When scouring the national headlines around the current debate on the 'productivity puzzle' we find next to no mention of the role of the workplace and facilities in delivering upon the productivity promise.
Facilities are there to do exactly that - 'facilitate' the businesses that they are there for. Forward-thinking businesses realise this and leverage their facilities as part of their business strategy and go far beyond the basics.
The debate in the FM media is alive and well, but how do we take the insight of the facilities management profession and convey its contribution in terms of value to organisational performance to the wider business community? Ultimately, our primary audience is business leaders; business leaders need to understand how through leveraging their facilities and workplaces as part of a coordinated business strategy they can unleash the untapped potential in their business and raise their productivity levels to meet their strategic objectives.
This has been the impetus behind the evolution you see in two of our flagship programmes to champion our profession and challenge and drive forward the latest thinking, our annual conference, ThinkFM and our Awards. Our Awards focus on the impact of FM on business and society; FM impacts business performance in a multitude of ways from affecting the brand perception and representation of an organisation, the experience that customers have when engaging with a business, or through a workplace that enables the business to release more of their human capital potential, ultimately we are all working to contribute towards the performance of the organisations we work for.
This year we've introduced a new category to recognise and identify those very initiatives that can be demonstrably linked to delivering improvements in performance in their organisation's top-level business metrics. The new category is Impact on Organisational Performance.
ThinkFM, our annual conference, has evolved. In 2015 we focused on business performance with gaining competitive advantage through the workplace, and this year the theme is ThinkFM: Think Productivity - focusing on FM's role in business performance and the economy to facilitate productivity levels. Every organisation faces its own challenges, circumstances and internal struggles, but universally all face the same key questions; how do we create value for our chosen market and how do we do this most efficiently?
Join us in the debate online and at ThinkFM and bring forward your examples of how FM makes a difference both through the Awards or our magazine features. Let's raise FM's business and economic profile.
www.thinkfm.com www.bifmawards.org
James Sutton is CEO of BIFM