When you think of it, an organisation’s human resources and facilities management departments should already be closely aligned. Both are required to meet businesses goals and support an organisation from an operational and legislative perspective. Opportunities for crossover and common cause between the two departments seem legion.
Indeed, HR already has a key role to play in the delivery of FM. Whether contracted out or delivered in-house, both FM and HR are about people delivering services to the business; the teams on the ground making a positive impact on organisational efficiencies. And there are clear areas of business where HR and FM can, and should, work effectively together to achieve positive results. Handling processes, with TUPE (Transfer of Undertakings, Protection of Employment) an obvious case.
“HR professionals do get involved with FM professionals when working on processes such as TUPE, to help with legal obligations,” says Ali Moran, HR associate for workplace law and chair of the BIFM’s people management special interest group. “Collaboration in this area can ensure that new employees transition into the business in an appropriate way as well as ensuring good change management and communications,” she continues.
It’s vital, then, that the FM team has the ability to respond appropriately and sensitively to changes, recognising the time and skill involved in issues such as mobilising a new workforce. HR needs to involve itself in this too.
Flexible and agile working procedures also require effective collaboration between HR and FM. Phil Ratcliffe, managing director of Procore, believes that this is one of the main areas where there is an overlap. “The market has been pushing a model of flexible working, as this is where corporate real estate, IT and HR come together,” he says. Yet, in general terms, he doesn’t believe that HR and FM are working effectively together. “We must provide an environment for our workers to do their work in. Organisations must provide the right environment for them. Global companies have taken on the idea of flexible working and driven it, but it’s rarely the HR department making the effort. It’s mostly real estate departments, often HR doesn’t come to the table,” says Ratcliffe. “FM and HR should work together in order to enable workforces to work more productively and efficiently. Conversations may occur in some companies at a senior level, but operationally and tactically, collaboration is often invisible — even in the enlightened organisations.
Ships in the night
Experience suggests that interactions between FM and HR tend to be rare. You have to ask the question: what does a modern HR department think its job is? HR staff think that they are responsible purely for hiring and firing, payroll, appraisals, employee development and employee benefits. And because they see their roles as being defined in this way, which is quite narrow, they don’t see a link to FM, says Ratcliffe.
Ratcliffe believes HR and FM do work effectively together in many of the more basic functions, such as employee information and statistics, security clearance, recruitment and attendance and sickness. Yet he believes that there is a disconnect at the higher levels of involvement.
Having worked on the Workplace 2020 project (which aimed to tie FM, HR and IT together as the holy trinity of departmental integration that would encourage business development and growth), Ratcliffe is still sceptical of the involvement of HR departments with the other departments.
“Very senior people have got together on the Workplace 2020 project to look at certain aspects of their industry, including flexible and agile working and how to improve productivity. However, 80 per cent are FM, global and corporate real estate and property professionals. The HR professional is sadly under represented in this particular project,” says Ratcliffe.
Tony Sanders, managing director — commercial, for FM service supplier Interserve, agrees. “An effective working partnership between HR and FM departments can pay dividends,” says Sanders. “Collaboration should not be confined to managing day-to-day employee issues such as underperformance or sickness, but should be focused on developing important people-skill sets.”
He cites communication, customer relationship skills and core management techniques as examples of key competencies. This, he explains, leaves HR free to focus on the strategic development and wider issues that will help the facilities team to concentrate on the long-term, “helping to deliver efficiencies for the future and not just for today.”
Separate but equal?
The good news is that there has been a definite change over the past five years or so, according to independent FM consultant, Jane Bell. “Historically FM was something of the ‘poor relation’, having to make its own way with recruitment, learning and development with little or no help from internal specialists. There has been a noticeable increase in the number of organisations with an HR and/or learning and development representative either attached to FM or working alongside them from a central team,” says Bell. “The change has coincided with the tightening up of work processes within HR and a desire from within FM to become more professional. FM IS now recognised as a legitimate function, and IS being engaged by HR more than ever; there is now a better recognition of what each side can bring to the process. FM has finally been taken into the corporate family.”
Collaboration between the departments is clearly happening in some companies and not others. Yet the impetus is in place; both parties have valuable expertise to feed into effective planning of strategies, learning and development, people management, change management and effective communication.
There is a great benefit to the HR professional in understanding what the FM professional needs from them — and indeed, the reverse is also true. “HR professionals can only really provide the right level of service if they have an understanding of the challenges and imperatives of what the FM is working to, and the objectives and barriers they may be facing,” says Moran,
He suggests that, from an FM perspective, in terms of looking at outsourcing or insourcing, HR can provide valuable experience and expertise to do it in the most effective way possible. “HR can help FM to understand the due diligence procedures and costs,” he says. “On a day-to-day basis, HR can support and guide the FM and help to up-skill their teams.
“When HR and FM work together, there is a win-win situation. If the two departments can share information, the FM team will be able to more effectively deliver what the client needs, which is everyone’s desired best outcome,” concludes Moran.
Bell suggests that part of the problem is that, like other departments, the HR profession views FM in a certain way. “Typically, HR professionals may view themselves as advisors to a wide range of management teams in organisations,” he says. This contrasts to the role of the FM professional, which can be more complicated because it covers such a diverse range of technical and professional areas.
“The role of the FM professional may seem daunting to HR professionals although essentially the people management issues are the same,” says Bell. “In many instances FM is still playing catch up on some aspects of HR practice — notably job design, recruitment and succession planning. HR managers don’t yet always have the depth of knowledge and experience of FM to offer advice directly on industry standards and benchmarks for jobs and employment.” Bell explains that specialists are often called in where expert advice is needed.
Common ground
In general, there is a trend towards the two disciplines working more closely together, with the common theme being both disciplines’ attempts to establish their strategic value to the wider organisation. HR professionals are increasingly tasked with finding effective ways of measuring and demonstrating strong human capital performance. Here, there are obvious parallels with FM — which is, after all, essentially about people.
HR professionals must work to integrate themselves fully into all of the departments of their organisations and with their FM counterparts, suggests Tony Sanders. “HR and FM can be very closely aligned and this can be attributed to two areas of similarity, which creates natural synergies between the departments. First, both an external facilities management team and its HR counterpart are working in a service capacity. Second, both departments are focused on the effective management of people — whether that is through the direct HR function of recruiting, training and developing staff or via the facilities role that ensures the effective management of the working environment,” says Sanders. “HR should be communicating regularly to keep employees abreast of any changes or challenges the business faces, as well as any successes.
“To support this and to help deliver sustained growth, it is important to put the right facilities managers in place.”
Sanders sees FMs as the ‘people on the ground’ who can manage the day-to-day running of an office, factory or estate, leaving the business free to focus on its core activities. “We’re seeing increasing numbers of clients moving to a one-team approach where the traditional boundaries between employee and service provider are merging. Today, it is much more about helping a client to deliver its business outcomes and creating a flexible working culture where facilities staff integrate seamlessly into the clients’ operations.”
While this bodes well for the future, it also suggests both HR and FM professionals may need to reassess the role they play in their wider organisations, learning where necessary to work together as a more cohesive unit.
