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Facilities Managers hold an incredible wealth of knowledge of the facilities in their care. Often, they’re the only one who can recite key details of critical systems and have a unique understanding of how the facility runs day-to-day.
Which is why, often when a longstanding Facilities Manager leaves, the knowledge loss leaves businesses scrambling. Without that knowledge, it’s close to impossible to remain compliant with regulation, let alone solve emerging problems in daily operations.
While once the knowledge held made the outgoing Facilities Manager a legend, the ever-present threat of its sudden and complete disappearance is a significant liability for the business.
For the incoming Facilities Manager, knowledge loss from the departure of a predecessor guarantees they’ll be thrown in the deep end.
Anyone who has been in this situation understands how overwhelming and stressful this can be. Most facilities professionals suffer this unpleasant experience at some point in their careers. Empathy would suggest that nobody wants their replacement to suffer the same fate, so why is knowledge loss such a persistent problem in facilities management?
Fundamentally, facilities management has a lot of moving parts to consider. The sheer volume of information required to do the job means it is nearly impossible to “download” information from a departing FM during a handover period. Even so, in many cases, no handover period exists.
This leaves the incoming Facilities Manager reliant on documented information and processes, if they exist. Too often, this information is stored across disparate spreadsheets saved in various local folders, in individual’s inboxes, in other department’s systems, or as paper records in physical filing cabinets.
These formats can make it difficult to wade through the information. This compounds the problem as the incoming Facilities Manager has to then spend a significant amount of time searching for information that may or may not exist.
When organisations suffer knowledge loss within the facilities team, there are several potential flow on effects. Due to the important role facilities management plays in day-to-day operations, almost all stakeholders will be impacted to a degree.
The biggest potential impact stemming from FM knowledge loss is the risk that the organisation will be non-compliant. A failed audit can result in an immediate cessation of trade or reduced funding, not to mention the safety risks to facility users.
While this might sound like a worst-case scenario, it is the reality for many organisations. What happens if the outgoing FM is the only one who knows the planned maintenance requirements for critical systems, and that information lives in their head? It is very easy for this work to fall off-course, which could lead to a failed audit. In turn, this can result in an immediate cessation of trade, reduced funding, or worse, safety risks to facility users.
Asset data is one of the biggest areas affected by knowledge loss. Having an accurate maintenance history of key assets is key to several different processes, not to mention, important from a compliance standpoint.
For many organisations, asset data, when it is updated, is stored in locally saved spreadsheets, or worse, exclusively in suppliers systems. The consequence of this is that when the outgoing Facilities Manager departs, this information is often lost, with few clues left to track it down.
Even if spreadsheets are saved to a shared drive, sorting through them to find relevant information for a particular asset becomes a cumbersome task. Asset information that is unavailable, difficult, or time consuming to access can be debilitating to the facilities management function.
Knowledge loss puts incoming Facilities Managers at a huge disadvantage when it comes to maintaining business relationships. Without the information needed to do the job, service delivery to facility users, contractors, and other stakeholders is negatively affected.
These early interactions can leave all parties feeling as though they need to defend their competency, through no fault of their own.
It is frustrating on both sides when a lack of formalised processes and inaccessible information leads to expectations not being met. When these relationships start out on the wrong foot, it can be the start of a long uphill battle.
Advice around knowledge loss typically relates back to retaining experienced staff members. However, in reality everyone eventually moves on, whether to another role or into retirement.
Reducing the risk of knowledge loss is about ensuring that at any point, someone can step into the role and hit the ground running. Because while it’s a given that eventually this knowledgeable person will move on, it’s rare that anybody, even the individual, can predict exactly when that will happen.
Reducing knowledge loss comes down to ensuring key information and process documentation, is available and accessible. This is achieved through consolidating all information into one centralised system.
Keeping all facilities management data in one place helps to ensure relevant information is always available. Additionally, when all information lives in the one place, the accuracy of that information is dramatically improved. Rather than asset and maintenance data living in various spreadsheets, it’s updated in one, central location.
Process documentation is critical to reducing the potential impacts of knowledge loss for organisations. Key processes should be clearly documented, and that documentation readily accessible.
Leveraging digital solutions to support core FM processes helps to streamline processes and reduces the potential for error. Simple, easy to follow processes are also easier to reverse engineer in the case of a quick handover, or a handover with little documentation.
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