Good facilities and IT boost employee happiness and productivity

Photo by Ryk Neethling via flickr.com

When it comes to worker morale, the place where they work might matter more than just more money or other factors, according to a survey of office workers in the UK. Read the full story on at FMJ.co.uk. See an excerpt below. 

New research has found that temperature, lighting, noise and quality of IT facilities can affect the happiness and productivity of office workers.

The research* from a UK-based engineering, IT and facilities services firm sought to identify which factors most affect well-being and productivity in the workplace. It found that more than half (59%) of respondents felt that noise, lighting and temperature are key for their happiness in the workplace. In comparison, about a third (31%) believed that the right hardware, software and networking drove satisfaction in the office.

When it comes to productivity, however, over half (53%) of respondents believed having a good IT set-up is crucial, compared to over a third (35%) who thought that having the right bricks and mortar provisions is most important.

Read the full article on Facilities Maintenance Journal. 

How Recycling System Reduced Water Use by 25 Million Gallons at the University of Alabama-Birmingham

Listen to or read the questions and answers from Matt Winslet, of the University of Alabama-Birmingham as he talks about their water recycling system that saved the university 25 million gallons a year. Green cleaning in action! Read the excerpt below from Facilitiesnet.com

Water Ripples, photo by Macky Franklin, via flickr.com

1. Briefly describe how the water recycling system works, and how the school uses the water that's collected.

UAB has three centralized chilled water plants with machines capable of 38,000 tons of cooling. Serving 47 campus and hospital buildings we use a lot of water in our cooling towers during the evaporative and blow-down process.

As condensate water is gravity-drained from air handler chilled water coils, it is intercepted and collected in small basins positioned locally at each air handler. Each local basin has a small level-controlled sump-pump sized to transfer collected water to a larger 500-gallon collection tank. The 500-gallon collection tank contains level controls that pump high-pressure, filtered condensate into the chilled-water return-line before it leaves the building. This rise in pressure is sensed blocks away at the central plant and water is relieved from the chilled water return line into the cooling tower. This in turn reduces makeup water required during the evaporative cooling process. Note that if either the small basin sump pump, high pressure return pump, or central plant tower relief valve fails, the water exits down the drain in the building as it has for many years. The system works very well with ground water sources too.

Read the full article on Facilitiesnet.com

Managers Discuss Sustainability Efforts

Sustainability Building by Hietsun Photography via flickr.com

Facility Maintenance Decisions hosted a round-table with building and grounds managers across the country on the topic of sustainability. SkyPro prioritizes being clean n' green with our window cleaning systems, so we wanted to hear what decisions real managers make to tackle these issues. Read more on Facilities.net, and check out the excerpt below. 

Devaney: [...] I once asked a group during a staff development training session, “What does sustainability mean to you?” So many related it to recycling. I was a bit surprised at that. So for the next hour we discussed sustainable initiatives. Recycling is much more than paper. We recycle lamps, batteries, engine oil, carpet, construction building materials, furniture, equipment, vehicles, to name a few. There is a sustainability policy associated with every department, from construction and design, procurement services, facilities, landscape and grounds, on through the academic programs. Planet, people and prosperity; relate one of the three, or all, in every business decision made, and you have a successful sustainable program.

Read the whole discussion on Facilities.net.

What You Don’t Measure You Don’t Manage: Taking the Guess Work Out of FM Performance

This is an excerpt from a Facilities Management Journal article.

At a recent breakfast briefing held at the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) HQ to discuss the benefits of benchmarking FM performance, the very clear message from the speakers was “What you don’t measure you don’t Manage”.

According to the event speakers, the implication of neglecting to measure, is, at best, that you are not in a position to outline ways of improving your performance, at worst, your decision is a guess which can simply end up costing your organization more money.

Whether you are using in-house or a third party FM provider, the need to benchmark remains the same. It allows you to identify the value for Money you receive from your FM provider or to develop the business case to make any internal investment.

During the event all the speakers had a variation on the same message, to drive up standards and drive out inefficiencies you had to first know your current status, which means measure how you are currently performing. This also allows you to identify your objectives and formulate your strategy for delivering on your objectives.

The full article is available at fmjdata.com.

Start as You Mean to Go On

This is an excerpt from an article in the Facilities Management Journal.

No one has a better understanding how a building operates in its day-to-day life than the facilities manager (FM). The responsibility for even the smallest of operational elements results in a much greater understanding of economy, aesthetic and efficiency and how all of these impact on the end user. Now, with the advent of Building Information Modeling (BIM), the role of the FM in the design process is expected to increase.

BIM is a completely different approach to designing buildings. It analyses a building’s efficiency at all stages of the life cycle, treating it as a holistic entity. As such, different aspects can be added, changed or removed to alter performance levels before work even begins. This step change in every aspect of building design has meant a review of processes of how decisions are made and the people involved in making them.

Alongside this development, a recent report from Building Research Establishment (BRE) and the British Institute of Facilities Management (BIFM) looked at the results of a three-year study to increase the role and profile of FMs both in their organizations and relationships with other sector or industry professionals. One of the most interesting aspects, from the point of view of a partitioning company like Komfort is the setting out of the multiple benefits of involving FMs within initial design consultations and the common reasons they’re excluded from design processes.

The full article is available on the Facilities Management Journal website.