"Someone showed up with a ladder a few days ago and said he was coming back...?"
Facilities Management plays the vital role of making sure that a company can keep running. It plans and maintains and when it works brilliantly, it never gets noticed. It's no surprise that it's hard to get recognised as an excellent facilities team. And on the front line, we're always the one being called when something goes wrong. And then, it's partially infrastructure and partially communication that can cause the experience to go down hill. The interesting thing is that, generally, people in the space perceive themselves as having a good relationship with Facilities staff. This is good news. It means we're managing relationships well and successfully smoothing the process of responding to a service request. The bad news? Facilities are generally rated most poorly on response times and being proactive – meaning planned maintenance. So we're great at talking to people and well, not so good at anticipating and reacting. Keep in mind this is the customer perspective. Internally, we're planning lots of things and successfully nipping loads of problems in the bud. So how do we change this perception?
Currently, our perceived customer, whether we are in-house or external, is the company that pays our budget. However, the company needs the people in the space to be productive. And staff satisfaction drives performance. So we need to be thinking about how to keep them happy. There are many ways to do that in terms of planning new builds or renovating existing spaces. Airier spaces with more pleasing decors go a long way. On the more day-to-day level, it's harder to achieve the same results.
One of the things that hurts us the most is our silence
However, the simple step of treating the person who is reporting a problem as the customer can have a profound impact. We rely on the people in the space to let us know when there is an issue to be resolved but they are not doing it to be helpful to us; they are doing it because they require a certain level of service to do their jobs. Thanks for telling us
We'll keep you posted
I'm sorry you were inconvenienced
. One of the things that hurts us the most is our silence. It might be because we don't know and want to be sure before we commit to a time frame. But it's nice to know that an issue has not been forgotten about. And if we don't explain what else is going on, people have no idea why we're not prioritising the issue.