What running a field service business really teaches you about people

When your team spends their days out on the road – no office, no shared space, no one looking over their shoulder – trust isn’t just a nice idea. It’s the whole thing. Our MD Andrew Shelley on what really makes a field-based team work.

I’ve been managing people who work out on the road for over fifteen years now. And if I’m honest, most of what I know about leadership I didn’t learn from a management book. I learned it from watching what happens when you put people in a van, send them out for the day, and trust them to get on with it.

That’s a very different kind of management challenge to running a team in the office. There’s no ambient accountability and nobody glancing over to see what you’re working on. It’s just one person, their schedule, and a set of expectations. What happens after that tells you a great deal about your culture.

I thought I’d share what fifteen years of that has taught me.

Trust. You either build it or you build surveillance

When you manage a dispersed team like ours, the temptation is to fill the visibility gap with monitoring. Your instinct is to want to know that work is being done, that clients are being looked after, and that standards are being met. 

We’ve built a reputation for high quality execution and our client feedback surveys rank us between 98-99% satisfaction levels. Part of that is down to tracking apps, check-in requirements, and detailed job reporting. But there’s a version of that which tips into surveillance. And surveillance, whatever its intentions, communicates something to the person on the receiving end: we don’t trust you.

The problem is that trust, once it goes, is extraordinarily hard to rebuild. People who feel watched rather than trusted will do the minimum that the watching requires. They stop thinking for themselves. They stop caring about the outcome because the process has become the point.

I’ve seen both ends of this. The teams that thrive are the ones where people feel genuinely accountable because they care about the work and understand why it matters, not because they’re being monitored. That’s a culture you build deliberately, over time. It doesn’t happen by accident.

My instinct has always been to use technology to support the team, not to police them. There’s a meaningful difference, and people will feel it even if they never actually articulate it.

When people aren’t in front of you, clarity becomes everything

In an office environment you have the bandwidth for communication to sometimes be, let’s say – imprecise. You can course-correct in real time. A misunderstood instruction gets sorted in the next conversation, which might be five minutes away.

In a field-based team, imprecision is expensive. If someone starts their day with the wrong understanding of what’s expected, you might not find out until the end of it, and by then, the damage is done. The client has had a substandard experience and an operative has potentially just spent the day doing the wrong thing well.

This has made me much more deliberate about how we communicate expectations. Not just what we want done, but why. People who understand the purpose behind an instruction will use their judgement when something unexpected happens. People who only know the instruction will either follow it blindly or freeze.

It also means being genuinely available. One of the worst things you can do to a field-based team is create a culture where people don’t feel they can pick up the phone. I genuinely live by the open door policy. Unless I’m on a call or in a meeting, our staff know they can walk straight into my office. If your operatives are silently struggling with something, be it a difficult client, an unclear instruction, or a problem they don’t know how to solve, you want to know about it before it becomes a pattern. Make it easy to reach you, and make it feel safe to do so.

Autonomy. The counterintuitive truth about letting go

Here’s something I’ve come to believe quite firmly: micromanaging a field-based team doesn’t just damage morale, it actively makes the operation worse.

When people are empowered to make decisions within a clear framework, they get better at their jobs faster. They develop judgement. They start to own outcomes rather than just executing tasks. And that ownership, in a service business, is the difference between someone who turns up and someone who genuinely cares whether the client is happy.

I’ve hired people who were technically excellent but needed constant direction. And I’ve hired people who were less experienced but deeply self-motivated. The second group, almost without exception, outperforms over time. I firmly believe motivation is the one thing you can’t train into someone, it either exists or it doesn’t.

The question for any business leader is whether your environment nurtures that motivation or gradually extinguishes it. There are things that chip away at people’s sense of agency until they stop trying. Too much control, too little trust, too many processes that are really saying ‘we don’t believe you can handle this’. Letting go is uncomfortable, especially when you care deeply about quality. But the alternative is a team that only functions when you’re watching.

Culture. It’s not just a values statement on the website

I’ve visited enough businesses to know that the framed values in the reception area often bear little resemblance to what actually happens inside the building. Culture isn’t what you or your website says it is. It’s how people behave when nobody senior is watching.

For a field-based business, that’s the everyday reality. Nobody senior is watching. Which means your culture is tested, genuinely and repeatedly, every single day in every service visit, every client interaction, every decision an operative makes when they’re on their own and something doesn’t go to plan.

Building a culture that holds up under those conditions requires a few things. Consistency – people need to know that the rules apply equally, that there are no favourites, that what gets rewarded and what gets addressed is predictable. Fairness – the sense that the business is dealing straight with them, that they’re not being taken advantage of. And meaning – some understanding of why the work matters, beyond their payslip at the end of the month.

That last one is really underrated. People who understand the impact of what they do (for the clients, for the communities they operate in, for the business they’re part of)  show up differently to people who see themselves as an interchangeable part in a machine. We’ve worked hard at Simply Washrooms to make sure our team knows what we’re about and why it matters. Our B Corp status is part of that. It gives people something to be genuinely proud of.

Why your best people leave and what to do about it

The field service sector has a reputation for high turnover, and it’s not entirely undeserved. The work can be repetitive and the hours can be unsociable. And if the culture is poor, there’s no office camaraderie to compensate for it.

But I’ve also seen businesses in this sector with remarkably stable, loyal teams. And the difference is almost never pay. It’s almost always about whether people feel valued, whether they’re managed with respect, and whether they see a future for themselves within the organisation.

For me, this means a few things. Recognition matters – by which I don’t mean a generic email. I mean knowing your people well enough to acknowledge specifically what they’ve done well. Development is key – even in roles that don’t have an obvious upward path, there are almost always ways to grow. And involvement matters – people who feel consulted, who feel that their experience is drawn on rather than just tolerated, are people who stay.

Losing a good field operative isn’t just a recruitment cost. It’s the loss of client relationships, institutional knowledge, and team cohesion that you can’t easily quantify. Investing in retention is always cheaper than the alternative.

What this kind of management gives back

I started by saying that most of what I know about leadership I learned from managing people in the field. I mean that seriously.

Running a distributed team forces a kind of management clarity that an office environment doesn’t bring out in you. You can’t rely on presence. You have to be intentional about almost everything – communication, culture, trust, accountability – in a way that managers in more traditional environments sometimes don’t have to be.

What it gives back, when you get it right, is a team that genuinely functions. People who are self-directed, client-focused, and proud of what they do. That’s not a small thing. In a service business, it’s everything.

I don’t claim to have got it right every time. Fifteen years means fifteen years of mistakes as well as successes. But the direction of travel has always been towards more trust and more genuine investment in the people doing the work. I’ve never regretted moving in that direction.