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does your meeting space facilitate good decisions
Meetings are a fact of modern business life; they are one of the catalysts that help move business forward by getting people together sparking ideas, planning strategy and similar dynamic activity, or at least they should be, but all too often they are nothing more than a waste of everyone’s time.
Some of the reasons for meetings failing are in poor planning, preparation, chairing and team issues, but what I want to look at here is the room itself because that is something that facilities teams can influence and make a bigger contribution to business success that we might realise.
Often meeting space is fitted in around the office as best as we can rather than consciously designed and I’ve seen some horrors over the years. As an example, let me first set the scene: We were bidding to win the outsourcing of a service for an international business. On offer was a 3 year deal with options for extension, but the basic contract was worth around £5m. We were invited to present for 40 minutes plus 20 for questions, told we could bring 4 people and use an SVGA presenter. All pretty standard for such a session and we turned up prepared and rehearsed.
We were taken up to the room on an upper floor and on the corner of the building. As the door opened we could see that it was long and narrow. Three tables were end to end down the middle with 6 chairs either side and one at each end, and 11 of these were occupied. The door was in one of the short walls and one long wall and short wall opposite the door were windows through which the low winter sun streamed.
So basic maths will show that there weren’t enough seats, and common sense will tell you that we couldn’t project onto the door with any degree of success and to project on to the one possible wall meant that half the people would have to turn around and, in any case, the sunlight would wash out the slides.
As Bid Director I had covered for not being able to run the presentation; it’s always a risk, so you prepare for it. I’m also used to standing to present, so standing against the door for the hour that we were there was not really an issue even if it was unusual. As for the outcome, well, we got into the final two, so we did OK in difficult circumstances, but what was the point in making use of such a room for the buying team? The people facing the windows were covering their eyes a lot of the time to avoid being blinded and the solar gain was making the room like a sweatbox. We were only there for an hour, but they had five presentations to sit through and debate on, and I would question the quality of the decision making under such conditions of discomfort.
This is an extreme case, but I’ve encountered poor facilities in many offices and hotels that I have visited over the years. The point is that meetings are about human interaction, so having the right sort of space for people to interact in is crucial to making meetings successful. As FMs we can look at providing spaces that can be used flexibly and provide an environment in which people can be productive and contribute.
Decent meeting space is an investment, but it costs about the same to do it right as to do it wrong, so it’s well worth looking at if you can.
Showing courage when the chips are down delivers trust
Engendering the trust of your people is crucial to leadership and, without it, they will not follow for long, but it is also a key factor for those that the leader will be answerable to, for most business leaders are, themselves, answerable to a board, shareholder and investors amongst others. Each of these groups will have different agendas and serving each requires a division of loyalty that, in turn, is an area where many leaders fail.
What you need to be able to do is to do what is right. That is what is right to achieve the objective that you are expected to deliver.
Your people will have had this explained to them as you have sold them on what they need to do and when they need to do it by. You will have explained the importance of that deliverable and, if you have done your job well enough, they will have bought into it. They will trust you to be right but, more importantly, they will trust you to protect them from interference in their efforts to succeed.
Every business will have a way of working that may not be something that a functional or divisional leader can influence. We tend to call these things office politics and they are a fact of life for most of us. Now a leader needs to be on top of these things and be able to ensure that they are able to fight their team’s corner, but this is something that not all leaders are good at.
It is so easy to lose sight of what is right for the organisation when office politics come into play. Good leaders know when to fight these battles and when not to. They know what their priorities are and how to juggle these against their resources. They know what they have to do when things get tough; to make the right call every time.
There will be times when they have to go to their people and explain that the rules have changed and what was the goal is no longer so. They understand that they need to be truthful with their people because that is what will retain their trust.
Equally, those above the leader will need to trust the person that they have placed in a position of responsibility. There will be times when they have their own hard decisions to take and require the leaders of their businesses to deliver. This is another potential pitfall for the leader; when pressed to deliver something from above that could threaten their people, how do they call it?
