Facility Management comes with industry challenges, but also with opportunities for improvement and business success. Ultimately, the goal of facility managers is to minimize efforts and resources, while creating the greatest level of productivity possible.
A study done in March of 2020, revealed the top 5 issues Facility Managers consider to be most important as:
- Health and safety
- Improving facility image
- Improving productivity and inefficiencies
- Security
- Training or educating staff
These concerns run deep through leadership within FM companies and are important to address in solutions and strategies for improvement. Many of the above concerns tie into one another. They could benefit from a processes improvement in onboarding, training and cultivating culture.
On a positive note, understanding these concerns, can help in goal-setting. It all starts with reducing time spent on onboarding, training and developing culture. Begin your journey in efficiency by setting up flows that support the goals of the facility manager and are in line with the company vision. Let’s dive into how you can do just that!
Onboarding Flow
Like many leaders, facility managers seek to attract, retain and develop their talent. However, it is not a surprise that some Facility Management segments have high turnover rates. For example, manufacturing has a rate of 37% absenteeism and employee turnover. There is a lot that needs to be addressed in order to improve and engage employees. To start with, welcome talent into your organization with a cohesive onboarding process.
As it stands, HR managers already consider onboarding important for many reasons, such as:
- Having a quick integration in company culture for the new employee,
- Instilling a positive attitude towards the employer
- Increasing engagement
- Providing an overall positive experience
However, onboarding possesses many obstacles that need to be addressed as soon as possible. Some of the key challenges considered by HR Managers when onboarding are:
- Good monitoring of new employees
- A consistent approach and application of onboarding across the organization
- Clarity of responsibilities during the process
- Measuring success and effectiveness of the onboarding flow
Why do we still see managers struggling with attracting quality talent and high turnover rates? This may be due to the lack of investing and developing a thorough and smooth onboarding flow.
Challenges can make developing or tweaking an onboarding process seem daunting. Yet, with a few key tools at hand, it can be made simple and show lasting results. Research reveals that when an organization creates a standardized onboarding process, they experience 54% higher productivity in their new hires.
Need some help creating your onboarding flow? We have summarized the steps to build an efficient, smooth, and automated flow. All to ensure each new employee receives an equal amount of attention and care before, during and after they join your company. Check out the resource here.
Training or Educating Employees
Creating a company culture built on learning and development is important to have a competitive advantage, higher levels of productivity, and knowledge-sharing in the workplace. It is especially important in Facility Management to tackle high levels of disengagement, specifically in hospitality which experiences 29%, the highest incidence of disengaged employees. However, even though a culture of learning is important and impactful, only 31% of organizations have developed well equipped learning environments.
In Facility Management, 96.3% of managers offer hands-on or on-the-job training to their employees; however, they may be overlooking the effectiveness of these trainings. There are certainly ways of improving the hands-on/ on-the-job training experience by embracing micro-learning. Micro-learning is proven to both minimize the attention and focus needed to learn a new task. This, while shortening the time for an employee to be ready to perform at work.
Micro-learnings are bite-size learning units with 1-2 key objectives that provide about 4-5 key information takeaways. They are typically packaged in short sessions lasting less than 15 minutes. Developing a plan to start training your employees in this way would increase the knowledge transfer by 17% and allows employees the freedom to learn wherever and whenever they are ready. Overall, leaving behind the old and traditional ways of training frees up time for managers because they know their employees will be better equipped and 50% more engaged in their job.
The Covid-19 pandemic has brought to light how important it is to educate and train employees on health and safety, one of the main concerns of facility managers. Educating in this area, whether it’s about the new safety regulations around containing the virus or learning how a new machinery functions, is critical to get it right. Micro-learning is the solution.
Cultivating Culture
Cultivating culture can be time consuming but the benefits are far greater than the effort allocated. Creating company culture is about turning something abstract into a shared feeling of living out the mission and vision of the company, while feeling connected to your colleagues. A study showed that 46% of job seekers deemed company culture as very important when applying to a company and 35% said they would turn a job down for misaligned company culture. One of the best ways of cultivating culture is giving employees a network for them to connect among each other and management.
A big part of company culture is cultivated by the leaders and managers, however, it must also include employees. By giving employees a shared network to connect, relate, share stories etc. with one another, it introduces autonomy and changes the conversation stream from only top down to both ways.
There is great power in bringing in a business application of Social elements into the workplace and can help significantly in recruiting, employee engagement, communication, creating culture etc. SHRM shared the following list of benefits around this topic.
Advantages of using social media in the work context:
- Facilitates open communication, leading to enhanced information discovery and delivery.
- Allows employees to discuss ideas, post news, ask questions and share links.
- Provides an opportunity to widen business contacts.
- Targets a wide audience, making it a useful and effective recruitment tool.
- Improves business reputation and client base with minimal use of advertising.
- Promotes diversity and inclusion.
- Expands market research, implements marketing campaigns, delivers communications and directs interested people to specific websites.
Perhaps you’d be interested in 10 tips to boost employee engagement through socialization.
Work relationships significantly shape the way we feel and our well-being. Overall, social connections make people happier, more engaged and more productive. Supporting a network for your employees to connect would impact them by increasing happiness, reducing stress, increasing engagement, creating a healthier life, creating a social format, increasing celebration of success, connecting departments, encouraging team building and inspiring positivity. All the while, creating a stronger and more connected work culture of engagement.
Overall, onboarding, training, and building upon company culture can be facilitated by creating supportive flows. Through supportive flows, facility managers should be able to reach a higher level of productivity, while staying true to the values and mission of the company’s vision and mission.