A facilities management plan is a facility management tool that focuses on improving the workplace to boost productivity, performance, and employee well-being. First, a facilities management plan enhances understanding an organization’s or business’s wants. Then, it sets procedures and processes to meet these expectations for effective and efficient services.
The right plan goes beyond providing day-to-day support and service. Instead, it begins to create long-term initiatives that may extend asset life and increase productivity. For example, a facilities management approach is motivated by the safety and pleasure of the people who work in the facility.
What exactly is facility management?
Facility management is the process of handling and maintaining an organization’s facilities. These facilities are not limited to offices; they may also comprise mechanical and electrical services and physical resources owned by the firm that could jeopardize the workers’ safety or health. In addition, technology advancements and improvements impact facility management, requiring facility managers to identify technology investments that may benefit facility management.
What exactly is a facility management strategy?
A facilities management strategy is a long-term collaboration between facility management and facility planning that involves integrating facility management into corporate activities. To improve the workplace and organization, a facilities management strategy requires understanding business objectives and their integration with facility management. It is motivated by goals.
Why is facility management more important than ever before?
Facility management can help firms in operating more efficiently and productively.
Buildings with a facility management team run smoothly since they are in charge of the daily utility analysis, maintenance, and repairs. They also participate in the company’s strategic planning operations to boost employee productivity and save expenditures.
According to research, the ideal office environment can influence productivity and worker well-being, impacting company production and overall firm performance. For example, employees may feel more at ease and safe in clean working spaces and restrooms. Facilities management is in charge of such duties.
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What are the goals of facility management?
Facility management comprises many activities, including ensuring building users’ comfort, functionality, safety, and happiness. To accomplish all of this, facility management goals must be met, and these goals may apply to all types of facilities.
Stakeholder and occupant communication
Maintain contact with building tenants and stakeholders to ensure that everything operates smoothly when managing a facility. Such talks help you understand how others perceive the institution and make necessary recommendations for making it more pleasant and secure.
Our team builds a simple but vital communication method for occupants to express their ideas and comments on how the work could be done better so that every renter is satisfied and secure for each facility for which Busters Group provides property management.
Maintain a safe and healthy environment
Safety is always our first priority at Busters Group. We can keep many people safe by being aware of potential health issues and discovering methods to treat and avoid some of these risks.
We focus on restrooms in the homes we manage because they are essential to any structure. By keeping them tidy and hygienic and providing them with the necessities, we strive to make every visit as pleasurable as feasible.
Our team also works to reduce moisture and mold formation in toilets by performing regular stall inspections and investing in high-density polyethene, improving air quality and preventing mold growth.
Keep deficiencies in mind.
If left unchecked for an extended length of time, some items may eventually have an impact on the operation of a building’s utilities. Routine inspections may aid in discovering construction defects and preventing larger problems in the future. A facility manager is in charge of performing these periodic inspections every three to six months.
Enhance and promote energy efficiency
Increasing the building’s energy efficiency may result in cost savings. By evaluating the building’s spending on water, gas, and electricity, a manager may determine how much is being spent and how to minimize energy waste. For example, investing in energy-saving equipment such as energy-efficient light bulbs, upgrading old equipment, and sealing up leaks in pipes all reduce and avoid future energy waste.
Planning for business continuity
Some facilities rely on completely operational equipment to operate. Like a contingency plan, a business continuity plan defines a facility’s critical assets and the potential hazards connected with those assets. The strategy also describes how the asset’s failure could impact corporate operations. With careful planning and assessment, you may ensure that a company or institution does not shut down if the unimaginable happens.
What are the five stages of strategic facility planning?
Strategic facility planning (SFP) is a critical practice that can help a facility management team provide better services to its stakeholders. An SFP can reduce service delays and customer dissatisfaction and ensure that all facility management operations align with the company’s corporate strategy. SFP can be used by facilities management to help organizations become more successful and pleasant places to work. The procedures are as follows:
1) Make Your Strategic Position Known
To identify the suitable demands of a facility, an investigation of the current position or conditions of the building is required. To create techniques consistent with these essential principles, the team must research the organization’s values, culture, vision, and objectives. In addition, the facilities manager must comprehend the direction of the business, potential changes, and how these changes will impact the organization’s real estate requirements. This can help anticipate future operational, maintenance, and space demands, needs, and costs.
