My name is Martin Read. I’m an editor, writer and publishing project manager with experience in the B2B, client publishing and membership organisation sectors. This blog comprises three types of post — examples of my editorial comment writing from the past twelve years, blog entries and general comment on business issues. I am the editor of FM World magazine.
Thanks for dropping by. Get in touch if you’d like.
How much of your time is spent on ‘strategic FM’ activity? Given that so many facilities managers complain about being a slave to their operational prisons, unable to step back and plan ahead, it sounds like a very pertinent question. But it can only be useful if we’ve adequately defined the parameters of an FM’s strategic role. And that’s a much trickier thing to pull off.
An alarm bell goes off in my head whenever a presenter has to explain the word in question with a slide that shows its dictionary definition. It suggests that while we may all be talking about the same topic, we’re coming at it from different angles.
So it is with ‘strategy’. We could be talking about the strategy needed to integrate FM into the wider organisation, or whether the FM function has its own strategy, or how FM feeds into an organisational strategy, or global asset management strategy… How about the question of whether facilities management is accepted as a strategic tool by organisations? Ask three people and you’ll get three different answers.
There is a danger that in speaking so frequently about achieving FM’s rightful status, we devalue certain words through their constant repetition. All this synergising, leveraging and, yes, strategising could be making the eyes of those we need to convince glaze over.
FM is not unique in this. Click on any piece of industry news and there’s a good chance the ’S’ word will turn up somewhere in the story. Just this morning I’ve read about how “the strategic management of health resources across the East of England has failed”. And in the same piece: “MPs said there had been a ‘complete lack of strategic oversight’ of NHS services in the region.” Take the word ‘strategic’ out of both sentences and guess what? They still mean exactly what they were written to mean. Nothing is gained from the use of the word ‘strategic’.
True, other sectors suffer from this use – and abuse – of language. Yet we in FM, may be disproportionately affected by it. There’s no question at all that FM needs to shout about its successes, particularly when those successes see FM accepted as the department of organisational empowerment it aims to be recognised as.
But communicating this shouldn’t involve plundering a buzzword dictionary, it should be a question of reporting the simple common sense. Rather than talk about the strategies, let’s talk about the bald, fundamental business logic of the work being undertaken. How embarrassing and just plain backward it would be to not integrate FM into corporate decision making, whatever the project.
Right now, many companies are doing fantastic work restructuring their FM departments, aligning with other corporate real estate functions and working alongside IT and HR in projects that show just how FM can shine. Shouldn’t we just concentrate on the basic facts of these stories, rather than complicating them through use of weasel-word adjectives that only serve to confuse the message?
Anyway, now I’ve got that off my chest, I’m off to the kitchen to implement my hot liquid consumption strategy: it’s time to leverage a beverage.
At what stage in its development should an organisation deploy a dedicated facilities manager? Perhaps the obvious answer is: ‘When it has a facility to be managed’. If this were true, an FM should be present in any organisation occupying any place of work, regardless of its size.
Another criteria could be: ‘when the organisation embarks on its first expansion into a new facility’. This ties the requirement to a critical stage of an organisation’s development via a neat (if rather blunt) determinant about when precisely that is.
Or perhaps an FM should be hired ‘when the organisation needs to comply with its first workplace regulation’, for which I refer you back to that first suggestion.
And, of course, there’s always ‘when it reaches a total of (arbitrary figure) employees’, in which case we’ll all be hiding under our desks and banging our heads against the worktop, trying desperately to avoid calculating the exact figure. Clearly, there are lot of potential answers, but no single one seems definitive.
Of course, we all know that, in fact, the functions of an FM are conducted from the day an organisation starts trading. But from that same organisation’s perspective, where’s the pressure to look again at who actually does this vital work? If there’s no line, no ‘biting point’ at which the role becomes a formal requirement, we have to rely on a jumble of worthy but typically transient project and compliance issues – some the result of unforeseen crises – to move the issue ‘front of mind’.
So seeing as that’s such an inexact science, perhaps we should take another look at that ‘number of employees’ idea. We might all agree that setting such a figure would be ridiculous, but from a promotional perspective,might there not be some value in coming up with one that we could all use? Something to spark a wider debate about the status, importance and skillset of this multi-faceted role?
