Developing A Facilities Management Strategy

The right strategy goes beyond providing day to day support and service and starts creating long term initiatives that can sustain the life of assets and improve productivity. The driving force behind a facilities management strategy is the safety and happiness of the people in the facility.

What is Facility Management?

Facility management refers to how facilities at an organization are managed and maintained. These facilities are not limited to offices but can also include mechanical and electrical utilities or the company's physical resources with the potential to cause the employees a safety or health hazard. Facility management is affected by technology changes and advancements imploring facility managers to identify technology investments that can positively influence facilities management.

What is a facilities management strategy?

Facilities management strategy is a collaboration between facility management and facility planning focusing on long term outcomes and involves incorporating facility management into company initiatives. Facilities management strategy calls for an understanding of business goals and linking them to facility management to improve the workplace and organization. It's driven by goals.

WHY IS Facility Management MORE RELEVANT THAN EVER?

Facility management can ensure that companies are running efficiently and effectively.

Buildings with a facility management team run properly as they are responsible for the day to day analysis of utilities at the company as well as maintenance and repairs. They also take part in strategic planning activities of the company to aid the growth of employee productivity and cut down costs.

Studies have shown that the best workplace environment can affect productivity and improve the well being of workers which can affect business output and the success of organisations as a whole. For example, clean working space and bathrooms can make workers feel comfortable and secure. Facilities management takes care of such services.

Busters Group offers the best facility management services for all types of buildings. With skilled management experts and your own facilities manager, we can offer you tailor-made management services both on a short or long term basis so you can focus on other aspects of your business without worry.

What are Facility Management's objectives?

Facility management involves so many responsibilities that include ensuring comfort, functionality, safety and happiness of occupants in a building that is being managed. To successfully accomplish all these, there are facility management objectives that should be met and these objectives can fit all types of facilities.

Communication with Stakeholders and Occupants

For everything to run smoothly as you manage a building, establish and maintain communication with occupants and stakeholders of the building. Such dialogue can help you learn how they view the facility and they can also offer invaluable suggestions to make the environment more comfortable and safe.

For every facility that Busters Group is offering facility management to, our team invents an easy but vital system for communication for occupants to tell us their recommendations and opinions on how the job should be done better so every occupant is happy and feels secure.

Provide a Safe and Healthy Environment

Safety is always our main concern here at Busters Group. By being aware of potential health risks and creating strategies to correct and avoid some of these risks we can keep a lot of people safe.

In buildings that we are managing, we focus on bathrooms because they are an essential part of any building. By maintaining cleanliness, freshness and stocking them with adequate toiletries we make them as pleasant as possible for every visit made.

Our team also focuses on reducing the level of moisture and mould growth in bathrooms by doing regular inspections on stalls and investing in high-density polyethene that not only improves the quality of air but also prevents mould growth.

Be Mindful of Deficiencies

Some things if left unchecked for a long time can ultimately affect the functionality of utilities in a building. Routine checks can help identify any building deficiencies and avoid bigger problems in future. A facility manager is responsible to make these routine checks every three to 6 months.

Improve and Endorse Energy Efficiency

Making the facility more energy-efficient can save money. By going over the expenses of the building on water, gas and electricity a manager can identify how much is being spent and ways of reducing energy wastage. Investing in equipment that can save energy such as energy-efficient light bulbs, boosting existing equipment and sealing off leaks on pipes can reduce and prevent more wastage of energy.

At Busters Group we offer detailed plans on how any building can be energy efficient after a thorough investigation and implement such plans to save cost.

Business Continuity Planning

Some facilities depend on fully functioning equipment to run. A business continuity plan is like a contingency plan that identifies the key assets of a facility and the potential risks that the asset has. The plan also shows how business operations could be affected if the asset stopped functioning. With evaluation and the right plan, you can ensure that a business or facility does not stop its operations if the inevitable should occur.

Our team at Busters Group is experienced in creating business continuity reports so you never worry about continuity.

What Are The 5 Steps in Strategic Facility Planning?

Strategic facility planning (SFP) is a key process that can enhance the delivery of services from a facility management team to its stakeholders. An SFP can reduce delays and customer dissatisfaction with services being offered and ensures that all facility management activities are in line with the corporate direction of the business. With SFP a facility manager can help organizations become effective and conducive space for workers. The process follows these steps:

1) Clarify Your Strategic Position

To know the right needs of a facility, an analysis of the current position or conditions of the building must be done. The team must study the values, culture, vision and goals of the organization they want to work with and develop strategies that will be in line with these core values. The facility manager must understand where the organization is heading, what changes might occur and how they will affect the real estate needs of the organization. This can help predict future needs, requirements and cost for operations, maintenance and space.

