About this blog
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.
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Protected: Flexible future is more than just a numbers game
A model opportunity
It feels as if we are hurtling headlong into a world in which every possible item is coded and catalogued. Perhaps I sense this more because I already do it myself. I can, for instance, tell you how many Maltesers are in the average family bag (46) and how many goals the mighty Wealdstone FC have scored in my presence (feel free to take my word on that one).
The logic is simple enough. The more detail you have, the more you can expect to measure. In the case of an asset register for property portfolio, what’s on offer is a reassuring sense of control. Companies that spend the time and money to catalogue their portfolio in all its fine (some might say ‘granular’) detail tend to exit the exercise with an evangelical zeal for the benefits that accrue.
Christopher Newton of Lloyds Banking Group is a case in point; at the RICS Strategic FM conference he said that his team’s approach to asset-level control had given the FM function at Lloyds a newly elevated status within the company. “Now, FM is leading the capital plan,” he said with an obvious sense of satisfaction; “we know where we’re spending the money.” It seems obvious that the knowledge of how many pieces of kit you have, their condition and probable maintenance / replacement requirements is critical to the planning and cost calculation of both capital and maintenance expenditure.
Yet this is cataloguing post-construction. What are we to make of building information modelling (BIM)? Here’s where the floor plans, wiring diagrams and spec sheets of individual components can be coded into three-dimensional models, each packed with technical and geometric information right down to the details of the vendor chain involved. Effectively, the provenance of every brick in a building is being written into the initial construction plans at a granular level. This sort of dynamic cataloguing has profound implications for the way buildings are conceived and constructed – and if the recent RICS BIM conference is anything to go by, it’s going to have a seismic impact on the way designers and the construction industry interact with each other.
On the face of it, BIM makes huge sense to the construction and design sector. It allows everyone in the construction chain – designers and architects through to project managers and construction companies – avoid overlap and duplication of materials, assessing component cost and performance prior to their ultimate specification. But delve only slightly deeper and it becomes obvious that BIM is where FM can at last be of certain relevance to the process of designing the buildings it ultimately manages. Part of the data set fused into each component is its operational performance – and that, clearly, is where FM comes in.
The recent RICS conference on BIM saw speaker after speaker tripping up over themselves to explain how FM and the operational side of the equation was of critical importance to the whole concept of BIM. They may all have said it, but there was little detail about how FM would actually be involved in the process. Therein lies a great opportunity.
All about the “All about the people” people
Well, here’s a thing. It turns out that ‘children are the future’. I mean, what are we supposed to do? Younger versions of our current selves are simply going to rise up and take our place in the world. Isn’t someone going to do something about this?
As hackneyed phrases go, it’s an achingly obvious example that should be banned. The trouble is, ‘children are the future’ has an evil cousin – and it’s one of this sector’s very own stock phrases. Apparently, when it comes to FM, ‘it’s all about the people’.
Surely whatever ‘it’ is, it will pretty much always be about the people. FM teams, football teams, production lines, newsagents, nunneries, moon bases – when you’re seeking to establish how well any of these things are running, you will invariably end up realising that strategy, equipment, processes and systems are all secondary to the relationships and abilities of the people involved. In pretty much any sphere of human activity you can safely say that any determination of its success will be “all about the people”.
I mention this because our recent procurement roundtable saw plenty of people either skirting around or directly deploying the phrase. Understandably so, perhaps. While the process of determining and procuring the facilities management service can be hampered by the rigidity of the tendering process, true success in the delivery of such an all-encompassing and complex service requires an ability to be flexible, innovative and responsive. And that’s definitely ‘all about the people’: Firstly, in the relationships between the procurement team, facilities team, and in-house or outsourced facilities provider. Secondly in the relationships with those in finance, HR, IT and some annoying bloke called the ‘end-user’.
In theory, people who are truly flexible, innovative and responsive will work together to ensure that these relationships all work properly. Yet our round table provided further confirmation that this simply doesn’t happen often enough. Perhaps it’s because true flexibility from all the parties in such a complex service delivery requires a level of empathy for each other’s roles that goes far beyond most typical business relationships.
