chuck out your KPIs and measure real performance

Something that crops up constantly in the line of business that I am in is measurement of performance; often it is as simple as “Did we get what we ordered?” not least in terms of my clients being satisfied with me, but it is also about service contracts where delivery can get harder to pin down. I am in the process of writing a short eBook on the subject, so let me share some of my thinking here.

great customer service starts from the top

Customer service has been prominent in my thoughts this week, especially as I have experienced some really good service, together with someone trying to put right something that had gone wrong.

Many years ago I came up with something that I called the Ghent Agenda, named in honour of some really good service I had experienced from hotel people first in Brussels and then in Ghent. It was a blueprint for our facilities management team to raise our game, and it did make a difference, but it is how you make these things happen that intrigues me.

It is the leader that sets the tone for the way their team will work, and various old and new adages describe this; setting the tone, leading by example, walking the talk and so on, and these are, like all such sayings, very true. More so than many realise, because the way a leader acts and behaves will have a huge influence on their team (very much in the way that children are influenced by their parents).

It is all very well to try and influence your team towards providing a high level of service, but how do you yourself behave? Is the example that you set one that you would like your team to follow as they deal with your customers? For example, how do you treat people? You may be good with your team, but how about others?

My premise here is that leading by example, or whatever we want to call it, comes from setting a personal standard first. If you truly want to be a role model then you have to become that model and apply the standard. There is a wonderful quote attributed to Sir Laurence Olivier during the making of the 1976 film Marathon Man. Dustin Hoffman’s character had to portray levels of exhaustion commensurate with having being awake for 24 hours or so, and kept himself up to experience the effects. When Olivier asked him what he was doing Hoffman explained his need for accuracy in portrayal, only for the former to suggest “Why not try acting, dear boy, it’s much easier”.

And that is the issue, acting is much easier, but leadership is not acting. If all you are portraying to your team is an act then you will be found out at some point, so you do need to live the role.

If your team here you tell them about the importance of giving good customer service, of treating people with respect, but then see you behave poorly towards others then how can they truly believe in the message when the person delivering it lets them down? And if you do not strive to apply the standards to yourself in everything that you do, are you not applying double standards?

We can’t be perfect. We are, after all, only human, but if we are going to try to achieve the highest standards then we have to raise our game. A record of continuous success does not come without constantly pushing yourself and your team, and that is what the better leaders do, and they push themselves hardest.

If you want to be that great role model for your people then try to apply the highest levels of behaviour in everything that you do; be polite and show respect to others, regardless of who they are. If you treat the ticket collector on the train or the barista in the coffee shop the way you want your people to treat your customers then you are setting the right tone for them. Lead from the front.

Mum, Dad, I want to be a facilities manager when I leave school

Just what did a boss do? I wasn’t too sure, but had decided that I was going to be a boss when I left school. It wasn’t my first choice, that had proved impractical, and my second choice was vetoed by my parents, but my Mum wanted me to be a City Gent, heading off in pin striped suit with a briefcase and rolled brolly every morning; that seemed to sound like a boss and so that was what I would be.

But, again, what did they do? The people my parents worked for were captains of industry; one a director at Beecham’s (long before Smith & Kline turned up), another had his name, and that of his partner, on many domestic appliances in kitchens around the country and another was the Admiral in charge of the Royal Naval College for example.

Any of those suited me, but to become one surely you had to know what they did? TV and films were not a lot of help, but then along came The ‘Plane Makers and its sequel The Power Game. There Sir John Wilder made fortunes, lost them and remade them, he had the big office, the big car, was married to a smart and pretty wife (and had a smart and pretty mistress) and got involved in all sorts of Machiavellian dealings with rivals and colleagues alike. Sounded good to me; where did I sign up?

The reality of course was somewhat different as I was to find when I got there. I suppose that the first time that I got close to the fictional Sir John’s life (by the way where is my knighthood?) was the time that I was de facto MD of a business unit turning over around £130M pa. I had the office, the car, the smart attractive wife and the Machiavellian stuff and loved pretty much every minute of it, but then, as with Sir John, mergers and takeovers saw me on the move.

And that is how I got, in the real sense, into Facilities Management. I didn’t set out to be in FM, and have joked that I’d been thrown out of everywhere else. Not quite true, but I had worked in finance, operations, sales, purchasing and IT and hold professional qualifications in both of the latter disciplines, so I wasn’t there just marking time. As a buyer I passed exams in accounting, economics and commercial law amongst others

One of the things that I brought to FM was that wide business background because by then I had realised that what I wanted to be was not a boss so much as a general manager; a businessman if you like. That childhood image of the boss was really where I ended up.

