Whether you are a seasoned business owner or looking to improve your ranks within a company, becoming in charge of a corporation’s day-to-day workings involves education, experience, and practice. When it comes to implementing new methods and technologies in the workplace, new things aren’t always embraced.
However, there are certain tips you can use to ensure your company and your employees are receptive to changing the daily workings of your business. By altering the everyday running and performance of your business, you can improve your company’s effectiveness, productivity, and safety.
Best practices for facility services and operational management
Reduce operations costs
One of the first ways you can help your facility services and operational management reach new levels is by reducing the total operational costs of your business.
- Turn off lighting at night – depending on how your site is maintained, you can create an eco-mode for your business that reduces the brightness and number of lights turned on overnight. Make sure that you keep lighting by the entrances, but reduce any unnecessary lights from burning electricity during the nighttime.
- Replaced older lights with LEDs – using LEDs reduces power consumption and looks nicer.
- Implement a sustainable design – help your facility services and operational management practices by creating a sustainable and affordable design for your business. Not to mention, eco-friendly practices put your company in good standings with the public.
- Know the total cost of facility work – being aware of your business’s total expenses makes sure you are on top of the overhead costs and the complexities of running a company.
- Inspect energy use to reduce operations costs, improve your facility services and operational management procedures, and focus on energy-related projects to provide the building with a more eco-friendly nature.
- Inspect the building insulation – all buildings contain some type of insulation. However, some buildings are not built according to code, whereas others have a strict county rule to adhere to when insulating their building. Making sure your building has enough insulation can affect your overall budget, since higher insulation means a more efficient heating and cooling system.
- Find the right suppliers for facility work – you can improve your facility services and operational management by finding suitable suppliers, whether it is maintenance suppliers or contractors who can provide clear, quick, and tangible products.
- Schedule a professional energy audit – one way to reduce costs and wasted energy is to run an energy audit, which automatically identifies and provides opportunities to reduce energy use in a commercial facility by decreasing operational costs. Determining the areas and systems to include in the audit typically focuses on the complexity of the face, the detail of the building, and the level of analysis of the audit.
- Identify efficiencies in your kitchen energy usage – commercial kitchens are energy zappers. These spaces use around 2.5x more energy than any other commercial space, so finding the technology to help prevent energy consumption and carbon footprint is crucial to lowering your overall energy costs.
- Look at the lifecycle of your building – lifecycle costs are a great way to measure the infrastructure and control the facility services and operational management costs of your building.
Maintenance tips
- Measure your maintenance activities – to reduce management operational costs, you need to analyze your performance measures to see how your afternoon work compares to your morning work.
- Set a plan – preventative maintenance is about planning. Every piece of equipment should have a list of required maintenance procedures and how much it will cost when it comes time to fix the problem.
- Focus on failure models – failure models tell us how a piece of machinery fails. By recognizing our downfalls, we can work on our facility services and management operation to see where we can improve our efficiency.
- Do a walkthrough to identify issues – catch small problems in your business before they spiral into bigger ones. Analyzing small details can eventually lead to considerable improvements in your investment return, such as fixing doors, corners, and light switches.
- Know the different kinds of maintenance – when keeping your business in check, there are three different types of maintenance: reactive, preventative, and predictive. Make sure you stay current with predictive maintenance to help spot problems before they happen and keep your technology working at a proficient level.
- Work time vs. idle time – make sure you keep an eye on how often a machine is idling versus how often it is working. If you schedule maintenance for a machine that is idle for 15% of the time, it may be serviced more frequently than actually necessary. Reducing any unnecessary fixes can help your facility services and operational management.
- Benefit your equipment – make sure the maintenance tasks are beneficial to the equipment you are servicing.
Management and communication tips
- Use different modes of communicating – find out what works for individuals and stick to that communication Since your employees are often bombarded with emails, texts, and stimuli at work, you need to sometimes repeat yourself to be heard during the chaos of the workday.
- Optimize available space – if you are wasting space, you are wasting effort, time, and money. Make sure you have flexible workstations that can be mobilized around the office, utilizing the entire office space and preventing any dead areas that are zapping your profit.
- Set clear definitions – everyone needs to be told how to do something and what is allowed. If you don’t set rules for the workplace to define work practices and behavior conduct, your employees will not be as efficient as they could be.
- Plan for social time – setting aside time for get-togethers and social events is a great way to de-stress and build a better relationship with your co-workers and subordinates.
Conclusion
By reading our tips for how to better your facility services and operational management, you can make sure your business is running as efficiently and safely as possible. Learning how to improve your company in terms of reducing operation costs, maintaining a high-functioning atmosphere, and increasing communication can all aid in producing a more effective business strategy.