Elsewhere, the law determines at which point an organisation needs an accountant. Accordingly, no one questions the value of the accountancy profession. Can we really expect the wider business world to bracket FM alongside such professions when there is no formally accepted trigger point at which FM is declared mission critical?
Yes, FM begins with an organisation’s very first employee. Yes, it’s not just about the facility, it’s about an organisation’s need for business support, sustainability credentials and commitment to workforce. But do any of these sugary words really help someone who’s new to FM? An important person who’s just a bit busy for all this ‘added value’ stuff right now and who could really use a simple number – ANY number – to latch on to?
Let’s just magic one up: 50 employees. So at 50 employees, you, Mr. Managing Director, require a dedicated FM. It doesn’t matter what the science behind it is, it just matters that there’s a figure to work with. Because when such a figure exists, might it not offer an immediate basis for comparison? Something to personalise the issue, and allow the reader to make calculations about their own requirements?
Contentious? Of course. Unworkable? Probably. But 8 out of 10 people really do respond positively to figures…
as anyone else been wondering about the length and editing of the BBC’s upcoming Sports Personality of the Year programme? You have to wonder how it will cope. It’s sad to think that we’re just weeks away from seeing London 2012 tick over into ‘Unspecific 2013’, but at least we can console ourselves with the knowledge that FM’s involvement in the summer’s feel-good factor – the facilities, their management and the much-lauded games-makers – were, if briefly, the talk of the wider media. The good news is that even though the clocks have now gone back, FM is still winning gold – or to be strictly accurate, winning with a scheme entitled ‘Project Gold’.
KPMG’s project of that name aimed to embed FM into the design of its new headquarters in Canary Wharf. It took the ‘highly commended’ prize at last year’s BIFM Awards in the category of FM Excellence in a Major Project. It was then entered by the BIFM for this year’s Global FM Awards for Excellence in Facilities Management. Two weeks ago, at the World Workplace convention in San Antonio, Texas, the scheme was declared victorious, sharing the Platinum Award with another British FM success story (the Forth Valley Royal Hospital, which we reported on in case-study form back in our 24 March 2011 edition).
Among other things, Project Gold won plaudits for the way in which the client and staff experience was ‘designed into the building’ from the beginning. This has allowed the facilities team to be (to quote the submission) “customer facing rather than hidden away”.
The story here is about the early involvement in the project of a facilities team that was able to contribute and radically affect the final design of the new offices it would then go on to manage. Inevitably, having a friendly CRE / property team open to the prospect of including FM in all the key decision-making meetings was paramount, and it would seem that at KPMG they took this enlightened approach. The additional collaboration didn’t come naturally for the project teams, but the architects loved it because, it turns out, they were tired of going into the buildings they’d designed only to find that the ops team had completely changed something.
The fact that Project Gold has been so successful, and that KPMG has since gone on to use the same method of working on projects around the world, must say something. In a year in which building information modelling has become such a hot topic, any project in which the FM team gets to introduce operational data into the design stage of a building is a good story that should be publicised as widely as possible.
Looking back, the only FM project involving the word ‘gold’ that hasn’t properly taken off this year is the idea of the ‘FM Gold Star’, in which small acts of great FM service are recognised across our social and mainstream media. Perhaps we can make a fresh attempt at this in 2013; FMs have a lot of good stories to tell, and in all of their cases, silence is far from golden.
A statistic published last year by the Business Services Association – and dropped into an address to the recent FM Charity Network conference by Mitie chief executive Ruby McGregor-Smith – has been causing quite a stir. The figure is eight per cent, and refers to the amount of UK GDP attributed to outsourcing in a BSA survey.
That figure is for all business service outsourcing and includes, for example, recruitment and IT. Exactly how much of what’s left is specifically facilities management is a source of thoroughly enjoyable conjecture, but when you look at their stats it is reasonable to conclude that the BSA survey’s figure for combined property, technical and facilities services represents about 60 per cent of that initial eight — effectively, five per cent of GDP.
This is a figure deserving of being picked out in huge neon letters. So again, please, and this time with feeling: five per cent of the gross domestic product of the UK is outsourced facilities management! And that’s without even attempting a figure for how much is wrapped up elsewhere through other FM delivery models.
