The service plan had already chosen where people would live

## Read the human assumptions inside the diagram

The proposed dispatch arrangement was easy to understand. One central base would coordinate eighteen field technicians and send them to customer appointments. It reduced the number of locations operations had to manage and offered a simpler account of where the team belonged. The employment assumptions were less visible. Eight technicians already travelled regularly; ten worked mainly locally. The proposal expected frequent travel from all eighteen and relocation from twelve. Those expectations appeared in the model before the company had established whether the people could or would accept them.

I did not object to central coordination as a principle. A business needs to consider different operating models, including ones that require changes in jobs and locations. My concern was that the proposal treated a human commitment as though it had already been obtained. The resulting cost comparison gave the central model an advantage it had not yet earned. If relocation proved impractical, or the travel obligation required different staffing, the apparent simplicity would change. HR needed to explain that uncertainty before approval, rather than inherit it as an implementation problem afterwards.

Conversations with colleagues also needed care. We wanted to understand the employment arrangement they could consider, not conduct an inquiry into private family circumstances. A person should not have to present an intimate account of caring responsibilities or domestic relationships before management accepts that frequent travel is a material change. The role discussion can identify the proposed base, expected journeys and available alternatives. Professional advice is needed for the employment implications. Collecting more personal detail than the decision requires can create another problem without making the operating proposal more realistic.

Operations had legitimate concerns about fragmentation. Several bases would require coordination, equipment and a more complicated view of capacity. A technician available in one area might not be available where the next customer needed help. I did not want the people function to promise a painless alternative and leave those consequences with dispatch colleagues. We needed a joint recommendation in which the service model and employment choices could be examined together. That meant treating the regional option as a commercial proposal with costs and limitations, rather than a statement of goodwill outside the business case.

## Give the alternative its full price

The alternative used four regional bases, including the existing Shillong base. It carried ₹1.3 crore incremental annual operating expense and a four-month implementation period. The central proposal had envisaged two months. Those figures made the regional approach harder to approve, and they belonged in the recommendation for precisely that reason. If the company chose it, directors should know that they were accepting additional expense and a slower start in exchange for a different staffing and service arrangement. Calling it an efficiency improvement would have obscured the choice we were actually asking them to make.

Fourteen existing technicians accepted regional field roles. Four chose existing local workshop vacancies, and two additional field technicians were recruited. That left sixteen people in the regional field team, with the four transfers still employed elsewhere in the company. The arithmetic is important because a loose account could suggest that all eighteen original technicians moved into the new service structure or that four had left the business. Neither would describe what happened. A workforce proposal needs to preserve the destination of people as well as the total number of roles in the final organisation.

The local vacancies were genuine available roles, not positions invented after the fact to make the transition look resolved. Their availability was part of what made this alternative feasible for our business. Another company might not have the same options. I would therefore resist presenting the case as a formula that can be copied without examining the receiving work, the person's skills and the applicable employment arrangements. An alternative is only meaningful if it has a credible place in the operating plan and if the colleague understands what accepting it will involve.

The CEO approved the regional model after considering those consequences. HR coordinated the role discussions and changes with appropriate advice. Operations retained the routes, technical service and promises made to customers. That separation mattered after approval as much as before it. A people-function account could not claim successful service merely because the employment conversations were complete. The company still had to deliver appointments, support technicians and explain the actual cost. A more workable employment commitment creates an opportunity for operations; it does not by itself prove that the customer experience has improved.

## Report the service that actually followed

The six-month review ending February 2025 covered 380 completed service jobs. Of those, 342 were attended within the window promised for their booking, and thirty-eight were late. We reported the count rather than a vague statement that regional service was working well. It did not establish complete coverage of rural locations, and it did not describe enquiries that had not become completed jobs. The remaining difficulties mattered because the network still had to decide where it could make a credible promise. A useful review should make the boundary of its evidence easy to see.

First-year incremental operating expense was ₹1.36 crore, compared with the ₹1.3 crore budget. Additional travel and weather-related costs contributed to the ₹6 lakh difference. The result did not vindicate a claim that regional bases would be cheaper, because we had never made that claim. It showed the price of the approach the company selected and a variance that needed explanation. Directors could then consider whether the service and workforce outcomes justified continuing or changing the arrangement. An honest proposal is easier to review when its original tradeoff has not been rewritten as a success story after implementation.

There is a broader leadership issue in how we describe mobility. Organisations can treat willingness to move as a sign of commitment, then overlook the practical obligations already attached to a person's life. That does not mean every job can be redesigned around every preference. It means the proposed obligation should be named clearly and discussed before it becomes a test of loyalty. In our case, the question was whether a central model genuinely required the available people or whether a different network could support the service. The answer carried cost, delay and operational complexity that management chose to accept.

My contribution was to make the staffing assumption available for decision. I did not determine the technical service standard or direct the routes from HR. I helped the business see that the diagram had already chosen where people would live and how they would travel, then worked with colleagues on an alternative they could assess. The lesson is to bring that conversation forward. Once a model has been approved as the efficient answer, every later employment difficulty looks like resistance to execution. Before approval, the same difficulty can be understood as evidence that the business case is still incomplete.