Irrespective of the type of industry, facilities management skills are essential. It may be true that your business is unique in its operations or staffing requirement. Still, improving facility management can help you to improve your organization’s overall operating cost and can facilitate employees to work more productively.
You have to accept that facility management is an ever-evolving process. The facility demands change as your business grows, or new roles and procedures are added. This is why facility managers must stay up-to-date with facility management best practices.
Here we are sharing some ideas on how to improve facility management services.
Table of Contents
6 Facilities Management Improvement Ideas
1. Lower operation costs with preventive measures
One of the core responsibilities of your role as a facility manager will be to strive for optimum efficiency of operation of all the assets to cut the maintenance cost to a minimum. One of the critical facilities management improvement strategies to employ here is to implement preventive maintenance.
What is preventive maintenance?
Preventive maintenance is proactive actions taken by facility managers to extend the life of equipment within a facility and reduce downtime. It is opposed to reactive maintenance when you respond to any malfunction, but you must stop the operations from doing maintenance.
It costs revenue and productivity. You need to invest in intelligent solutions like IoT for facility management to track metrics and access maintenance schedule KPI analytics that help you make data-driven decisions and reduce reactive maintenance costs.
Organizations that effectively deploy preventive maintenance plans reportedly save 12%-18% on annual maintenance expenses. Preventive measures also ensure that your facilities provide a safe work environment. If left unattended, faulty equipment can cause workplace accidents, endangering staff.
Furthermore, facility maintenance managers must keep things charted to avoid later overwhelming maintenance. It would help if you routinely replaced old hardware and equipment like lights, wiring, and motors to fix wear and tear and keep things running smoothly. Also, adopt eco-friendly practices like using LED lights, biodegradable materials, and saving power and water.
2. Set a customized facilities management operations plan that fits your organization's needs
Facility management is not the same for every organization. This is why you must access your business model to understand your organization’s priorities – preventive maintenance, event scheduling, asset management, workforce training, etc. The workflow you create for facility management must be tailored to accommodate your organization’s unique facility maintenance needs.
Discuss how to improve facility management services for your business with supervisors and consultants. There is no one-size-fits-all solution. When creating customized facility management workflows, you can capture, track, and report all the crucial metrics surrounding the facility’s processes.
It provides you with essential tools that are required for operation success. A customized facility management operations plan also ensures that all services are aligned with the organization’s best interest.
3. Communicate with your employees
Communication is the key to success in every aspect of business operations, and facility management is no exception. Clear and effective communication is one of the essential facilities management improvement ideas. Communication among team members, inter-department communication, and communication with outside vendors must be aware of what is going on in your facility for a smooth workflow.
All the stakeholders must be updated about the changes within your facilities. You must communicate with your employees if any changes are made to the facility processes. Any emergency repairs must be notified to all stakeholders. As a facility manager, you must always be open to listening to the workers’ concerns and be ready to answer their queries.
Proper communication is vital for facility management because:
- It improves the overall productivity and accountability of the teams by informing them about the current state of affairs at the facility.
- You maintain cordial contractor and vendor relationships when communicating planned maintenance, service requests, training programs, equipment changes, etc.
- Eliminate any confusion that can result in unnecessary tasks allowing your workers to focus on facility management.
- Transparent communication is how you encourage workers to participate in the conversation regarding important decisions. It is also how you attract honest employee feedback that can play an essential role in facility management improvement.
4. Set clear definitions for facilities' work practices
Your workers are your greatest asset. You need to ask yourself how to improve facilities management by optimizing their performance repeatedly. As a start, you can create and share facility work practices with the employees, so they know their roles and responsibilities.
Be descriptive about their functions and how their role affects the others within the team. Also, the impact their performance makes on the overall efficiency of the facility. Employees should be provided with detailed policies on work schedules and attendance. There must not be any confusion among the workers.
Company expectations from them should be conveyed. Employees should be aware of any disciplinary actions that can be taken against them if they fail to comply with attendance policies. As a facility manager, you should ensure that all work and shift schedule policies comply with federal, state, and local employment and labor laws. All of this is a necessity to provide facility management at its best.
5. Develop employee skills
A lot is going on in the facility management industry. New technologies are making it much more efficient and sustainable to operate the facility. Internet of Things is a breakthrough technology impacting all aspects of facility management. When you have such new-age facilities management improvement ideas, you have to make arrangements to develop your employees’ skills to utilize these technologies fully.
Evaluate the skill level of your existing workforce to create an upskilling plan to develop their skills. Your workers are your greatest assets which is why instead of looking for replacements, you should focus on training employees to adapt to the new technology revolution in the facility management industry.
More and more facilities are adopting enterprise asset management software to manage employee experience. If you plan to do the same, you must take feedback from your employees before upgrading the tech.
6. Automate and streamline facilities management operations
Streamlining workflow is one essential facility management best practice. You can create customized workflows for your facilities using automated software systems to maintain consistency and workforce availability and improve facility efficiency.
Many facility management companies invest in automating processes like HVAC systems and facility lighting. It increases the efficiency of the facility operations. HVAC systems connected directly to the building automation system allow you to control heating and cooling settings within facilities based on occupancy.
It leads to better energy utilization. Similarly, smart lighting that can be operated as-needed basis makes facilities more energy efficient and further cuts operating costs. Furthermore, facility managers can be facilitated with automated attendance and shift scheduling software to eliminate paperwork.
Truein is a complete employee attendance and scheduling system that is cloud-based. Its hardwareless architecture makes it highly suitable for facility management. Your employees can download the Truein app on their smartphones. There is no need to install biometric systems or card punching machines all over the facility.
Employees can record attendance based on geofencing or GPS. It also gives facility managers the option to track facility workers in real time.
Conclusion
The facilities management improvement strategies we have listed here are at the forefront of workplace modernization. Digital tech is quickly influencing the facility management industry, reshaping everything from how space is managed to the workforce trained and reduced operation costs.
With so many new facility management solutions entering the field so frequently, as a manager, you need to stay updated with what new ideas can improve the operational efficiency of your facility.
