May 14 is World FM Day, an annual appreciation of the role of facilities managers. In recognition of the day, Facilities Dive has brought together voices and resources on one of its most pressing challenges facing the profession: labor recruitment and retention.
“Skilled labor is one of the biggest complaints, in my world,” Max Serrao, chief operating officer at CFM Associates, said in a State of Facilities Management Technology webinar presented by IFMA and JLL. ”Finding service providers or finding our in-house technicians is difficult. But people are more willing when they see that they have things in place to make their jobs easier.”
A decline in confidence is part of the problem, Serrao said. “Things that, maybe in the past, were clean knowledge are not there,” he said. “The fear of breaking something really keeps [employees] more paralyzed, so we need to make sure that we’re giving them the education, the training and the partnership. Because they ultimately own their facilities.”
As long as the labor shortage persists, the facilities management profession faces an operational resiliency problem, according to Paul Morgan, global chief operating officer of work dynamics and head of workplace management at JLL.
“There’s risk in having institutional knowledge in one person in one building,” he said. “How do you build resiliency into your portfolios, whether it’s your people, your supply chain, your assets themselves, the effects of the climate and so on?”
One way facilities managers can make the best use of the talent they have is to get routine, low-level work off their plates so they can concentrate on what’s important, Morgan said.
“We’re trying to strike the balance here that we value people for doing higher skilled work, where they can apply their experience and knowledge that they built up over the years by taking away some of the mundane, less-skilled work that we can actually get an agent to perform,” he said. “Those individuals then get to work at a higher level and are actually getting more fulfillment out of their jobs because they get to focus on the more interesting elements of their skill set.”
Getting technicians up to speed on newer systems is another way to boost talent. “There’s a big challenge in the scarcity of resources and being able to attract people to our industry, especially when we talk about facility management,” said Jean-Marc Zola, commercial senior vice president of digital energy at Schneider Electric. “Talented facility managers are able to go deeper into the systems. As the systems are becoming more sophisticated, by the way, the level of expectation has [risen]. So that's a challenge. No discussion.”
It’s also important to train staff to “ask the right questions,” Morgan told Facilities Dive. “I remember being at university, the first thing they said is that it’s not [about] the question you answer. It’s the right question you need to answer.”
“You have to give your technicians the confidence to do what they’re going to do, whatever that may be: touching and working on that equipment or managing those things,” Serrao said.
Resources
Outside of technology, resources are available to help those in the field improve their skillsets and make an impact at their organizations. Here are a few:
- International Facilities Management Association provides tools, resources and guides to help managers work through common talent problems in the industry.
- ASHRAE 180 and 211, two standards aimed at helping facility managers and technicians improve the quality of commercial building systems through widely applicable maintenance and implementation procedures.
- Facilities Management Institute, a program launched by the U.S. General Services Administration to help provide core competencies required for federal building personnel.
- The MEASUR Treasure Hunt is a collection of calculators by the U.S. Department of Energy that helps industrial users quantify savings for low/no cost energy opportunities such as turning off unused equipment, reducing compressed air pressure, upgrading lighting fixtures, and many more.