In facilities management a lot has been done to raise the profile of the job, and it is great to see so many young professionals amongst our ranks. BIFM have done a great job in moving things forward and maybe we are close to the point where FM can be a clear career choice for school leavers.

I, like many, came into FM as something of a generalist. If the next generation of FMs can be specialists that is great, but we must not lose sight of the need for FMs to have a wide business education, because it is the world of commerce that FM serves. We need to be able to speak their language and to be comfortable in their world, because that is how we can ensure that they trust and respect what we can contribute.

 

 

Is the customer king? Or is it the client? Why is the difference important?

Recently I’ve been doing some work with clients on the joys of customer service, in one case the delivery of product direct to those that have ordered it and in the other the delivery of service to various sites where the contract, and therefore the service level, has been placed with a central client.

In the former case things are straightforward; the product is requested and the customer advised as to when it will come. As long as the promise is kept the customer is happy and will come again, or at least in theory, because there are times when the customer doesn’t take account of the fact that what has been ordered has to be put somewhere when it arrives, and they don’t always realise quite how large a delivery might be. Back in my logistics days I had software developed to flag exceptional order quantities; “Do you really want 1000 boxes or did you mean 10 boxes of 100?” Far better to check than to send a lorry load out knowing it might all come back. It is all good customer service.

Where you are dealing with a centrally placed contract though things can get more difficult. Let’s call the contract placer the client and the recipient of the service the customer here. Now the client will specify a service level and this will probably be fairly well stripped down on price grounds, but what do they tell the customers to expect? It should be the client/customer organisation that ensures that they are able to play their part in the contract and sometimes the communication is good, other times it is nonexistent, but in most cases there is no effort whatsoever to make a connection between the two parts of the business and it is left to the contractor to be the interface.

One of the great benefits that I have enjoyed in my managerial career is to have worked in sales, operations and purchasing and so have seen how these three disciplines interlink (or not) and maybe I have a greater sense of perspective as a result, but I still recall a career low point when I took over an FM contract that had been centrally placed with no thought to what was going on at the sharp end.

Off I went to the first Quality of Service quarterly meeting of my tenure. We sat either side of the table with the client as they ran through the KPIs. Most were within the required standard, but a couple were not and we got the required dressing down. That dealt with what was actually contractual and relevant to what we were paid, but then we got on to “end user feedback” (complaints). Now there we got pretty well hammered by the people we were serving on a day to day basis in every area except for the ones where we were failing the KPIs, but it didn’t matter to the client because it wasn’t in the contract. They still went through the motions of giving us a hard time, but it was pretty half hearted.

We turned that contract round in spite of the intransigent client team by talking to the people at the top of the organisation about what they really needed from us, not to deliver just for them, but to enable them to deliver what their customers wanted. You have to think down the line.

Contracts should be about what a business needs to succeed, and should be flexible enough to adapt to changing needs. You should never paint yourself into a corner, should you?

just another quiet day on the facilities front line, then Anders Breivik came along

News from Norway last week shocked the world, and we feel for the families of those who lost loved ones. The media have made much of possible motive and the whys and wherefores, but I am more concerned about the impact on those who had responsibilities for the security of people at the two venues that were targeted, because those of us in facilities management walk in their shoes.

I’ve written here about the time, just after the Columbine spree killings in the USA, that one of my sites had a suspected gunman outside. That came to nothing, but we learned some lessons that we built into the way would handle any future incident. I’ve also covered a suspicious package incident, one of three that I have experienced, but I have also had someone gain access to one of my sites and start brandishing a knife, demanding to see their estranged partner, and four or five other incidents involving domestic issues that got to the edge of violence come to mind.

When you are managing a site where there are large numbers of people, probably also with public access, you walk a tightrope. Now I don’t want to suggest that this goes on all of the time, but you don’t know when an incident will occur. When one does, then speed and level of response needs to be on the money if you are to have any chance of dealing with it. How you cope with something like the second incident in Norway is mind boggling and I can empathise with my opposite numbers up there. What they must be going through is something that I never want to have to face. My thoughts are also with the forces of law and order. Expectations on them are enormous and the media cane them whatever they do these days.

