In this episode, we discuss how to build out a building automation training program in order to train your folks in your office.
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Transcript
Phil Zito 0:00
This is the smart buildings Academy podcast with Phil Zito episode 333. Hey folks, Phil Zito here and welcome to episode 333. So it's been a crazy, crazy week, I have been doing a lot of stuff with our workforce development students. And quite honestly, it has been a lot of fun, more fun than I expected it to be. I wasn't quite sure how it was gonna go. But you know, we're two cohorts in now. And it's crazy awesome to see these folks like, really starting to pick things up. So funny enough, today's episode, which you can find that podcast at smart buildings academy.com forward slash 333. Once again, that's podcast that smart buildings academy.com Ford slash 333. Well, today's episode is going to be about how to execute training in the office. I mean, we've all done it right, we've all gone to that training session, you know, the Omni Bus Safety slash, building automations slash sales slash HR training session, that's all crammed into an hour, you know, we show up, we get some stale bagels, maybe some donuts, maybe some coffee, show up, sit down. And literally, if you're seeing your tech, as you're walking in the room, ops manager pulls you aside and says, you know, hey, Phil, I need you to teach something technical today. I laugh because it's happened to me so many times. And it's like, what am I supposed to, I don't care what you teach them, just teach them something technical. And that is how a lot of training in the office goes down. That is it, it is literally an afterthought, once a month, right after safety, ng safety training, you know, but before the HR kind of updates, and you get to cram in about 15 minutes, maybe using, you know, go through, hey, they just released this update. And it's got this capability that changed the PID Loop and how attunes or something. Yeah, so that is kinda it in a nutshell, with how most office training goes on. But it doesn't have to suck like that, it doesn't have to be a giant time sucking waste of time. You know how I really feel about that, right? It doesn't have to be that way, though. And, you know, as much as I would love you all, all of you to buy our training and go through our training courses, they are the best in the market, bar none. I realize some of you aren't gonna do that. Some of you are still gonna go and try to create your own training in the office. And that is what we're going to guide you through today. So here is my three step process is ridiculously simple. Didn't say easy, but it is ridiculously simple. And if you implement this process, you will be executing effective training in the office. And why would you want to execute effective training in office? Why would you care to invest in training? Well, training has a lot of positive outcomes. First of all, it reduces callbacks and slippage. So if you have ever experienced a customer calling you and going, Ah, you know, ever since you upgraded the software, we're leaking water and data data die. And you know, having training on one hand can make you able to identify that, hey, there's no way that could happen. We didn't touch that. No, because there's not just technical training. There's training on communication. There is training on upselling. There is training on document management. You know, folks hear me say training so often, and they associate technical training. Now as I look at our course library, we have a project management course. It's amazing. We have a sales course it's amazing. We have a troubleshooting course. It's also amazing, y'all how many of those we sell, not a whole lot. Everyone wants to go and buy the technician training. They want to buy the installer training, they want to buy the technician training, they want to buy the program or training. And then I asked these folks, I literally sit on the phone with some folks and I say what are the issues you have callbacks to jobs, troubleshooting, not being able to upsell not being able to project manage, and then I'm like,
Phil Zito 4:58
but she bought the technician Training? Well, yeah, because we need to train our technicians. And I'm like, but you said your problems are this. So I'm challenging you here. Do not get pigeonholed into the fact that you're an ops manager, you're a senior tech. So what you need to train people on is ops, or senior tech stuff. It doesn't have to be like that. Okay, you can go and train on other things. And like I said, I'm gonna show you how, and it's ridiculously easy. So write the benefits are reduced slippage reduced callbacks, the benefits are increased employee retention, the benefits are the ability to execute more tasks on a job. You know, if all your folks know how to do is integrate BACnet cards from rooftops, and set up vav boxes, then you're probably not going to be doing tier four data centers, you're probably not going to be doing advanced corporate headquarters, you're probably not going to be doing large, you know, level one trauma hospitals, it just not going to be doing that stuff if your team isn't experienced enough to do that. Alright, so enough, kind of fluffin I've hope by this point, you're like, Okay, I'm gonna give this training thing a go. And I'm going to consider it. But how do I do it, Phil, all right, three step process, analyze roles, train, and then have a feedback loop. Step one, analyze roles. First thing you need to do is have job descriptions for everyone. And these job descriptions cannot be those stupid fluffed job descriptions that are like 40 years experience with, you know, tritium, and for and until like, it hasn't even been out for two years. It can't be silly stuff. All right, we want to go and actually figure out what the person is supposed to do and what actions they take, are going to have a direct impact on whatever we're trying to impact with them. And that's where a lot of job misalignment comes from, if your technicians, right, if