Finding and retaining employees in facility management has never been harder; faced with an aging team, many anxious to retire, the industry has been incentivizing employees to work longer than they had originally intended. Eventually this short-term fix will run its course and that day is sure to come sooner than later. Finding replacement/new employees is a bigger challenge and retaining them requires a lot of planning and new methods that the industry is just beginning to learn.

Unlike the tech industry, which is relatively newer, mature job functions like FM have a larger percentage of employees that are older, with many ready to retire. They care deeply about their job, about the transition plans, about maintaining their legacy of a safe, well-functioning facility long after they retire. It is not unusual for the FM industry to have retiring personnel with more than four decades of experience; they know every aspect of the building, the sensitive sites, the cranky mechanicals, the routines that were tried and tested, the location of every shut off valve and emergency switch, they had mastered the myriad of pipes and cables, everything worked and worked for years. When they retire, the industry faces a gaping hole, four decades of knowledge walks out of the door and there is a dire need to fill this gap. Management is reluctantly willing to invest more in hiring new personnel, college grads, there is a willingness to hire a greater number of employees and there is a greater willingness to invest in technology and outsource certain functions.

Today’s scenario

Intentions are good but action is everything; the very next day after someone retires, new employees will have to take over, despite a few days of walking the sites with the retiring employee, trying to understand every nuance, every nook and cranny, it can still be very overwhelming; written notes would seem like gibberish, annotations at the edge of blue prints, the markings and cryptic notes on the HVAC units are not always easy to understand. Walking through every site and inspecting every shut off valve and sprinkler system is hard to do. New employees generally do not embrace the old, stained, torn floor plans, the notes pinned to the wall or photographs rarely tell what to do in the event of any emergency. Third party contractors have a tough time finding the equipment that needs to be fixed, the new employees cannot always help. Auditors cannot find the physical inventory listed in the spreadsheet. New employees are overwhelmed, they no longer want this job, some quit during training, some quit soon after they take over without the assistance of the senior employee that just retired.

It would be great if there was a way to plug a data cable into the retiring employee’s head and download all the most important information into the minds of new employees and subcontractors and audit inspectors. While waiting for that miracle, it be wonderful to have all the information available in an easily accessible way, as in a phone app.

Thankfully, there are digital apps available that are made for FM. At its core, these apps help locate anything inside the buildings and surrounding grounds, track assets and tricky mechanicals, reduce training time and help new employees find the right valve in seconds and guides them to it. These apps help plan maintenance schedules, when the filters need to be replaced and even how much warranty is left on a critical equipment.

Their value goes much further than scheduling and convenience. These apps can even be used to save the trip late at night during an emergency call. New employees find that a week’s worth of training can be enough, and they find it much better to use an app rather than an old floor map. Contractors can find everything instantly, language is no longer a barrier; save a ton of money during regular audits.

Eliminating frustration

For most new employees, the most pressing challenges revolve around locating assets, system controls and everything else that make facilities work.

  • Where are the critical mechanicals that require routine care?
  • Where are the emergency shutoff valves?
  • Where are filters that need replacement?
  • Where are dispensers that cannot go on empty.

Apps will guide them to whatever location, just like map apps. Why is it important? No matter how good a printed paper map is, for a new employee in a huge building with many turns and twists, it might take a few attempts to locate something. That’s frustrating, costs precious time and is expensive.

Whether it was a physical inventory check or an annual audit, the senior and now retired employees led the effort because they knew everything. The CFO usually wants an accurate count of critical and high value assets, and the FM wants to know if those assets have moved from one place to another. All the while, every extra minute with auditors costs more money. Apps with IoT sensors attached to critical assets can track anything that can be moved, including physical inventory, which takes a fraction of the time. Because most of the data is already available in the app, the auditor does not need to write or type up asset descriptions, matching barcodes and actual mechanicals is accurately and quickly completed. The assets can be ‘seen’ from the desk computer or the phone, all identified, tagged and verified.

Transition

Two weeks of training is typical for most FM roles. When an employee retires and new employees take over, the two weeks go by fast, and can be grossly inadequate to learn the maps, understand the notations and navigate the spreadsheets. It can be months before a new employee feels comfortable enough to fully take over from a retired employee.

In contrast, a digital app is easy to learn. If employees were already using it, routes, shortcuts, notes, instructions and much more are probably already entered. New employees can see images of the assets, of valves, of the sensitive equipment of panels that are regularly inspected and more. In essence the app provides a digital twin to the building. New employees can add their own notes to the original and those notes are instantly shared with all users. The building’s digital twin is now dynamic, and it is like preserving four decades of knowledge.

Recruiting & retention

It is hard to find new recruits in FM, and when new employees join, many do not make it past the training. Younger employees do not always want to do the same work in the same way as the prior generation. They did not grow up driving using paper maps. They typically do not like to sit by a desktop and look at spreadsheets of assets and cannot quite understand why notations on the air handlers are important. An app can change all of that. When training and new employee orientation is completed using a state-of-the-art app, the process is more fun and engaging to both the trainer and trainee.

Conclusion

While digital FM apps for wayfinding, asset tracking were originally designed to save time and money, they have the added benefit of being able to train new employees faster. When new employees fix problems quickly and accurately the very first time, it increases their job satisfaction and leads to higher employee retention outcomes. As the industry transitions to digital apps that track, tag and annotate, valuable experience and knowledge is preserved and does not walk out of the door with every retiring employee. The retiring employee will love it as well, their legacy is preserved, and their notes are used every day.