If you wish to see a plant grow into a full-fledged tree, you need to set up the right atmosphere to nourish it. Simply wishing is not going to make things happen.

You need to till your garden and prepare the soil, add the right compost and fertilizer, provide protection from pests and diseases, water the garden bed regularly, and ensure ample sunlight as well as fresh air to help your plant blossom.

The same holds true for your field service team: simply bombarding them with goals and objectives isn’t going to transform your team. You need to create certain conditions to help your team thrive. 

Before exploring these conditions, let’s explore the attributes associated with a high-performance team. High-performance team players consistently show high levels of collaboration and trust. They are also:

• Highly skilled
• Goal-focused
• Innovative
• Produce superior results

To empower your team to live up to these traits, you need to ensure the following conditions:

Process

A process sets up the foundation of how your field service team interacts with your business, office, and customers to transform an input into output. Field teams must be:

• Provided with a workflow that is well-connected, transparent, short, free from roadblocks, and designed to cover a wide spectrum of what-if scenarios. The workflow should support collaboration with cross-functional teams and internal users to ensure seamless performance.
• Equipped with essential resources at each milestone such as information, tools, and enough time at hand to complete repairs and simultaneously build positive relationships with clients. Field teams empowered with audio-visual communication and tracking and monitoring tools are highly likely to coordinate event logistics and perform jobs more efficiently.

Training

Field technician training encompasses three aspects:

• Skills: Your technicians should be trained to effectively diagnose the problem, determine the solution, and successfully perform installation, repair, maintenance, and test tasks.
• Communication: This aspect involves both internal and external communication. It could be properly communicating any foreseeable problems to the authorized personnel at the earliest indication. Likewise, communication with external stakeholders like customers or other teams helps build a positive brand experience.
• Safety: Your technicians must be trained to operate safely, following all the procedures and protocols in place. 

With the advancement of technology, delivering such training isn’t cost-intensive and can be a fun-filled experience for your teams. Upskilling employees at regular intervals can also help you foster better relationships with them. 

Hiring

There are many preferences that dominate hiring decisions. The most common one is that the candidates must have experience in a similar domain; the best is to have worked with competitors. Another is to have exact skills as required to fulfill the job criteria.

While these factors offer a shortcut to measure the candidates’ knowledge and experience, they are regressive and restrict the entry of fresh candidates.

Maintaining a fair ratio of fresh talent and those that possess deep technical knowledge has proved to be an effective hiring strategy for service businesses across industries. While training these fresh faces may seem daunting from financial and other perspectives, its long-term benefits far outweigh the efforts.

Tech Enablement

Empowering technicians with futuristic technologies such as IoT, AI, mobility, communication tools, cloud solutions, and data analytics can not only improve their efficiency and overall profitability but also nurture a positive brand image.

Purpose

High-performing teams are synergistic social entities that work toward the achievement of common goals—short-term and long-term. They often exemplify a total commitment to work and to each other. 

Team members do better work when their roles are clear: They know how to do their jobs and why they are doing them. Each member must understand and support the meaning and value of the team’s mission and vision. 

Clarifying the purpose and tying it to each person’s role and responsibilities enhances team potential. Consider setting up a goals meeting with the team as a forum to discuss key priorities. This allows them to have some input in the development of objectives, and they will likely be more committed to achieving them.

Leadership

High-performing leaders generally accompany high-performance work teams. Essential leadership qualities include the ability to:

a) keep the purpose, goals, and approach relevant and meaningful 

b) inspire commitment and confidence 

c) ensure that team members constantly enhance their skills 

d) manage relationships from the outside with a focus on the removal of obstacles that might hinder group performance 

e) provide opportunities for others without seeking credit 

f) get in the trenches and do the real work required 

Effective team leaders focus on purpose, relationships, and an unwavering commitment to results that benefit the organization and each individual.

Trust

Trust is at the heart of any successful team. Without it, teams will be unable to progress due to fear of conflict or lack of commitment.

Establishing trust between team members can help take the team from satisfactory performance levels to outstanding results.

Being open and honest about strengths and limitations in workplace behaviours is an excellent way to help generate trust between team members.

Create a culture of transparency, innovation, and collaboration. Encourage your team members to brainstorm and present new ideas, cultivate their problem-solving skills, and train them to make the best decisions in any scenario.

Incentives

Both monetary and nonmonetary systems that encourage high performance have a positive impact on the implementation of business goals. 

Over the long term, intrinsic motivators such as personal satisfaction at work and working on interesting projects provide the greatest impact on performance. 

In addition, a belief in one’s self and abilities encourages people to take more strategic risks to achieve team goals.

In a nutshell

Taking care of the factors mentioned above can turbocharge the performance of your field service team. Supporting your business with a robust field service management software is another excellent way to boost the performance of your field executives.

Happisales is a neat and elegant field force engagement platform that allows you to perform sales, collection, order, and service in a synchronized way. 

Designed to enhance collaboration between managers and field reps, Happisales allows managers to assess and maximize the performance of field executives. 

Schedule a free consultation and talk to our experts today! Take your first step towards field service transformation.