To run a successful field management business, you’ll need to hire qualified candidates to represent your brand in the field. For some business owners, this task alone can be overwhelming and tedious, as resources in several growing industries are scarce.
As a result, some franchise business plans today are driven by the mindset of increasing productivity without increasing employee headcount. This means that management teams are forced to drive business results with access to fewer resources.
An increasing number of field service organizations are also relying on third-party technicians to complete their jobs. Contractors will only continue to become an important facet of your business, so here are some tips for attracting top talent and integrating these employees into your workforce.
What Is the Contractor Management Lifecycle?
To maximize contractor efficiency, it is first important to understand that there is a contractor management lifecycle. This cycle is important because it emphasizes that for field service companies to utilize this approach, it needs to be as efficient as possible.
Using this lifecycle approach helps to eliminate ad hoc sourcing and hiring, leading to a more efficient workforce and happier customers. Four different elements make up an automation-enabled lifestyle in the field services industry:
- Find: This involves sourcing and interviewing contractors who will be a good fit to work for your company. Make sure each contractor is experienced and qualified to keep up with the needs of your organization.
- Manage: Monitor and look over field service employees and assist with tasks such as streamlining proposals, capturing invoices, etc.
- Analyze: Use data to drive decisions on how you can enhance your field service operations. There should be strategy involved in this step to help drive future business decisions.
- Pay: Get rid of traditional pen-and-paper payment systems and instead use an automated approach to take care of invoicing and payments.
How to Attract the Best Contractors & Third-Party Workforce
As more and more third-party contractors are entering the workforce across the board, it has become increasingly difficult to find the right contractors for the job. As a business owner, the last thing you want is to settle and hire contractors that aren’t up to your business’s standards.
Here are some tips on attracting qualified candidates and retaining them to help assist your business.
Establish an Efficient Onboarding Process
When a new field service employee starts with your business, you should have an established onboarding process to lessen their stress during this time. If the onboarding process is clunky, tedious, or unorganized, onboarding employees may pick up and take their talent elsewhere.
To help you with this process, you can rely on a workforce management system to help manage your blended workforce. Even if you are onboarding a third-party employee, everyone at your company should feel confident in the onboarding process.
Aim to communicate as often as possible with your independent contractors, as they value a company that responds quickly and clearly. This helps them stay updated on new jobs and how they will be paid.
Create a Positive Work Environment
There’s no worse feeling than waking up and dreading how you’re going to spend the next 8 hours of your day. Creating a positive and welcoming work environment can not only attract top talent in your industry but can also keep third-party contractors from looking for work elsewhere.
Ensuring your employees are happy will also directly impact if and how they build relationships with clients while on the job. The more a client can trust what your contractor is doing for them, the better the experience with your company will be.
A simple way to keep customers and employees happy in situations like these is by having a mobile consumer portal. This allows for transparency for the consumer and allows them to make comments about their experience with your field employee.
The more valued your field employees feel while on the job, the bigger sense of purpose they will feel.
Embrace Technology
No matter the industry you’re in, staying up-to-date with emerging technology is a crucial part of running a well-oiled machine. The right field service management software is the ideal way to streamline your operations, resulting in happy customers and happy field service employees.
For example, technicians can take advantage of route optimization that is automatically implemented when they’re on their way to their next job. This will help cut down on wasted time and save your company money.
Another benefit of field service management software is how easy and fast it makes communicating with your employees if a field contractor runs into an issue while on the job, they can lean on modern technology to seamlessly communicate with other team members to resolve the problem quickly.
At the end of the day, technology allows technicians to be more efficient. The more jobs they complete, the bigger their sense of accomplishment.
Include Employees in the Decision-Making Process
Field service employees have valuable insights about your business as they are in the field performing their job. It’s important to encourage field employees to be vocal about their field experiences to boost their morale and to help them feel like a genuine part of the company.
Go out of your way to ask for their opinions and ask them to express any pain points with their customer interactions. This helps them feel a sense of ownership over the work they are producing for your company and assures them that their opinion is valued.