Can standards help? The BS11000 collaboration and BS8572 facilities service procurement standards were hardly the first thing on people’s minds at our event. In fact, there was some concern about the restrictive nature of working to such templates and the amount of admin they can impose. The case against posits that standards hem you in, strangling the very flexibility and responsiveness that successful FM delivery requires. Standards are designed to codify; to ensure that all bases are covered. By definition, a standard defines a standard approach. It could be argued that the more prescriptive a standard is, the less room is left for companies and individuals to differentiate themselves from one another.
Finding a way to be truly effective may simply mean the way we communicate within our organisations. So yes, great FM comes down to the people. And in truth I’m glad of that. Because while ‘‘it’s all about the people” may be a horribly hackneyed phrase, it’s people that make facilities management such a fascinating profession. Long may that continue.
Window addressing
I think I may have had an epiphany of sorts. At a recent and well-attended BIFM international special interest group meeting, the host company Steelcase presented some of its regularly conducted research into workplace trends. Plenty was said about the priority now placed on ‘collaboration space’ at the expense of ‘focus space’ (a theme echoing comments made earlier in the week at Workplace Futures), and there was much talk about how the office will continue to provide a priceless element of ‘social cohesion’ despite the rise of flexible working.
For me, however, the really intriguing bit concerned what Steelcase described as ‘wormholes’ – effectively, a form of ‘always-on’ video conferencing. The idea is that instead of formally arranged video conferences conducted in specially prepared rooms, large screens are set up in two normal open-plan offices. Each screen has a camera and a microphone; the camera is trained on the whole of the room and the microphone tweaked to pick up any conversations that take place in it.
Crucially, these ‘wormholes’ remain on all of the time. Come into the office in the morning and you can wave at your counterpart in the other office and say hello. If a conversation gets out of hand in one room, someone in the other may need to ask them to keep the noise down. You can also respond to the behaviour you see in that other room; if someone is eating a sandwich or talking to a colleague or obviously concentrating on something, perhaps you should wait before sending that instant message or email. If they’ve just come back into the room with a cup of tea, perhaps you can just shout over to get their attention.
For me, this changes everything. My previous concerns have been about how the gesticulatory, performance-focused video conference prescribed to a set agenda, which is uncomfortable for many. This, by contrast, is a powerful new type of collaboration space. Quite simply, the wormhole is an open window into another office. Just as I can strike up a conversation wit the folk over on our sister title Supply Management ten feet away, so the ‘wormhole’ screen can be used to collaborate between teams on other sides of the country, continent or indeed globe. It’s all done naturally, with those involved responding to natural human behaviours. And yet it couldn’t be more high tech.
Here is one of those intuitive uses of technology born from a more complex, cumbersome predecessor. For me, the concept of video wormholes is a bit like Apple’s democratisation of the mp3 player. In that case, Apple took an existing technology and made access and use of it completely instinctive. Here, an existing technology that has been through a number of iterations could easily become something that simply fades, almost literally, into the background. The technology here isn’t dictating the type of interaction between users; it’s simply allowing for natural interactions to happen.
All of this is predicated on the headlong rush towards super fast, permanently available broadband access. But this could be the big one for video conferencing, where video communication between spaces finally becomes as ubiquitous and obvious as the humble phone call is for audio conferencing. And if it becomes that successful, the ramifications on levels of required office space will be significant indeed.
What’s wrong with simply being right?
Back in the eighties, a popular brand of washing powder was advertised as being capable of getting your clothes ‘whiter than white’. I never quite got that. Surely, white IS white? I know there’s ‘off-white’ and a myriad variations for wall paint (apple blossom, egg shell, magnolia, somewhat garlic, etc.) But ‘whiter than white’? That’s like saying something is ‘very unique’, ‘completely dead’ or ‘more than alive’.
It’s hype, of course, and the world’s full of it. But ‘whiter than white’ breaks the cardinal rule of being an impossible claim, which is why I could never take it seriously. Today’s marketers are more aware of how ludicrous such claims look. Instead, they use more subtle words with less certain definitions — ‘best’ and ‘great’, for example.
In FM, benchmarking allows us to define what constitutes a ‘great’ level of service provision. A ‘good’ service can, with an increase in budget, be made ‘great’. Similarly, a ‘better’ service is one that can be upgraded to ‘best’ in class. All of which is fine, but my question is — what’s wrong with good old fashioned right and wrong?
