When it comes to tha harsh truth, there are two methods organizations look in the facilities they occupy. The standard approach is to see facilities like a cost. This target the inputs to a business process leads naturally to cost control and expense cuts as organizations strive to reduce expenditures, cut staff, economize and minimize. Many real estate and facility executives report that their organizational culture and priorities drive them for this exclusive concentrate on cost containment.
But there’s one other way of taking a look at facilities, and it gets back towards the reason organizations have buildings to begin with: to get work done as efficiently and effectively as you possibly can. Seen out of this perspective, the ability can have a positive bottom-line impact by helping improve employee productivity.
We might call the older approach an input-oriented perspective: Corporate property and facility executives are simply suppliers of workplaces, providing complex products – buildings, furnishings, technology – and services. These executives have little direct worry about the ultimate impact of their services and products around the organization as a whole.
Contrast that worldview having a newer outlook – output-oriented, if you will. These facilities organizations focus on helping the core business to be more effective and competitive by helping employees to be more productive. To them, the buildings, using their furnishings and support services, are means, not ends. Economy, efficiency and skillful control over physical assets continue to be necessary, and can no longer suffice. These workplace providers are devoted to outcomes such as improved productivity, instead of inputs for example desks and chairs. Top priority would go to meeting the requirements of the occupants, with the addition of value to core business processes, and responding to alterations in the core business workforce, all to best contribute to organizational success.
Top facility executives have only recently started to consider how to boost the added value towards the primary process, or core business, of their organization. These executives understand that they must not just address the problems of cost control and income, but additionally must develop and implement a method to aid the core business.
What types of facility and property departments appear to be focusing most on productivity? Interestingly, the move toward productivity generally began in centralized facilities and real estate departments, not departments that are a part of individual business units. This is the opposite of what one would have expected: Decentralized departments should, theoretically, be closer to their clients and have a better sense of the actual needs of the organization. But, in reality, these executives typically focused on cutting costs or on helping the worth of real estate portfolio.
By comparison, adding value towards the core business, or optimizing the core business, became a top priority for a surprising quantity of centralized facility and property departments. It was true even though, in traditional corporate organizations, the central units are the least integrated with specific processes of the sections.
Why did this role reversal happen? Perhaps because the centralized departments saw their internal customers – the core sections – might decide sooner or later to buy workplace services and support direct from the marketplace, i.e. not from or with an in-house facilities department. That meant the facilities department had to see itself as competing with firms already in the marketplace – powerful discipline to pay attention to the customer.
Regardless, during the last couple of years, there has been signs the decentralized departments also have begun to concentrate on productivity. To the extent that this trend continues, decentralized departments should be well-positioned to add significant value for their organizations.
Obviously, not all organizations – centralized or decentralized – walk the talk with regards to management priorities. Some do indeed give first priority to serving occupants; for years their management continues to be building this perspective into their group culture. For the rest, the focus on the customer may be the destination, but not yet the achievement, in the hands-on staff levels.
Satisfaction Plus Delight
Adding value to the core business includes meeting the needs of work processes as well as of people; it also includes going beyond what is acknowledged as necessary and it is explicitly asked for. Economy and efficiency are of course necessary but not sufficient. This is periodically confirmed by a continuing survey of true facility end-users: thousands and thousands of occupants of facilities supplied by the U.S. General Services Administration’s Public Buildings Service. The survey has found that good service and good technical performance are required, even taken for granted. They merely become an issue for occupants if significant deficiencies exist.
PBS established an objective of increasing customer satisfaction to some specified level. It found from the survey that a huge increase in effort to upgrade basic technical performance, for example HVAC or cleaning, in a large number of smaller buildings would not bring occupant satisfaction up to target. Nationally, the very best driver of overall satisfaction was “responsiveness with regard to procedures for obtaining services” and that was much more of an issue in large buildings than small.
The additional value, expressed as delight, comes when workplace innovations make it easier for people to do the brand new necessary tasks which are being invented at the same time. Workplace changes must keep pace with changes in work processes the ones while respecting the workers’ priorities for quality of life.
Integrating Facilities
To be fully effective, workplace improvements have to be integrated with appropriate technology and work processes. In the future, the control over workplaces is going to be integrated into the management of business processes. Consider the history of corporate management information systems (MIS) during the last two decades. MIS used to be a stand-alone department. CEOs trusted their MIS managers to oversee the organization computerized business systems and the mainframe hardware which they ran. Business units and headquarters each identified it (IT) requirements and relied on the MIS department to develop application programs and deliver information. CEOs and line managers delegated towards the MIS people the role of identifying needed IT investments and of recommending priorities in MIS support for the business.
That’s no more adequate for companies that use IT to gain strategic advantage. It is a core component of their strategic business plans. It can make viable a widespread empowerment of managers and staff by giving them use of the information they need for decision-making. It can be the core of recent products and services. It’s integrated into almost every work procedure for retailers and petroleum, pharmaceutical, airline and trucking companies.
CEOs are recognizing that strategic management of It’s at the heart of companies’ business processes. These processes, such as the order fulfillment cycle or the product delivery process, bridge divisions or departments of the organization. Today, some CEOs are former senior executives of MIS, and many plenty of expertise to handle It as being an integral part of their role. Further, they’re distributing IT expertise and leadership meant for business processes instead of delegating IT responsibilities to a central, separate support group.
Because it becomes pervasive, it enables a transformation from the workplace. Much work that a decade ago could simply be done on corporate or government premises has become location-independent. New processes made practicable by IT take place in places chosen for convenience of the buyer, not the vendor. For instance, creating a bank deposit or transfer used to be done by seeing a branch bank or mailing paper to the bank; now it is done by the customer, whether in an ATM inside a retail center or in the pub, on the phone, or from the pc in the customer’s office or a notebook computer anywhere.
Just like IT a decade ago, workplaces are beginning to become an identified component of business competitiveness. They’re becoming answer to emerging business processes. To some companies, the automobile has graduated from the transportation vehicle to a primary workplace. An area engineer who has the various tools to use anywhere, anytime, may need a workplace desk, not a private, permanent office. Indeed, small cubicles in an open-plan office may be shared among several engineers on a part time, as-needed basis.
