Facilitating Better Communications

Over the past decade, facilities management has seen a shift from being trade-centric, to service-centric. With this shift, how facilities managers communicate with their stakeholder groups has become more important than ever.

Effective communications ensure the right people have the right information at the right time and in the most useful format possible. Sometimes, this will be a conversation, an email, a meeting, a report, or a dashboard.

Effective communication is only possible when those communications are based on accurate information that you and your team can access in a timely manner.

When communications fail within the facilities team

Improving communications with stakeholder groups starts with improving communications within the facilities team. For many facilities teams, issues with information accessibility and accuracy stem from poor data management.

Without clear processes for information collection and information storage, it’s nearly impossible to improve your information, and thus communications.

A lack of accessible, accurate information within the facilities team can lead to problems such as double-handling work, missed jobs and damaged stakeholder relationships. The accuracy and timeliness of information relies upon having robust processes in place to support information gathering and management.

Non-compliance

Poor communication often leads to jobs being deferred or missed, including planned jobs and compliance-critical tasks. This is something many teams face when a team member leaves, a lack of visibility over the tasks managed by them, causing the knowledge to be lost.

This could mean that those tasks become completely neglected over time, leaving the organisation with significant risk of non-compliance.

Whenever work is completed, details of that work need to be recorded and securely stored. These records are necessary not only for compliance, but to support effective communications.  

Double handling work

Team members need to know what work is in progress, what is scheduled, and which jobs are assigned to them. This can be a challenge when there is a lack of visibility over work, or when work orders are being sent to individual inboxes.

When work requests go to the entire team, there needs to be a system in place for the facilities manager to triage the work out. Otherwise, if multiple team members are receiving the same request, and there is no visibility over who is actioning that request, there’s a chance multiple team members will action it, wasting time and money. On the flip side, the same lack of visibility over the request could mean that everyone assumes someone else is actioning it, leaving it unactioned.

Improving facilities communications

Fundamentally, improving communications within the facilities team relies upon improving data management processes. Looking at how information comes into the team, and how it is made accessible, is a great place to start.

Streamline your sources

Before information can be analysed and actioned, it needs to be collected, and stored. Are work requests all coming in through the same channel, with the same format, or is it all ad hoc?

When work requests are actioned, is there a record of that work? Where is that record stored, and is it linked to an asset record?

What about planned maintenance requirements, or contractor documentation?

Crafting effective communications starts with accurate and accessible information.

To achieve accuracy and accessibility, information needs to be stored in “a single source of truth” for the team. Making important information available to them, in a format that makes it usable. When information is updated and stored in a single place, its accuracy is improved and it becomes accessible for the team.

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