Any business with many moving parts has a myriad of programmes, processes and priorities to manage.
In our view, the key to managing many moving parts is to align your culture and stakeholder behaviour to what your organisation is trying to achieve. You should aim to create the right parameters for employees, suppliers and supply chain to support your objectives, and for your internal and external customers to provide valuable feedback. You should also continually focus on getting, providing and evidencing value for money – to prevent costs spiralling up.
Culture and behaviour
The starting point is to ensure the culture and behaviour of your in-house estates team and supply chain align with, and display the values of your organisation. Any disconnect between what the brand represents, and the behaviour of estates staff will be obvious, and create a dissonance that may adversely impact customers and staff.
For instance, inappropriate interaction from a security guard or cleaner can create a negative first impression and skew a customer or stakeholder’s perspective of the business’s overall performance. The potential cost impact of such a situation can far outweigh the investment needed in training to ensure this does not happen in the first place.
We suggest you work with staff to explain and demonstrate the positive impact they can have for the business, and give them the tools and skills to support this. This will help build an estates team and supply chain that has the objectives, strategy, brand and service culture of your business at its heart.
Value for money
You should also review value for money. It’s worth regularly comparing the efficiency of both your in-house and supply chain partners, to the efficiency of the rest of the market. We advise you do this ideally at least every three years, to ensure you’re receiving value for money.
Questions to consider
Here are some questions for you to consider that may help manage complex functions with many stakeholders and moving parts:
- Have you invested sufficient time in communicating the business’s mission and value to internal staff and your supply chain?
- Do your service level agreements or performance metrics for all facilities staff include clear ways of working and interacting with other stakeholders?
- Are your non-facilities stakeholders encouraged to care for facilities? Are they prompted to act on simple energy saving steps? Do they know how to report maintenance issues?
- Do you keep a simple matrix of each stakeholder group, its potential concerns, how to address these concerns and how to measure your success?
- Does this cover every level from boardroom to contract workers, customers, suppliers and visitors?
- Do you benchmark the value for money you’re getting from in-house resource and supply chain partners every one to three years?
Please contact LCMB on 01295 722 823 if you would like to explore this area in more depth or use us as a sounding board. Or download Our free ultimate guide to improving business performance.