The Importance of Consistency and Continuity in Facilities Management

Any facilities management program needs to provide consistent, predictable results. That’s one of the fundamental points of even doing facilities management in the first place, as it ensures that the workplace is easy and safe to use for all. There are many ways to go about this, and of course, relying on lean principles through the implementation is definitely one of the best first steps.

Spreading the Tasks Equally

A good way to guarantee some level of consistency in your facilities management work is to spread the tasks across the board more equally. This means that the people in charge of making the important decisions shouldn’t be concentrated at one end of the spectrum i.e. only top-level managers. It’s important to get feedback from those below and ensure that their work is not impacted by the changes that are being implemented.

On the other hand, delegating some of those tasks to lower-level employees also ensures that everyone will be up to speed on using the new features as quickly as possible, minimizing downtime incurred from extra training and integration procedures. This can go a long way towards ensuring that the work of the whole organization is consistent, and that everyone does their job in the same conditions.

Continuity Planning for Effective Operations

Accidents can happen anytime, anywhere. But not everything has to be a showstopper for your organization. A responsible company will spend a lot of time on continuity planning, and there’s a good reason it’s an integral part of facilities management. Put simply, continuity planning guarantees that your business will remain operational in at least some capacity in the event of a major incident. Sometimes this means quickly relocating the whole facility to another site and resuming operations from there.

In other cases, it could mean setting up a temporary working site and using it until the situation is resolved. Ideally, the company will have some facilities in place already prepared for those situations, but it’s hard to predict everything that could possibly happen. That’s why an effective plan for facilities management will be flexible and provide enough fallback options in case the different pre-planned alternatives are not suitable.

Integrating New Employees More Easily

Another important part of proper facilities management concerns ensuring that new employees are brought up to speed as quickly as possible. When you have a standardized approach to every aspect of your work, this can be quite simple the new workers just have to follow a list of predefined steps. At every point of the way, they will have the opportunity to ask specific, concrete questions to their teammates in case they get stuck in their work.

This can have another, somewhat less obvious benefit it can give your new employees an opportunity to point out problems with the current way things are done, and you can do something with that feedback. Far too often it happens that such comments fall on deaf ears simply because there isn’t much opportunity to make a change in the first place. But when you’re working with a standardized approach to every aspect of your organization’s work, it can be much simpler and straightforward to make changes in the structure.

Conclusion

Proper facilities management should provide consistency as much as possible, while also ensuring that the company has an adequate plan of action in case something goes wrong that jeopardizes the workflow. There are many aspects to this, and covering all your bases is important if you want to run an organization that works smoothly and produces predictable results much more often than others.