Most building service contractors don’t have a people problem. They have a definition problem.
The word accountability shows up in the news whenever something goes wrong. Someone must be held accountable, and everyone listening knows what that means: a firing, a resignation, a public apology. That association travels straight into the workplace. By the time an owner says the word in a staff meeting, the room has already braced for what comes next.
Jeff Carmon of Elite BSC said stripping that baggage away is where the work starts.
“Accountability is knowing what success looks like before you start, and then owning the result either way,” Carmon said. “In other words, it’s not punitive; it’s clarity.”
The distinction matters more than it sounds. Carmon noted that when accountability and punishment share the same meaning within a company, every attempt to raise standards reads as a threat, and field leaders learn to keep their heads down rather than raise their hands.
“The problem in most BSCs isn’t that the people don’t care,” he said. “It’s that success was never clearly defined in the first place.”
You can’t manage a result
Owners tend to set goals at the finish line. Retention rate. Customer satisfaction. Contract renewals. Those numbers are worth tracking, but Carmon pointed out that none of them can be managed.
“You can’t measure outcomes directly,” he said. “You can only manage the activities that produce them.”
Customer retention makes the case. “You can’t force a customer to stay with your company,” Carmon explained. “Customer retention is the result of a hundred smaller things that are done consistently over time.”
Those smaller things are where a manager has leverage. How often a field leader shows up at a site. How quickly a complaint moves from reported to resolved. Whether anyone is having a real conversation with the customer on an ongoing basis, rather than only when something breaks.
“We can have a tendency to set outcome goals without defining the daily and weekly activities that produce them,” Carmon said. “When the outcome doesn’t happen, we’re scratching our heads and saying, hey, I wonder why that didn’t turn out.”
Start with a one-pager and a conversation
Carmon teaches a three-part approach: define, monitor, address. The first part carries most of the weight, and it costs nothing but time.
Defining success means putting it on paper and then talking it through. Carmon said this does not require a corporate document. For an account manager, a field leader, or a recruiter on the HR team, a single page is usually enough, if it is clear and simple and gets discussed out loud.
“The conversation alone changes a lot of things for most people because they never have it,” he said.
A dashboard can feel like Big Brother
Monitoring means checking the numbers on a regular cadence, and different metrics call for different intervals. Carmon said AI-built dashboards are creating real opportunities here, giving BSC leaders visibility into lead indicators that signal outcomes like retention well before the renewal conversation arrives.
There’s a catch, though, and it lands squarely on culture.
“If you haven’t redefined accountability first, a dashboard feels like surveillance,” Carmon said. Field leaders who already equate accountability with punishment will read any tracking tool as management watching them. “We’ve got to get the culture right before we introduce the tools.”
Get that sequence right and the same screen reads differently. “When your team understands that accountability means shared success, a dashboard becomes a coaching tool and not a threat,” he said.
Address the good weeks, too
The third piece has two halves, and Carmon said the first half is constantly skipped. When expectations are met, that outcome deserves to be named and celebrated. Recognition, he stated, is a powerful accountability tool.
The other half applies when results fall short, and Carmon recommends two questions before anyone assumes the employee is the problem. Are the expectations correct, and was this person set up to succeed? Are there barriers or misunderstandings nobody has identified yet?
From there, the job is solving the problem together. “Accountability is something to do with people,” Carmon said. “Not something to do to people.”
The staff is for guiding
Carmon closed with an analogy that reframes the whole idea.
“A good shepherd doesn’t use their staff to harm their sheep; he uses it to guide them,” he said. “That’s really what accountability ought to feel like in your organization.”
