FM vs Workplace – A personal perspective

You never know where you career is going to take you.

In 2012 I worked at the Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM) leading their PR work which landed me on national news channels discussing the controversy around organisers of the London Olympics, LOCOG, going after small businesses who dared to try and glean some benefit from a generational event. In 2014 I had the pleasure of knocking onone of the most famous doors in the world at Downing Street for a reception to launch support for SMEs.

But a decade later I feel like the thing that has really defined my career is the transition of a profession from one idea to another. Facilities management and the embracing of the ‘workplace’.

This 'shift' came up recently when friend of the Audiem family, Mark Eltringham (editor of WorkPlace Insights) posted about a broken lift and suggested that we’ve forgotten to hold good maintenance in high regard as we get distracted by sexy workplace ideas.

I don’t agree. To explain why let me give you a very brief history of my, sometimes totally random, connection to this debate.

It started when I left the glare of national news outlets and joined the British Institute of Facilities Management (BIFM). The move was driven by my mentor at CIM, James Sutton, making the same move six months before. He wanted to get the band back together and use our experience to elevate BIFM’s status and ‘voice’.

But, and maybe to support Mark’s argument, I thought I’d made an awful mistake. I’d suddenly found myself in the world of engineering, technical compliance, systems, processes that represented what FM was ten years ago. It didn’t float any of my boats. I’d left the glamour of talking about marketing on the national stage and instead found myself wondering around the Excel being asked if I had a ‘lift strategy’.

Seeing the early seeds of regret in my eyes James suggested I spoke to a chap called Chris Kane. Chris was trying to get BIFM to think bigger and the idea he was using to capture that was ‘workplace’. Of course, there were others banging the same drum, but Chris, myself and few notable ‘true believers’ like Simon Heath (artist and thinker), David D’Souza (now Director of Membership at CIPD), Perry Timms (multi-award winning HR influencer) and Ian Ellison (yeah, that Ian Ellison) started cooking up an idea which was called ‘The Workplace Conversation’ which tried to get BIFM and CIPD into a partnership that would bridge the gap between HR and FM. Our view being that linking the work of the FM practitioners to the ideas of productivity and engagement that HR concern themselves with would give us a raised strategic footing.

How I ended up in the eye of that project is beyond me, but I think it was from that moment that I realised that ‘workplace’ represented my FM flavoured world view. It was people centric, it was linked to core business disciplines and, frankly, it brought in a stack of marketing principles (like experience) that I was much more familiar with. It felt more like home than the technical world that FM had become.

A few months later I arrived at BIFM towers on a Monday morning to the news that Chris Stoddart had passed away. I hadn’t met him, although knew the name. But it was clear by the reaction of the staff, and then subsequently senior members, that he was important. You can read more about him, and his impact here, but how his story impacts mine is that there was a push to recognise his legacy with a project of some sort, driven (amongst others) by Julie Kortens and Polly Plunket-Checkemian.

It was my job at BIFM to facilitate this into something so, building off of some of the momentum we built with the Workplace Conversation, the idea was that it would be focused on the role of ‘space’ on productivity. The idea being that this would be a strategic, research driven ‘report’ that took the style of a ‘Government inquiry’. Professional statements, interviews and submissions into an idea. The Stoddart Review was born and went on to influence business leaders, FM service providers and professionals. It was the document that spawned many of the ideas that we still talk about today, things like the Chief Workplace Officer (CWO). It gave a platform for ideas that lived in the margins, things like what would eventually become the Return of Workplace Investment (ROWI).

And it showcased an emerging workplace experience benchmarking tool, Leesman. An organisation I had joined during the early months of development of the Stoddart Review. My time with the team at Leesman between 2015-2018 was amazing. I remember joining just before they hit 100,000 responses and left just before the celebration of 500,000. I got to visit new countries, speak to real estate teams at some of the largest, and most recognised brands on the planet about how they were focusing on improving workplace experience, and I got to play with data (alongside some brilliant minds) that showed some of the trends that are still in the headlines today.

But what I rarely experienced in those three years was conversations with facilities teams. They were nowhere near the debate. The decisions. And it was that frustration that really drew me back to BIFM after they ask me to lead the narrative around the changing of name, and focus, to the Institute of Workplace and Facilities Management.

It was, and sometimes continues to be, a controversial conversation. One that I couldn’t help but be minded of when Mark posted his lift picture on LinkedIn. I was told that ‘workplace’ was a fad driven by people on conference stages. That ‘workplace’ was just something that FM’s do. We got into arguments about what was the ‘parent’ and what was the ‘child’. I was asked ‘what about hospitals, they’re not workplaces’……..don’t tell the nurses/doctors/reception staff/FMteams….

We had to balance a profession that was very proud of its past, frustrated with its present but anxious about what we suggested could/should be its future. But the answer for me couldn’t be clearer. The narrative that sits around workplace experience is away of framing the ‘WHY’ of the work that facilities managers did. How it linked to business performance. Why business leaders should take note.

Let’s use the lift and put it into a simple thought experiment. I’ll use the questioning technique of my 5 year-old twins to make the point.

The lift breaks down, it’s the role of the FM team to get it going again. Why?

Because the lift needs to keep running. Why?

Because people need to get to their floor. Why?

So they can work.

And the lift not working will impact how they feel about their workplace experience. It won’t stop work per se but it will create a problem. Which brings me to the final questions of this experiment.

Will repairing the lift quickly be good FM? Yes

Will it not working impact your workplace experience? Yes.

Will getting it fixed mean that it’s a good workplace experience? Not necessarily.

Which to me says that a good workplace will probably (in fact, very likely) have great FM inplace. But great FM does not guarantee you a great workplace experience because the Wi-Fi might not work and your boss might be an arse.

Should we ignore good FM and focus on the more ‘strategic’ workplace idea? Absolutely not. But we should be leading with the workplace conversation. At the end of the day, good FM will ultimately judged on the experiences it creates.

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