facilities management archive

Sitting on a (yet again) delayed First Capital Connect train this morning, the chap next to me was busy tweeting his views on the service and reading out extracts of abuse from other tweets, and the Facebook FCC hate group.  All a pretty entertaining way to wile away the time while the train crawled through south London. Searching Twitter and Facebook for comments on FCC and Southern Trains, its counterpart on the Brighton line, I could only find negative remarks: “The lesser spotted ‘On Time’ variety of the First Capital Connect train” and “Train is clearly running late. Not a single announcement. First Capital Connect at its best” and “First Capital Connect services have all the vim and vigour of a hungover panda with its head in a pail.” Some people put a great deal of thought, wit and effort into their 140 characters. Yet only a few had thought to thank the train companies when their train arrived on time – “Bizarrely First Capital Connect have done something that makes sense for once.”

And why should they? They pay for a service (£3,708 for an annual season ticket from Brighton to Victoria in 2012) and they expect to receive it. Commuting is enough of a hassle without late trains, packed carriages and diverted routes (the London Bridge train this morning rather remissingly failed to stop at London Bridge).

It’s all rather reminiscent of facilities management. The feedback (read complaint) board at my local gym is a litany of moans (why isn’t the Jacuzzi working? The shower are always dirty, why don’t you clean them? The music is crap, can we have something decent?) and most FM helpdesks are the same – my bin wasn’t emptied this morning; the toilet isn’t flushing properly; the sink’s blocked; the car park is always full; you ran out of jacket potatoes again today; the coffee tastes disgusting. And, like with the train companies, our customers aren’t afraid of sharing their views. Facebook groups have been set up complaining about everything from an organisation’s new lifts to the restaurant food; while internal social networks such as Yammer are ubiquitous with facilities-related comments.

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World Workplace is over for another year, and I’m leaving Phoenix exhausted (existing in two timezones is grueling, but the ‘networking’ is quite tough too) but inspired. I have managed to tear myself away from the networking to attend several of the more than 70 sessions on offer (some of which start at 8am) and the content and range was excellent. From sustainability and benchmarking to communications, finance and leadership and on to business continuity and FM strategy, there was almost too much on offer. The organisers should consider filming some of the more popular sessions for people who had a clash or didn’t make the conference at all.

One UK delegate complained that the advanced session she attended on benchmarking was more of a basic level, but that’s occasionally going to happen when different countries are at different stages of a journey. My only complaint is that the sessions, at one hour, are too long – it takes a top-notch presenter to keep the audience’s attention for that length of time. But having been involved with the application process this year – helping IKEA’s Helena Ohlsson with her presentation about IKEA’s journey creating an FM strategy across 28 countries – I can appreciate the effort that goes into the process. If you’re going to fly 5,000 miles around the globe, you want to speak for more than 30 minutes.

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So the World Workplace carnival is officially underway. IFMA president Kathy Roper this morning opened the gathering of what she described as “alpha facility managers” for their week of “being facility nerds.” Emphasising the conference’s sustainability credentials (a far cry from previous years) Roper announced that host city Phoenix is the first US city to be on track to be a carbon neutral city with its 17-point Green Plan. She went on to introduce the city’s mayor Phil Gordon to welcome the thousands of delegates to his city.

Gordon went further, proudly announcing that although Phoenix had 5,000 new residents every month and created 45,000 jobs every year, sustainability had been its guiding force for decades. Mayor since 2004, Gordon boasted that the city uses less water now per capita than it had two decades ago. The Phoenix Convention Center is a green building, he said.

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I haven’t been to World Workplace, the mass gathering of American facilities (sorry facility) managers for a few years and I’d forgotten the sheer scale of the affair. Shops and restaurants in the host city Phoenix, Arizona have “Phoenix welcomes World Workplace” posters and the hotels and coffee shops must be rubbing their hands in glee at the prospect of  several thousand visitors from out of state and around the world  descending on their city for a few days.

The opening ceremony is still an hour or so away, and I trust it will be as glitzy with as much razzmatazz as in previous years, but in true IFMA style the conference has really been going all week. Yesterday there were site visits to the Arizona Science Centre, the US Airways Center and Trinity Episcopal Cathedral and on Monday Global FM held a day’s meeting. Many of the British contingent have been here since Sunday night.

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Our productivity at work is ruined by small things – the light which is just a little too bright, or dim; the office being too hot or cold; the noisy colleague the other side of the floor; or the printer not being filled up with paper (and no paper being in sight). Yes, there are bigger things too. Organisations failing to provide the right type of workspace, for example not enough quiet rooms to do some one-to-one or reflective work or not enough space to collaborate with colleagues we might see only occasionally.

These are what Tim Oldman, founder of Leesman, the opensource index which measures the performance and effectiveness of office environments, describes as “productivity toxins”. Oldman was speaking at the Federation of Corporate Real Estate’s autumn seminar looking at some of the key issues involved in creating an efficient workplace.

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