your technicians do not project manage, then we should not have their roles and tasks for their job aligned with project management, right, it doesn't make sense, they're not going to impact project management, the project manager may manage them, but they are not going to impact project management. So doing a job task breakdown from a solid job description is going to really help and it's going to create a baseline from which we can measure current capabilities, current profitability in forms of, you know, revenue per employee slippage per employee, margin per employee, time to execute, etc, we can start to measure all these things, and we can align them to our job task breakdown. But we can't just break down every task, because all tasks are not created equal, you know, going and wiring up an exhaust fan wall, definitely important is probably not as common as working on vav boxes, or working on fan coils are working on rooftop units, you have to understand what kind of projects you do, then we have to go and identify the key tasks that are going to be executed on these projects, whatever these key tasks are, we need to go and execute these key tasks near perfectly. That is how a lot of folks will ask me, how do you scale a business? How do you grow business? There's definitely stuff on the sales side. There's definitely stuff on the operational management side. There's definitely stuff on the systems process side, and we'll talk about those in future episodes. But from a execution perspective, from a task perspective, you know, see, I'm even guilty of it, you hear this,
Phil Zito 8:58
I'm already starting to go down this tech rabbit hole. I just said I just kicked off this episode, saying how we always go towards the things that we focus on. And yeah, I've already started to shift this episode into talking about technicians. And therein lies the rub, wherever you come from is where you tend to focus. So as we start to go and develop training and execute training, we really have to continue to challenge ourselves to think outside of, okay, maybe we want to focus on designers, maybe we want to focus on graphics, maybe we want to focus on programmers, don't just focus on technicians. Alright. But I'm gonna focus on technicians for this episode, because this is an easy example. All right, so that being said, let's continue to dive into this. So it doesn't job task break down. What does this look like? It looks like grabbing a job description. Pulling out the fluff like lifting 40 pounds or whatever being able to move while important, yes, those aren't things you train on. So we don't need to go and do a job task breakdown on this person needs to be able to move around a job site and okay. Then we identify our key tasks. And we identify the metrics that we're going to measure. What are we going to measure? Are we going to measure revenue per employee? We're going to measure margin per employee, we're gonna measure time to execute, are we going to measure slippage per employee? What are we going to measure, I usually recommend two financial measurements, and one time measurement, those tend to do well. And some good ways I like to do things are revenue, and margin. Alright, so revenue and margin, revenue is going to tell us like, how much revenue did this person generate, and then margin is going to tell us like how profitable this person was. Now you can go for slippage in lieu of margin, because sometimes the margin is going to be just all over the place and slippage will show kind of a better different and better difference between how much that person was estimated to produce and how much they actually produced. And you get positive and negative slippage, so you can measure those. So it's up to you, whatever you want to do just have two financial measurements, one that shows overall execution, and one that shows profitability. And then we want to have a third measurement. And that's going to be time related. How long did it take for this person to execute said task. That's why I highly recommend using task codes. I've done so many episodes about task codes, about these are the job task codes, you should use. And this is why you should use job task codes, probably we'll do another episode on job task codes. Again, suffice to say job task codes are you know, if you're installing, you have a task code for that. If you're designing you have task code for that, if you're programming, you have a task code for that, you can get as granular as you want, as long as you have a system to track it. But the important point is once you get past six or seven task codes, the ability of people to just pencil with their task codes on their timesheets increases dramatically. So if you have you know, three to five task codes, you have a high likelihood to adherence to people actually filling out those task codes. That is if you communicate the value, you need to help them know with them, what's in it for me right with them, every year, probably have heard that. So you have to identify the withum of these task codes so that people will actually put them in. Not going to go anymore on that though. So we've got our tasks, because we've got our key tasks identified. We've done a job task matrix job task breakdown, and we are going to identify these tasks. And now we are going to assess these tasks, we're going to baseline them, not just from a financial and time perspective. But from a performance perspective, this can be done a lot of different ways. You can use an online skill assessment, we provide online skill assessments completely free, like you literally have to buy nothing from us. You just sign up, take it and it's your time. If you buy something from us great. If not, you get free assessment. So I encourage everyone to do that. That being said, you can create your own assessment, how do you create your own assessment, you basically take the tasks that you have identified, you think of three to five questions per task. These questions need to there's so much into writing an assessment question, it needs to be clear.
