilities are a key attribute they look for in potential service managers
• 77% of field service companies state that Technical Skills are a key attribute they look for in potential service managers
• 80% of field service companies believe their Service Managers must have a customer-centric outlook.
• 55% of field service companies expect their Service Managers to have an excellent rapport with their service technicians
• 23% of field service companies provide their Service Managers with business or financial acumen training.
• 70% of field service companies believe that there are not enough suitable candidates to fill the demand for Service Managers

 

About The Research:

The research was conducted over a six week period reaching out to fieldservicenews.com subscribers as well as the respective audiences of our partners inviting recipients to complete a detailed online survey. In total there were 131 respondents.

In addition to this Field Service News Editor-in-Chief conducted a live polling session at the recent Field Service Connect event, held at the Belfry, UK which was hosted by WBR at which an additional 33 senior field service executives were present bringing the total respondent level to 164 field service professionals - a sufficiently large enough response base to provide a fairly robust snapshot of the current trends around recruitment and development amongst field service organisations today.

The respondents represented a diverse range of industries including; Heavy Manufacturing, Healthcare, Consumer Electronics, Power Generation and Facilities Management. There were respondents from all across the globe including the UK, Belgium, Germany, UAE, Canada, Spain and the USA and there were responses from companies of varying sizes ranging from those with less than 10 engineers through to those with over 800 engineers.

 

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Kris Oldland, Editor-in-Chief, Field Service News talks to nick Frank, Founding Partner, Si2 Partners, about some of the key findings of a recent research project recently undertaken by the two companies that explored emerging trends in the recruitment and development of both field service engineers as well as service managers across a wide range of industry verticals.

 

Find more from Nick Frank @ Si2Partners

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Will self-service for customers be the answer to the dwindling number of available field service technicians? Prudence Kolong, Editorial Director, Copperberg, joins the ranks of Field Service News associate columnists and in her first feature tackles this important topic.

Join Copperberg and Field Service News in Warwick, UK for the Field Service Summit in April and in Amsterdam, Netherlands in May for the Field Service Forum.

A recent survey by the Service Council showed that 70% of global manufacturing companies with small to large service operations are increasingly concerned with the lack of prospects to replace their retiring workforce.

However, less than half have implemented human capital management strategies capable of addressing talent shortage and competence development. It does not help either that scores of new STEM graduates and millennials, who in a perfect world should be lining up to join the ranks of highly skilled service teams within seemingly economically stable firms, see manufacturing jobs as old fashioned and dated and therefore not appealing.

On the technology front, deep shifts in customer demands drive innovation at a riveting speed. Many service organisations now look into technology as a potential avenue to circumvent the lack of prospects to renew their existing human resources.

On the technology front, deep shifts in customer demands drive innovation at a riveting speed. Since Industrial IoT and digitalisation have stopped being buzzwords meant for technologists, they have quietly slipped into the day-to-day dealings of service directors. The future landscape of field service operations for traditional or advanced manufacturing products will integrate a wide range of technological advancements.

The use of robots, artificial intelligence or automated supports on the production line is not new. However, their utilisation to enhance service lifecycle performance constitutes a new set of challenges for which very few are equipped.

Market leaders are now prototyping innovative solutions, with pilot projects, to engage clients and benefit from value-added technologies ranging from Industrial artificial intelligence, automation, machine learning, robotics processes and big data.

An abundance of opportunities opens with IoT, including hyper-personalised data mining solutions that enable targeted customer response with mission-critical predictive maintenance, optimised time management and strategic deployment of multi-skilled fleets.

The question that remains open is how can an industry slated to generate up to 4,45 billion dollars by 2020, thrive without sufficient manpower? Can it rely solely on progress in technology?To ensure that the right people maintain the effectiveness of their enhanced service ecosystems, smart service directors engage in constant skillset assessment, retraining, reallocation and reassignment. However, the question that remains open is how can an industry slated to generate up to 4,45 billion dollars by 2020, thrive without sufficient manpower? Can it rely solely on progress in technology?

The race for market share has service directors drastically redefining their KPIs, readjusting their resource strategies and the means to achieve them.

Furthermore, a new trend is sweeping the industry: crowdsourced field service. In this instance, the very concept of field service management is revolutionised. Fleet ownership, task scheduling, work order management and SLA’s compliance are no longer the sole prerogative of the product manufacturer and its service department.

