by Brianna Crandall — January 31, 2014—The Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS), the U.K.-based global real estate organization, released its Global Facilities Management (FM) research report January 29 in Washington, DC. The report reveals how organizations can increase efficiency and productivity, and be better prepared for the workplace of the future, through facilities managers across the globe proving the value of FM to board-level directors and establishing its role as a strategic and essential business function.
The global report, Raising the Bar: City Roundtables (Phase II), calls for innovative new dimensions of measurement to prove FM’s effectiveness and its impact on productivity and profitability. According to the report, FM initiatives have proven that when closely aligned with corporate strategy, they can provide some of the greatest cost-savings and heighten the sought-after competitive advantage of any organization, in all industries.
Authored by the Occupiers Journal in partnership with the RICS, the new report demonstrates that gaining efficiency through aligning with the information technology (IT) and human resources (HR) departments is critical for optimizing the return on an organization’s productivity. For example, the Internet has enabled employees to engage regularly in telework and virtual meetings, having huge implications on the delivery of optimal workspaces in the digital age.
Global organizations facing an era of rapid urbanization and increasing energy prices are realizing that FM must be understood as a business function in order to maximize performance. Neil Shah, Managing Director of RICS in the Americas, commented, “RICS’ Raising the Bar research is groundbreaking in that it raises the profile of facilities management from pure execution of tasks, to being able to drive property life cycle costs strategically. It gives the facilities manager a seat in the boardroom, instead of the backroom, and brings to the forefront his or her capacity to drive return on property assets.”
Raising the Bar (Phase I)
The new report builds on the findings of the original Raising the Bar (Phase I) report, which reviewed the current state of practice in the facilities profession and identified critical FM challenges, focusing on the relationships between FM and other key functional areas. The report drew upon a survey completed by almost 400 FM professionals across six continents and considered what “being strategic” really meant. It concluded with recommendations to build a more strategic profile for the profession.
Raising the Bar: City Roundtables (Phase II)
Raising the Bar: City Roundtables (Phase II) investigates the potential of FM to remodel itself as a strategic business asset. Interviews were conducted with small focus groups of facilities managers in 12 cities across six continents, representing economically diverse regions: Amsterdam, Chicago, Guangzhou, Hong Kong, London, Los Angeles, New York, São Paolo, Singapore, Sydney, Washington, DC, and Zurich.
The discussions reflected overwhelmingly similar experiences across geographies. Strong concerns were raised around the profession’s poor image in the corporate sector, the excessive time spent on operational activities, management’s failure to adopt the language of business and communicate the discipline’s value, a poor alignment with other departments, and the need for strategic leadership.
In response to the original research report, in November 2013 RICS launched its Think Strategic campaign, which will provide free news and advice from industry experts directly to FM practitioners. The campaign is designed to encourage FM professionals to think and act more strategically by giving them the tools they need to develop an FM plan that will directly feed into the wider corporate objectives of their organizations and clients and help gain a competitive advantage.
The campaign will run as a series of monthly articles, freely downloadable from RICS’ Web site, addressing such topics as:
- The risks of cost cutting
- Creating competitive advantage through strategic FM
- Performance benchmarking
- Talking the language of the boardroom