Five per cent of GDP is an incredibly powerful figure, made all the more so by being literally the only one we have to work with. The lack of sensible data surrounding facilities management is nothing new, but its absence is becoming increasingly difficult to justify. There’s almost an air of desperation about the scarcity of empirical figures in the sector, reflected in the attention given to the eight per cent figure quoted by one of the FM sector’s most high-profile characters. Still, it’s nothing like a fully formed and accepted number. To what can we refer those in government and the national media when they come calling? In the absence of hard statistics, is it any wonder FM remains so nebulous to policy formers?
BIFM chief executive Gareth Tancred used the figure on the day of the BIFM Awards in a special event alongside Asset Skills promoting new high-level apprenticeships. Of course, it is only right that in such situations we sell the profession to a new generation – and figures such as five per cent of GDP help allay any fears a potential new recruit may have that FM is no more than a fly-by-night job role. It would be much more to our advantage if we were able to pull more detailed specifics from a strong, academically acceptable figure.
Last Monday, the best of the best got to celebrate their achievements at the BIFM Awards. The rigorous judging process was overseen by chair of judges Oliver Jones, who pointed to collaboration between FM and other departments as a clear trend in the projects put forward for judging this year. It’s a complete joy speaking to the winners, finding just how much they’ve gained from the wider organisational acceptance of what they do. You’ll find stories surrounding all the winners later on in this issue and we’ll be profiling Wendy Cuthbert, the new facilities manager of the year, in our next edition.
So within organisations FM is increasingly recognised for its achievements. Yet we can’t convey this added value adequately to the wider world. Big-ticket figures like the five or eight per cent of GDP can help. But only when the sector comes together to fund the ongoing research necessary to generate a more refined data set will we have something of undeniable certainty to point others to. At that stage we’ll be able to dial down all of our shouting about how important FM is to UK PLC – because the numbers will be speaking for themselves.
Innovation in the provision of facilities is always great to see. I recently had the good fortune of visiting The Hive, a new PFI facility in which the University of Worcester and the local city council both have stakes. The building satisfies the combined library requirements of the university and local population, while for good measure, it’s also home to Worcester’s council services. You can borrow a book, pay off your council tax, or even visit the university’s archaeology department, should you so desire. It’s a true community project and all the more interesting because of it.
We’ll have more on The Hive next issue. What’s really interesting is how previously separate services are now all available in mutually beneficial surroundings. Indeed, this example of co-operation between organisations got me thinking about mutually beneficial relationships within them.
At the recent Corenet Global Summit in London, the question of how FM should seek common ground with what we might call the other ‘departments of empowerment’ was aired in various discussions. The idea is that FM, HR and IT would be of most benefit to an organisation if they all came together as one. These enabling elements of an organisation have common goals. In essence, an organisation needs to do two things to succeed: develop a product or service, then sell it. To perform these two tasks, it needs three resources: the right people, the right tools for the job and the right working environment. In other words – HR, IT and FM.
The inescapable conclusion is that there’s nothing between these three departments of empowerment in terms of their importance. Each is there not to develop the business, but to enable it. The right people won’t do a good job without the right equipment, while without the right environment, the equipment won’t work and the right people will feel wronged.
Today’s work is conducted in multiple locations and is increasingly disconnected from the physical constraints of the past. Surely, the departments that support this work should break free from the organisational hierarchies that have hitherto constrained them from working together as the one over-arching support structure that they should collectively embody.
But then, what does one call this blending of HR, IT and FM? As a description, none quite achieves the goal of combining the other two, and while ‘facilities management’ is the best fit, phrases like ‘performance management’ do a better job. Yet the kicker is that FM has every right to be seen as the lead partner of the three – for starters, it supports the day-to-day requirements of the other two.
In Worcester, the organisations involved in The Hive are benefiting from their co-location in surprising ways. Members of the public who might otherwise have shouted at council staff are finding that they moderate their behaviour in a facility that doubles as a university library.
So co-location is having a positive effect on these individual organisational elements. Perhaps co-location of HR, IT and FM would lead to its own innovative outcomes. And it could be the kind of thinking that moves facilities management out of the shadows and in to the full glare of the organisational spotlight.
Imagine it’s 2004. Prime Minister Tony Blair is visiting Libya’s President Gaddafi; the iPhone is nothing more than a pile of sketches on Jonathan Ive’s desk; London is mounting an ill-conceived bid for the 2012 Paris Olympics and David Beckham is regretting a European championships penalty struck so poorly that, eight years later, it’s still no nearer a return to earth. The words ‘Facebook’ and ‘Twitter,’ mean an actual book containing pictures of people’s faces and the sound that birds make, while of a more direct professional interest, the first plans to ban smoking in the workplace are announced. Oh yes, and April sees the publication of the first edition of FM World.
