The Dynamis team recently completed a project to enhance the safety of the field workforce from a major UK energy utilities company. Imagine this for a moment:
“Your job is to travel out into the community, enter a completely unknown person’s home and spend 2–3 hours there installing equipment. You’re a competent professional and you understand the technical elements of your job extremely well, even though you work with gas and electricity — either of which have a habit of hurting people when things go wrong. The funny thing is, probably the most unpredictable part of your job are the people you meet, in the homes you work in, in the communities you visit as part of your work.”
You’re a utilities engineer working in gas, electricity, water or other utility provision. You gravitated towards this kind of work because you like solving technical problems, but the truth of the work is that you also need to be good at reading people, delivering excellent customer service and anticipating people’s needs.
This was the scenario we developed with our utilities customer earlier this year when we were asked to design and tailor a course to help field engineer teams enhance their risk awareness and their ability to anticipate and head-off personal safety issues. It is a testament to the company’s forward-thinking and safety-focus that, despite a very strong customer-centric ethos and a very short list of higher-risk incidents, they were determined to have their field force trained to a high standard.
Following our ethos of working from a detailed Training Needs Analysis with every customer — a stringent requirement of our accreditation from the Institute of Conflict Management — we began with a period of discovery with the client to tease out the detail of the engineers’ day-to-day work.
We stuck a crowbar under the engineers’ daily task lists and lifted the lid, discovering a timeline of common tasks they routinely carry out. This allowed us to start putting shape to their work, so that we could then ask informed questions about when, where and how they might encounter personal safety or conflict risk.
We are particularly interested in something called Initial Contact, which is a core part of the Vistelar Conflict Management curriculum through which we see the world here at Dynamis. In prying open the details of the engineers’ initial contact with clients, we discovered all kinds of habits and customary questions that they ask in order to make sure visits proceed in the smoothest way possible.
“What if we spent more time focussing on Non-Escalation of incidents… wouldn’t it mean that we spent less time on De-Escalation later on?” — Gary Klugiewicz, Vistelar Master Trainer
The utilities engineers were excellent at Initial Contact and understood well its role in establishing the bedrock on which a safe and successful visit would be built.
Veteran utilities engineers on our course spoke about the various strategies they use to interact with the client, establishing a supportive environment for their visit to the person’s home. All of the engineers could quickly and clearly describe what the characteristics of a smooth visit would be:
In short, the visits where utilities engineers felt most secure and comfortable were also ones in which they felt that the customer had respect for their efforts to provide a good service and supported them to achieve their main tasks.
Our task during this module was to have the engineers highlight the habitual things they could do to achieve an even higher percentage of smooth visits — through decisive, alert, pre-planned, and practised communications during initial contacts.
The teams described factors which would immediately signal a difficult or uncomfortable customer experience:
💡 Key takeaway: Intuition is the most important risk-management tool at an engineer’s disposal. Far from being an ethereal concept, it is a powerful survival signal — what popular-science writers call the “thin-slicing” effect: experts acting on very little information are often accurate in their judgements, even when made in the blink of an eye.
One very interesting exercise we went through was to ask the utilities engineers what things they might sense in the first ten seconds of an interaction with the client — perhaps at the front door — which would signal that they must terminate the visit immediately. We certainly got some interesting stories. Most were of the ‘usual’ variety, such as an angry dog inside the property. However, some interesting issues arose when we discussed the problem of lone engineers working in consumers’ homes when the consumer might not be fully or properly clothed — in one case we know of, this became particularly risky for the engineer.
This decisive moment presents an interesting dilemma for utilities engineers. They are ‘caught’ between their normal mode of being polite, respectful and cooperative with customers, and a mode which prioritises their personal safety — requiring them to be very direct, maybe even blunt, and barely cooperative in order to make their exit. This ability to prioritise one’s safety over politeness comes easier to some people than others.
Companies these days provide numerous tracking, alerting and safety devices to their staff in order to address supervision, monitoring and assistance obligations under health and safety law. We have always applauded the provision of these alerting devices and tracking technologies.
It has to be said, though, that even the best-designed software using the most up-to-date platforms still needs a human user to:
In our experience at Dynamis, we have yet to meet a team of people who can meet these criteria fully and with confidence. Many teams have patchy compliance with installing the ‘safety app’ on their phones. Even more teams find they have little confidence in the service or system — the ‘cry wolf’ syndrome from a few unintentional activations.
These devices are so important, though. Being able to summon help, to alert others to your need for assistance in any kind of crisis is imperative. In our sessions, we specifically have the teams practice drill evolutions where the alerting device is central to successful performance.
“Practice Fire-Drills, not Fire-Talks.” — Gary Klugiewicz
Hope is not a strategy. When it comes to a critical moment where your last conscious act might be to summon help, we firmly believe it is important for teams to know that the alert device is set up correctly, working as expected, and has a predictable response once activated in an emergency.
Every now and then, predictably, a utilities engineer’s visit would take an unexpected turn:
In these circumstances, the engineer would be thrust, according to our paradigm, into one of two main modes. Either the engineer would need to engage in a careful process of listening — drawing out the customer’s issues through a haze of anger, frustration, anxiety and fear — or the engineer would need to engage a persuasive process, gently corralling the customer into making a key decision about how to proceed.
We were impressed by the experienced utilities engineers who employed long-refined and perfected approaches to these scenarios. Interestingly, these engineers are tracked using customer surveys for satisfaction, and this simple act of individualisation, coupled with oversight on behalf of the organisation, quite clearly influenced behaviour. These engineers were as focussed on the customer being happy with the service they received, as they were that the customer received the service they asked for.
📊 Did you know? The perception of care a hospital gives its patients actually correlates better with patient satisfaction than whether or not people are being cured of their illnesses at that hospital. The way people are treated during an encounter has more to do with their satisfaction scores than any technical competence the organisation displays.
This is why our Vistelar programming has at its core a focus on the procedural elements of the encounter. People who feel that they are being ‘properly dealt with’ find themselves with better perceptions of an organisation’s customer service — even if the company did have to switch off their gas, water or electricity. It is vital that staff have a framework for both conceptualising the conflict and have some habitual, pre-planned and practised responses they are confident with, so that this ‘procedural justice’ effect can happen.
Our team really enjoyed getting into the whole topic of personal safety, conflict management and risk assessment with these utilities teams. We are standing by to help similar organisations and teams by delivering a fully customised programme of Conflict Management Training for Utilities Engineers, Customer Service Operatives, Risk Managers and L&D professionals.
Personal Safety for Utilities Gas Electricity Engineers
📚 Book recommendation: Lone Working Personal Safety: A Guidebook for Health & Social Care Workers
Team Dynamis Ltd. is the UK representative for Vistelar Conflict Management Training. To learn how your organisation can benefit from this modern, evidence-based approach, please visit www.dynamis.training/vistelar.
Train-the-Trainer opportunities may be available in the near future, allowing you and your organisation to bring these leading Conflict Management, Crisis Intervention and Personal Safety concepts and practices into your organisation.
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