In our world, the FM team need to be well trained and to understand what they should and should not do when something flares up, but also in spotting the warning signs. We do have a variety of states of alert, and raise the level of vigilance if we are warned of a specific threat, but so often incidents arise without warning, especially the domestic ones. All of the incidents that I have mentioned came on ordinary days, albeit a couple of the suspicious package ones were are the height of the IRA campaigns. One minute you’re quietly getting on with something and the next you’ve switched to crisis mode: that innocent looking visitor grabs your colleague, pulls out a 12 inch kitchen knife and holds it to your colleague’s throat.

Thankfully the majority of us don’t ever face these situations, and those that do probably only get one in a lifetime, so how do you prepare? The start for the reactive side is in the basic emergency process; you get used to handling these things in a calm and structured way so that when something happens it is dealt with. Regular practice helps, both in desktop exercises and live ones, to settle the team into being able to react effectively when an alarm is raised. The proactive side needs a culture of vigilance, and that applies to the whole team; you have to have an escalation process and you need an intelligence network.

If you do these things then you have a chance of reducing the risk.  I doubt that we will ever prevent a determined solo attack like that seen in Norway last week, but we might be able to limit the impact. When did you last review your process?

They call my right hand men Himmler & Hess and want me fired Part 2- more tales of life on the facilities front line

Last week left my team and I somewhat on the back foot. The clients were ganging up demanding my head to head off the changes I wanted to make and, in at least one case, to waste a 6 figure sum. My team’s morale was on the floor and, quite frankly, I just wanted to get back down the M4 before the fog set in as the winter darkness fell, but this was not the time to be walking (OK driving) away.

Things had gone badly wrong in taking this building on and I had made a mess of the politics. These things shouldn’t get in the way of doing what is right, but they often do in an organisation where genuine leadership is a rare quality. So how do you come back from these sorts of depths?

One of the keys to leadership is a belief that the objective can be achieved. Not by you as the focal point, but by your people. Your job is to make them believe in the goal as a thing both worth doing and within their grasp, and then to do whatever you have to do get them across the line.

So there we were on this dank, grey, day with our future seemingly just as bleak; what to do?

Well to a large degree I had got the outcome that I wanted. The building was being run as a collective of fiefdoms and needed sorting out if any progress was going to be made; for 7 years they had been raiding the maintenance budget to fund other projects. The top brass may have been posturing, sore because we had control of the maintenance and operating budgets for the site, but their troops needed a better building and better facilities, and that we knew we could give them.

I had already made costed proposals to the client at board level and had their approval, so I had isolated my local problem from above and knew that I would be backed if that became necessary. We were also tacking the problem from below by enthusing the workers and middle management about what could be done. It was only at local senior management level that there was an issue and the problem had been festering long before we had come on board. I just lanced the boil.

The first job was to follow up with those senior people one on one and give them room to step back from the position that they had taken in the meeting without loss of face. I was privy to their individual business plans so presenting them with ways in which we could help them meet their targets through saving costs and, in most cases, reinvesting some of that saving in new technologies, furniture, ways of working and more gave them a way to move forward in a positive way.

One year on we had the building sorted as far as essential maintenance was concerned, almost all floors had new workstations and better space utilisation, that allowed us to bring in another functional team and sub-let their building. Everyone won in the end and all ended up with operational performance benefits because their people could work in a building that was better. My team got done what they needed to and we took over half a million a year out of the running costs of the site.

Yes we took some flack, and yes the name calling was a shame. We had to be ruthless about sorting the problems, but we did it and made friends in the end.

They call my right hand men Himmler & Hess and want me fired Part 1- more tales of life on the facilities front line

The other Facilities Front Line posts here have been on the dramatic side; gunmen, dodgy parcels and so on. These are rare occurrences although they do make for good copy; most days at the office have some drama, but overflowing toilets, disputes over parking places and rows over catering or meeting room bookings are not the sort of tales to grip the reader. Today’s tale is somewhere in the middle.

It’s around 0800 somewhere in South East England. I’ve been on the road for nearly two hours as the winter fog has made the 55 mile drive somewhat fractious. Visibility has been under 50 yards in places, but I had left early to allow for problems and have got here safely. It will give me some time with my on site team before I head into the tenant’s meeting at 0930.

The site is a corporate HQ outpost, acquired to house a new division that had outgrown central London (I’d been part of it before it moved), and had come here because the big cheese of the time had lived down the road. The site was now too big for their needs in this part of the world, but contained some technical infrastructure that was vital and this was enough for it to be our equivalent of a listed building.

