I have recently been shadowing some cleaners for a large building, where Covid significantly reduced the level of occupancy. Watching them travel across large areas of flooring and manoeuvre up and down 11 floors, carrying out 4 checks per day for a couple of bathrooms per floor was baffling. With so few people in the building, the bathrooms remained clean throughout the day, so the cleaners were checking and cleaning the same near-spotless floors and surfaces all day long. Their sole responsibility was to maintain the cleanliness of these bathrooms, so they ended up doing 7 quick spot checks per bathroom, with very occasional spot mops. That is nearly twice as many checks as they would normally do for bathrooms that were already clean, along with the extra tedious travelling up and down 11 floors.
Surely there must be a smarter way to do this, so they could be more productive elsewhere? Why was there not more flexibility in this frequency; could we have fitted sensors to measure the level of usage to plan and adjust the frequency of checks accordingly? There are lots of interesting examples being marketed, which I rarely saw in practice. A report by the IWFM suggested that the FM industry currently lacks the understanding of emerging technologies and their wider implications, hence there is a limited uptake.
So why might that be? Does the desire exist to take up more technology – but there are constraints – or is there just no general interest in the first place?
If it is the former, that could be because FM organisations may just not have the necessary capacity to strategise how to effectively adopt the emerging technology. Often what we and the IWFM see in the industry is that there is a tendency to deal with jobs purely reactively, where there is just constant firefighting when they could be improving performance and preventing fires in the first place.
If it is the latter, it may be due to cost. It can require large sums of investment in time and money to implement some of the technology, like sensors, and deliver the necessary training. The IWFM suggests that technology is only likely to augment roles within FM, rather than replace them. So tasks, like cleaning, are unlikely to become automated in the near future. Therefore, it’s still going to be a person visiting the bathrooms and cleaning them, regardless of how much data we collect through sensors. So perhaps it just isn’t worth it. Instead of technology, it seems like driving performance requires more focus on the people, processes and systems.
Which one it might be could remain unclear. What is clear is that FM organisations have already begun adopting such technology into their operations. So the question is, have we made sure the necessary foundations are set to drive continuous improvement to allow the digitisation to be fully utilised?
Otherwise, without the basics, can we truly ever say we are technologically ready and will that cleaner still be cleaning the building in the same way as they always have, as the world continues its move to hybrid working?