Take someone with a long term project to deliver, but who is then faced with a requirement to cut headcount. This is a time for hard truths: You have to be able to look at the overall position and make the right call. Now that might be to accept the cuts, knowing that it will mean failing your project objectives, but in the knowledge that there is no other way that will work for the business. In that case there will be a hard sell to your team, but explaining the what and why and making sure that people understand is the right thing to do.
On the other hand you might dig your heels in and fight to show that there is another way to those above you. This might be a personal risk, but it is a better risk to go with what is right than to fold when to do so is wrong.
Showing courage when the chips are down delivers trust.
How resilient is your supply chain? It’s only as good as its people.
Supply chain resilience is a bit of a favourite theme for me. Being Swindon based I am very conscious of our local car plant where we turn out fine Honda models for folks to enjoy. Now Honda suffered with events in Japan a while back and short term working was a fact of life, not just at the plant, but for the sub component suppliers, logistics businesses and several others locally who feed to lines.
Recently things were looking brighter and, with a new model due out, Honda went back on to an 11 day fortnight to catch up and that pulled the supply chain along with them. All looked bright, but then another tsunami rolled across the Pacific waters and the resulting flooding in Thailand knocked out the supply of electronic components. Last week was down three day working instead of six, and next week looks like three half days instead of five full ones.
I bang on here about it being the people that count in business because, bottom line, without people nothing much will happen. Now most of the people affected by the events at Honda are on some form of flexible working package that helps to smooth out these sorts of fluctuations and so there is some resilience even if it does lead to an element of disgruntlement; catch up often means working for no extra pay (or that is how it is perceived) and the disruption to families can be considerable.
But there is also an element of these working groups that is sourced from the agency pool. Here there is a different impact in that no work means no pay. Now if you have some agency people trained up and working effectively to contribute their part of the supply chain, telling them that they are only wanted for three half days next week is a hard hit and, if they can get five days somewhere else, they are going to take it. And you might not get them back.
When we are making purchasing decisions on the companies that we will engage as part of our supply chains we look at all sorts of factors to determine their resilience; financial, technology, physical resource, quality, process, standards, the list goes on, but the crucial part of holding things together often rests with a small group of people who turn in and ply their trade as a form of mercenary band. Labour for hire, sometimes of questionable quality, but there is a hard core of grafters in any town and these are the backbone of the local labour pool.
It is often on these small groups that the real resilience of a supply chain will hang. Management and process are all very well as is investment in plant and facilities, but if you can’t keep a good team of people together you will have a problem. Sure you can plug the gap with other bodies, but it is experience on the job that glues everything together. Getting someone new up to speed takes time and effort. Just throwing bodies at a problem rarely solves it.
So next time that you are looking at the strategic supply chain, take the trouble to walk the floor of your supply partners and look at the people. Take the time to talk to some of the recruitment agencies about the local labour market. Find out where that supplier sits in the local pecking order of employers. Do they get the best or the dregs?
Because at the end of the day it is the people that matter: Never forget that.
Things That Go Bump In The Night – part three
In crisis or incident management there is a lot that can go wrong. One outfit that I worked for had a crisis management manual that was spilling over into a third 4 inch thick ring binder. Yes it was well researched and worked well for desktop exercises, but how are you going to work with that when you are stuck out in the car park in the wet and the wind trying to sort out which page you need?
One of the big problems with thinking about what disaster might befall you is that you go down the input specification route; you plan for all sorts of things that might happen when many of them have the same two or three results and they are that you can’t use all or part of the site, or all or part of its services.
My contention is that it doesn’t matter that much why you have the problem. That just gives you a clue as to how long you have the problem for, for example if you have a gas leak outside the site and you can’t get in (or get evacuated) you can’t use the building for a few hours, but if you have a fire it will be a few days disruption to, possibly, having to move to new premises. In both cases it is the loss of use that needs priority.
All of the functional groups within the building will have their own continuity plans and the FM team need to be aware of these and support as necessary, but it is the FM team that will take most of the early actions in managing the incident.
In these pages you’ll find stories of some of the major incidents that I’ve been involved with. In The Day The Town Stood Still it was a pretty routine day when something came up, and that then escalated to a point where the improbable coincidence of a second problem brought us close to the edge of a disaster. If the team at the second site had not been effective in dealing with the flash fire, the gridlock caused by the first problem preventing the Fire Brigade from getting through might have seen us lose a building. There is a very fine line between OK and Oh S**t! sometimes.