2) Prioritize Your Objectives

After identifying the needs, a facility manager must evaluate the objectives that collaborate with the core values and vision of the organization and how each chosen objective can help reach set goals.

Priority should be given to objectives that are more urgent, relate more to the needs of stakeholders and can support the performance of everyone at the workplace.

3) Formulate A Strategy

Formulating a strategy involves identifying the right initiatives to reach set objectives and creating a time frame to reach them.

4) Implement and Manage The Strategy

With the plan on paper, it can be implemented, but for its success, everyone in the organization must be aware of what sort of strategies you have put in place. Team members should know what their roles will be throughout the facility management plan.

5) Monitor and Evaluate Strategy

To determine if the strategy is successful, continue to monitor work being done and check if progress matches up with set priorities. Managers can also take opinions from members of the organization to see if the work they are providing is up to their standards. Where priorities or changes must be made in approach, the manager is also responsible for these.

Implementing strategic facility management

It takes control to perfectly carry out strategic facility management. The International Facility Management Association list's four steps to successfully implement a strategic facility plan:

Understand

Strategic facility management is guided by goals and the capacity of facilities to support such goals. The strategy must be well understood before it is executed and this goes beyond knowing the time frame to identifying if the strategy has enough resources to run.

Analyze

The second step in facilities management calls for a deeper understanding and experimentation on how the plan can be put into action. Use experimental and analytic tools to help fully build the strategy. By using scenario planning you can have a systematic layout of the plan and to analyse focus areas we use SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, opportunities and Threats) analysis. Brainstorming and Strategic Creative Analysis (SCAN) can help the whole team come up with facility improvement ideas.

Plan

Developing a strategic facility plan is easy after outlining what you want to do and how to do it. A facility manager is usually the one who hands in this physical plan to executive managers for approval.

The plan details what changes should be made to the facility, why they should happen and what will be done for such changes to occur. Like a business plan, the facility plan shows the time frame for actions, responsibilities of team members and shows how success will be measured.

Act

After the plan is approved, it's time for action. Strategic facility management requires leaders that can execute the changes in line with the strategic management facilities plan and who are able to track and report changes and improvements to the overall plan. These leaders should value the vision at the facilities level and know how it affects the goals of the business. After implementation, continue to measure the success of the strategy on different aspects of the business.

What do facilities managers do?

Simply put a facilities manager keeps infrastructures and real estate assets alive. They are in charge of security, maintenance and services of organization or business facilities to guarantee they meet the needs of employees. Some facilities managers can specialise in hard facilities management services that focus more on electrical systems and other physical aspects of a building while others specialise in soft management that is more people-oriented.

General responsibilities for facilities managers can include:

• Arranging and preparing maintenance and repairs for the building regularly
• Keeping premises secure and investing or outsourcing technology to maintain control on access to high-security facilities
• Ensuring the premises are complying with health and safety regulations
• Ensuring the happiness and safety of building occupants
• Identifying and implementing and integrating smart technologies in everyday processes of facilities
• Using collective data to understand the workplace
• Supervising cleaning, security and maintenance staff
• Making reports and recommendations for facility changes

Best Leadership Practices for Facility Managers

A facilities management leader must have the right skills and knowledge to contribute to the development of organization's and the performance of workers. With training and years of experience, a leader can give competitive advantages to a facility they are working with. But leaders must continue to learn to know the current trends and practices in facilities management. Here are some leadership practices that facility managers can put to use:

They are on the same page as the higher-ups in regards to the future

A competent facility manager must look ahead and implement and support strategies that can help the facility and people move ahead with the times. With the right business continuity plans for emergencies and open communication, they can stay on top of things.

They know how to plan and budget

A facility manager must know the value of every infrastructure in their facility and the cost for upgrades. They should also be able to create long term budgetary plans and efficient tools for saving on costs to support the productivity of the organization.

They have a feel for developing a great team

Organizations have different needs and a facility manager must understand the duties and constraints of different employee positions and come up with ways to work with them.

They are willing to listen

Facility managers work in partnership with other departments by listening to their opinions to improve workplace relations and communication.