There are always budgetary reasons for not accepting the optimum service option, but that shouldn’t prevent us from declaring it the right solution. Not good, great, better or best — just right. After all, any other choice is certain to involve an element of compromise. And like whiter than white, you can never be righter than right — but you can be wrong. Call a service ‘best’ and it confirms the existence of other, potentially acceptable service levels. By contrast, call it ‘right’ and everything else is automatically a certain shade of ‘wrong’.
Now, let’s be clear; greatness has its place. At the recent BIFM Members’ Day, the Co-Operative Group’s Workspace Services team gave a superb presentation detailing what they’d done over the past two years to transform what their clients — the Co-Operative Group’s workforce — think of, and expect from their FM provider. This includes an evolving programme of improvement entitled (and you’re probably ahead of me here) ‘Good2Great’.
It’s been a whirlwind two years for the Co-Operative Workspace team, and their story is an inspirational one. The FM team now operates its own three year plan and is seen by the Co-Operative board as a key part of the group’s management of operational risk. Part of the process involves a benchmarking exercise in which clients rate elements of the FM service as basic, good or great. ‘Good2Great’ comes from the team’s plan to highlight to the board what the optimum service level would need to be, and what it would cost.
This use of ‘great’ is absolutely fine —it’s when the options are presented upwards to the board that I question the terminology. And of course, I’m being entirely impractical. Sub-optimal solutions will always need to be offered, and you can’t go around calling them ‘not quite right’. Still, I’d like to see more emphasis on what’s right and a focus on the compromises implicit in other, middling service levels. In fact, I think that’s a great idea.
Dyckhoff’s ‘British ideal’ workplace is nonsense
In the second episode of Channel 4’s ‘The Secret Life of Buildings’, architect Tom Dyckhoff seems to be characterising British workplaces as less joyful and more soulless than those inhabited by our European counterparts.
Using a few admittedly iconic examples of extraordinary workplaces in Germany and the Netherlands, Dyckhoff suggests that the early promise of game-changing workplace designs in the UK — such as Norman Foster’s Willis Building in Ipswich — has been snuffed out. Walking around the Dutch headquarters of insurance company Interpolis, Dyckhoff claims that “this hugely successful re-imagining of the entire office culture could not be more different to the British ideal.”
The ‘British ideal’? Come off it Tom. There are myriad examples of inspiring workplaces, many of which we’ve covered over the years here in FM World; suggesting otherwise is just plain odd.
In the programme, Dyckhoff’s claim that poor workplace design is in some way a specifically British disease is compounded by an excruciating section in which, dressed in comedy bowler hat (you can’t move for British people in bowlers these days, can you?) he puts a handful of Interpolis staff to work in a bland side office, telling them they cannot move from their desks and can’t even change the room temperature. This, apparently, is a typically British environment. Really, Tom? Needless to say, the Dutch workers complain of headaches, backaches and lack of motivation. What a surprise.
Instead of presenting this surface-scratching parody of the UK workplace scene, Dyckhoff would be better off examining the root causes of under-performing workplaces. In a revealing and frustratingly small interview with fellow architect Rab Bennetts, Dyckhoff hears what he surely already knows — that with the typical workplace leased and not owned, workplaces are invariably commissioned to conform to a vanilla, ‘one size fits all’ format. “You don’t want to offend the market,” says Bennetts.
A nationally televised documentary concentrating on the impact of the relationship chain comprising architects, workplace designers, landlords, tenants, workers and, yes, facilities managers is long overdue. There’s a final installment of ‘The Secret Life of Buildings’ next Monday. Will it be that programme? I doubt it. But here’s hoping.
The big fight: FM vs. workplace design
At last night’s BIFM International Sig meeting at Macquarie’s Bank in London, representatives of the BIFM and The Workplace Consulting Organisation (WCO) took part in a Pecha Kucha debate between. The motion? “It doesn’t matter how the workplace is designed, it’s how it’s managed that is important.” Naturally BIFM lined up for, with the WCO against.
