Facilities management is one of those areas of your business that doesn’t get a lot of attention. It’s not glamorous or sexy. It doesn’t generally make headlines, and it certainly doesn’t add to your bottom line. For most, it’s an afterthought, at best – at least until something goes wrong. There are two very good, very important reasons to keep it a bit higher on your personal radar.
Morale Boosting
If you’re like most people of entrepreneurial stripe, then odds are good that before you branched out on your own, you worked for a number of different firms, in a number of different capacities. That breadth of experience is no doubt a big part of what gave you the capacity to wear so many different hats when you launched your own business. It also exposed you to a staggering variety of working environments. You’ve probably lived and worked in a cube farm, had an office that once did time as a broom or supply closet, and maybe even worked in a dingy, dimly lit basement with leaky pipes overhead and flickering fluorescent bulbs to provide something close to enough illumination to navigate by.
One thing you probably noticed, having worked in such an array of locations, is that appearances matter. The people who worked down in that dingy basement with you probably felt a lot more like moles than humans. If they cared about the company they worked for at all, it was probably mostly lip service. Mostly, they probably just cared about collecting their paycheck and getting back out into the sunlight.
All that goes to say that appearances matter. If you stick your employees in a veritable dungeon, you might get some work out of them, but they won’t be excited or enthusiastic about what they’re doing, or what you’re doing, and they probably won’t make the connection between their work and its overall importance to the company. The better the working environment you provide for your employees, the higher their morale. That’s something that should be fairly obvious to everyone, but sometimes it gets forgotten or overlooked in the hustle and bustle of trying to take your business to the next level. Overlook it at your peril, because that’s a great way to lose your best people and to take the spark of creativity right out of them. Nobody wants to work in a cave. Don’t make them.
It’s Not a Party Till Someone Gets Hurt
On a more practical note, there’s a reason why OSHA regulations were invented. They weren’t dreamed up by a bureaucrat with too much time on his hands, but rather, came about in response to companies not doing enough to ensure a safe working environment. Don’t be that manager, and don’t run that kind of company. Accidents that happen because of slipshod facilities maintenance are completely avoidable, and such accidents, if they occur, are heinously expensive and embarrassing to deal with. They can give your company a black eye that will take quite a while to recover from, and will do a lot to keep top-tier employees from even applying to come work for you. Both are damaging to your future prospects.
Maintaining your business’s facilities is another crucial part to both short- and long-term success. Make sure you create a comfortable, safe place to work. Doing so will garner great benefits for you, your workers and your bottom line.
