S2:E22 Online Communities and The Maintenance Community

Bryan Bieschke is the Director of Maintenance and Reliability of T. Parker Host, and expert in the Maintenance Community! And, Caitlyn Young-Gilbert is the Chief of Staff at UpKeep and Head of Community at The Maintenance Community Slack Group! 

Summary

In this week's episode of Masterminds in Maintenance, we are excited to have Bryan Bieschke and Caitlyn Young-Gilbert on the show! Ryan, Bryan, and Caitlyn dive deep into the topic of Online Communities and The Maintenance Community Slack Group, discussing its value during a period of extended isolation, and how it can potentially be a solution to bridging the impending skills gap. Listen today!

[Embedded content: https://anchor.fm/upkeep/embed/episodes/S2E22-Online-Communities-and-The-Maintenance-Community-enieqq]

Episode Show Notes

• Why was The Maintenance Community Slack Group created?

• The future of The Maintenance Community on Slack!

• Tips and tricks for newcomers in a Slack community! 

Podcast Platforms

• Anchor FM

• Apple Podcasts

• Spotify

• YouTube

Transcript

0:00:04.1 Ryan Chan: Welcome to Masterminds in Maintenance, a podcast for those with new ideas in maintenance. I'm your host Ryan, I'm the CEO and founder of UpKeep. Each week I'll be meeting with a guest who's had an idea for how to shake things up in the maintenance and reliability industry. Sometimes the idea failed, sometimes it made their business more successful, and other times their idea revolutionized an entire industry. Today, I'm super excited. We've got two guests here on the show. Bryan Bieschke is a Director of Maintenance and Reliability at T. Parker Host, an expert in the maintenance community. And secondly, Caitlyn Young-Gilbert, is the Chief of Staff here at UpKeep and the Head of Community at The Maintenance Community Slack group. Welcome to the show both Bryan and Caitlyn.

0:00:42.2 Bryan Bieschke: Thank you for having me, Ryan.

0:00:44.4 Caitlyn Young-Gilbert: It's so fun to be a guest. I used to work in the background on Masterminds in Maintenance to... I feel like I've finally made it.

0:00:51.9 BB: Propelled forward.

0:00:53.8 RC: Maybe we'll kick it off with Bryan and then Caitlyn right after.

0:00:56.5 BB: As I've said many times on Masterminds and also with other podcasts and webinars, I'm a college drop out, wasn't for me, I rolled out of there and I went to automotive school where I learned how to be an auto mechanic and I got out of school graduated, I went and worked in a small shop working on everything you could think of, boats, trucks, cars, trailers, welding, fabrication, it was a one-stop shop. I ended up leaving there and going and joining the Navy where I was a GSE troubleshooter on the flight deck of the USS George Washington. So my job was to troubleshoot, repair and maintain every piece of equipment associated with flight operations during flight operations on carrier. I got hired by Caterpillar right out of the navy, where I worked doing troubleshooting overhauls, repairs, I left Caterpillar and went and worked for a material handling company where I was a field mechanic working on fully electronic, fully hydraulic machinery, and then eventually I was hired away from there to establish the maintenance programs for Host terminals across six different facilities, so that's where I'm at now, that's what I do. The Navy is the pinnacle of maintenance and reliability for me, and then I just took that and carried it forward.

0:02:01.3 CY: Alright, I have quite an opposite story from Bryan in my journey into maintenance reliability, while his is storeyed and developed over time, I did not have a background in maintenance and reliability before starting at UpKeep. So my background is in social impact in non-profits, I've worked spearheading different non-profits around the nation, and then worked with different corporations in the past to start their corporate social responsibility. So my heart was always about trying to help people and prove that you can do well as a business by doing good by people. And so when I was looking for an opportunity and saw UpKeep, that was something I was really excited about. Didn't know too much about maintenance reliability, but immediately started understanding that the folks that we service are the backbone of every industry, every sector, and I was really excited to be part of a company that just wanted to do good for them. Joining upkeep, I started getting a crash course, I studied for the CMRP exam, knowing nothing. And after two months, I passed the exam and have been trying to be a student ever since, so there's always times where we're putting on a webinar or a conversation in the community, and I am just eating it up because I have no idea...