Phil Zito 13:37
It needs to focus in on only one set of knowledge. So for example, you don't want to ask them a question on something that assumes they know something else you want to try to focus in on the key thing you're trying to assess their knowledge of. Once you've done that, once you've built out this assessment, you build out three to five questions per task. And the reason why you want three to five is so that not everyone is getting the same question. And you also want them to have at least one to three questions for a task. That way, if they just mess up on something, you have another option for them or another opportunity for them to answer that question and that task and basically it gives you a better more realistic look at what they know. So, for example, our assessment has 49 domains. Each domain has about 20 to 40 questions in it. So pretty broad drawl that we're able to pull from as far as questions. So and then as they ask or answer the questions. If you see everyone getting a question wrong, then you need to evaluate the wording Have the question. And you need to evaluate the optional answers to make sure that it's, you know, not a invalid question. And it's just a bad sample. Okay, so at this point, you've done the job task breakdown, you've done a key task identification, you started to measure what success looks like, both in two financial forms and one time based form. And now you've assessed their skills, and you've ranked their skills, typically on a numeric ranking. Now what you have to do, and this is kind of raw, this is kind of Wizardry, right? It's a little bit of science, a little bit of Wizardry, and it's going and kind of sticking your finger in there, like licking your fingers, sticking it in there and being like, which way are the contracting winds going to blow? Because you need to figure out, are we going to be moving to healthcare work? Are we going to be moving to data center work? Are we going to be doing analytics? Are we just going to be doing commercial like plan and spec bid work? What do I think we're going to be doing? And one of the best ways to determine this is if you have a healthy sales pipeline, you can look at the 18 month, look out and see kind of what is stacking in your sales pipeline. And that should give you an idea of where your business is trending. So once you understand where your business is trending, you can then say all right, commercial office space, a lot of vav boxes, a lot of air cooled chillers, a lot of packaged rooftop units. Okay, what do I need to know, I need to know how to line out my subs and need to learn how to do good point to point some basic BACnet integration, some quick template graphics. And the key with commercial real estate is fast and no slippage, like university work, healthcare work, tier four data centers, stuff like that CDC labs, that stuff is forgiving of slippage to a point I mean, if you totally like hose your design, yeah, you're gonna get bent over. But if you make a little bit of slippage on those, those costs usually are high enough revenue that you can absorb. The lower you are on the contracting tear and the closer you get to plan and spec work, typically the lower your margins are, and thus as lower margins you have lower tolerance for slippage. So you have to say, no, not that I advocate slippage. I don't advocate slippage. I'm not saying Oh, yeah, we should have slippage. It's okay. No, I mean, ideally, we should strive for no slippage, right? We shouldn't have positive slippage either. slippage, by the way is when your costs in the case of positive slippage, your costs are under the estimated cost. So you're profiting. And negative slippage is where your costs are over the estimated cost, just so you know. And the reason why you wouldn't want positive slippage is because if you had positive slippage, that means that there was slack in your estimate. And if you're in a highly competitive bid environment, then having positive slippage means you could be overpriced, and you could be losing bids. So hence why was sometimes we want to avoid positive slippage, right? We want to have our margin targets to where the market will tolerate our margin targets. Okay, so as I was saying, we want to look at the project. And then like I said, if it's a very low margin,
Phil Zito 18:25
