What are the core values of your field service organization?

The Netflix Culture Document is a fairly important document to emerge from Silicon Valley. Sheryl Sandberg, the COO of Facebook and author of Lean In, once called it the most important document ever to emerge from Silicon Valley -- and it’s been viewed over 13 million times on SlideShare. The document, which is linked above, was developed in the early days of Netflix to describe their culture, mission, core values, and accountability to employees and customers alike.

Patty McCord, who was a senior leader in HR at the time for Netflix, was one of the major people behind the development of the Netflix Culture Document. Speaking to Fast Company in late 2015, this was noted:

So, the two decided to start a different kind of company. Instead of listing the company’s core values like every other company was doing, McCord decide to write down the things the company valued, what mattered to them, what they expected in their people. For instance, if the company wanted courageous employees, they also wanted employees to know what “courage” looked like and what it didn’t look like.

If you’re a decision-maker at a field service organization, you might initially be confused. Netflix is a huge, revenue-producing entertainment company. What does this have to do with us?

In a word: everything.

It’s important for your FSO to have core values. It’s crucial, even, because as you bring on new employees and technicians, they need to know how to behave and what to do in different situations they encounter. You need to think about questions such as:

• What types of employees do we want?
• How will they act toward customers?
• What are the core adjectives that describe our work with others?
• What do we want people internally and externally to say about us?
• What are the most valuable non-monetary aspects of our company?

If you start asking these questions critically, you come to a good place around what your core values are -- and, hopefully, how these core values drive your business growth.

The problem for many organizations is when they take a list of adjectives that businesses commonly use and turn those into ‘core values.’ Many regular employees (not senior leadership) can view lists like that as buzzword-heavy. If the core values don’t mean anything or are hard to define, they are mostly useless. No one will operate according to them and this can create inconsistent service experiences for your clients.

Core values are crucial, but they’re one of those elements of field service that goes beyond fix and repair. Fix and repair is your cornerstone role -- a client has a need and you fix or service it. Once you’ve established processes and started doing that well, though, you need to start thinking about broader topics with regard to analytics, sales, marketing, and more. These topics will push you forward beyond your basic, core responsibilities to a client.

We put together an eBook detailing some of these ‘beyond fix and repair’ aspects of running a FSO. Download it today, and if you have any questions, definitely contact us.

Written by Shloma Baum