Celebrating Facilities Managers on World FM Day
This year’s World FM Day theme is ‘Celebrating FM: Standing tall beyond the pandemic’, paying tribute to the unsung Facilities Management heroes and raising awareness of the vital work that goes on behind the scenes of every successful organisation.
We are still a long way from returning to pre-COVID-19 normality, but as we do progress towards our ‘new normal’, Facilities Managers will continue to be integral in helping the UK economy recover and to help us all to get back to a more normal life and ways of working.
Standing tall beyond the pandemic
As well as making sure that buildings are ‘open for business’, Facilities Managers  are also responsible for the health, safety and well-being of employees and building visitors. Facilities Managers  also have a large influence on how efficiently employees are able to work, by providing the optimal working environment to enable them to be highly productive.
The role of a Facilities Manager is a varied one, with a wide range of responsibilities that contribute towards organisations, such as hospitals, running as smoothly as possible, which ultimately saves lives and provides critical health services.
Navigating the next normal
Our ‘Realigning to the Next Normal’ series outlines some of the key deliverables that will allow businesses to adapt to the post-COVID world and create future advantage. We reveal the trends that will impact Facilities Management and provide expert tips and guidance on how to ensure your business emerges stronger from the pandemic.
Find all of our thought leadership pieces and webinar series below.
Estate risk management
Very closely linked to estate and facilities management are the real and present challenges that top executives are wrestling with around risk management. Whilst most will or should know about the need for appropriate risk assessments and method statements, it is unlikely that the level of focus and conscious need to protect estate users has ever been so high.
Our work at Bellrock has always centred around managing and reducing estate risk. We foresee that colleagues’ perceptions of estate risk will now continually be in an elevated state. In reaction to this, we expect a number of trends to persist.
Technology & IoT
Covid-19 has presented many challenges, from rapidly designing and implementing new working practices, through managing working lives during lockdowns, and finally to implementing the new working environment.
Technology has been an important enabler during these times, so how do we continue to leverage and build upon what we have done to date?
Property as a meaning destination
With the increased potential for staff to access technology and work from home and the greater societal demand for better safety around larger gatherings, the use and design of significant parts of our estate infrastructure will need to be rethought.
Global warming and energy management: The long term priority
Whilst not linked directly to COVID, the enforced lockdown periods have made people become acutely aware that through lower fuel usage, a reduced carbon model may be more possible than they thought.
This pressure, through legislative and societal forces, will continue to grow. From an estate perspective, there was already a drive to lower energy usage, from cultural programmes to capital projects like LED replacement.
Using the IDEA model to plot your way to the #NextNormal
In order to exploit the opportunities presented by the emerging trends, the central requirement is to build and maintain excellent digital estate data and link that data to your estate activities and outcomes.
Plotting asset use, capacity, asset lifecycle and managing intelligent IoT devices remotely maximises the use of technology in improving your estate’s effectiveness.
The journey to building this picture and the stages of improvement you may expect are mapped out within our Integrated Digital Estate Assets (IDEA) model.