Does fortune play a part? Maybe it does; there are times when timing or nature will be on your side, but mostly it is thinking, training and practice that will make the difference. If you’ve thought things through, planned and prepared through getting people trained and have drilled them then most of the risks are mitigated or reduced.
But to finish off this series with a final foul up, I’ll tell you about the one that really got me into FM. At the time I headed up the Operational side of a logistics business and the property maintenance team worked for HR. We had a problem with the flashing that covered the join between the wall and roof of the warehouse above the goods inwards doors and a decent repair was budgeted for.
I arrived one morning to find a queue of lorries outside. The cause was obvious; scaffolding completely blocked access to goods in and our operations were paralysed. It cost us dearly, but was easy to put right. The cause was poor communication; no-one had bothered to consider that we needed to work through the repairs. Facilities came under my control from then on so that there would be no more such incidents. and led to me making the move to FM myself.
Computers & automation can help get things done, but who programs the machines? It’s us, the people
At the moment am working on a supply chain project for a client supplying into a just in time manufacturing business looking at the various processes supporting the supply of components and sub assemblies work well enough for the lines to keep running.
Delving into these though there is the one factor that, however good or bad the process, the whole thing depends on and that is the human element.
In many ways what you have is more of a chain mail that a chain of single links, but there are points at which the whole thing holds or fails on a single link and one challenge that you have is to assess the risks. These things are a balancing act and the amount of engineering redundancy you build in is a cost so you make the appropriate decisions on whether or not you go for eliminating the risk or just mitigating it.
One of the things that I enjoy about these sorts of projects is that they are a microcosm of business in general, but they are quite easily modelled and fiddled around with. You can accurately predict things such as the effect of failure. You may not be able to eliminate the risk of the occurrence, but early warning of the problem might be enough to avoid the worst consequences.
Automation and robotics take away some of the issues of human frailty in these chains and computer simulation will help the decision making process: It becomes easy to make decisions when the magic box has worked out all of the possible permutations and told you what your three best options are complete with all the consequences of each. All you have to do is to chose one and do what it suggests.
This is all very well, but one of the key skills in managing, as well as in leadership, is in making good decisions. It may well be the best thing in some circumstances to have the machine give you options, and even to evaluate them for you, but there are many times when you will not have such support and so to come to the right decision in those times.
So to have your own decision making process is a vital tool for your skill set. It isn’t that hard to make a decision if you have a system that works for you, but the basics have to be a pragmatic approach to the facts as they are know and an ability to understand what the consequences of the choices you have will be.
Taking a calm approach and working with what you know, and what you can find out within the time available, will almost always lead you down the right path. It is, in essence, what the computer is doing when it models options in a supply chain sense. Sure it can do a lot more and much more quickly, but the only experience it can apply is within the algorithms that it has been programmed with, and they came from people.
It is us, the people, who gain the experience that we can apply to decision making, whether that is in making the decisions ourselves or explaining to the computer software how to examine them. Automation has made enormous strides in delivering consistent standards and reducing costs, but it all has come about from people.
People with ideas and leaders with vision do guide the way, but there are all those people who turn up and just make it all happen. These are the unsung heroes who really good leaders acknowledge and cherish.
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.
First impressions count, but you can’t judge a book by its cover
Two very conflicting statements, but both are encountered pretty much daily in business, so which is true?
We talk a lot about the first 10 seconds, the 30 second elevator pitch, the 6 word pitch and we micro blog in under 140 characters. We talk in sound bites and all know people who have the attention span of a gnat. Novelists have to grab their readers with a killer opening sentence or the book will go back on the shelf. A lot of things have that immediacy these days, so there is a lot to being able to grab attention.
Being able to do this is a good discipline anyway; to be able to scope a project or business plan on one side of A4 means that you have thought it out and, probably, have it right. To be able to put a point across in three or four sentences in a meeting is effective and saves everyone time. If you can cut to the chase and avoid all of the peripheral, often irrelevant, issues it is a great business skill and well worth practising.
