Develop a sustainability culture

Would you like to take the frugality mindset a step further and put the focus firmly on maintenance and its associated jobs but are aware how much your teams don’t possess or share this state of mind? Here is how you can get around the problem.

Based on

The Innovation Delusion
Lee Vinsel et Andrew L. Russell
(Currency, september 2020).

1. Shine a light on maintenance

Maintenance jobs and activities are often kept at a distance since they’re headquartered in basements or use subcontractors on a massive scale. They go unnoticed and neglected. Help raise the visibility of these jobs and highlight their importance.

Organize work shadowing with maintenance teams. An employee who spends a day accompanying someone working in customer service or a heating engineer will look at these activities from a different perspective. They’ll become aware of their added value and how difficult they are, and their attitude and esteem will grow.

Ask people to talk about the satisfaction they get from their jobs. You probably have maintenance enthusiasts in your teams. They love hard-to-crack breakdowns, technical challenges and the pleasure of repairing things. They have the feeling, and the satisfaction, of making a positive visible contribution. Encourage them to share this enthusiasm and find out who could be a role model in this area.

Train maintenance teams in behavioral skills. Don’t stop at technical training: offer them communication training. They often need to interact better with their internal customers, for example to explore needs or act as educators. But they’re not helped to do this, and these skills are often – wrongly – considered to be of minor importance in their jobs. Include them in their job descriptions.