So now, all of a sudden, we’re approaching our 200th issue. Of course, we do publish a daily online newsletter (you didn’t know? See the bottom of this column), but still, 200 issues in print is a bit of a milestone. We celebrated our 100th with a ‘state of the nation’ piece, so we’ll be doing something similar for our 200th. It’ll be published in October.
If a year is a lifetime in politics, the eight years since 2004 should have represented an entire epoch in facilities management. After all, it’s not as if the stars haven’t aligned in our favour. An unprecedented global recession putting extraordinary pressure on property performance, an increasingly compliance-orientated business landscape and a jaw-dropping increase in energy prices. If you’d predicted back in 2004 that 2012 would have seen all that, you’d have surely concluded that FM would now be up front and centre in the political and business landscape.
Certainly, there’s been plenty of change in those 3,288 days, but has it really had the effect of elevating the profession? Have the eight years since our first edition seen a significant shift in the status of FM, or are we still engaged in the same old struggle for awareness, acceptance and status? We’ll be asking commentators from across the sector, and some from outside, to cut to the chase: has FM truly advanced since 2004?
If you ask me, it’s not a question of whether the profession has changed. It most certainly has, and pretty much all for the good. But what has stayed resolutely the same is the external perception of it – something that’s still pretty much just as it was back in 2004. If there’s one thing I know it’s that the good FMs of all types are really, really good – as managers, as communicators and as business people. The problem is that this expertise is not necessarily recognised at the highest level by the organisations that benefit from their presence.
Perhaps it should be the aim of those within FM to concentrate our message on those without. We talk a lot about educating young people about the profession, not enough about educating those in senior, influential roles in other sectors and the national media. Maybe it’s time to do something about that.
You may have caught wind of the London 2012 Olympic Games recently (sporting event – running, swimming, that sort of thing). In fact, it’s going to seem very strange to see the Olympic and Paralympic party leaving town. When you factor in the bidding process, we’ve been working towards it for close to a decade now. Doubtless the organisers of the 2014 Commonwealth Games in Glasgow will seek to bathe in the afterglow of London; a vague ‘after the Lord Mayor’s Show’ sentiment might be hard to avoid, however. In truth there has been no greater multiple-facilities construction project in this country for decades and certainly nothing else that has so publicly showcased the best of the facilities management sector.
The good news from an FM perspective is that a cascade of positive reviews for the facilities themselves quickly replaced widely reported pre-games concern over security issues (although please note that I’m writing this on the second Thursday of the games – there’s still plenty of time for something to go wrong). Moreover, while the Olympics and Paralympics will be over by early September, the legacy of the games is an ongoing project and that’s where some of the best FM stories of the near future will be found. The good news (for us) is that restrictions on reporting these projects have been lifted.
The writers of the BBC satire ‘Twenty Twelve’ found much to mock in what they saw as the vague and interchangeable notions of sustainability and legacy attached to the London Olympics. But in re-purposing – and in some cases entirely relocating – facilities (the shooting range at the Royal Artillery Barracks will be dismantled and rebuilt in Glasgow for the Commonwealth Games, for instance), LOCOG has provided as public a demonstration of sustainable construction as could be imagined.
The London 2012 slogan is “inspire a generation” and hopefully the performance of British athletes will achieve just that. Perhaps, though, the Olympics will help us inspire the next generation of facilities managers as well. While it would be wrong to suggest that a typical career in FM automatically involves ’sexy’ projects like the Olympics, we can say with confidence that FM’s involvement in the design of new buildings can only grow in the years ahead. Building information modelling (BIM) presents that opportunity. Until now, the operational history or ‘past performance’ of a building has not necessarily been a guide to the future performance of buildings proposed for a similar purpose. BIM can change all that, involving FM at the very beginning of the building design process. For those considering their career options, the knowledge that their work could be factored into the design of new and better buildings will surely help make FM a more aspirational career choice.
Yes, it’s true that BIM can seem a dry and detached subject, far removed from the more social nature of day-to-day FM activity. But FM has to be involved in order for BIM to work. BIM offers an opportunity to showcase FM in the same way London’s 2012 Olympic facilities showcased the best of contemporary sports facility design.
