Strategic Issues for Facilities Managers

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Facilities management is becoming a key issue in many organizations as change is, as Charles Handy et al. have recognized, the only way forward. Companies which remain stagnant eventually fall behind their competitors or have change enforced on them. The latter is obviously undesirable for many reasons owing to hastily planned measures which have probably not been properly thought through. This will have an obvious knock‐on effect to staff with potentially enormous strategic problems. Change is something we all have to get used to in order to progress and develop, and it is against this backdrop that the right type of facilities are needed to enhance the smooth transition of the change process. People normally associate change with an organization which is shrinking or off‐loading unwanted space and facilities which are no longer any use. This would probably be quite undesirable owing to the recession‐hit 1990s in which companies either have gone into liquidation or have made radical changes to meet the demands of the modern industrial era. But successful organizations also make radical cuts in staffing and facilities. Barclays Bank, for example, cut 2,000 branch jobs in the UK during 1994 while it increased its profits by 181 per cent to £1.86bn. This controversial strategy of cutting back on staffing levels and making better use of facilities while continuing to make huge profits is quite obviously a contentious one, as many organizations are looking for “smarter” ways of working. This entails examining alternative working practices to maximize the use of current facilities.