The installation industry has a relationship that is rarely as sharp in other sectors: the people who make commitments to the outside world, about sustainability, about delivery times, about the energy transition, are seldom the same people who have to carry out on the floor or on site what has been promised. Between management and work planning, between sales and the technician standing at the customer's door, lies a chain of handovers that can shift the original promise at every level. This is not unique to this sector, but the physical distance between office and customer makes it more visible. A commitment about an installation date is not an abstraction; one day it comes back as a technician who does or does not show up.
On top of that, the installation industry finds itself in the middle of a number of societal challenges that the sector did not choose itself: the heat transition, the replacement of gas connections, the demand for charging infrastructure. Anyone holding a management position in this industry therefore speaks not only on behalf of a company, but is also addressed as a representative of an entire transition. This widens the gap between what is promised at management level to government, industry association or major client, and what the organisation can actually deliver at any given moment.
Within the organisation there is usually a small number of people who put something on record to the outside world: a director, someone with commercial responsibility, sometimes a project manager on a major assignment. They know what has been said. What they do not always know is what has stuck with the parties on the other side: a housing association counting on a schedule, a municipality expecting a certain number of connections, a major client who signed a maintenance contract based on a commitment about response time.
The question of who you should talk to is therefore really two questions. The first is: who within your organisation has made commitments that others will still follow up on. The second is: who on the other side of that commitment has remembered exactly what was said, and whether that matches what you remember. Between those two answers there is often a difference, and that difference is rarely the result of unwillingness. It is the result of time, of staff turnover, of a commitment that sounded logical at the moment itself and later proved harder to carry out.
In an industry that runs on planning and delivery, the emphasis often lies on the big projects: the megawatt park, the large-scale renovation project, the multi-year maintenance agreement. But trust is rarely lost at that level. It is lost at the level of the small commitment: the customer who was promised a callback and never got one, the warranty on a part that turns out slightly different from what was promised, the completion date that slips two weeks without notice. A large investment that does not go ahead is often understood by the outside world; a small promise that is not kept is remembered. That is why a commitment tracker holds more value than an annual report full of ambitions: it keeps track of what was specifically promised, to whom, and whether it happened.
What exactly is going on at a housing association, a network operator or a major business client is not something that can be established from a management floor. The same applies equally to comparable questions in healthcare, where administrators and healthcare professionals often have a different picture of what has been promised, or in wholesale, where purchasing and delivery agreements sound different at management level than they do on the floor. The Trust Baseline does not fill in that picture itself. It places an internal survey alongside an external stakeholder survey and shows the difference between the two. That difference is the first outcome, not a conclusion about what a stakeholder truly thinks. What a housing association or a major client thinks is something we do not know until they say so themselves.
The Trust Baseline consists of three parts: the internal survey, the external survey, and the signal rhythm that tracks whether the difference between the two pictures grows smaller or larger over time. Added to this is the commitment tracker, which records per commitment what was promised and whether it was kept. This is not advice on which commitments you should or should not make, and no guarantee that your stakeholders' perception will change as a result. It is a way to make visible where the organisation's own picture diverges from what is experienced outside, so that the person carrying that picture, such as a CEO, a CSO or someone responsible for corporate affairs, does not hear about a gap for the first time at the moment it has already become visible.
These roles share something with those responsible in other sectors facing comparable societal pressure, such as manufacturing, where commitments about sustainability and production chains often originate at management level or the transport sector, where delivery promises and climate targets are voiced by the same small group. The tool that maps out this difference is under construction. Anyone who wants to work with this already can sign up for the waiting list.
Once it is clear which commitments have been made and which people are responsible for them, another question naturally follows: how much of the work needed to keep those commitments requires human judgement, and how much is task work that can be supported or taken over. The work scan from FTE TO AI calculates per task which part of the work can be taken over by AI, not as a replacement for the people who make or keep commitments, but as a picture of where capacity is freed up to do exactly that.
Vraag maar. Het interessantste antwoord komt meestal van wie u nog niet heeft gesproken.
Answers come from this site’s knowledge base. Not tailored advice, and not a scan of your company.