very simple project, then we want to aim for perfection on our task execution. Okay, how do we aim for perfection on our task execution processes. So in that case, we're going to be training processes where you're going to train processes, we're going to bring people in, we're going to drill them on VAV box installs, we're going to drill them on BACnet interfacing, we are going to drill drill, drill drill, and what does drilling look like it looks like going and creating scenarios buying a VAV box like an 810 inch VAV box, putting it on a pallet, rolling it out and having people drill vav boxes till their fingers bleed, I mean not literally. But you get the point like keep doing it and doing it until it's second nature. And as you go and perfect these processes, you're going to execute your processes and you're going to execute them well. And you're going to have reduced slippage, better execution, you're going to be getting off jobs faster, and thus you have more capacity to work. Now let's say that you're primarily a service organization. In that case, what we are going to do is we're going to train knowledge and theory skills, because oftentimes troubleshooting is dependent on your depth of theory skills. So do I understand psychometrics? Like for example, if you get called on a troubleshooting call, and someone says the heating is causing condensation and You understand psychometrics, and you realize that something else must be going on. Because if you heat air, then you are actually decreasing the relative humidity all things considered, of the air. So thus understanding that theory immediately rules out a bunch of potential issues. So understanding theory and having theoretical knowledge and understanding how systems work for service people is very valid. But how do you know what theory you should focus it on? I'm glad you ask. Well, this is where we want to go and do a key task identification, we want to do a job task breakdown. And we want to actually go analyze our service logs, we want to understand like, what is going on with our service loss? Okay. So we want to really figure out what is going on with the service logs, what common things are happening, like, what is commonly happening? And then based on what's commonly happening, we can go and say, Okay, we're typically running into the service issues. Let's train on those. So what would that look like? What that would look like is you would say, this is the problem. And you would identify the root causes, and then based on those root causes, you would assign a probability to those root causes, you know, if you're having XYZ issue, and then maybe 80% of the time, it's issue a, or it's caused B, or sorry, cause a, maybe 10% of the time, it's Cosby in 10% of the time it's caused C, then we want to focus in on that cause a and all of the knowledge associated with determining that cause a and so thus, we train people that way, you know, on my screen, you can't see it, but I have a mind map. And that is a good way to do that kind of training, is you basically flowchart it out and you train people on the individual pieces of the flowchart. So those are kind of two different looks at training approaches you can take, but all of that is dependent on you implementing the third step. The third step is really where the rubber meets the road. Anyone can go analyze a job task Sprayground, anyone can create an a skill assessment. I mean, it takes a lot of time, but you could do it. I mean, we've got probably 1000 plus hours, sunken into our skill assessment. But you know, you got the time and resources, you could do it. Anyone could train. I mean, you know, training, it requires a certain temperament. But you can find people you could train, where the things start to fall apart is the feedback loop. Okay, we analyze the roles, we do our CI key task analysis, we analyze our skills, we train, and then we put the people out in the field, and we never talk to him again. And that's how things really typically happen. The issues with not having a feedback loop are that we don't know what's effective and what's not effective. If we have a feedback loop, and remember the data points I talked about, right, we should have two financial indicators, one time indicator, and a skill assessment. So two financial indicators, typically revenue and profit, our time to execute and our skill assessment. And we should then on a quarterly basis and a health of the business review, we should analyze those metrics, we should have green, yellow, red metrics. So if we're looking for, you know, we have slippage, maybe we're taking that as one of our financial measurements, slippage. We're saying, Okay, we want to go and reduce slippage by 2%. Well, 2% slippage, that's maybe our green, that's our ideal goal. 1% slippage would be our yellow, red would be no slippage reduction, or more slippage. So like an increase in slippage, that would be a red indicator. Okay, so now that we have this green, yellow, red indication, we have essentially what's called a score chart, and this is what the large companies do, they do what's called score charting. And so we do our score chart. And that's our health index, and that's one thing, but then we have to combine that with time to execute, because it's one thing to look at financials. But, you know, if I look at financials and I see slippage has has significantly increased, my time to execute, has decreased significantly significantly. What does that tell me? That probably tells me that my people are rushing through and maybe I train them how to execute