In layman terms, the “Uber” business model has come and conquered the field service arena; now anyone can order and/or deliver turnkey maintenance operations and end-to-end field service.  At the onset, uberized field service seems like a palliative solution to workforce shortage, a momentary placebo that may serve its short-term purpose. So how about a realistic solution that identifies the root cause, and just like preventative maintenance addresses issues before they occur.

Gartner predicts that within the coming 5 years, 10% of emergency field service work will be managed by artificial intelligence, implying less use or need of manpower on the horizons.  Nonetheless, service organisations need to invest in out of the box approaches to talent acquisition with hybrid skillsets and become more proactive in handling their single most important asset: people.

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Nick Frank, Managing partner at Si2 Partners explores an important topic in the face of an ageing workforce crisis - how to make your brand an attractive prospect for the growing Millennial workforce...

Today, brands pervade our lives – be it food, clothes, shoes or phones - and drive the value of companies, particularly on the stock market.

The brand value of Samsung Electronics (ranked No.6 on Interbrand’s “Best Global Brands 2017”) is $56.2 billion – while for Small Medium Enterprises, their sales turnover and assets generally create their value. In either case, the value of your employer brand has an impact on many areas, including your ability to deliver growth opportunities, to hire the right talent, as well retention.

Understanding the new workforce in this regard will be critical for your Talent Management efforts – Sarah Gibbons wrote “I’m a millennial, and I embody a lot of the clichéd things you’ve heard about the generation: the frivolous wanderlust, the tattoos, the addiction to Instagram, and one pretty powerful behavioural trend – the insistence on ethical substance and integrity from brands, or in other words, choosing to make mostly idealistic purchase decisions. Without a socially conscious framework, your brand means nothing to me or many of my millennial cohort, and without capturing the millennial market, you’ll never amass the army of brand advocates you need to partake of the nearly $200 billion in millennial-driven sales each year”.

Unlike many of their Consumer driven organisations like Coca-Cola, many Manufacturing Service companies being technical driven do not focus on this critical area so this article aims to provide some assistance in what to consider.

However what is an employer brand?

It is the internal and external perception of your company. It is often not a single ‘something’ that drives the perception. For example, the belief you have in the Apple brand starts with the shop you visit and the service they provide. The decision to purchase a wonderfully designed product is only reinforced when it works well, and by the reception and quality of the phone. If something does not work, you take note of how Apple deals with maintenance or the return policy. This end-to-end experience drives a belief in you and it is the belief that drives your behaviour - a positive belief will have you returning to buy more Apple products.

It is critical that you develop and communicate workplace expectations internally - what is acceptable and what is notIn the same way, a person experiences how a company responds to and leads their employees.

This will be communicated to others and of course, will influence whether people are retained or if they will look elsewhere for a brand they want to work for.

So, what can you do to build a strong employer brand? There are many actions that can be taken to grow or strengthen your employer brand, and the energy exerted will be driven by how seriously you wish to be taken and how important your employer brand is to the delivery of business opportunities.

Our goal here is not to overload you with the many actions that can help, but to share what I consider to be the critical few – 3 simple things you can do irrespective of the size of your organisation.

First, it is critical that you develop and communicate workplace expectations internally - what is acceptable and what is not. In developing the expectations, try to reflect the organisation you want to be and the people you wish to hire and retain. For example, as a software company, you will inevitably hire younger generations.

When a leader is seen as driving the right behaviours, share their success, its impact on team morale and the impact on the organisation’s growthHaving flexible work hours and dress codes will help you, as these are important attributes today! However, frankly, these are the easy wins – expectations around leadership style and development of the team will carry far more weight and will be shared amongst top talent more than the hygiene factors.

The second step is to reinforce and redirect workforce behaviours. When a leader is seen as driving the right behaviours, share their success, its impact on team morale and the impact on the organisation’s growth. Equally, when a leader does not drive the right behaviour, they need to be told and redirected to what is expected. If this leader is permitted to continue with their unacceptable behaviour, it will undermine your employer brand building efforts.

The most important contributor to your employer brand is for the leadership team to view it as equally important as product brand value. In the great brands I have worked for, I can remember very clearly the good and great leaders who absolutely represented the brands they led.

