The hidden costs of disorganized facilities maintenance departments.
Facilities maintenance departments are responsible for making sure buildings and assets are working. When a maintenance issue comes up, it's not only inconvenient, it costs your company in the form of lost sales, damage to your brand, and repair costs. If your maintenance department is unorganized, maintenance issues carry even higher costs.
Disorganization makes your team less productive
According to a study of 18,000 business leaders by Express Employment Professionals, disorganization costs companies over one-fifth of their employees' salary. An employee who makes $50,000 per year costs their employer an additional $11,000 per year in lost productivity.
So, where are employees spending their unproductive time? There are two places: searching for information and recreating information. MediaValet, a SaaS firm, says employees spend about 8% of their time looking for the right information and end up having to recreate between 5% to 15% of their work.
In facilities maintenance, this means employees are wasting their time looking for contractors to make repairs, hunting down lease information to determine who is responsible for the work, or researching the repair history on an air handler. Meanwhile, there is a store who is losing sales and customers.
Disorganization makes your company spend more on repairs
Which scenario would you prefer for your facilities maintenance department?
Scenario One
You get a call from your store support center at 6:30 pm on a weeknight. An HVAC unit at one of your locations isn't working. Customers are getting upset and leaving. Employees are complaining. You are in the middle of dinner, and you still need to help your kids with their homework. But, it's your job to take care of these sorts of things, so you retreat to a quiet room in your house to get to work. The contractor you normally call for this type of work cannot get anyone to the store tonight. You fire up a Google search and start dialing. After 4 attempts, you finally find a company who can go out there. At least you hope they are a company. It's 9:00 pm now, and the contractor still has not made it to the store. The manager is getting frustrated because they want to avoid having to stay after hours. You convince them to stay onsite and keep calling the contractor. The contractor finally arrives at 9:45 pm. They tell you the compressor is out and tell you they will have to quote the repairs. They ask you to pay a $450 site visit fee with a credit card. The next day you can't get a hold of the contractor, so you have to send out your normal contractor, at a cost. They tell you the same thing, it's the compressor. The part is on back order and won't be here for 3 weeks, but they can get it expedited in 2 weeks for 30% more money. You approve their quote and have to tell the manager it will be 2 weeks before their HVAC works again. Your boss is mad. Customers aren't spending money. Employees are complaining.
Scenario Two
A contractor turns in a report for a routine maintenance check up on your HVAC system for one of your stores. For the most part, everything checks out fine. They replaced filters, checked levels, adjust belt tension, etc. But they did find that your compressor isn't operating at 100%. They estimate that you have another 6 months before it completely fails. Due to decrease supply, the part won't be available for 3 weeks. You check your repair records and see this unit is up for a replacement soon anyway, and you will be able to capitalize the replacement cost. You ask for a full replacement quote. Since the contractor can schedule it when it is most convenient for them, you can negotiate on the quote.
Obviously, scenario two is preferable. It's not only less stressful, it saves your company money and makes you look like a genius to your boss. And, the main thing separating the two scenarios is organization and planning.
Disorganization leads to higher turnover
Employees become frustrated when they feel like they are wasting their time. They leave for other jobs to find better, less toxic work environments. Higher turnover results in increased hiring and training costs for hiring. Not to mention, when you throw inexperienced workers into a disorganized work environment, the problems compound.
Don’t wait
There is no better time than now to take a hard look at your facilities maintenance department and ask yourself what the hidden costs of disorganization really are. You will find it makes sense to do the hard work of creating processes, centralized information, and structure. It might save you thousands. And when there is money to be saved, it's always worth doing a little extra work upfront for peace of mind later on down the road.
