“You reap is what you sow”

If you wish to see a baby plant grow into a lush green tree, you’ve to nurture it under a favorable atmosphere and nourish it with utmost care. A process of simply seeding plants or wishing as a daydreamer never will let you get the harvested crop.

Why am I saying this? The same holds true and exactly fits in the concept of your field service team management while targeting improvement in their performance. 

Think of it, if you’re coming up with a critical approach, bombarding your field workforce with unrealistic goals and letting them face unorganized communication, dissatisfaction will definitely arise. Rather if you’ve a full-fledged strategy to be on your field employees’ side irrespective of situations, you’ll not only make them but your business too thrive.

Well, you don’t need to think about strategies whatsoever. I’m curating proven hacks that you can apply to better manage your field workforce, boost their morale, and get a worthwhile performative output.

So, let’s check out what they are!

Underrated Field Team Management & Performance Improvements Tactics That You Can’t Skip

Managing your field service team demands your patience, energetic attention, and bold support from your side which really is not so easy to bring off their plate. For this, you need to cultivate well-curated strategies which are as follows:

Make Effective Communication A Two-Way Street

Two-way effective communication leads to better field workforce community management, mutual understanding, and valuing each other and this communication skill improvement can be implemented by:

• Talking less, listening more actively, and commanding attention.
• Listening to understand, not to respond.
• Stopping preaching and giving clueless judgment.
• Avoiding dumb statements that make you regretful.
• Refraining yourself from jumping ahead with predictions.
• Reflecting back and asking for clarity only when it’s necessary.

Why is it important? Sometimes it may happen that your field team members feel like speaking to bricks while getting engaged in a conversation with you. He may have been trying to be terse with clear and concise words, but unfortunately, the unnecessary recap of conversation or interference make it too hard to be focused.

Therefore, the feelings of being undervalued and unlistened not only hamper your field employees’ productivity but also sink your work culture. Also, you can miss out on important ideas, suggestions, and opinions from your skilled employees or verbal feedback from your loyal customers that has been shared with your field team members.

In fact, the data on effective communication statistics shows that 86% of employees and executives claim that ineffective communication can cause workplace failure. Therefore, you need to make sure the communication with your field team members isn’t going downward or feel like suppressing someone’s point of view rather make it friendly and open for both.

Have A Transparent & Purpose-Driven Approach

The most important ingredient in the recipe for field workforce success is transparency as it builds trust. When your field folks have a crystal clear overview of your purpose-driven strategies and high-end objectives for both your business and employees, they’ll move in the same direction. By doing so, they’ll keep away from earning extra by any chance while understanding your concern on the concept of avoiding field employee moonlighting.

How to make the transparent and purpose-driven approach actionable? Here is your answer:

• Provide clarity on your futuristic mission and vision.
• Dedicatedly define what transparency is meant for.
• Foster accountability within team members.
• Document decisions and make them shareable.
• Take ownership to hold every member on the same page.

Why is it important? Having a transparent approach for your field team members can make their understanding clear of what they are doing and how they can provide more value to your business. This enthusiastic encouragement not only makes them build a better collaborative engagement with you but also keeps you away from overwhelming field team management every time. 

Moreover, you can avoid your business being counted on those, where 41% of employees are ‘Quite quitting’ because of less engagement which is stated once by Gallup’s 2023 State of the Global Workplace Report.

Set Realistic, Achievable & Smart Goals 

Making your field workforce burdened with excessive tasks, unachievable goals, and unrealistic sets of deadlines in daily field tasks won’t be welcome ever by them. Think of it because otherwise the negative impact on your field folks’ court will be:

• Burnout and exhaustion.
• Disbalance in work-life integration.
• Increase in interpersonal conflict.
• Repeat mistakes & serve quality issues.
• Decrease in productivity and efficiency.

Your loss? Not only do you worsen the working environment but also you’ll lead towards holding goodwill which further impacts hiring skilled people. Moreover, following the repercussions, an untrusted relationship between you and your field folks eventually takes you away from achieving your targeted revenue.

The way out to hinder it effectively? You undoubtedly need to establish SMART – Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-based goals that are both realistic and achievable too. Also, with software aids like Lystloc on your hands, you can have an eagle-eye view of task accomplishment so that you never need to overburden your field folks and dissatisfy them by being too bossy.

Incorporate Right Tool to Automatically Equip with Field Folks

While managing your field workforce can be overwhelming, easing communication can be challenging, and getting in touch with them every second can be a headache, the right software can make you relax. 

However, make sure the integration of the same software can be supported in smartphones and tabs to make your field folks’ lives easier. Well, in this case, you can think about tapping on sign up with Lystloc to equip your field team members and make them feel connected throughout the whole work process. 

The benefits? 

• Schedule, assign and dispatch multitasks with right-field teammates to impress your customers.
• Restrict location-based tasks and align lead-based tasks to avoid ambiguity and confusion.
• Execute fingerprint and facial recognition user authentication to eliminate buddy punching.
• Get geo-fence attendance to track the exact time and location of your team members.
• Curate the route and adjust it with built-in AI to help your team members head in the right direction.
• Provide support for smooth communication through email, chat, and phone calls.
• Send reminders to make them proactive with alerts for tasks, working hours, checkout, and more.

