Let’s first divulge into what drives Facility Manager’s Value Metrics…
We all know Facilities Management encompasses multiple disciplines to ensure smooth functioning of buildings. In that regard Facility managers are constantly aligning processes and people. Here ‘People’ span across – who work in the facilities management, facilities care and maintenance and occupants.
The current pandemic environment is forcing range of changes in usual workplace setup – from employers and employees demanding transparency in how FMs are ensuring scheduled cleaning tasks have been undertaken to meeting compliance requirements imposed by regulators to contain the spread of viruses and bugs.
Employers of course are driven by productivity, efficiency, risk mitigation, employee well being and most importantly profitability.
Although work from home has picked up as a trend to mitigate some of the health risks. Recent surveys have indicated that employees are looking forward to come and operate from offices for 50-60% of their working days. As the risk of this pandemic will subside the office trend should move up. However social distancing requirements may continue for a foreseeable future. This will create challenges around space utilisation.
Building owners are keen to get the employers and employees coming back to their usual place of work to retain and improve occupancy rates. FMs know they may be held accountable where buildings have failed to take adequate steps in protecting the occupants and the visitors at their facilities.
All these challenges and these unprecedented environmental forces are presenting complex value metrics for the FMs.
As a Facility Services Provider, you have the ability to take away some of these concerns from the FMs and align your services to some of these value metrics.
For example, if your business is providing cleaning services, you have the opportunity to position yourself as a leader or as an adviser of this crucial function which seems to hold a number of keys for addressing anxieties from workplace participants.
Here are a number of steps you can take to proactively guide and assist Facility Managers:
What are the applicable requirements with respect to facility cleaning?
Your experience as a contractor provides you unique insight across multiple buildings and understand what are up and coming requirements and what is the best way to meet those requirements in that particular FMs situation. Prepare yourself to have these conversations.
Do’s and Don’ts for workplace participants to stay safe.
Again you have advantage here to help FMs develop these policies to help them remove unnecessary precautions but help them identify what is practical and what safeguards will have the most impact without creating unsustainable hurdles for everyone involved.
Guide about the equipment and chemicals used by your teams to meet requirements
We cannot see who else can take the lead here.
Provide transparency of tasks, along with the number of occurrences of specific tasks completed by your team. (i.e. if desks need to be sanitised three times in a shift they are aware of this requirement and they are consciously completing those tasks)
Now this can be tough to track and report but on the other hand this transparency offers the most credible information which building occupants and workplace participants can rely on. You need to start doing it.
How you are conducting quality reviews to oversee the work of front-line staff?
All clients love the fact that you are not only performing tasks but you have methods to measure the effectiveness of those tasks. And you can use this data to continuously improve the service.
What training or information delivery initiates you have taken for your staff to help protect themselves and use methods to meet changing standards applicable for different facilities within the building.
FMs know the ultimate outcomes are still dependent on efficiency of your front-line staff. They will be keen to understand how you are keeping the information about changing requirements flowing to them.
How you are helping your frontline staff with technology to be proactive in reporting issues and being in control to access scheduled tasks, occurrences of tasks assigned to them.
Signing and keeping hard-copy service sheets is not going to cut it. Not only it is cumbersome but compiling relevant information from these is somewhat impossible.
You can assist FMs by demonstrating how your business is at the forefront to adopt technology to meet these challenges.