Facilities Management had been self managed by the occupiers, but was now mine as part of another corporate shuffle and my team and I were trying to make sense of what we had inherited and to start to get the building performing. Cans of worms were being opened; the lifts had not been maintained since the building had been taken on for example and this was part of a huge backlog of work that we were tackling.

My meeting there this day was going to be difficult as I was going to have to set out the budget and cost apportionment along with our plans for the next three years. Amongst my audience was one director who blamed the failure of her department to meet its numbers on the feng shui being wrong and wanted her team moved to a different wing and their accommodation upgraded to remedy the defects. We had managed to get her wants reposted to just under £1m, but there was no way that the business would fund it regardless of how loud she shouted. As you will imagine I was not looking forward to my day.

As I walk in from the car park a large car slows alongside me and the driver points to the passenger door. I open it and get in; it is my boss squared from the days when I worked in this division. He tells me that things are brewing against my plans; that my two area managers who are working full time on site putting things right have been labelled Himmler & Hess and that my back needs watching. I thank him and he is also kind enough to been seen to walk in to the building with me.

My site team are despondent. People who were once their colleagues are now their customers and hate them. I spend an hour bolstering and head off to my meeting. I go alone; you don’t take your team into an ambush.

The meeting is a bloodbath. I’m told that they will have me fired, that I am a disgrace, that I am ruining the business and more. My plans and the way that they support the business strategy are rubbished; they will never work.

But they did: Part two next week.

when people come together they can fill a space with their life and energy

I’ve written here before about the alleged demise of the office, but the topic has raised its head again this past week so I’m off again.

We earthlings enjoy a fantastic range of communications devices these days, and we’re a couple of generations away from my early days at work where I would carry change to phone in to the office as and when necessary. Now the science fiction of my youth is a reality and I have a few of these devices at my disposal and am a happy, and fairly prolific, user of them.

The ability to keep in touch and to interact with others remotely has changed the way that we work, but that isn’t new; it’s just the natural process of evolution. The pace may vary, but change is constant.

The office as I have known it is a relatively new thing in terms of human history, and it has changed a lot in my time. At the end of the day it is a tool and we will adapt it as we need to. One of the buildings that I once managed is now an easyOffice and part of Stelios’ new venture. It still exists, which is more that can be said for some of the other flagships of my old 1990s empire; one has been demolished and an apartment complex now stands on the site, another has just been demolished and a third has been gutted and the shell absorbed into an industrial building. My team and I used to look after over 3000 people in those three offices and they were all key parts of the organisations that we worked on behalf of.

But we changed them radically over the time that we ran them and had them in a constant state of flux as the tenant businesses needs changed. There may have been an illusion of permanence, but it was only an illusion. The illusion is in the minds of the people though; the building is just a convenient place. Those of us who have managed big workplaces will know how lonely and dead they are when empty.

When people come together they can fill a space with their life and energy, and those provide a synergy that no amount of remote working or cloud collaboration can replace. The challenge for us within the industry is to provide those spaces, but in what form?

I remember the first Regus office locally and being very interested because they were doing on the open market what I was trying to do for an internal market. There was a time when it looked as though they wouldn’t make it, but the financial model has worked and others have followed, as with easyOffice in our old floors at Palmerston House, and all power to them for that.

Coffee bars, hotel lobbies, supermarket cafeterias and motorway services are all playing their part as alternative places to meet, but the thing that intrigues me is that there is still so much focus on city centres. With all of the moves away from pinning us down to the daily grind of going in to the office, most cities are working towards transport and infrastructure plans that are based on sizeable growth over the next 10-30 years. That implies that we will still have these great hives of activity for a long time to come.

Will we push the market, or will the market pull us? I don’t know that I have the answers right now, but it sure is a fascinating time to be in the industry isn’t it?

 

experience is as to intensity and not as to duration – thomas hardy

Quite rightly experience is valued. When we are recruiting an employee or engaging a contractor we look for relevant experience, and when we look at ourselves we talk about having paid our dues; done the hard yard and so on.

All of this is fine because experience does count for something; it has value as a commodity that has been earned over time and those that have it are fully entitled to trade on it. Our market value may fluctuate, but when combined with a mix of talent and ability to make best use of our experience we have a product that we can market at whatever rate that the market will pay.

