Triumph over disaster
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| FM of the Year 2008 Tricia Stanley |
Hailed by employer and client alike after the flood-hit summer of 2007, the FM of the Year Tricia Stanley speaks to Cathy Hayward about how, at times of crisis, the facilities management role comes into sharp focus.
Few facilities professionals have had to set up a soup kitchen for staff and contractors as part of their role. But for Tricia Stanley, the BIFM’s facilities manager of the year 2008, it was a natural solution to seeing her site under several feet of water following the devastating floods of summer 2007.
“Engineers and clean-up staff were on the site 24/7 trying to get it back into working order and we needed to support them so we set up emergency ‘soup kitchen’ facilities,” she tells FM World matter-of-factly 16-months later, in a dry Sodexo office in Sheffield.
On one day in June in east Yorkshire, a month’s rain fell in just one hour. Household product manufacturer Reckitt Benckiser’s site in Hull was badly hit by the floods. The basement and ground floor, storage areas, effluent pit and warehouse were flooded by drains back-up. Water filled up the substation meaning that there was no power to the site. Meanwhile the rest of Hull was in chaos with many Reckitt Benckiser and Sodexo staff flooded out of their homes — one in five houses in the city was damaged. The 900-client staff were sent home while Stanley’s 100-strong Sodexo team started tackling the mess.
Part of the clean-up involved practical tasks such as picking up the debris which had fallen as a result of the strong winds to avoid it blocking the drains and making the problem worse, and mopping up the water. There was a complete team commitment, says Stanley, who stayed in a hotel near the site until it was operational again.
“My FM at the site called to say that she was on her way in but she’d had to abandon her car on a roundabout and was wading through deep water,” she remembers.
The organisation’s crisis management plan was put into full swing with early morning and early afternoon meetings with the heads of department every day to plan the course of action for the next few hours. Stanley acknowledges that lots of lessons were learnt as a result of the flood and changes put into place once it had been resolved. Getting hold of emergency supplies such as Wellington boots and protective clothing was a key issue, only solved, says Stanley because of Sodexo’s purchasing power and contacts in the area. “We went to a local Sodexo client Smith & Nephew, to get supplies. Basically we despatched staff wherever and whenever to get what we needed.” Stanley, who spent eight years client side before moving to Sodexo, believes that Reckitt Benckiser only recovered so quickly because of Sodexo’s network of contacts and purchasing power.
The factory was up and running in two days, the R&D and commercial buildings, which had been more seriously impacted, back in use in five days. A fortnight after the floods, the factory had an audit and went on to win a best factory of the year 2007 award — a tribute to Stanley and her team.
She believes the floods demonstrated that FM is an intrinsic part of an organisation and allowed the client to get on with their core business. But she is wary of her career being portrayed as without incident until the 2007 floods. A quick look at her CV shows that Stanley has deliberately sought out challenges and difficulties since she made the transition into FM 12 years ago.
From the ivory tower
Her switch from a highly-respected technical role at surface coatings manufacturer Sigma Kalon to create an FM department within the group in September 1996 caused astonishment among her colleagues. Stanley acknowledges that she was incredibly naïve and had lived in “an ivory tower” before she moved into FM. “On my first day as a facilities manager at Sigma Kalon I took my letter opener down to the mailroom to meet the staff only to find half a dozen people there operating the giant letter-opening machines.”
FM had previously been spread across a number of functions and Stanley went about creating the department’s responsibilities by taking on everything which gave other departments a headache. “I didn’t go home for 18 months,” she recalls. Her hard work paid off as she saved around £100,000 from effective management and contract rationalisation. The financial savings soon gained interest from the financial director but Stanley was determined that she continued to report into HR to ensure success was measured by service level not simply bottom line — something she still strongly adheres to.
Much of Stanley’s work at Sigma Kalon was about trying to influence senior management to accept and respect FM’s role within the business. She feels she achieved this to a certain degree but to learn more she decided she needed to move to an organisation where FM was an established function.
The role of facilities contract manager at Ventura was a major change and not just because Ventura is a call centre environment compared to Sigma Kalon’s manufacturing facility. Stanley was given a departmental budget — something absent at Sigma Kalon. She was also exposed to a number of disciplines in a variety of buildings: new builds, multi-story buildings, landlord owned and shared buildings. And, after achieving the Nebosh qualification, she created a company health and safety manual.
In January 2005 she decided to make the switch supply side to gain a different perspective on the FM sector. As group general services manager for Sodexo she looked after Reckitt Benckiser’s healthcare sites — a combination of manufacturing, R&D and commercial environments delivering 20 soft services. She recalls that it was immediately apparent that the sub-contracted services had resulted in silos of expertise focussed only on their particular function. “My role was to change the mindset of staff by making them see the wider picture, for example that catering does not stop at the plated food — the preservation of environment standards should also be part of the catering manager’s role and not reliant on the maintenance and cleaning managers to notice and record lights out or carpet cleaning.” The management had been continuously applauded for making savings by delivering under budget; sometimes at the expense of long-term benefits of investing to improve the service, she says.
Driving changes
“This was the biggest challenge as it demanded the trust of the client to support the change. Convincing management staff that it was acceptable to spend the budget, if appropriate, and reward on total service delivery, not simply by financial under spend was a key driver in changing how Sodexo manages and delivers the site-based services.”
Six months after she moved to Sodexo, Reckitt Benckiser took over BHI Pharma Products and Stanley was responsible for mobilising the Nottingham site. It was to be good training for the crisis of the Hull floods. Her team worked round the clock getting the site ready for staff. “People were almost whistling while they worked, it was a real sense of teamwork.”
The following year the Derby site, which had been under a different division, also came under Stanley’s control so she had overall responsibility for 160 site-based staff and sub-contractors across three sites. “The sites changed dramatically over three years and it was a mammoth achievement keeping up with their demands”. Overall Stanley increased the contract turnover by 250 per cent over three sites within two years.
Communicating across the three sites and to clients is one of Stanley’s key achievements. She introduced a client recording system to manage the facilities operation, offering transparency and ensuring parity of communication between sites. The introduction of an impressive, yet simple, KPI recording system also satisfied the client’s need for performance assurance and acted as an effective staff management tool.
No sooner had all three sites been given the “Stanley factor”, then the Hull floods hit and she had to start from scratch but she has relished the opportunity to see both sides of the industry. “I’m a better FM for seeing both the client and supplier’s perspective,” she says, adding that it’s easier to be the client.
This summer Stanley was promoted to the role of business development manager at Sodexo where she acts as a consultant to both clients and Sodexo management to streamline operations, use technology and make commercial decisions. It’s a perfect next step for someone who has spent the last 12 years in client and supplier side operational roles, allowing her to take the next strategic step but still keep in touch with day-to-day operational issues. “The opportunity to visit alternative sites allows me to stay abreast of the latest developments in facilities management,” she says and she’s enjoying the opportunity to network with her FM colleagues in the area, a key part of her new role.
Stanley comes across as a natural facilities manager, someone who is an instinctive multi-tasker, customer-focused and an inspired leader, and who whether by design or luck, has forged a diverse facilities career encompassing client and supplier side roles in a variety of environments.
“I realised early on in my FM career that this is what I was destined to do. It was like I’d been speaking a foreign language for years and then suddenly I was speaking English and people understood me.”
