Fresh Content: How To Keep Your Team of Technicians At Their Best

 

If your company is delivering a service that requires technicians to carry tasks out, it’s important to try and keep the team confident that they can carry out what is required. For example, if you’re running a company that rents out technology and solutions to other companies for events, you’re going to need people who are able to problem solve, and flexible enough to work either long hours or unsociable hours, depending on the type of event you’re catering for. As this can be a very fast paced, and sometimes stressful environment, it’s in your best interests as an employer or manager, to do what you can to make their jobs as smooth as possible, and also keep them satisfied within themselves. After all, technicians are a brainy bunch, they have to be able to deal with pressure, use logic to fix issues as they arise or sometimes think on the spot, and as you’ve put so much effort into hiring the perfect team, it’s handy to be able to keep them, right? Here are some tips on how to keep your tech team content and confident in their work, and how you can get the best out of them. 

Training and qualifications

In a company that provides a service, training and qualifications are very important. It provides the technicians with the belief that they can carry out their tasks without too much issue, and also the confidence to be able to use their own knowledge and initiative to problem solve. It provides them with a sense of achievement and pride, so try to provide training to not only do their current roles, but also to upskill. Technology is always evolving, and as such, so should your technicians! Qualifications also look great as a company portfolio, to potential customers. For example if a customer is looking for a team to install a bunch of networking and connectivity equipment in their brand new warehouse, and all your team are all Cisco CCNA approved (And it says so on your site), it’s going to look great. It provides reassurance that your guys and girls are the ones for the job.

Set Goals and Targets with Them

As with most employees anyway, it’s important to outline where your techies are at currently, and what they can do and improve on to better themselves. Allow them to tell you where they want to be, tell them what they can do to get there. Most of a technician’s job is problem solving and challenges, so setting them targets themselves is a great motivator.

Have a Skills Matrix

Creating a team wide skills matrix and having it available for the whole team to see is a great way to ensure you’re not asking the impossible of an individual, gives them something physical to look at, monitor, and to work toward if they wish, and also ensures that you’re sending the right person out for the right task. For example, if you’re providing IT support, and one of your customers has a faulty printer, you’re probably not going to send someone who specifically excels in troubleshooting Office 365 related software issues. This will also reduce the amount of mistakes that could occur, saving time and the necessity to escalate in the process.

Competition Doesn’t Have to Be Bad

In a company, it doesn’t hurt to have a bit of friendly competition among peers. If used correctly, it can motivate each technician to perform better than before, increase productivity, and keep the morale generally quite high in the workplace. Incentives are a great way to make it competitive enough to be enjoyable to work toward, and can often bring teams closer together. Some of a few examples, in a technician scenario, could be as follows:

• Highest amount of positive feedback (Percentage or otherwise) from customers 
• Most support tickets closed in a given amount of time (month, week) 
• Who received the most glowing feedback 

Those are to list a few, but there are many others that you can use to keep your team motivated, without creating a hostile environment. People tend to naturally want to compete amongst one another in friendly head to heads, so why not use it to make the work environment more friendly, and get the best you possibly can out of your team?

Keep in Contact

When you’ve got technicians out on the go, it’s important to keep in contact, or just make yourself available to them, and vice versa. It helps both sides to be kept in the loop, even if it’s just a small update on progress. Communication is important, and it keeps that level of trust and confidence in each other. It helps the technician to know that there’s someone at base who’s available if they need to contact anyone, and equally, it helps the manager, team leader etc to know that everything is under control.

Manage their Workload Effectively

Making sure that your technicians are able to effectively manage their workload is vital. Ensure that you have proper communication channels and software, and that it is easy to see and access for everyone. For example, using dispatch software to manage your technician’s time and allocation is good practice, and provides clarity to all parties on what is required, gives a level of control to the technicians as to what work they are taking, and who is best placed to carry out certain tasks based on requirement. 

Listen – They Might Have Good Ideas

Typically your team will report to, and listen to you, but it also helps to listen to them! You hire these people because of their sharp minds, creativity, work ethic, and other great traits, so they might have equally great ideas that can benefit the business. How you approach this is up to you, whether you do this via one to ones, or as a group, but it’s a good idea to warm to the idea of suggestions from your team. Everyone will be working toward the same goal, but may have different methods, approaches and ideas to get there, and it can’t hurt to have input from more than just one person. It also breeds confidence on both sides, you’ll feel assured that you can trust in your team’s input, and they’ll trust you enough to come to you with suggestions.