Always take into consideration what your field service employees are saying and use it to make beneficial changes to your company. A little bit of effort to hear their opinions will go a long way in keeping employees around.
Develop a Strong Work Culture
Establishing and maintaining a positive work culture is more important than ever. Many employees value a company that has a strong work culture over a company that will pay them well.
There are many ways to improve your work culture, even though it is not tangible. For example, you can clearly define the company hierarchy and map out what it takes for employees to be promoted to encourage them to work hard.
Recognizing hard work is another easy way to improve company culture. Send that extra email thanking your employees, buy them lunch once in a while, or consider giving bonuses at the end of the year. Any expression of employee appreciation will go a long way in keeping company morale high. The happier your employees are, the harder they’ll want to work for your company.
5 Steps for Effective Contractor Management
To effectively manage your field service contractors, use the following steps.
Optimize Your Network
Without any automation in play, you’ll be managing your network in an unorganized manner. This typically results in higher costs and one-off processes that cannot be easily repeated or scaled. Many companies attempt to overcome these hurdles by using third parties such as intermediaries or brokers to monitor field service employees.
With the help of service automation and data analytics, field management teams can gain insights into which vendors are performing the best. This helps business owners to optimize their directory of service providers, cutting back on wasted money.
Optimization also helps field management teams to partner with corporate departments such as operations or finance due to increased visibility. This enhances the sense of transparency in your company.
Service providers must stay updated on service automation, so they continue to be considered for jobs.
Automate Your Work Order
The larger your company grows, the more important it is to automate the process of dispatching your employees. Without an organized process, your large-scale operations will quickly crumble due to a lack of organization. It’s best to avoid traditional pen and paper methods of dispatching contractors and instead rely on service automation tools.
Service automation tools can help dispatch the closest field service employee, give them the fastest route to arrive at the job, and allow them to settle work orders on the job site. This helps keep them accountable for each of their tasks and ensures that jobs don’t slip through the cracks.
Besides, dispatching through a centralized platform can cut down on your service response times and allows your company to complete a higher volume of jobs.
Implement Cost Controls
Data plays a huge role in determining how successful your business is, and it can help keep you and your team on the right track. Service automation platforms will be tracking nearly every aspect of your business, giving you insights into both historical and real-time data. Easily keep track of your key performance indicators (KPIs) and monitor spend by specific franchise locations.
This data allows business owners and their field management teams not to exceed (NTE) pricing controls for routine work orders. It also helps field management teams accept new job orders and allows for active participation in budgeting and planning, helping them feel like a more valued aspect of the business.
Ensure Contractor Compliance
Your field service contractors need to follow all regulatory and corporate compliance requirements while on the job. If even one employee fails to do so, the liability costs could be substantial.
Many companies rely on field service employees to self-report compliance issues, however, the right field service management software can make it easy to see which vendors are following compliance guidelines and which aren’t.
Ensuring everyone is on the same page from a compliance standpoint allows the company to take action if necessary.
Conduct Regular Performance Reviews
Evaluating vendor performance regularly can help establish a positive and professional relationship between the company and the vendor. This objective data can be used to drive company KPIs and removes any uncertainty in terms of vendor performance.
Field service management software can provide a clean way to view this data on a dashboard and produce analytics that drives accountability.
How Workforce Management Software Helps You Onboard and Manage Contractors
The above guide can help your company assess which subcontractors are valuable and which need to be reconsidered. One common theme is the importance of harnessing field service management software to make nearly every aspect of running your business easier and more straightforward.
This technology can save your company time and money, and it helps your hybrid workforce stay on the same page regardless of the phase of the project. Transparency, seamless operations, and consistency can attract top talent to your company and keep them around for years to come.
Conclusion
Workforce management software makes managing your field service company that much easier and more effective. Lean into this advanced technology to improve the operations of your company and to help keep your company competitive with other similar businesses.
If you’re interested in learning more about field service technology, reach out to serviceminder.io to see how our team can help! Book a demo to start learning about how we can transform your business today.