So firstly, what on earth is Pecha Kucha? Well, it’s pronounced Pe-KACH-Ka, and it’s a debating style that originated in Tokyo. But really, you just need to think of it as an Oxford Debate crossed with speed dating. Before the debate, a vote is taken for or against the motion. At the end, there’s a second vote. No matter how weighted the initial result for or against, it’s the side that takes more votes from the other during the course of the debate that wins. Each side gets just over six minutes per presenter to put their case.
Representing the FM industry is a truly stellar trio: Seb “Does the Tea Round” Royle, Leigh “Management is Key” Carter and Martin “What About The People” Pickard. The team starts from a strong base: The initial vote is 35 in favour of the motion, 22 against.
Seb Royle (of Instant Offices) kicks us off. “Good management succeeds where design fails, but without good management design is useless,” he says. “Well-designed offices mean nothing if they’re managed badly.” As an example, Royle asks the audience what defines a great hotel —the fabulous atriums, for example, or the immaculate staircases? In the end it’s whether there are stains on the sheets or if you get poor service at the bar — not the design elements, the human elements.
Royle finishes with an interesting thought — of all the categories used to determine the Times 100, no mention at all is made of workplace design…
Next up is Interserve’s Leigh Carter: “When companies change, people can adapt,” she says, “but the problem with design is that it’s static.” Fortunately, good FMs can make a workplace effective whatever its limitations, “and users will be happier to put up with a building’s limitations if the people managing it are trying their best.”
Finally, Martin Pickard packs a punch with three case studies indicating the gap between good workplace operability and good workplace design. There’s the function room situated 15 floors away from the furniture room and another three from the kitchen, with just a single lift to carry guests, furniture and food; the refit in which new chairs made workers feel cold, a problem solved by the simple expedient of the FM chatting to the workers (not the consultants, brought in at great expense); and finally the naturally lit workspace which caused so much glare on computer screens that the FM department had to bring in a new break-out space. These are all recent examples — but of good design? Surely not. Says Pickard: “Design can help buildings to work properly, and when it’s good it’s great. But every FM knows how rare that is. Too many buildings are failing their occupants.
Pickard continues: “I meet FMs all the time who tell me how excited they are to be invited to project meetings. But as soon as they want to talk about method statements — how do I change the lightbulbs so conveniently sited 20 metres off the floor, for example — they’re told that the conversation has to move on to something else. Because FM is simply not considered important.”
And, being Martin Pickard, there’s a typically robust final thought: “Designers need to go back to school and be taught, as part of their training, how buildings are operated so that FMs don’t have to keep on picking up the pieces.”
Next up is the WCO team, comprising Johnson Controls’s director of workplace services Tim Allen, workplace consultant Adrian McNeece and architect Brian Szpakowski. Much is said about how function always trumps form in the first instance, of how it’s difficult to predict how people will function in the workplace, and that corporate culture, branding and internal politics always play their part in the typical workplace design project.
In the Q&A following the presentations, event chair Neil Usher suggests that it’s just as relevant for FMs to be trained in building design, and the challenges of the design process, as it is for FMs to suggest that designers train in FM. Szpakowski claims that in fifteen years “I can’t think of a project in which FM wasn’t involved’. Tim Allen says that, “unless FM talks the language of the board, and is able to present the benefits and the vision, it will never have that seat on the board. It’s all about vocabulary and language.”
Pickard suggests that work carried out by FMs to improve on workplace design is all too often snaffled up by architects for use in future design briefs, while someone from the floor points out that, “FM is a continuum, whereas workplace design only occurs at intervals and junctures.”
All good knockabout fun. But who won? Well, despite some fresh voters turning up during the debate, I’m reliably informed that the BIFM team took it on absolute vote numbers but the WCO won in terms of voter swing. Under Pecha Kucha rules, that’s technically a WCO win — but really, no one’s counting. An honourable draw, then, although “we all need to come together some how,” isn’t my idea of a particularly rousing final shot.
More such debates, please, and soon! A great night.
Postscript: It’s first thing on Wednesday morning and Messrs Usher, Pickard and Oseland are all still at it on Twitter, discussing user satisfaction surveys amongst other things.
Twitter details:
Hash tag: #wcovbifmpk
Selected team members: @theatreacle @oseland @Brian_Szp @thefmguru @adrianmcneece
BIFM International Sig
http://www.workplaceconsulting.org/
