Technician Accountability + Your Bottom Line
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How To Utilize Technology To Improve Employee Engagement and Move Your Business Forward
No matter the industry, perhaps the most common trait of great leaders and employees is accountability. Why? Accountable workers have the ability to truly make a difference to a company by directly driving positive results.
The value add of accountable individuals can’t be denied. They take responsibility and pride in their actions and behaviors, providing full transparency into their work, strategies, successes, and any changes, challenges, or roadblocks they may encounter along the way.
This level of openness and effective communication helps to create healthy team dynamics, increase collaboration, and builds trust both internally and externally. In a nutshell, accountability is a key component of successful teams and businesses.
Technology Adoption in Field Service
For many field service providers, increasing technician accountability may not be the leading factor for adopting a new technology platform. The most common goals and reasons we’ve heard from service providers looking to incorporate a modern technology solution into their day to day service often include:
- Streamlining and improving business operations
- Improving transparency and communication with customers
- Improving technician training and troubleshooting
- Increasing customer satisfaction and trust
- Achieving market differentiation
By enabling process standardization through the use of streamlined on the job checklists, modern technology solutions like XOi’s Vision app can help commercial and residential service providers achieve the goals listed above. Vision allows techs to easily and safely capture critical job site information, launch on the job remote support, access relevant equipment documentation, and provide customers and managers photo and video documentation of all recommended and completed work.
The result – improved and guaranteed quality of service and complete transparency into each step a technician completes while on site.
Technician Accountability – An Added Bonus
While employee and technician accountability weren’t at the top of the list of common reasons why service providers seek technology solutions, increased accountability is an added and valuable benefit that comes with adopting a platform that enables process standardization and visual documentation.
The Information Management Resource Centre defines accountability as “the obligation to demonstrate and take responsibility for performance in light of commitments and expected outcomes.”
Most technicians take pride in their work and understand the value of successfully serving their customers. During a recent site visit with a client, a key takeaway that stuck out was the statement “you know a great technician by the number of photos and videos of jobs well done he or she has saved in their phone.” Whether it’s out of pride, necessity, or a combination of the two, most techs want to get the job done right the first time around.
In Vision, when a technician is assigned a job, they are provided a clear step by step list of job responsibilities that they must complete before they can finish and close out the job. From confirming proper safety procedures were followed to visually documenting job site conditions before, during, and after service is performed, these checklist or “workflow” steps are in place to ensure every job meets the same quality standards by making sure the technician doesn’t miss a step while on the job.
These workflows act as reliable sources of quality control, guaranteeing a repeatable level of service, while also providing customers and office managers a front row seat to observe each job. And because open communication and transparency are necessities when it comes to accountability, the app provides the added benefit of improving technician accountability by giving techs a platform to showcase and document their work.
Why is improving technician accountability important?
Studies show that 82% of employees feel their leadership team had “limited to no” ability to hold employees accountable. That same study found that 91% of respondents believed “improving the ability to hold others accountable in an effective way” was one of their business’s top leadership development needs.
In addition, research has found that improved accountability not only bolsters individual employee engagement, but also positively impacts your overall bottom line. According to Gallup, highly engaged workforces significantly outperform competitors, resulting in 21% higher profitability.
Instilling a sense of accountability into your business’s culture gives employees a sense of autonomy and ownership over their work. For field service providers, it’s important for technicians to feel trusted by their employers, and a system of accountability, transparency, and documentation will also help to give you and your customers peace of mind that their work meets certain quality standards.
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Posted In: Management, Technology
