Without adequate facilities management, no organisation has a snowball in hell’s chance of achieving best performance in the modern commercial world.
But what do we mean by adequate? Is adequate enough? Should FM’s be striving for exceptional performance? If so, how can they demonstrate its achievement or, more importantly, justify it?
The fact of the matter is that nobody has yet come up with any hard, universally accepted conclusive evidence in support of the benefits to business of high-quality facilities. Anecdotes abound, but no organisation has yet told its shareholders that high-quality FM is the secret of this year’s increased profits.
So we have a conundrum: FM does not (apparently) add value to the business performance, while at the same time, most would agree that poor FM undoubtedly detracts from it.
However, this is a misconception — one must be the reciprocal of the other. But because the benefits of good FM are not so far proven, and FM’s cannot make their business case coherently, the contribution of facilities performance to core business performance is rarely argued or understood in terms that are commercial.
The reciprocity of risk avoidance and achievement is a fact — people who want to deliver to the best of their ability play to their strengths — so as to avoid playing to their weaknesses. The soccer striker shifting the ball to his preferred foot does so to increase his chances of scoring, while at the same time reducing the risk of not scoring.
So, until FMs can demonstrate, beyond question, that higher quality provides added value, maybe they should concentrate on proving that without it, business performance might subsequently suffer.
Quality and the FM policy
The quality of facilities, that is the performance of facilities, should be enshrined in the facilities policy supporting the corporate plan.
Quality management in facilities is primarily dependent upon a willingness by top management to accept the contribution of appropriate facilities to the productivity of core business.
However, down the line, any facilities managers unable to identify the relationship between their own goals and corporate requirements will be unlikely to make any pro-active contribution, even if management is enlightened enough to be seeking it.
Seeking an improvement in the quality of facilities performance must be accompanied by a two-way educational process — both within the organisation’s core business management and from within the discipline itself.
The core business customers must know what they are being offered and why — and accept or reject that. On the other hand, facilities managers must be able to make the case for what is on offer in language business can understand and interpret.
Justifying the strategy
Justification for providing a specific level of quality in facilities can be based on either:
- conventional wisdom
- the potential effects on business performance.
Due to a quite universal dearth of good data, both approaches must inevitably depend on sensitivity analysis of different assumptions, with regard to increased benefits.
Sometimes justification for the adoption, or confirmation, of a specific level of service is derived from comparisons with peer group organisations — maybe in benchmarking groups — where facilities managers draw confidence (although perhaps not inspiration) from the decisions made by their peers, in other words, the conventional wisdom.
This is a safe route, provided the peers have got it right, but one that suggests a lack of business acumen in the FM slavishly following the fashion.
The easiest way to express the benefits of a given level of quality is to identify and appraise the risks to the organisation of not achieving the appropriate level of support. This can be built on sensitivity analysis of options around a ‘zero-base’ drawn from normal or minimum conventional practice.
There is one fundamental difference that makes this risk exposure-based approach more likely to motivate the end user than one promoting the prospect of added value: that is the fact that whereas it suits some finance directors to be sceptical about unsupported financial arguments for higher quality facilities, most people can accept the existence of a risk — a possibility — of loss through under-provision of quality. At risk of over-egging the piece, we repeat that quality management and risk management have exactly reciprocal implications.
Risk management is a discipline in its own right. Here, it is simply necessary to look at the areas of business supported by facilities which are the potential beneficiaries of added quality: these are, of course, the self-same areas which put the business at risk of loss through failure to provide adequate support. Of these, in most organisations the impact of facilities on external and internal image is likely to be by far and away the most significant.
Effects on ergonomics and therefore productivity will be fairly important, with the benefits likely to be most achievable at and around the workstation. Frequently, it is possible to reduce risk substantially with very little cost other than that incurred by dint of good management, for example, disciplined filing and storage, clean desk policies.
Meeting legal requirements such as statutory compliance (health and safety) and contract obligations (leasehold commitments) can be a problem when quality falls away. But failure rarely results in more than miniscule hard revenue penalties. That said, a bad image gained through adverse publicity due to such indiscretion may well have far-reaching implications for the core business.
Maintenance that affects assets that enhance or maintain a good image, and ergonomics, are concerned with quality management in terms of functional performance. However, the process of maintaining the assets at a level that avoids excessive depreciation and/or obsolescence is one for risk management in terms of physical performance.
It is not hard to see that the same piece of work could fulfil both these objectives; the problem is that many property managers (and some facilities managers) are pre-occupied with the actual physical performance, to the detriment of the more significant functional issues stemming from any environmental failures.
Weighting the risks
The value management process requires that performance objectives should be weighted, across such areas as internal and external image, physical property, intellectual property, intellectual property, ergonomics, legal obligations and assets.
The logic of this is that the impact of facilities quality (whether relating to appearance or comfort), on the way visitors, passers-by, customers and staff perceive the organisation will affect business success and productivity to a must greater extent than the effect of any better, or more comfortable or safer working conditions. Loss of intellectual property can be very serious, but matters involving fines or penalties are normally insignificant in the context of business turnover.
Although this clinical analysis may not hold good in every business scenario — and may well be considered unacceptable by some on social and moral grounds — facilities managers do need to keep the right balance between philosophical and economic justification of their expenditure.
But to get that balance right they do need to be able to make the latter argument coherently. FM is about getting the right thing at the right price, but getting the right thing at the wrong price is always better than getting the wrong thing at the right price. In other words, nothing’s cheap if it ain’t what you need!
