Monitoring Facility Performance
by Elizabeth Murray
Performance monitoring is part of every facility management program. Operation and maintenance costs are tracked to predict future expenditures for repairs or replacement and to warn of deterioration before an equipment failure occurs. The condition of furnishings, floor coverings, safety equipment, and general cleanliness is periodically assessed and maintained as required.
Occupant perceptions of the office setting should also be monitored. Obtaining systematic and reliable feedback from the users of an office facility need not be expensive and can generate positive support for the facility management function, offer cost savings, and improve morale. Actively seeking feedback enables management to address potential problems in a timely manner before they become so serious or politicized that there is insufficient time to develop a cost-effective solution.
The systematic collection of occupant comments provides a broader perspective of facility conditions than simply tracking complaints. Complaint reports are not representative of the office population as a whole. They are the views of a self-selected group of individuals – those sufficiently bothered by some facility issue to take the time to express their dissatisfaction. Complaint reports also tend to focus on a specific problem, usually related to an individual’s work space. A systematic polling of occupants seeks both positive and negative reports about conditions throughout the facility as perceived by everyone or by a representative sample of every group it is to serve.
Systematic polling enables facility managers to more readily identify the frequency, pattern, and severity of deficiencies, which, in turn, allows problems to be diagnosed earlier and resolved more quickly and less disruptively. Systematic feedback can also be a means to collect quantitative information on how facility design and operation decisions affect occupant performance and satisfaction. For example, the effects of altering the operation of a ventilation system can be monitored by measuring the number of absence days due to illness and the frequency of occupant complaints.
By regularly soliciting the input of office occupants and in turn keeping them informed of facility actions, a positive rapport is developed. Not only is morale improved; users are more tolerant of facility limitations when they see that everything is being done to provide them with an efficient and comfortable workplace.
Both direct and indirect feedback measures should be used. There should be a well-defined and well-publicized system for accepting, logging, and addressing occupant comments. Anonymous notes should be accepted to alleviate concerns of retribution for unfavorable remarks. Comments should be evaluated for content as well as for the frequency and periodicity of complaint categories. Similarly, indirect measures of facility performance – such as the rate of illness absenteeism, occupational illnesses and injuries, worker turnover, and interdepartmental moves – should be periodically assessed. These indicators are affected by many factors other than physical workplace conditions. Alone they do not necessarily indicate deficiencies in the physical office setting, but when analyzed together with occupant comments and data on facility equipment and operations, they provide valuable diagnostic information.
There should also be a mechanism for occupants to report facility-related complaints directly to senior management, circumventing facility management personnel. There are occasions when the facility management process is so unresponsive or antagonistic that occupant complaints are ignored or actively discouraged. These situations are extremely destructive of morale as well as productivity and demand prompt and vigorous attention.
Performance measurement need not be cumbersome or expensive to produce practical results. For example, one facilities group instituted a performance-monitoring program for a 31,000-square-meter (330,000-square-foot) facility accommodating 830 software developers. Each time a facility service request was completed, a “customer” reply card was left on the desk of the requester. The card asked the occupant to rate the quality of work done and the acceptability of the response time on a scale from “Excellent” to “Poor.” A tally was kept of the number of “Excellent” responses to each question. These were plotted by month to show how the facilities group was progressing toward its goal of having every occupant delighted with the facility management services.
Unscheduled maintenance activities (i.e., work on anything that is broken or in disrepair) was used as a defect measure of the facility management service. Such interruptions in a building’s service impact occupant productivity. By analyzing the cause of each unscheduled maintenance event, preventive maintenance procedures were augmented and the incidence of unscheduled maintenance was halved within a year.
The time to complete unscheduled maintenance was seen as a valuable measure of both responsiveness and the efficiency of facility management resource use. If repairs could be completed in a more timely manner, occupants would be less disrupted and facility staff would be available for other activities.
In this organization, facility services are requested via electronic mail. The time and date the message was sent are automatically recorded. The time it takes from the request for service to completion of the work is termed the cycle time for unscheduled maintenance. The average monthly cycle time was graphed and then used to track improvements in this performance measure. In a similar way, a measure of facility reliability was obtained by tallying the number of power interruptions per month.
Overall effectiveness was measured by calculating the equivalent number of person-months that were used to operate the building each month. This measurement included people who were permanently stationed at the building and those who were called in on a demand basis (e.g., technicians doing equipment repairs).
Not all aspects of facility performance and management are amenable to measurement, and quantitative measures commonly assess only a portion of what is important. Despite these limitations, measurements of facility performance are a useful means to evaluate service quality over time as well as a source of valuable feedback to guide improvements.
Elizabeth Murray is a Long Beach-based management consultant.
