How to Be A Productive Facility Manager

Each day you arrive at the office determined to tackle an ambitious to-do list.

Lunch plans with a coworker turns into a cup of noodles at your desk as you scramble to catch up. By mid-afternoon, you’re lucky if you’ve accomplished even half of your projects.

If you feel like there are never enough hours in the day to get it all done, you’re not alone.

Every professional grapples with how to improve productivity, but for facility managers, the pressure to be efficient can be even more intense. To help you, we’ve compiled five of our favorite productivity tips.

5 Productivity Tips for Facility Managers

1. Change Your Email Habits

It takes an average of 23 minutes to get back to work after a distraction—like an email, phone call or visit from a co-worker, according to a study at the University of California, Irvine. And considering the average person checks their email about 15 times per day, it’s a wonder any of us get work done at all!

That’s why it’s no surprise the most productive people limit how often they check email. Schedule three or four email checks throughout the day and consider turning off notifications so you’re not tempted to peek in between. Chances are, if there’s an emergency, someone will find a way to alert you.

2. Get a Handle on Service Requests

For facility managers, service requests are another constant distraction. If you don’t have a system that makes it easy for employees to submit mobile service requests and for your team to keep track of them, those ticket items will continue to pile up—either on your desk or in your inbox.

Even if you do have some form of help desk software, using the same system for

both IT and FM can create complications if there’s no way to filter the requests.

To eliminate this issue, use facility maintenance software that offers customization. That way, you can make sure you’re getting all the information you need to handle requests and organize assignments in a way that makes the most sense for your team.

3. Use Facility Management Dashboards

Managing a workplace without using facility management dashboards is like playing a game without a scoreboard — except the stakes are even higher. If you don’t have visibility into important metrics like space utilization and maintenance, how do you know you’re running things efficiently?

A customizable facility management dashboard allows you to slice and dice data in whatever way you’d like, so you can view costs by department, review space utilization across multiple properties and see how efficiently your team is handling service requests. Having this level of insight makes your job much easier. The next time your boss asks for a breakdown of your real estate costs and space utilization by building, you can pull up the dashboard rather than spending hours compiling a report.

4. Identify Your Biggest Time-Sucks

There are few worse feelings than realizing the day is almost over, and you’ve barely crossed a single item off your to-do list. Unfortunately for busy workplace managers, it happens all the time. From unexpected facilities issues to impromptu conversations, many activities siphon your time without you realizing it.

To improve your time management, spend one week tracking your activities and then decide how you can better allocate time throughout your workday. You may realize you need to excuse yourself from a few meetings or designate more time to work in a quiet area where you won’t be interrupted so often.

5. Find Ways to Delegate More

If you’re frequently the last person to leave for the day, this could be a sign you’re taking on too much. While most facility managers are hard workers by default, spreading yourself too thin is a surefire way to burn out and kill your enthusiasm for the job.

Instead, look for tasks you can delegate to other members of your team. Not only will this reduce your burden, it will also empower your team and give future leaders an opportunity to shine.

Improving productivity doesn’t have to be a pipe dream. By using these FM productivity tips, you can stop treading water and finally make the progress you’ve been hoping to achieve.