While your FM professionals are experts in keeping your facilities operating, they may not have access to ongoing training to keep pace with new technologies and approaches that could help improve facilities performance, reduce cost and risk, and benefit patients. In addition, learning and career development opportunities can make a difference in FM talent retention and recruitment.

Upskilling is especially important when it comes to preventative maintenance strategies. Preventative, or reliability-focused, maintenance can reduce unplanned equipment failures by 17%, in turn reducing energy and maintenance costs by as much as 30%. Unlike calendar-based maintenance, preventative maintenance involves using sophisticated technologies to monitor refrigerators, imaging machines and other equipment so the FM team can prevent costly emergency repairs and replacements.

In highly decentralized FM operations, a training program can help instill system-wide standards for operations, service delivery and facility quality to provide a consistent brand experience for patients.

Investing in FM technologies and training staff to embrace them will enable you to leverage your facilities data to improve building operations and optimize the ROI of your FM technology.

Where facilities compliance is concerned, leading practice is to always be prepared for a visit from The Joint Commission or other accrediting or regulatory authority. However, it’s far more likely that compliance and accreditation preparation is a time-limited initiative. When the inspection date approaches, the FM team will focus on remediating items most likely to receive attention, while also juggling daily service requests.

Meanwhile, documentation of compliance activities is often available only in large paper binders, perhaps maintained by a single building engineer. Should that person retire or move to another organization, responding to regulatory inquiries will be very difficult and time-consuming.

Leading practice is to adopt always-on compliance and digitized compliance documentation that is accessible on a mobile device by authorized users. Ideally, the FM team will make regular rounds of key equipment and facility areas and maintain an always-current digital record of compliance-related checks. With the right tools and training, preparing for inspection authorities can simply become part of the daily routine for the FM staff.

Contrary to popular perceptions, optimizing FM performance doesn’t have to mean outsourcing or reducing your team—it means empowering your FM professionals to perform at their best. Through performance optimization, you may be surprised at how much your FM team can accomplish—and how much you can potentially save. Pinpointing $1 million in facilities operating expenditures could translate into $33 million in additional revenue. Those savings can be redirected to nurse recruitment, patient care or to investments in FM solutions that lead to further savings, more productive facilities and an improved patient experience.

Ready to assess your facilities' performance? Start the conversation with our experts here.

Case Study: 

JLL’s Performance Optimization Program allows hospitals and healthcare systems to create a vision, roadmap and detailed plan, supported by change management, to infuse their in-house FM teams with new skills, business processes and FM technologies, ensuring no jobs are outsourced or eliminated. One large healthcare organization implemented POP after several adverse facilities-related events jeopardized the system’s reputation. The Initial assessment identified and prioritized $6.7 million in savings opportunities, including savings of $1.5 million in procurement, $0.9 million in energy, $3.3 million in operations and $1 million in labor. In addition to cost savings, the POP resulted in fewer and less severe Joint Commission findings, elevated FM staff performance and capabilities, and enhanced patient safety.