Well, these benefits include but are not limited to automation facilities with appropriate software like Lystloc. Remember, you and your field service teammates can enjoy this complimentary tool to achieve higher productivity and accelerate smooth collaboration

Utilize Data to Analyze On-field Performance

If you can agree that the data is the core of providing a visualized outlook about something that you didn’t know or think about before, you’ll definitely gather data and optimize it very minutely. Well, before diving into data, you must know that there can be various types which are as follows:

• Identical: The basic information about your team profile and their role details.
• Descriptive: Detailed information about completed, due, and rejected tasks with reasons.
• Qualitative: The information about your field teammates’ behavior, opinion, preferences, and choices, and their satisfaction level. 
• Quantitative: The metrics to optimize the current field workforce trends such as First Time Fix Rate (FTTR), Mean Time to Repair (MTTR), Revenue per Employee (RPE), Customer Satisfaction Score (CSS), and much more.

Now, think of having Lystdata on your side, just like a holy grail that is full of quality like the aforementioned data types to help you in smooth evaluation. Your benefits? You can differentiate between best performers and slow doers, understand their strengths and weaknesses, and easily find the evident reason behind the performance gap to help them improve better with the right development training. 

It may sound like you’re investing much of your time and wisdom into your field folks’ court. However, don’t forget that you can proactively stop molehills from turning into a mountain with this approach to prevent a full-blown crisis.

Skip Micromanaging & Avoid Helicopter Parenting

Think of your manager looming over you, intervening in each minor task, inspecting every minor detail, and doubting your skills and expertise. How do you feel? I’m quite sure you’ll criticize it, get demotivated, and take it as micromanagement whose global average rate is 48%, or may give it a term of helicopter parenting.

Well, your field service employees can think exactly the same if you give this headspace. Fortunately, you can avoid this unwanted situation while you’re ready to execute the same as mentioned below:

• Pre-assign tasks & discuss them with the team beforehand.
• Focus on outcomes first, not approaches for completion.
• Allow them to enjoy flex field operations when it’s not peak season.
• Figure out how your field team members would like your support.
• Embrace field force automation trends anyway.
• Make your field folks breathe under a safety net & let them succeed in their own way.

The result? When you’re persuasive with the aforementioned action points, you’ll get out of micromanaging, be aware of reducing stress, and pave the way for your field workforce’s performance enhancement.

Share Fast Feedback but Avoid Being Too Hard

While the study by Gallup states that fast feedback can increase the engagement of your employees by four times, you must consider avoiding hard statements especially when it’s about your field teammate.

Why? You surely agree with the fact that the feedback is about the work, not the person and your field folks aren’t going to see your body language or expression. Therefore, the toughest choice of words or slight negative feedback can make them depressed and hold them back from completing a task with flying colors.

The way out? When the intuitive purpose behind providing feedback is to practice managing your field service team, you can make it constructive with the following tips:

• Start by understanding the strength of emotions of your field folks.
• Ask open questions and leave the room to share their views.
• If there’s a deadlock in conversation, take a break.
• Don’t think about giving, rather ask for their feedback often.
• Allow for silence too small to take a deep breath and time to process.

The benefit? A proper feedback system in a positive way can strengthen the relationship between you and your field team members, bring changes wherever needed, and help to keep going to the preset goals. Continuing this, not only makes it smoother for you to handle your larger field workforce but also makes your employees perform more well.

Handle Disputes Proactively without Any delay

As much as your field service employees would love to free themselves from unnecessary disagreements, disputes, and conflicts, you know it’s practically impossible to implement. Therefore, indulging yourself in proactive conflict management can save you from facing hurdles with infringement.

In that case, you should know about some most common possibilities from where conflicts can arise:

• Last minute changing chaos in tasks and deadlines.
• Missing, incomplete, inaccurate, or vague information exchange.
• Avoiding acknowledgments of team achievements.
• Wage, expense, and reimbursement disputes.
• Different interpersonal and work styles.

Why is it time to give attention? Well, if you really want to know the benefits of handling disputes effectively, I must include the benefits of monitoring field employees to understand their psychology. Moreover, you can identify problems at the earliest, come up with solutions without beating around the bush, sow the seed of a healthier commitment to execute smart field workforce management, and increase productivity.

Executing A Better Field Workforce Management Can Make You Achieve Targeted ROI

“If you’d like to better understand the Return of Investment, get into gardening”.

To make the gardening of managing and increasing your field team performance fruitful, you need sure sorted ways that you already have at your fingertip at least now. You just need to implement it in your business process without wasting time. 

By doing so, you are only not able to smartly execute field employee management, and contribute to their performance growth, but also in return, you can smoothly reach the mountain of your targeted revenue. 

Remember, your field employees are the ones who’ll first be involved in direct interaction with your prospects, leads, and loyal customers. It means till you make your field folks in relief headspace, you build the passive way to make your target audience happy and satisfied.