Encompass Insights

Facility maintenance costs are hefty, so finding savings anywhere possible, can mean more budgetary room for other essential areas.

One of the best ways to cut costs is to incentivize outsourced vendors to help you reach your savings goals. By using performance-based contracting and contract incentives, you can easily get vendors on board with saving you money.

If you’re hiring someone to manage your facilities, it’s incredibly important that they have and adhere to a formal facility maintenance plan.

Why is this so important?

Well, according to the Whole Building Design Guide Program (WBDG) of the National Institute of Building Sciences, “it is now widely recognized that Operation and Maintenance (O&M) represents the greatest expense in owning and operating a facility over its life cycle.” 

Your team is an integral part of your overall facility maintenance program. After all, they’re the ones you rely on to carry out day-to-day operations and ensure everything is up to snuff.

So how do you build a reliable team of facility maintenance supervisors? Here are some tactics we’ve found effective.

We spend a lot of time indoors, which means indoor air quality is paramount. So how do we recognize and eliminate pollution sources and create a facility maintenance indoor air policy?

Here are some ways to move from foul air to fresh air.

Image via Elephant Journal

Saving money is nice. We all wish we could get our costs down and give our budget a little more wiggle room. But what are you willing to sacrifice in order to get there?

Although low bids can be tempting, they can be costly in the long run. In fact, hiring the vendor with the lowest bid can mean ongoing problems after the project is complete, leading to significantly higher lifecycle costs. 

Here are some ways you can avoid the hidden risks of the lowest bidder.

Have you ever hired an outsourced vendor based on a great proposal only to be slammed with additional costs and projects past due?

The problem could be your request for proposal (RFP).

It takes a lot of time and resources to find a vendor that’s a great fit for your organization. In order to get started on the right foot, you need to spend some quality time making sure your RFP covers all necessary bases. This way, the vendors you send it to will be crystal clear about what you expect from them, thereby building a foundation of transparency and clarity from the get go. 

Outsourced custodial services have their pros and cons. As with all outsourced services, you believe the price of a third party vendor is worth the time and effort it will save your in-house staff. But how much can outsourcing custodial services really benefit you?

If you’re not already outsourcing your custodial needs, here’s why you should start.

It’s time we all do our part. As facility management professionals, we can have a big impact on how we run our facilities and how our facilities impact the environment. That’s why sustainability as a part of facility management is so important.

We all want to conserve energy and have high-performance buildings. That’s why we need to consider sustainability in all aspects of facilities: from energy, water and waste to standards and reporting.

We all dread them: crises. They pop up at the most inopportune moments, cause stress to your employees and impact your organization’s bottom line. 

Here are some unfortunate crises that have affected facilities recently as well as how you can prepare and protect your own facility.

Company culture is becoming increasingly important in today’s workplace. An awesome culture means higher employee engagement, and higher employee engagement means a deeper commitment to your organization’s values, goals, and mission. 

But that’s not where the benefits stop. Having a great company culture also improves the customer experience. Think about it this way: if a prospective customer interacts with a happy employee, chances are that his or her positive attitude will be palpable and the prospect will be more likely to become a customer. If an employee is disgruntled, on the other hand, s/he may not be the best representative for your company and you may lose a customer.