2) Prioritize Your Goals
Following the identification of requirements, a facilities manager must assess the objectives that align with the organization’s core values and vision and how each chosen purpose may help achieve specific goals.
Priority should be given to more urgent goals, closely tied to stakeholder demands, and can help everyone succeed at work.
3) Create A Strategy
Formulating a plan is determining the best actions to achieve particular goals and developing a timeframe to achieve them.
4) Execute and Manage the Strategy
Even though the plan can be carried out on paper, it won’t work unless everyone in the organization is aware of the procedures you’ve established. Therefore, throughout the facility management strategy, team members should be aware of their responsibilities.
5) Strategy Monitoring and Evaluation
Continue to examine work being done and check if progress matches with set priorities to determine whether the strategy is effective. Managers may also seek feedback from corporate employees to determine whether the task being performed satisfies their expectations. The manager is also in charge of setting priorities and revising the strategy.
Strategic facility management implementation
To carry out strategic facility management flawlessly, control is essential. The International Facility Management Association recommends four phases for efficiently implementing a strategic facility plan:
Understand
Strategic facility management is dictated by objectives and the capabilities of facilities to accomplish those objectives. Therefore, the approach must be thoroughly understood before it can be implemented. This encompasses anything from understanding the time frame to analyzing whether the method has the necessary resources to operate.
Analyze
The second level of facilities management necessitates more understanding and experimentation with strategy implementation. To aid in developing the strategy, use experimental and analytic approaches.
By using scenario planning, you may create a logical structure for your strategy, and to identify critical areas, we use SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) analysis. Brainstorming and Strategic Creative Analysis (SCAN) can help the entire team develop facility improvement ideas.
Plan
The process of developing a strategic facilities plan is straightforward once your goals and preferred method are determined. This physical plan is typically submitted to top management for approval by a facilities manager.
The plan outlines which facility adjustments should be made, why they should be made, and how these changes will be implemented. The facility plan describes the time frame for activities, the responsibilities of members of the team, and how success will be measured, much like a business plan.
Act
This is the time to carry out the strategy. Leaders who can make changes following the strategic management facilities plan, monitor changes, and report on improvements to the overall process are essential for strategic facility management. These executives should be aware of the facility-level vision and how it affects the company’s goals. After implementation, keep assessing how the strategy worked across various company sectors.
What exactly do facility managers do?
A facilities manager merely ensures that real estate and infrastructure assets are maintained. In addition, they are in charge of ensuring the needs of an organization’s or company’s staff are met through the security, maintenance, and services provided by its facilities.
While some facilities managers focus on soft management, which is more people-oriented, others specialize in complex facilities management services, which include electrical systems and other physical characteristics of a facility.
Facilities managers could be in charge of the following general duties:
- Regularly planning and executing building maintenance and repairs.
- Maintaining security on sites and investing in or outsourcing technology to maintain control over access to high-security locations
- ensuring that the premises adhere to health and safety standards
- ensuring building inhabitants’ pleasure and safety
- Identifying, deploying, and integrating smart technology into facility operations.
- Understanding the workplace via the use of collective data
- Managing cleaning, security, and maintenance personnel
- Reporting and making suggestions for facility modifications
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Facility Managers’ Best Leadership Practices
A facilities management leader must have the required abilities and competence to contribute to a company’s growth and employee success. Through training and years of experience, a leader can bring competitive advantages to the facility they operate. On the other hand, leaders must stay current on trends and practices in facility management. Here are a few leadership strategies that facility managers could use:
In terms of the future, they agree with the higher-ups.
A competent facility manager must plan ahead of time and execute and promote techniques that will allow the facility and its users to stay up with the times. They can stay on top of things if they have the proper business continuity strategy for crises and open communication.
They understand how to plan and budget.
A facility manager must grasp the value of each infrastructure in their building, as well as the cost of renovations. They should also be able to design long-term financial planning and cost-cutting methods to boost the organization’s productivity.
They understand how to build a terrific team.
Organizations’ demands differ, and a facilities manager must understand the roles and restrictions of various employee positions in order to interact with them.
They are ready to listen.
Facility managers engage with other departments to improve workplace relations and communication by listening to their opinions.