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Hi! I am Ashley, and I am the Community Manager at Crewhu. I have the pleasure of getting to promote a company that has been a major player in my career. Even more, I get the opportunity to share my knowledge of Customer Service, MSP, and company culture with all the amazing people who find value in the product.

I have over 15 years of experience in Customer Service and in the MSP universe, from the dispatcher to Service Manager. I understand the pain points and organized chaos of how MPSs work. And I’ve gotta say; it’s hard to promote a healthy and productive culture without a process!

Now, why is the blog called “Ask Ashley”? It’s an ode to the bit “Ask Ashley” from Nickelodeon’s “All That”!   My intention is to share my knowledge of the industry, culture, and everything customer service by answering your questions! 

My first question comes from an anonymous source:

Dear Ashley (that is me!),

Hi Ashley! I am a Service Manager at a smaller MSP. We are growing and keep having issues with finding the right hires for culture fit. We just cannot get the formula right. Any ideas on how we can match the Leadership wants with the needs of the teams when bringing new employees on??

Air High-Five,

Anonymous  

Simply put, it’s coming down to engaged leadership. There is always a need to hire, but things like budgets, talent pool, and training get in the way. MSPs are all different shapes and sizes, forever evolving – like Technology. Often, the cost outweighs the need. When that happens, you cast a shadow on the current staff and potentially settle for candidates that do not fully align with your company’s goals and visions.

As part of a leadership team, we would see our employees becoming negative and burnt out because we weren’t continuing to bring in resources to help support the workload or we were not letting go of people who were not meeting performance metrics. As negativity progressed, when we did hire, people often saw or experienced differences in portrayed culture vs the reality of the culture. Additionally, there was a dark cast on the expectations of a new employee. Causing the new employee to be cast out unless they met these unwritten emotional expectations of the job.

When leadership fully engages with their employees, you manage with metrics, not emotions. Paying attention and rewarding metrics is the most consistent way to encourage positive culture reinforcement. It also shows new hires that you promote productivity and engagement from them as a member of the crew, and they will be rewarded as such. It helps set the tone and, dare I say… “vibe”… of the environment. Allowing people to grow or morph into indispensable members of the crew.

My question back to you is, how are you measuring and reinforcing your metrics? Better yet, do your employees know and understand the metrics and how to achieve their goals – individually or company-wide?

Now, for the shameless plug… I mean, what do you expect!?

Crewhu Contest feature helps reward and reinforce meeting metrics, better known as Gamification.  Essentially, this is a feature that brings automation to rewarding key metrics by integration with your ticketing system. The API allows us to pull data into the Crewhu platform to reward the crew for meeting those KPIs!

This is a great way to stay consistent, see the low performers, celebrate your achievers, train, and improve cultural health. It removes the manual processes and allows the organic celebration of the crew. It also allows snapshots of the Leadership team to be transparent with individual and company goals. Leadership will be able to see in real time how their crew is performing. That alone gives insights that are worth gold.

Good luck! Crewhu is happy to help with shaping and supplying culture reinforcement tools to help you and the Crew!

Culture is the difference between a happy client and a not-so-happy client. Be the difference and take a chance on your staff. They are the heart of the company, even the low performers.

Until next time, 

Ask Ashley