News
Conference - second day round-up
29-03-06 0:0 FM World
Dalkia business development manager Mike Sewell opened proceedings on day two with a keynote presentation outlining the FM's challenge to meet environmental obligations. Sewell reinforced to delegates that reducing carbon emissions is now a global imperative. “Given that Europe's 160 million buildings account for over 40 per cent of EU energy consumption and about half of the continent's CO2 emissions, the challenge to do something about it lies firmly at the door of our leading businesses - and ultimately that means with their facilities manager,” said Sewell. He added that the question for business is now not so much whether or when to save energy, but "how to set about it and how to do it cost-effectively". “Before leaving the conference each BIFM member should accept the challenge to look beyond the four walls of their particular facilities responsibility to the long-term environmental problem that is outside facing all of us,” he concluded.
Senior management does not have a monopoly on effective leadership. In the most competitive organisations leadership is not hierarchical but takes place throughout.
Because the workplace is a vehicle to change an organisation's culture, FMs have a great opportunity to become leaders, said Andrew Mawson, managing director of Advanced Workplace Associates.
But to do this, FMs must articulate a vision, take risks and bring other people including IT, HR and finance to create this vision. In his presentation on strategic infrastructure management, Mawson said it means FMs have to move away from the operational side of FM.
Mawson's presentation was followed by a session on flexible working and security. Although the running of the building has to be efficient and smooth because it gives an FM credibility to talk about visions and strategies. FMs should not forget that changes to the workplace environment to improve productivity and increase worker satisfaction shows that a company cares about its employees. It can also support the reconfiguration of an organisation's business structure and melt silos to improve overall organisational communication.
In today's ever-increasing flexibly working environment, security management does not mean protecting the corporate office building. The trend for home working, spending more time out of the office and hot-desking when in the office means less of the traditional infrastructure is within the building itself.
FMs should ask themselves who is doing the risk management for their firm's off-premises mobile infrastructure, said Martin Bell, head of corporate responsibility consulting at Johnson Controls: “If business continuity is about protecting offices, what happens when there is no office?”
Bell asked the delegates to his presentation on security and flexible working if any of them had ever gone into an employee's home to do a risk audit. Few had and so few had any idea of how important documents such as credit-card statements were being disposed.
Large cities have embraced the coffee-house culture and so have employees. Security management means urging employees to be careful when working on their laptops, talking into their mobile phones and meeting people at coffee shops. You never know who is listening to a loud conversation.
Also, in public a laptop computer bag is a signal for thieves so employees should guard the hardware carefully.
Post-traumatic stress affects not only employees that have been through a major accident at their office building. It is just as important to have a plan for a flexible worker after a major incident, such as a car accident.
Bell's message was all the more poignant because of an earlier announcement at the conference. One speaker could not make it because of a major car accident while en-route to Oxford that morning. The speaker was unharmed physically but severely shaken up.
In a parallel session, Consilian director Tim Lloyd spoke of the failure of many organisations to properly consider the strategic importance of property. “The priority for most organisations that manage real estate assets is to control running costs, focusing on immediate operational and maintenance matters,” he said. Lloyd informed delegates about a new project his company has started alongside a number of organisations, including BIFM, called PropertiWiki. Lloyd said the project will develop best practice guidelines for business and property managers and apply the principles of PAS 55 to operational property. He said the project web site - www.propertiwiki.net - will be a public forum for people working on the standard, and anyone will be able to access it.
More research is needed into the link between good facilities management and improved patient care outcome. Does a cleaner hospital with improved catering, good privacy and dignity facilities, as well as top security measures mean that a patient will get better faster after appropriate medical treatment? That's the question FMs should be asking themselves, said Daryl May, senior research fellow at the FM Graduate Centre, Sheffield Hallam University in another parallel session.
But asking the question is a lot easier than answering it, he told delegates to his presentation that considered whether the contribution of FM can be measured in terms of health outcome. His comments come after early results from a study based on 116 NHS FM respondents to a questionnaire. May found that 59 per cent of FMs believed that they could affect the outcome and only 12 per cent said it couldn't. However, 28 per cent said they did not know.
It appears that FMs in the NHS are in a good position to get their voices heard on the subject, according the results. Around 70 per cent of trusts have a director of estates responsible for FM, and importantly half of these sit on the trust's board.
But while those on the board have the ears of the other trust board directors, 82 per cent of board level FMs said they had not tried to measure anything that might give an indication of how FM affects patient care outcome.
May said the NHS has spends only around £375,000 on research for FM-related topics. Considering the importance that patients attribute to FM issues, he urged the BIFM to use all its resources to lobby health authorities including the Department of Health to invest in more such research. The study could be finalised by the end of the year.
After lunch iconoclast Michael Mainelli, executive chairman of consultancy Z/Yen urged delegates to do away with as much budgeting as possible if you want to improve your corporate performance. It's a myth that budgets are essential, he said. Mainelli, who was voted IT director of the year 2004/05 by the British Computer Society, acknowledged that getting rid of budgets is heresy within the business community.
Budgets are targets but they become a measure of success. As soon as this happens, they cease to be good measures, he said. Instead, meeting the budget targets becomes a demoralising game that stifles progress. He said that once a budget is set, employees spend too much time revising it instead of trying to improve their businesses in the first place. Too often missing the target - falling short - is taken as a failure.
People will try to spend as much of their budget as possible to prove they needed all he money in the first place and that the amount should not be reduced in the next budget. People will ask for more money than they really need - forecasts are never accurate - so the board can give them less and believe their departments are becoming more efficient.
