There are an awful lot of things we do well in the automotive repair industry as we provide the critical service of keeping our customers’ cars safe and reliable. A significant challenge to all of us, certainly those among us who are shop owners and service mangers, is creating and maintaining open lines of communication with our staff members. There is nobody who is in a better position to deliver on our goals and expectations toward success than our staff members, but far too often we leave them out of the discussion on where we are and where we want to be, with the very real impact of our day-to-day performance being way out of sync with what we are trying to achieve. It is not entirely surprising that most shops and shop owners are falling short of their expectations and performing well below where their goals demand.
With the dozens of shop owners and service managers I have worked with over the years, the No. 1 complaint I hear is that employees are not doing the things they are supposed to be doing or not doing them as management or ownership wants them done. This is often used as the immediate explanation or excuse as to why the shop is falling short on its sales goal or why tech productivity is low.
Most of these same owners and service managers are shocked when I tell them that the No. 1 complaint I get from both service advisors and technicians is that nobody has ever talked to them about what is expected of them or laid out their goals. In other words, at the same time a great many of us involved in the managing of our shops are running around angry and frustrated because our staff members are not doing the things we want, causing us to miss our goals, our service advisors and technicians are running around angry and frustrated because they have no idea what our expectations are, do no not know what our goals are and have no idea how to gauge success in our shops because we have never defined it. Not to understate the obvious and devastating impact of all this but it would seem that “what we have here is a failure to communicate,” as spoken by Strother Martin in 1967’s Cool Hand Luke.
Our role as leaders is to get our people to do the things we want them to do, in the way that we want them done. It is as simple (or as complicated) as that. When our staff members are consistently falling short of our expectations and consistently falling short of the goals we have set, in most cases it is a failure of leadership. Now I know that it is much easier and loads more convenient to blame that lazy technician out in the third bay or that incompetent service advisor, but before we make that assumption maybe it is time, or past time, to look at the message and the messenger and not assume that every staff member we have suddenly got lazy or just as suddenly began purposely working to be unsuccessful.
Several years ago I was working with a great shop owner in Boulder, Colo., and the two of us were trying to understand why his production numbers were consistently below what we saw as reasonable and easily achievable, given the talented service advisors and technicians he had on staff. This was a good crew from end to end, but a crew that seemed to be constantly under achieving given the market, the reliable car count we were seeing and the long experience represented both on the counter and out in the bays. It just didn’t make sense!
I arrived at the shop early on a Monday morning and did nothing more than watch for four hours and saw nothing that gave me the slightest pause in the operation; if anything, the shop ran like a machine with service advisors meeting and greeting customers and talking about pending services and the technicians being thorough and consistent in checking out the cars they were seeing, willingly using a comprehensive checklist on virtually every car that came in the shop. I mean this was a shop very obviously doing a lot of the right things.
In the end, I simply had a sit-down with the individual service advisors and technicians and asked them point blank why they thought we, as a shop, were consistently missing our production goals. Suffice it to say that after each and every staff member (both service advisors and technicians) got over the confusion of my use of the word “goal” it became painfully obvious that this extraordinary, highly motivated crew had never, not one time, heard the word “goal.” They never had an idea of what was expected from them beyond being to work on time and were never in any way aware that there was anything wrong with what they were doing. They were reasonably successful because of the talent, knowledge and experience they carried into work each day, but they never hit the goals the shop owner had set up in his business plan for the very simple reason that they never knew they had goals and never knew what was expected. Sad and disappointing, to say the least!
After a rather intense — and I would even say painful — series of meetings and discussions with the shop owner and his service manager, we did nothing more or less than communicate existing sales, profitability and car count goals for the service advisors, and existing production goals (billed hours per week and efficiency) for the technicians. Things are never this black and white, and our intention had been to follow this up with additional measures to drive these numbers, but almost overnight we went from tech productivity (efficiency) numbers in the vicinity of 70 percent to numbers topping 110 percent and billed hours that had been averaging 124 hours per week between 3.5 technicians to 173 billed hours between 4 technicians. We set up weekly meetings to review shop performance between staff members and the service manager and a similar monthly meeting with the shop owner.
Another important aspect in all of this was setting up time at each meeting dedicated to feedback, encouraging suggestions and comments on how we might do things better. It was amazing, especially with staff members who had been with us for years, to suddenly discover they had a voice and that somebody (the shop owner and the service manager) was listening. Ownership and accountability come out of these types of interactions and the change in this crew was amazing to see. Everyone and everything at this shop has benefitted from these enhanced efforts toward communication. Great two-way communication has proven to be a key.
Very clearly defining our expectations for our staff members has transformed this shop and for more than three years now, we have not only achieved our production goals but have far exceeded them. Simple efforts to define our expectations and communicate them consistently with our staff has transformed our labor operation and therefore (with parts sales following labor sales) our total operation. This shop owner is finally living his dream.
There is nothing like clear and open lines of communication to deliver on that success you have always dreamed of. The secret is letting them know what you want, learning to listen and leading them in the right direction.