0:03:13.2 CY: I had no idea previously, and then it's such a gift to me when I'm seeing these discussions and these photos and videos and all the debates that go on, because I'm really on a live journey, understanding as much as possible about maintenance reliability and how we can help this industry move forward.

0:03:30.8 RC: We've been talking a lot about the maintenance community, and obviously all of us are in it, and it's a platform that we started on Slack, which has really helped propel us to reach over 3000 different maintenance and reliability professionals. And what we saw from this was it almost came at the perfect time because of extended social distancing and social isolation, what happened was it actually gave a lot of people who are typically not online on programs like Slack an opportunity to come on Slack and connect with one another, share educational resources. Caitlyn, why did you decide to spearhead and make this community in the first place? And obviously, I wanna ask the question too, how has your experience been so far?

0:04:18.6 CY: I think it was a perfect storm in terms of timing, where the whole world was going online and digital, and we around that same time and had a nag of an idea of What if we made a central resource for all the maintenance professionals to have live conversations? So we at UpKeep, use Slack and had seen the success and so we thought it might be something if we made a Slack group free of charge and anyone can join and have as live of conversations as possible, not try to have any ulterior motives, just have a place where people wanna have conversations, people might take off with that and really start helping each other and let it evolve into its own thing. I think people saw the value of an easy place that you can log in and share vulnerable or things that you wouldn't otherwise share on LinkedIn. So LinkedIn is a very professional space where you might not put, "Hey, I'm not meeting my KPIs this quarter," and so what we're seeing in our Slack community is with COVID bringing challenges that no one's ever anticipated, and maintenance still having the legacy challenges that we always have been dealing with, Slack has turned into a protected space where people feel safe sharing some of the struggles they're having, and then in real time are getting four to five different perspectives from people who have been in the space for 30 years, one year, all around the world.

0:05:47.0 RC: And obviously, our community is hundreds of different volunteers that volunteer their time, and obviously, Bryan, you are one of these volunteers that have so graciously dedicated a lot of your time to helping support and join this community, how did you get plugged into the community and how has your experience been so far?

0:06:07.2 BB: Well, Ryan, you actually sent me a LinkedIn invite and I was like, What is Slack? I'm a caveman, so people have to introduce me to these types of things because just like you did, and like I told you, man, it's just a fantastic thing. I can't stress enough the value that it adds, having collaborative interaction with people from around the world. The diversity is the key, and it's the most powerful thing I see in these maintenance communities based on the diversity of perspective, the diversity of culture and nationality, all the struggles that we face as maintenance people are the same struggles. It may seem different and isolated because of where you are in the world, all these people are here to answer those questions and to be by your side in those struggles because they're not different. They're very, very uniform across the world, and I love to death when people message me and they have a problem and we solve it together.

0:07:04.9 CY: I love that Bryan mentioned the diversity present, because when we were first trying to recruit people to join Slack, a lot of people had the same reaction being like, "What is Slack?" And we started describing it as the universal virtual break room, we're all on one team, as one maintenance crew, and this is where we're gonna get together and share ideas, get to know each other, and so that's how we had to pitch it early on to just have people understand what we were trying to create.

0:07:36.4 RC: We've noticed a big shift due to COVID, from people going offline to online now, what was it like before? How did people come together to solve problems and share ideas prior to that, and how has COVID and how has this pandemic... Or maybe how has Slack changed that for you and what you've seen in the community?

0:07:56.4 BB: Forums is kinda where that kind of started for me, and on top of that, I would have to say, and I hate to speak on things I'm not super familiar with, but conferences and physical collaborations with an industry, I'm sure were huge dealing with multiple facilities around the country. You would have to physically go somewhere, sit with somebody, meet with them to get your points and thoughts across or find another avenue, but all of that being rolled into Slack, I think that it's just going to be an endless upward progression.

