Jai Agnani

The best a facilities team can do to ensure a sustainable workplace is to increase the efficiency of resource use and reduce the impacts on health and the environment. This can be achieved by creating awareness about efficiently using energy, water and other resources, protecting occupant health and improving employee productivity, and reducing waste, pollution and environmental degradation, advices Agnani.

One of the biggest challenges for a facility manager is to match pace with the millennial workforce. There is an immense pressure to be available 24X7, and in a high state of responsiveness. “While human interaction and intelligence will be at the forefront, we need to aggressively move towards digital interface including self help, ticket logging, app-based request services for utmost agility. At the same time, we need to make our teams efficient by getting away with physical checklists. As FMs, we need to ensure that we are ready to embrace this digital culture to evolve to the next level at a constant pace,” Agnani strongly asserts.

Internal to the organisation, there needs to be a detailed educational programme for all verticals and user profiles to ensure a continuous awareness of performing teams as well as leveraging on collaboration within the users. Externally, more standardisation, codes and ease of execution is needed, so as to make the entire programme financially viable for all sizes of organisations/offices.