Staffing Service Teams – Part 2 – Hiring/Managing Approach

Building effective and high productivity Service Teams can be a complex and challenging prospect.    While there are a number of general best practices that will be described below, the practical reality is that each company, market and team will have some subtle differences.

• Start with a Retention Plan – Effective Service Teams thrive on deep experience and knowledge.    General industry and software knowledge is a good start, but what adds value and retains customers is deep expertise in the product, processes and real-world experiences of other customers.    As a result, a relatively junior team member with 2-3 years of experience in the role can often add value well beyond a much more senior recent hire.
  
  As a result, it’s critical that retention is a constant consideration.   Ensuring compensation is aligned with the industry/competitors is critical.   As is achieving a clear, achievable career path that incentivizes, rewards and develops individual and team skills with progressively more challenging work.
  
  Of note, it’s important to support general career development within the company, which could include internal team transfers.   While this may create a short-term impact, having an internal ally in a partner organization that has an understanding (and some empathy) for the Services team can be extremely valuable as well.

• Hire Smart, Trainable People with a Growth-Mindset – Senior applicants can bring a lot of knowledge and experience, but can also be extremely set in their ways which may or may not align with your company’s processes and culture.  While there are some cases (i.e. Strategy), where experience is necessary to establish credibility, staffing your medium-sized (or larger) team with primary junior folks has significant benefits.
  
  Junior hires are eager to learn and typically comfortable taking on the lower-complexity, transactional work (Tech Support, Documentation, Training) while they come up to speed.  Junior hires also provide senior team members with mentoring/training and leadership opportunities to support our career development plan.   Additionally, junior hires are typically lower overall cost, which can provide more flexibility in pricing/cost management.

• Design Empowered, Autonomous Team – Although consistency of delivery and processes can be valuable (and can help reduce overall costs), a strong organization looks for ways to empower all team members to make progressively more important decisions at the individual level.   
  
  Work to provide general guidelines, both through published values and working norms and through regular communication where prior decisions are communicated and explained.    Establish regular communication with individuals where monitoring, feedback and communication occurs.   In many cases, empowered teams will find new solutions that would not otherwise have been suggested.

• Leverage Attrition/Transitions for Redesign – Often Managers attempt to replace departing team members with a new hire that delivers the identical skill set.  While logical, this approach fails to take advantage of an obvious opportunity.
  
  Teams are high adaptable and a departing team member provides the opportunity to rethink/expand current team member roles.   A junior team member can take on more leadership, a peer can shift their focus from configuration to date.    An effective manager understands the skills and objectives of their team and works to shift responsibilities, develop career and (likely) hire a new junior member to fill the roles.

While these practices may be adapted based on the specific needs of the organization, they provide a good baseline for scale, expansion and growth.