When we are considering someone’s experience with a view to engaging them, maybe as an employee or as a supplier, there are metrics around that experience that we will take into account. Perhaps the depth of experience, or specific subject relevance, or possibly how recent the experience. We will test these as part of our decision making process and come to some conclusion.

In doing this we are applying our own experience to help make that decision; experience is all around us and helps us through every day. I can remember events that, because of the location, I can firmly date to when I was 3 so they go back 55 years. All of those early experiences; climbing things led to the realisation that falling off hurts – learn the hard way, who needs risk assessments?

And that brings me to my point on experience. All of us that have any at some point had none. We had to start somewhere. The journey we have taken to learn whatever skill that we hang our experience on we rightly prize. Hey, we’ve paid our dues.

But experience can sometimes blind us. Those lessons that falling out of a tree will probably hurt tend to put you off doing it. All joking aside, experience is about risk assessment and we use that experience as judgement, but it can make you more risk averse. I wrote the other week around a Goethe quote; “One never goes so far as when one doesn’t know where one is going” and took one interpretation of that to be that you can go a lot further when you take the blind leap of faith: Pre-conceived expectations will not limit what is possible for you to achieve.

Pushing the boundaries may be built on an element of experience, but if you’re going somewhere new then you are learning, taking a journey into what, for you, is the unknown and may be the unknown for all of us, at least in terms of a new way of doing things.

When we are putting together teams we look for experience as a key ingredient, but I can recall many teams in a big corporate environment where I have inherited, or been allocated, people rather than being able to choose them. In almost all cases they strengthened the team because of what they brought to it and one of those qualities was a relative naivety. They would question things that we, with our experience, took for granted. They would challenge our thinking and, even if we did not change as a result, we were stronger from having taken that look. And whilst they did not have much experience in common with us they did have their own experience to bring to the party and for us to learn from.

We should be willing to look at alternative experience as strength rather than weakness and take that chance on people.

 

why do wives put up with it?

Lately I have been back on the train a lot, and have been reminded of a phenomenon I had largely forgotten. One of those strange ritual behaviours between the female and the male of the species that puzzles, even troubles me. So let me set the scene:

Join me on platform one at Swindon as I await an early Paddington train. As an avid people watcher I have plenty of material to work with in such situations; travel provides a fascinating insight into one’s fellow humans. The platform regulars are instantly recognisable, as is their pecking order.

But, just beyond the tracks, is activity in the north car park that has reminded me of a, to me rather sexist, behaviour that really should have died out in these enlightened times. A car will sweep into the car park, pull up near the station entry and from the driver’s side will emerge Mr Businessman, suited and booted for his day at the office. From the passenger side will emerge, well, for the purpose of this story, let’s call her Mrs Businessman, and she is dressed for doing stuff around the house.

Mr B will take his briefcase from the back and depart for his train, and Mrs B drives the car back to the 4 bed, 2 rec, 3.75 bath or whatever.

Now there are variations on the level of human contact in these vignettes, but most are pretty perfunctory at best, but one stands out: The Volvo estate is brought to a stop with some authority. Mr B emerges, takes his briefcase and strides away without a glance at his companion. She walks round the front of the car, seeming to distance herself from him as much as she can, and departs with a decent touch of wheelspin. It is a shame that she had to pause to adjust the driver’s seat and that the car is front wheel drive. If she had been quicker and had had rear wheel drive she could have sprayed him with gravel such was the violence of her leaving the scene.

What domestic strife had preceded this journey? What was the atmosphere in the car along the way? These are the joys of people watching, speculating on events.

But I digress. The point here is that this ritual, something that I have seen for as long as I can remember, still goes on. OK, it is none of my business how other people live their lives, but this behaviour is so alien to me and seems so insulting to the ladies, although they seem quite happy to accept it.

I would never have dreamt of behaving like this with any of the ladies I have shared my life with since I flew the nest over 40 years ago. I know I’m not unique here as the guy who lives opposite is equally as happy to have his wife drive him as he is to drive her, but he and I do seem to be in a very small minority judging by my observations.

Maybe all of this is covered in the Handbook of Inter-Gender Relationships, I don’t know. Perhaps the ladies concerned are quite happy to have things this way. Maybe it means that they don’t have their driving criticised by some chauvinistic oaf. Possibly one of them might read this and enlighten me.

I hope that they do, because I would love to know. Whilst I’ll never find out what the story behind Mr & Mrs Volvo was, my natural curiosity is aroused and do I like to learn something new every day.