Your company’s ability to achieve its highest goals, productivity levels, and employees’ satisfaction depends significantly on company culture. According to a Harvard Business Review article, a stronger, more positive company culture can boost employee engagement, increase productivity and cultivate more loyalty among employees.
To reap the benefits of a strong culture, organizations must be strategic and intentional. The culture cannot be left to chance; instead, it must be managed like any other business process or project. Luckily for today’s employers, operational software can help an HVAC company create and maintain a culture that reflects a core set of values and keeps employees engaged.
Company culture is a set of values and behaviors that mold your company environment. Your culture will dictate how your employees handle problems, interact with each other, and carry themselves on a day-to-day basis. Your company’s culture will be reflected in the dress code, business hours, office setup, employee benefits, turnover, hiring decisions, treatment of clients, client satisfaction, and every other aspect of your HVAC, electrical, mechanical, and plumbing operations.
It’s often easier to build your company culture when all your employees work day after day under the same roof. However, for HVAC, electrical, mechanical, and plumbing contractors, many of your team members are likely spending their time on work orders out in the field, not working together in-office.
When operating through remote or distributed teams, you can mold the company culture you want and foster a work environment that drives team productivity and overall satisfaction by clearly articulating your core values, performance expectations, encouraging open feedback, and cultivating employee engagement. Be an example of the values you want the company to embody and set expectations for the team to adhere to those values, too.
Operational software is designed to improve and streamline the regular operations of your HVAC business. It seeks to improve operating efficiencies, increase productivity, and lower business operating costs by removing operational bottlenecks and automating repetitive labor and data-intensive tasks. Operational software can improve company culture by helping in several ways, including:
The state of interpersonal collaboration often forms the backbone of a company’s culture—including how difficult or easy communication tools are to navigate, how contentious or smooth the interactions are, and how harmonious the group dynamics tend to be. According to McKinsey, the average employee spends nearly 20% of their time looking for internal information or tracking down colleagues who can help with specific tasks. Giving your team 20% of their time back in the form of more effective internal collaboration is a huge win for your business.
With the right operational software, everyone is working on the same platform – all the organizational operations are running through the same HVAC software, so everyone speaks the same language. Service managers, dispatchers, technicians, project managers, salespeople, and consultants all log in to one system, allowing them to effectively communicate, share files, and collaborate on projects with ease. This, in turn, enhances the quality of work and decreases the amount of time it takes to complete a task. A free and open exchange of knowledge and ideas is most certainly a booster towards accomplishing the company’s goals.
Transparency fosters trust, and trust is vital for the health of every relationship, including relationships with your employees. Sharing your vision and mission for the company helps everybody feel like an essential part of the team, with a deeper connection to the work. Transparency in an organization is critical. It starts at the very top – it’s up to company leaders to maintain open communication and keep employees fully in the loop, which means updating the entire company regularly on strategies and current events. Operational software allows you to do just that.
A culture of transparency will make your employees feel like a valued part of the business, allowing them to trust one another and their managers, collaborate more on projects, and work better as a team, which improves the organization’s productivity and profitability. Employees working in a transparent environment will be more engaged in their roles because they won’t be worried about unfair treatment. For example, comprehensive project visibility helps everybody see how their individual contributions impact big-picture goals and initiatives.
Studies show that management transparency is the top factor when determining employee happiness. More transparent work cultures lead to happier employees. When employees are happier and more engaged, they become more collaborative and innovative and can produce new and exciting ideas. Transparent company cultures also extend to an organization’s customers. Customers prefer to buy from companies they can trust, so if you’re upfront about your refund policies, sales prices, etc., you will be more likely to retain these customers over the long term.
Successful HVAC firms are likely to be juggling multiple contracts and working on multiple projects simultaneously. That can be difficult enough to manage, especially if you rely on manual processes. This can result in resource capacity shortages, scheduling conflicts, and missed deadlines. Operational software can completely change the way your company gets work done. With operational software, all the essential information is organized in one place – all relevant data and information are just a few clicks away in a single, efficient database.
With the right HVAC software in place, you can automate your operational processes, freeing up your employees to tackle more productive (and more lucrative) projects. For example, automated reporting makes it easy to measure productivity across the board, shining a spotlight on potential areas for improvement, while smart task lists and work queues make daily work prioritization a snap, so everyone can get right to work on the tasks that matter most. With project status always available at everyone’s fingertips, nobody wastes time manually checking on progress or sitting in meetings that are a waste of time.
What’s more, with your workforce being redirected towards more challenging and rewarding use of their time, you can boost employee morale and create a happier workplace. When employees are happy, they become more engaged with their work, and higher engagement increases productivity. In a Gallup analysis, companies with high-level engagement are 21% more productive than businesses with lower-level engagement. When it comes to salespeople, happiness has an even more significant impact, raising sales by 37%.
Company culture and employee engagement are at the heart of everything your company does, and it’s one of the most critical parts of any successful talent management strategy. According to a recent survey, 77% of job seekers would evaluate a company’s culture before applying to an open position. Employees who fit well with their organization, coworkers, and supervisor have greater job satisfaction, are more likely to remain with their organization, and show superior job performance. In this tight labor market, most companies can’t afford to lose the talent that they already have. You can set your workplace apart by investing in tools and programs that promote a strong company culture.
For many HVAC businesses, the software is the doorway through which customers engage. It has a considerable impact on the customer’s experience, whether that customer chooses to engage through a self-service page, a virtual agent, or another channel. By leveraging operational software, not only do you change the way you cater to your customer’s concerns, they will remember they can rely on you. As an example, what type of message does it send when you send a speedy, concise quote via email immediately after leaving a jobsite vs. a messy, hand-scribbled note? Polished, professional service creates happier customers. Happier customers create happier service staff, and better service staff creates more satisfied customers. This is the kind of positive feedback loop that carefully chosen software can create.
Establishing and maintaining a positive culture is challenging work, but the benefits are more than worth the effort. With operational software, you can reinforce your mission, vision, and values and significantly improve the company culture. Get in touch with us for more information on how our operational software can help improve your HVAC company culture.
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