0:08:27.8 CY: So when we were doing research about how can we connect people, we were looking at what are people already doing and how can we do a great version of that. Things we were seeing included conferences being the biggie, so paying to come to a conference and then that networking, happy hour time with the panel and expert learning, but as we saw the dawn of COVID and virtual life coming, we were realizing, what can we do to get ahead of the curve? And that's when we thought of Slack. Something else we learned is... Knowledge was shared in-house, you had a legacy team member who has been there for decades, and the other people in the maintenance team learned by shadowing, asking questions, who do you know? Where do you work and can you get the knowledge from their brains before they leave for a very well-deserved retirement? We thought, "Oh no, we need to get all of this online. We need to get everyone talking so that you can learn from someone at a plant 500 miles away about successes and go much faster."

0:09:36.2 RC: Digital online community has essentially leveled the playing field. So that's been really, really cool to see as well. So let's say I'm a new member to this community, any tips, any tricks to gain the most out of it, and maybe I'll ask Caitlyn first.

0:09:53.0 CY: The first thing to keep in mind is that it can be very overwhelming, you enter a room that is, kind of like everyone's shouting. Your left side screen is full of notifications. Every single channel has 3000 people in it, and you have all these conversations that might feel overwhelming to try and catch up on, just click on all those channels and get those notifications to go away, don't worry about catching up, you're here now, you will get value from the community. If you have any burning questions that brought you to this space, use that search bar, just type in what you're looking for, and it's going to pull up all the historical conversations, so you don't need to be catching up on 15,000 messages. Be sure to introduce yourself and talk about in your introduction, what are you hoping to learn? What brought you here and what experience can you offer? And that seems really small, but for people who've been in the community for a long time now, we are so excited when any new member joins. We have an automatic bot that welcomes you, we all get that notification so that we can say hello to you, and so while it might be overwhelming to you to figure out who is here? Who can I learn from? What do I do? We can just learn and say, Okay, this person shared that they're looking for information on this, this and this, I will go ahead and extend a helping hand and share with them conversations or a channel to see.

0:11:22.7 CY: So we're here to help you, if you see anyone with admin in the maintenance community Slack next to their name, those are people who work on the community team here at UpKeep, and our entire job is to make your life easier, so feel free to tag or message us and we will find you whatever answer you're looking for, and then if you see someone with expert next to their name, that means this is a person who has volunteered their time to put on a free webinar in the past, and most likely will in the future, and are actively there to answer any questions you have.

0:11:58.0 BB: Regardless of who is in Slack, there is no social hierarchy. If someone asks a question and someone answers that question, and if their title doesn't have that expert next to it, it doesn't mean anything. It's very important to know that there are people in this chat or in this Slack group that are leaps and bounds, so crazily well-versed in maintenance and they may not have expert next to their name. Don't discredit that since Slack in a way is very anonymous, and what I mean by that is that there's no emotional or professional connections for judgment, and it really allows for true and free communication between peers. And that's extremely valuable because you may be a very well-respected person in your job or your facility, and you may feel that it doesn't look good to be trying to look for help somewhere else, this is that place, right? It's okay, it doesn't... Ask away, and just know that the people who are gonna answer your questions are gonna do so to the best of their ability.

0:13:05.9 BB: We may ask you 100 questions off your question, just so we can better answer your one question, we may ask you 10 for your one question, and it doesn't mean that you're wrong or that you've said something wrong, it just means that we truly wanna understand your question and genuinely give you our advice or our factual information that we may have. And if we don't have it, you'll see that we'll tag somebody else in there, and if we do that, that doesn't mean we're saying, "Come look at this guy's dumb question," it means that guy knows what he's talking about and he's gonna come and help answer your question.

0:13:38.2 RC: A lot of companies do social good, and there is that Corporate Social Responsibility budget. What we saw is that there is this niche industry, maintenance and reliability that often gets overlooked, and so what we said is, We wanna do good, but we're gonna do good for this industry that often gets overlooked, and we've dedicated part of our budget for doing good for the community. And our community has three core pillars, one is centered around education, two is centered around connection, and three, again, is just doing good, elevating the status of everyone in our industry. That is our intention. It is nothing thing else. So I think that was really important. When you talk about having no hierarchy and no judgment here. What does the future look like for our community?

