Improving Business Performance through Estates Management

Part 4: Take Action

If you’ve been following our guide serialisation, (and downloaded our guide), we’ve covered a lot of ground together over the past months. Here’s a summary action plan distilled into five main action areas:

1. Get an insight into how you’re doing

• Start by getting the most honest 360 degree appraisal of how your buildings perform and support your business.

Seek feedback from your customers, staff, peers and management, your supply chain and any other key stakeholders. This will identify your strengths, weaknesses and priorities.

• Map this feedback to what you need to do to deliver your business strategy and build your competitive advantage. This will highlight the areas where the biggest change and impacts can be effected, which in turn will identify how you can improve the way your business runs and your return on investment.

2. Identify further areas for improvement

• Benchmark your performance against competitors and non- competitor organisations to identify where you can improve and capture fresh ideas to further improve what you do.

3. Create a plan

• The next step is to analyse in detail the results of your internal and external reviews, to identify where you can deliver the fastest and best results. Money from low priority areas can be redirected to support these areas to deliver better value for your business from your estate budget.

• You’ll also be able to undertake a quick skills and capability review of your team and supply chain to identify whether you need any additional resource to support your approach.

4. Raise your game

• You will deliver the biggest improvement through your teams and supply chains over time by compounding the small improvements. Aim to do a little better and a little more. Think of ways to communicate how your estate and buildings and the services they supply will support the performance you’re trying to deliver. Buildings set the initial tone, but the long-term performance depends on how people interact with the maintenance staff, cleaners, security and other staff who keep your customer-facing facilities humming on a day-to-day basis.

• Think about how you communicate what you want people to achieve, and continually reinforce it.

• Track what you’re spending and the value for money you’re delivering from your building related spending.

5. Focus on creating sustainable competitive advantage

• Identify what data you have available in the organisation and which elements of this data you need to track over time. The aim is to convert data into intelligence that provides insight on how your performance is improving. Identify new data you need to start tracking to support the performance improvement you want to drive. Communicate this data transparently with staff to reinforce the performance messages.

• Plan what you’re going to do, do it, measure the impact of your actions, re-plan and repeat. Re-examine what you’re doing, on at least an annual basis, to check if your plan is has been superseded by change and needs updating.

For further information on how to improve the performance of your organisation and real estate download our ultimate guides for businesses, and higher education organisations.

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