4 challenges in Facility Management (and how to overcome them!)

Check out in this post some of the biggest challenges in Facility Management and how to deal with them!

Often, the building facilities can have manychallenges – some of which can be consequences of other company areas or even the culture.

At W3lcome, we work closely with Facilities professionals, and we can see some trends that are worth paying close attention to. In this post, we will list some of the most common difficulties we have seen and how you can cope with them!

1. Facilities is left in the dark

To deal with responsibilities involving infrastructure, contracts, equipment, and other back-office tasks, it is common that the results are not visible to other areas of the company.

Sales and Marketing have a more noticeable impact on the goals of the companies for having more frequent contact with customers. This generates a visible recognition of the effects of these departments.

The Facilities area, on the other hand, is very reactive – the work becomes visible when the other fields need to contact the Facilities office.

Often this visibility is most apparent when there are problems in the company, such as pending issues with third parties or failures in the cleaning.

This causes people to associate the Facilities area with problems. This is not a desirable reputation – and neither it is in line with the real efforts of this part of the organization. Which works towards a working environment that boosts productivity and generates more results.

The best way to gain more visibility for the area is to make it more proactive.

Besides, to solve emergencies and to manage tasks, we believe the area should raise innovation project ideas as much as possible. These projects should focus on resolving significant problems of the infrastructure or processes of the company.

With the success of these projects, the company will observe the results that the work of Facilities can generate – bringing the recognition that the area deserves.

2. Problems with internal communication

Internal communication is a challenge for companies of any size. It might be the most recurring problem in any division.

The sector of Facilities is one of the departments that may have the most considerable difficulty here since it has direct contact with all areas of the company. It ends up being responsible for supporting several stakeholders across the business.

Internal communication goes beyond just implementing integrated chat solutions. It should also ensure it fits the company culture and needs of different teams. It should make it easier to interact, instead of adding complexity or bureaucracy into the processes.

To find the main communication failures, identify issues such as:

• In between which processes these failures occur;
• What are the impacts that these failures cause;
• Which are easy to correct;
• Correcting the fault would generate immediate results?
  

Working on internal communication will ensure a more efficient and lean handover from area to area, besides being an excellent opportunity to generate proper documentation, and avoid confusion.

3. Lack of investment budget

Even if Facilities has great innovation project plans, a barrier to execution may be the budget allocated to the area.

It’s often restricted to emergencies and recurring fixed costs, such as software and other outsourced services.

It is ubiquitous to get denied for investment that evades the already allocated budget for the area. 

It’s hard to get a budget increase. It is essential to be very clear about the return over investment and value-added to stakeholders to convince the finance department to make it happen.

Try to establish the principal return the project will bring, such as how it can reduce costs in the long run. So you can have more arguments to convince an increase in your budget and don’t let a potential project be only wishful thinking.

4. The company’s culture prevents innovation

Innovation is not an easy process, and unfortunately, it is ubiquitous that various companies block new ideas and projects.

When a company is in the market for a long time, It already has well-defined processes and practices, suggestions for changes can be seen as possible threats to something already consolidated.

It is also wrong to think that every attempt at innovating will be accurate since there are usually many errors before arriving in a big hit, and a lot of assumptions take place. Validating the most of them upfront is vital.

Several suggestions tend to be ignored and seen as a cost increase and just one more frustrating attempt at innovation in the company. 

A great innovation that sits in the core business of the company – its products and services, which can really be dangerous and seen as a high risk for the whole business model. However, in Facilities, innovations can be made in lower-risk areas and processes. Leverage that.

Because it is responsible for outsourcing services, small innovations in infrastructure can be made as a Facilities initiative. It is an excellent way to break these paradigms since its risk and cost of implementation can be lower than other projects.

Look for solutions that can be easily visible to everyone in the company, such as something in delivery management or that affects internal communication, as already mentioned.

Do you experience any of these challenges daily? Check out our post with some hacks to help you with the difficulties of Facilities Management!