Manelli said FMs should resist giving single-figure budget and fight to give ranges of numbers. For example, when giving a budget between £4 million and £6 million, they can say that the range is accurate to 95 per cent given all the variables. Mainelli said FMs should check the website of the Beyond Budgeting Round Table for more information on getting the best from financial forecasting: www.bbrt.org.uk.
One of the parallel sessions in the afternoon heard from Patrick Jongbloet, director of Eager-4-Excellence and chair of BIFM south region. Entitled “Complexity and FM leadership,” Jongbloet kicked off by showing delegates pictures of Ghandi, Martin Luther King, Sir Winston Churchill, Sir Richard Branson, and BIFM's own Ian Fielder. “Looking at the BIFM as an organisation, is our own Ian Fielder predominantly a manager or a leader?” he asked. Jongbloet pointed out that the complexity of an FM's role makes it difficult for them to deliver clear leadership. “Complexity arises from changes in the external environment, in customer behaviour patterns, in supplier-user relationships, in technology, and the modern FM leader needs to be well equipped to deal with this,” he said. Jongbloet warned that complexity will only increase as the FM environment becomes more volatile and unpredictable. “Our ability to deal with and reduce complexity will be viewed as an important competence to peers and potential future employers alike,” he said.
Elsewhere Paddy Hastings, team leader of the design and FM innovation group at Bsria, looked at maintenance contracts and why we need them. "This is the main written communication between potential maintenance contractor and client," he said. It must convey accurately the client's desires abd provbide sufficient information for the contractor to understand what is required of him so he can place a realistic price on the work. It is important for both client and contractor to be clear about maintenance needs and to select the correct contract for the job, said Hastings. His presentation outlined the framework for the client to prepare maintenance contracts and to evaluate each contractor's tender on an equal basis and include the procedures and reports required to carry out the work.
Elsewhere speakers argued that better FM focussed training programmes should be possible thanks to improved methods of finding out what the profession does within which organisations. Government data about FM work is based on a standard industry code, SIC 70.32 that also includes employees who do real estate management and other non-FM work. Questionnaires are sent out to organisations to classify their employees and to respond to questions about their work. The change to the SIC code - expected on 1 January, 2008 - is essential to the FM profession, said Tara Morris, research assistant at Asset Skills, the government-backed training group that organises the sector's training but does not itself provide any.
In the Asset Skills presentation, Innovation; Meeting the Skills Challenge, Morris noted that the government expects an increasing number of FM jobs to be created in the next several years and the skills issue will be paramount to making them effective at their jobs. Dr Sally Walters, head of research at Asset Skills, said there is strong evidence already that FMs need better customer service training as well as improved IT and communication technology knowledge. The general trend is for FMs to have more general business management skills grafted onto their already good technological knowledge.
After tea, Trevor Payne, director of estates and facilities at the Swindon's Great Western Hospital and chair of the BIFM's health sector forum, argued that pressures on FMs to better maintain hospitals will only increase as the NHS faces a financial crisis and patients expect more from their health service.
“It's now a consumerist society and patients have a high expectation for good service,” said Payne. FMs must manage this patient expectation that comes from the million patients a day treated by the NHS, he told delegates to his presentation Developing the Informed Client Role. The FM role in the NHS is one of Europe's toughest because the health service has an estate valued at £23 billion, one of the Europe's largest single estate. Replacement value is around £72 billion. The job is especially hard because 60 per cent of the estate is more than 30 years old. FMs struggle because it is more difficult to support hi-tech medical work such as robotic surgery in older buildings.
Even within Great Western, one of the NHS's most modern hospitals and one of the first PFI (private finance initiative), hospitals, pressures are piling up. Occupancy levels were expected to be 85 per cent, plus or minus 4 per cent. But in fact they are around 95 per cent meaning that it amounts to almost hot-bedding in some wards that makes cleaning turnaround it very tight. Payne said that PFI has allowed FMs to get involved in design of NHS buildings and to see up front the estimated whole life-cycle costs of running the building over the PFI period. Great Western was a 30-year PFI deal, now with 27 years remaining, said Payne who was BIFM Facilities Manager of the Year 2003.
Labour MP Fabian Hamilton defended PFI as good value for NHS patients as well as for FMs. PFI produces better quality buildings that an FM can more easily maintain, said Hamilton during the 45-minute FM World Interview with editor Cathy Hayward.
In the one-on-one interview - on stage - Hamilton said concern over the profit a private firm that builds and runs a PFI hospital makes is missing the point of value for money. “It's a bit rich that after saying to the private sector they must take a high risk by building using the PFI method, to turn around and say that we want some of the profits they are making.”
He said PFI means that a private firm will ensure the quality is built in right from the start because they also have to run it for several decades at an agreed rate from the NHS. Without PFI local authorities were building hospitals with loans for up to 30 years and some are still being paid off now despite the building being run down.
He acknowledged that changing needs within the NHS - equipment requirements, patient levels, speciality operations - will always be unpredictable, even in the short term.
But because FMs can be involved in PFI design form the start, they have an input into how the building can be flexible to cope with unforeseen demands.
Hamilton, who has represented Leeds North East since 1997, said a real test of how well the government can deliver flexible buildings will be the London Olympics infrastructue.
After the end of the games in 2012, what will happen to the buildings is a big question, said Hamilton who is also chairman of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Business Services. However, Mick Dalton, BIFM chairman and seated in the audience, noted the he has been told by the Olympic organising committee that there is no place for FM professionals in designing the Olympics. Only after the structures have been built will FM input be needed, he said.
Hamilton then gave Dalton a verbal invitation in front of the crowded hall to come to the House of Commons and put forward his case for FM input at an early stage of Olympic design and construction. It was a fitting end to an excellent day.