0:14:31.6 CY: We realize it's not me or anyone else creating educational resources, it's connecting people with questions to the people with the experience to answer them quickly, as quickly as possible, and making it as simple as possible. As we move into 2021, we are hyper-focused on one of our goals, which is make it so easy for people to connect and get the value they need when they need it. We have found that educational webinars, like these live podcasts, any kind of presentations that are asked for by the community are a huge win because we have those recordings, people can listen in their own time zones, they can play it for their teams, we provide the slides completely free. So what we're gonna be doubling down on is asking all the time, What do you all want to hear about and finding the people to present those.

0:15:25.3 CY: So events are going to be even better in 2021, as much as we can, we're looking into technologies we can invest in, we're looking into reaching out to more people in different industries that we haven't connected with to make sure that they are part of this and really providing value. I think that there has been so many people who've created bonds and friendships, genuine bonds and friendships over this Slack community, that's because we ask questions like, "It's Friday evening, can we see a picture of your dogs?" And we'll get 15 responses of maintenance puppies. And we want to, in 2021, try and provide opportunities for people to meet in person and have more of a human connection.

0:16:02.9 CY: Two more things, one, we're going to try and make sure that we bring in lots more maintenance reliability specific recruiters into our space so that those who may be dealing with COVID-related or any related job loss can start having a resource in one place to access different opportunities, vet them and know that this is a real opportunity. There are six people in this Slack group that work at that company and vouch, it's a great place, and also make the recruiters jobs a lot easier by having one place for quality candidates. And then the last thing is making sure that we try and not have the public and media lose sight of how important maintenance and reliability is. There was a blessing in that with COVID-19, people started realizing that maintenance and reliability professionals are also on the front lines. They also have to go into work to keep our water running, they have to go into work to keep the products we use going. It's our responsibility as the community team here at... The maintenance community to make sure that that continues and that we always are sharing stories of success from our members, and we're sharing lots of different ways that they're impacting the community. So those are our focuses.

0:17:20.1 RC: What's one thing that you wish more people knew about the online maintenance community and this Slack community?

0:17:27.0 BB: UpKeep Slack community, maintenance community is in the planning phase, okay, so give it some time. It Is a wonderful thing, and the technology never stops, and the human connection side of it is extremely valuable for people who feel disconnected and isolated, whether they've just lost their job, you still have a job, but maybe they're on the fence. So this may be something the community and the relationships that they've build with these people in Slack and know that they're heard, you may be changing someone's life for real. It's a natural thing in us is that we want to contribute to something, we wanna be a part of something bigger than ourselves. I truly believe that every person that comes on to Slack and is asking a question or answering a question, genuinely wants that person on the other end to be uplifted or some sort of value created in what they're doing. I think we need to try to get more mechanics, more electricians, more people touching, feeling, turning their wrenches and bolt. I don't know the data behind how many different types of trades or whatever, but I feel like there's a lot of leadership and reliability specialists and leaders and all things like that, and I would love for there to be maybe a channel or something where maintenance people who touch, feel their wrenches, they are there to communicate with each other and share their experiences. So other than that, I'm extremely happy, I appreciate everything you guys do.

0:18:56.2 RC: Bryan, Caitlyn, can you share with all of our listeners the different ways that they could connect with you, follow you on your journey?

0:19:01.3 CY: You can find me on LinkedIn under Caitlyn Young-Gilbert, and then connect with me on Slack so we can have direct messages in the maintenance community. It's on my phone, it's up all day on my screen and I am ready to chat with you.

0:19:16.3 BB: LinkedIn is one, that kinda was like the spot before Slack, and then Slack, of course, I'm on Slack all the time. UpKeep connect, Upkeep has partnered with several amazing people who want to dedicate their time to helping individuals.

0:19:31.1 RC: Thank you again, Bryan and Caitlyn for joining us. Thank you to all of our listeners for tuning in to today's live Masterminds and Maintenance. My name is Ryan Chan, I'm the CEO and founder of UpKeep. You can connect with me on LinkedIn or directly at [email protected]. You can also find all of us at the maintenance community, as Caitlyn and both Bryan mentioned. I hope to connect with everyone soon, until next time, thanks again to everyone.

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