Are facilities managers happy? Here's the research your boss needs to read.
The latest close up study of the challenges facing UK facility management makes grim reading for many businesses. But do you recognise the picture it paints of conditions in the industry?
This year, Watco published some shocking ‘state of the nation’ research about life inside Facilities Management teams in the UK.
Here are the highlights - or, more accurately, the low lights:
Are facilities managers happy?
Not right now - but there is hope for a stress-free future if businesses can make the change.
Workload and stress:
- 41% of facilities managers reported an increased workload in the past year.
- 37% regularly feel overworked, and 38% often feel stressed due to their workload.
- Almost 40% of facilities managers think about leaving their role due to workload stress.
Talent and retention:
- A third (32%) of facilities managers are considering moving jobs due to workload and stress.
- Over a third (34%) believe there aren't enough young people entering the sector, and a similar number worry about the skills shortage in the industry.
Repairs and maintenance:
- 60% of facilities managers have had their budgets cut by up to 25%, and 20% have seen budget cuts of 26-50%.
- Less than a quarter (23%) of facilities managers have been able to carry out proactive repair and maintenance jobs in the last year.
- 28% of facilities managers regularly go over budget on urgent repair work to remove hazards.
- More than 80% of facilities managers were unsure how many days of downtime their facility experienced per year due to maintenance work.
Health and safety concerns:
- Only 34% of facilities managers undertake a thorough site audit or risk assessment at least once a year.
- Over a third (36%) reported accidents or near-misses caused by materials handling equipment, increasing to 43% in warehouse and storage sectors and 40% in production and manufacturing sectors.
- Slips, trips, and falls accounted for 32% of non-fatal workplace injuries in 2022/23.
What to make of the Watco report.
Burnout is real!
Businesses shouldn't have to run their FM teams into the ground to get results - but right now that seems to be what’s happening.
And we see it all the time, too, with hard working managers taking on huge amounts of responsibility.
But the FM industry shouldn’t have to rely on superheroes. You know the type. Those individuals in the FM teams who know how everything works - with a Roladex of contacts in their brain and favours to call in. They might be an asset to a business, but they can be a liability.
The kind of estates businesses run now are too complicated for that. There’s no way that approach will work with the range of contractors they have to organise and deal with.
We need a new era of collaboration to ensure workloads are sustainable and life/work balance is a reality.
Overwork is avoidable
A major finding is that focusing on reactive maintenance is time-consuming, expensive and mostly unnecessary. Annual site audits and risk assessments are rare, so issues are often not picked up on. A lack of process seems to be contributing to avoidable workplace accidents. Money is being spent correcting and removing hazards rather than preventing them from cropping up in the first place.
Someone needs to give the C-Suite the message about preventive maintenance and strategic asset management.
A lack of data is holding businesses back
80% of FMs can’t see the amount of downtime they’ve lost in the last year due to maintenance! And that’s not the worst of it. We know that FM teams struggle to access data and turn it into actionable insight in so many ways.
But there’s no hope of accessing this data without having the digital tools in place to do so.
Where are all the young people?
FM is a rewarding career, but young people leaving school and university have got high expectations when it comes to working conditions. Millennials and Gen Z should be in the FM world, bringing their digital and problem solving skills to bear on problems of organisation and resource management.
To help recruit and retain, we should be training them and upskilling them - but in return, we need to give them the digital tools they need to do their jobs.
In the age of AI, VR, and Digital Twinning, imagine the disappointment of being given an email account, a link to a load of spreadsheets, and told to ‘get on with it'.
Budgets are being cut - but it’s a false economy
The research shows that while H&S is a number one concern for many FMs, they lack the time and resource to keep on top of it - and a thousand other tasks.
But cutting FM budgets won’t help things get better.
Instead, it’s time businesses did some adding up. It’s time they calculated how much investment in FM software will cost them to increase productivity versus the potential loss of staff and compliance risk.
Accidents in the workplace and dipping staff morale are the canaries in the coal mine - the indicators that something has to change.
This research reflects that reality.