I am a great fan of the three minute presentation as a discipline. To be able to report on your work area’s KPIs, to update on project progress, run through your plans for the next month or whatever in 180 seconds makes you focus on the important points. It also steers you away from bogging down with the worst excesses of visual aids and presentation tools. A three minute presentation is also easier to learn by heart, or maybe with just a few crib notes, and so it provides a great way of improving your skills at talking on your feet.
Making the right first impression may well get you hired for that job or win your company that piece of business, and there are a lot of sources of help geared to pointing you in the right direction. From the view point of the person selling, whether it is themselves a product or a service, I always recommend trying to master the approach.
But when you are the person hiring or buying, why are you allowing yourself to be so shallow? Why are you risking your business (and your reputation) on what can only be a kneejerk reaction? Let’s face it, would you really want to hire someone who made important business decisions without thinking things through? Sure experience helps you reach decisions quickly, and there are times when you need to make a snap decision, but are we really willing to accept that decisions are routinely made on gut reactions?
Yes, you can judge a book by its cover, but to do so is to run the risk of missing out on a gem, hence the adage being that you can’t. Perhaps it should really be that you shouldn’t, but my point is that, when you are making a choice, you should make as thorough as possible evaluation of your choices to give yourself the best chance of reaching the right decision.
My buying background influences that thinking, but so does my general management experience, the number of industrial accidents I have investigated, the number of disciplinary cases I have examined, the strategic and tactical plans I have evaluated let alone the hundreds of prospective employees or promotees I have interviewed and assessed.
Of course we have to sift, but the later stages of evaluating anything or anyone should be thorough. Making snap decisions at that stage makes very little sense, and I suggest that those that do are taking an unnecessary risk.
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?
On the anniversary of 9/11, an awful piece of emergency management
This morning I went out to do my usual Sunday morning shop for the week at one of the major chains local emporium. They have adopted the civilised approach of opening the door at 0930 even though the ludicrous Sunday trading laws mean that they can’t serve you before 1000, so I can, at least, wander round filling my cart and be back home at a reasonable hour to get on with my day.
I was accompanied as usual by a companion who, like me, is a veteran of managing large establishments and running countless emergency evacuations of such places, and so when a bell sounded a couple of times and an alarm started up we resignedly began the journey from half way round the store towards the exit: We know the signs, especially when my companion was literally shoulder charged by one of the store employees running towards the store room and bakery area.
Sure enough the public address burst into life and a message asking everyone to leave the store began, but then an extraordinary thing happened. From the Staff Only area that the lady who had bounced off my companion had vanished into, employees began to emerge shouting “There’s a fire, get out!” and running, yes running, towards the exit.
My companion and I were making a calm departure having abandoned our shopping carts at the side of an aisle out of the way and the other shoppers were also leaving in an orderly fashion, but not the employees, they were weaving and bobbing as they rushed to get out and the “There’s a fire, get out” was heard several times from more than one of them as they rushed past us.
It was truly one of the most extraordinary scenes I have witnessed at an emergency evacuation. I have been in some tight corners over the years, some of which you’ve read about here, but this morning I felt genuine fear. Thank goodness there was not a panic amongst the shoppers, especially as we got near the narrows of the exit. My companion was not too steady having had a fall at home the night before and, large as I am, I’m not too sure that I could have shielded them adequately in a stampede.
Fortunately we, and everyone else, got out OK, but I am writing to the company concerned with some observations. Given our experience of these things we did not hang around for the aftermath, but decanted to a rival store up the road where I may start to shop in future on the basis that I might be safer.
The other observation I will make is that, having assembled the store team in the centre of the car park two of the supervisory team, presumably having completed the roll call, appeared to realise that the main entrance had been left open and, seemingly, unguarded for about three minutes. They then both began to run back to the entrance. Why run through a car park with some, like me beginning to drive out and others still driving in unaware of the drama? Why run anywhere at all?
Whether there was a fire or not is not important, what matters is that an emergency evacuation should be carried out in a calm and controlled manner and this one was not, it was almost a “How Not To” demonstration.
All in all it was a shameful performance. I would love to do a debrief using the CCTV footage (assuming they have it) and to try and help improve. I’m still having problems believing it happened.
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