boxes, Vav boxes really fast, but maybe that training really didn't stick or there was a key mistake in that training. And because of that, They're rushing through executing these boxes, but they're doing them wrong. And they're getting callbacks, hence the slippage. Or maybe my team is executing really well. But there is some sort of material estimating issue or a design issue. And that is causing slippage now because my team is executing. And the problem is we're executing more and more. And so we're realizing the ramifications of those poor design choices, or the poor programming, we're seeing those faster, and thus, more slippage, because my team is executing faster. So we have to kind of think through the causation of what's going on. So we do that, right. We say, Okay, we've got those two things, right, time to execute financial metrics. And then comes the skill assessment has, let's say, we figure out that the slippage is indeed being caused by the team executing, well, how do we know where the issue is with executing? Well, then we re assess them. And we see what has improved and what hasn't, if we reassess, let's say, once again, the VAV box example, we're having tons of issues with vav boxes, and we reassess them. And they still don't know what the high and low ports are on the air sensing for the VAV. Box, okay, they don't understand high and low. And we find out, sure enough, we go and we look at the slippage and we look at the callbacks. And just because people have high and low flipped. That's a pretty simple fix, right? We can do color coding of our pedo tubes, we can train them like, this is atmosphere, this is not well, you could do a variety of different things to go and help them understand. But only if we have that feedback loop. And if we just simply went based off financial data, or time to execute, we still would be making a lot of assumptions. And that's where this feedback feedback loop becomes so critical, because people will do a feedback loop. But they will often only do it based on one point of data, they'll either say financial data, time to execute, or they'll just try to figure out, you know, hey, we're gonna do a knowledge check on our people again, but they don't often do three. And by not doing those three, you can't get this thing called triangulation. With triangulation, we're able to say, Okay, here's our financial data, here's our time to execute. Here's our skill level. And we're able to determine where the issue is, because as I mentioned with that previous example, if we just saw time to execute increasing, and slippage increasing, we could not determine why that is happening. We could make assumptions. And maybe our assumptions are right, people have pretty good guts. But all it takes for a $10 million business to tank is to make a couple assumptions and make, you know, directional changes based on those assumptions. And those assumptions be wrong. If we assumed that it was programming, right? We assumed that it was programming and we didn't do any way to validate that. And we went started investing in all our programmers, we're sending them to programming training, we're working with them after hours. That's done, we're hiring better programmers. And all along, it turns out that the designer is selecting the wrong sensors and data die and doesn't know what they're doing or can't do take offs, right, we have just sunk a lot of projects potentially, and maybe not sunk them but put a lot of cost on the projects because of what's going on. Alright, folks. So that's the three step process to how to train or how to execute training in the office. As always, you can find out any resources we discuss at podcasts at smart buildings academy.com forward slash 333. Once again, that's podcast that smart buildings academy.com Ford slash 333. If you are interested in doing job tasks, breakdowns, and analyzing your team skills, that is a service we offer. We assess teams skills completely for free, completely online. You can find out more info about that at podcasts at smart buildings academy.com For slash 333. And as far as the other tasks go. We do that on a consulting basis, helping people do key task identification, helping people build up their own training programs, build up their feedback loops, and how to scale their businesses. From 2 million to 10 million from 10 million to 50 million.
Phil Zito 29:52
We advise people on that as well. Thank you so much for being here. And I believe this coming Wednesday we're going to Are you talking about MQ T T, I'm actually doing a paper on that for my master's degree. And so I thought it would be really cool to explore MQ TT, as it is becoming a technology set that more and more folks are adopting. And I thought it would be really cool for us to do a deep dive on that and kind of explore together so we'll be doing that on Wednesday. Thanks so much for being here and I look forward to talking to you all on Wednesday. Take care
