5 Facility Management trends that will be defining facility services in 2021
With COVID-19 dictating most of the new Facility Management trends in 2021, there are also other themes that are hot: consumerism and the employee experience.
These are the five Facility Management Trends and Innovations of 2021:
1. Work is where your home is
For the majority of office workers, the dining room table has become their office. The line between work and home has become thin as thread.
For many, a healthy work/life balance is inherently difficult working from home. Not only are we missing the natural breaks chitchat and direct interaction with colleagues bring, we’re also forgetting to switch off from work at the end of the day.
The inherent risk to employee health—both physical and mental—is huge. The million-dollar question here is: how can you support employees in their day-to-day work needs and create an impactful workplace that keeps everyone happy DIGITALLY?
2. Consumerism is driving service standards
Intelligent mobile-first solutions that have impacted our home life are set to impact our work life too. We have become totally used to the fact that the world has entered our homes on our mobile.
Now that we’re using immediately accessible services for everything we do at home, we’re expecting the same when we interact with the office. A workplace has become a place where employees are onboarded, work, learn, socialize, share ideas and move on. It has matured to an all-embracing experience that is best supported by an omni-channel, digital platform.
Wherever employees choose to work, workplace services should be available to employees in a way that is easiest for them.
3. Facility management becomes a workplace service
Facility is fast moving way beyond just simply booking a desk or meeting room or reporting a broken projector or a light bulb that needs to be replaced. It’s about being able to see whether I can be in the office tomorrow and knowing if my colleague will be there.
Can I plan a meeting in a room that allows me to keep the necessary distance or should I plan a digital meeting via Zoom?
Office space needs to be redefined to offer the levels of safety required to welcome back the workforce— both in terms of actual space as well as levels of hygiene. And facility is increasingly about finding answers to workplace related issues.
Wherever your workplace is: at home, in the office or on the road. People will be turning to facility to find the services and solutions they need to conduct their daily work.
4. Going from reactive to preventive facility management
The working from home imperative has once and for all done away with the myth that distributed working has a negative effect on business performance.
With it, the hierarchical curve has been flattened. Importantly, working from home has made the employee experience paramount, in the realization that output can only be boosted if job satisfaction is maximized.
Instead of a transactional management style (you shall do this by that point in time) organizations will have to move to a transformational style (what is it that you need to be able to carry out your work to your best ability?).
5. Employee experience is the key to employee satisfaction
There are many more areas where the pandemic is forcing us to look beyond simply going digital and consider workplace related needs from the employee experience point of view.
For instance:
- Going touchless – Hygiene in the office is top of mind for facility.
Already, there are many technologies available to make entering a building or getting a cup of coffee in the coffee corner, where needed, secure and safe hands-free experiences.Smartphone capabilities, QR code generation options and nearfield communication (NFC) for scanning badges will make touchless the safe and also, from a user pointof-view, the easiest option.
- User interface
Going digital is one, but can you expect an employee to feel comfortable using logins, passwords or two-factor authentication when he just needs to go in and fix the toilet? What this boils down to is that digital brings many benefits but will fall short if the user is not top of mind in every design stage.You can even compare user interface with a joke: if you have to explain it, it’s not good enough.It is here also that the name of the game has changed and that the employer has to learn to speak the language of the employee. If he fails to do so, the employee will find it impossible to navigate through a jungle of things he doesn’t understand. Inevitably, this leads to a poor employee experience.
Join 1400+ ServiceNow professionals
Sign up to our monthly Flow@Work Exclusive newsletter to get free access to our expertise and lots of tips and tricks to make work flow on the Now® Platform.
Jeffrey Bos