They made me proud to work there, valued my contributions, reminded me of my obligations to the employer brand in what they said, but most importantly in what they did.

Value your employer brand as much as your company/product brand. Set expectations, hold people to these expectations, and always walk the talk.The real employer brand is defined in the moment when an employee issue raises itself in the workplace. Is the company compassionate, caring or mechanistic in its HR actions? The rest of the workforce watch, as this will define exactly the company they work for.

In summary, value your employer brand as much as your company/product brand. Set expectations, hold people to these expectations, and always walk the talk.

Companies, as well as people, define themselves every day by what they say and, more importantly, do. There’s no doubt - great employer brands built with this in mind will attract and retain top talent.

For more information on ‘Building your Employer Brand’, contact Dag Gronevik or Nick Frank at info@si2partners.com or call +44 208 144 6452.

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For our latest research project, which we ran in partnership with ServiceMax from GE Digital our focus was to see what the field service engineer of the near future will look like. In the first three features of our analysis, our focus was on the changing face of the field service engineer as we see an ageing Baby Boomer workforce reaching retirement age being replaced by a new wave 'millennial'  field service workers

In the first feature, we looked at the threat of the ageing workforce and the changes in training methodologies that are emerging. In part two we explored if and if and how field service companies are utilising their experienced field service engineers to train the incoming generation and in part three we asked if field service companies were reacting quickly enough to these challenges.

Now as we change tack, we explore the role technology has to play in attracting and developing new field service engineers

There is also a detailed white paper outlining the wider findings of this report which is available to fieldservicenews.com subscribers...

Not a subscriber yet? Click here to apply for a complimentary industry practitioner email and get this resource sent to you instantly

(Please note that by applying for your subscription via this link you accept the terms and conditions here and a plain English version is available from our main subscriptions page here) 

The field service sector is changing rapidly.

Not only are technologies constantly emerging that continue to enable field service organisations to push the boundaries of service excellence, but as we saw in our last article in this research series, the shift from an ageing workforce of Baby Boomers reaching retirement age and the Millennial generation coming in to replace them heralds an unprecedented change in culture within field service companies across each sector and in every corner of the globe.

However, one thing is certain this change is happening, it is happening on a large scale and the pace of the change is increasing day by day, week by week and year by year.

Almost half (48%) of the companies we surveyed admitted that the threat an ageing workforce poses to their business is either significant or severe. Those companies who are slow to react may find themselves with a potential crisis on their hands in the not too distant future - in fact almost half (48%) of the companies we surveyed admitted that the threat an ageing workforce poses to their business is either significant or severe.

In a previous part of this research analysis, we reported that not only did most companies acknowledge the potential threat to their service operations but also that they had identified that they would need to change their recruitment and training policies to make them a more attractive proposition to Millennials.

Yet at the same time, the majority of companies had so far failed to make any real changes in how they approached these dual challenges.

Now in this second half of our analysis, we explore the potential benefits of harnessing technology as a tool to attract, retain and develop talent from the Google Native generation.

Does technology attract talent?

One of the key findings of the research that we revealed in our first article in this series was that the role of the field service engineer is evolving into one which has multiple skill requirements.

Taking this into account, attracting the best talent to an organisation is of course highly important process for any field service company – but what role does technology play in making a service organisation an attractive option for the brightest and best recruits?

We asked our respondents if they felt that those companies who are harnessing technology such as mobility tools and Field Service Management systems to empower their field service engineers are likely to be more attractive to potential new recruits.

Here we saw a real even split of opinions. We gave our respondents three options to this question which were:

• Yes – we find that our adoption of FSM technology is a key factor in recruiting future FSEs
• Yes – but currently our adoption of FSM technology is limited and this could have a negative impact on our recruitment drives.
• No – we find that there are other more important factors such as salary levels and holidays etc.

In fact, the responses were almost perfectly split across the three options.

34% of respondents stated that they felt that adoption of technology was likely to make them more attractive but they felt they current solutions were limited, whilst 33% answered with both of the other options.

The consensus then is that technology does certainly have a role to play in attracting new talent to a field service organisation, even if a sizable section of companies feel their own levels of technology are not currently sufficient to fully take advantage of this fact.

Want to know more? There is also a detailed white paper outlining the wider findings of this report which is available to fieldservicenews.com subscribers...

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