The biggest factor in determining or predicting appropriate facilities management staffing levels is not the amount or type of space managed, but the size and type of the workforce served. This revelation, which contradicts widespread thought and practice, came to light in a new study of how facility management staffing models have changed over the past 10 years—a period that includes the Great Recession of 2008.
[The full study report is available below.]
While the staffing levels for some traditional FM services—engineering, maintenance, and custodial—are determined by space, most services are not, such as space planning and management, moves and relocations, IT connectivity, shipping and receiving, environmental health and safety, and mail.
“Population served is a bigger FM staffing indicator than space,” says Steve Westfall, Ph.D., founder and CEO of Tradeline, Inc., and author of the study. “That was the big ‘Aha!’”
Starting in 2003, Westfall compiled data from 102 companies in the United States and abroad to develop a mathematical algorithm that calculates an organization’s “Mission Complexity Score.” That score provides the basis on which to predict what staffing levels should be, based on the weighted value of mission variables, such as the menu of services performed, space types, outsourcing and leasing policies, occupancy density, churn, shift and mobile workers, the ages and number of buildings, and leasing and outsourcing practices.
The Mission Complexity Scores of 102 FM organizations studied since 2003. (Graph by Steve Westfall)
Westfall recently followed up with 13 of the facilities organizations from the original study—a mix of large and small organizations, both offices and more complex spaces—to see if his model accurately correlates with how FM staffing models have changed recently, and whether it could be used to predict future changes. He found that it does both.
Staffing model changes for 13 organizations that are detailed in the full report. (Numbers in boxes are study file numbers). (Graph by Steve Westfall)
Those 13 organizations are cumulatively responsible for 26.7 million sf of space and facilities services that support 52,000 workers. Individually, those organizations are responsible for either major parts of the facilities portfolios, or the entire facilities portfolios for these companies:
- Adobe Systems
- Alliant Energy
- Amgen
- Armstrong World Industries
- Dupont
- Eastman Chemical
- FreddieMac
- Harley-Davidson
- InterAmerican Development Bank
- Jack in the Box Corporate
- Leidos Biomedical (Nat’l Cancer Inst)
- Lexmark International
- The RAND Corporation
“There have been a lot of anecdotal descriptions of how things have changed in the past 10 years, particularly since 2008,” he says. “We hear of buildings being abandoned, leases shed, companies merged, FM groups reorganized, and FM services outsourced; there’s a kind of tumult going on. But what does all that look like on paper? There appears to be precious little published in terms of actual quantitative information on the major changes that have occurred, and are still occurring, in the facilities strategies and facilities management staffing models of individual corporations.”
Westfall’s data show that there is, in fact, a way to reliably predict FM headcounts for almost any mission or change in mission using the Mission Complexity Score. He states that widely cited data on national trends and averages serve only to obscure the real story of change occuring within individual organizations. His data using Mission Complexity Scores show that, while most of the 13 organizations in his latest study underwent significant changes, averaging those changes flattens the results and makes them meaningless.
“National benchmarking statistics on data averages and medians concerning facilities management do not tell the dramatic, quantitative stories that are playing out at the firm level, and they do not provide a useful basis for planning or testing staffing models for the diverse spectrum of change in corporate and facilities missions,” he says.
Westfall also learned that outsourcing, while accounting for more than 40 percent of the reduction of on-payroll FM personnel, does not tell the whole story of changing FM staffing models. His findings point to very lean staffing models, where FM services are highly outsourced, as an area in need of more study. The most surprising outcome, however, is the relevance of population served vs. space.
The People Matter More than the Place
The Mission Complexity Score factors in 25 services that facilities personnel perform. Of those, only a few are driven largely by space, such as maintenance, custodial, and engineering. All the rest are driven primarily by the population served.
Population served correlates as an FM labor driver in 8 of 10 cases and is the major factor in 6 of 10 cases. In only two cases does headcount change correlate uniquely with changes in space. (Graph by Steve Westfall)
One of the 13 companies in this study of FM staffing model changes has been focusing on people served instead of space for some time: “In my own experience here with new bosses and new senior leadership teams for the past five years, emphasis has always been on ‘what’s being done’ (mission) and for ‘how many people’ (workers served) and rarely, if ever, on ‘how much space.’ I’ve been measuring costs per worker served on a monthly basis for my corporate campus for a couple of years now.”
A clear example of the importance of people served is another organization in the study, which reports a zero percent increase in their space portfolio, a 60 percent increase in population served, and a near 60 percent increase of total FM heads. And in a case where an organization reported a 20 percent increase in space combined with a 17 percent decrease in occupancy, total FM headcount declined 25 percent.
Changes in workplace technology for employees may also be impacting FM staffing models, according to one case study. Westfall says this is another area that needs future study: The FM staffing-model effect for population-driven services for a technology-enhanced workplace characterized by electronic connectivity, phone messaging, email, electronic signatures and file transfer, digital storage, desk-top printers.
“That is bound to have significant implications for traditional staffing models and staffing benchmarks for population-driven services,” he says.
“I was having trouble figuring out why one of our study participants didn’t have more FM people for certain population-driven services than we were projecting,” says Westfall. “One item was mail services, where it turns out that they now receive very little incoming mail and are on track to add labor-reducing digitization technology to further streamline what incoming mail they do have.”
A representative of another company in the study cited the activity level of the building occupants as another factor: “I would wholeheartedly agree that population served has a greater impact than space. What we see is that the more people who are ‘exercising’ the building assets, the more staff we need to deal with that. It’s not just the population served, but it’s their ‘activity level,’ which is probably related to their spending budgets—hard to tease this out of our clients, though.”
Westfall’s report does not conclude that population served is the only driving factor for FM staffing. As one of the study’s participants states, “The biggest finding here is that square footage is not the defining character of the organization. This says that population served drives staffing more than square footage, but not alone. We have here a classic multivariable equation—population served and square feet.”
“What this study demonstrates,” concludes Westfall, “is that population served must, however, be a major component of FM organization planning, budgeting, and productivity metrics, and caution should prevail in using ‘per square foot’ metrics to judge facility management performance.”
The Story is More Than Outsourcing
For the entire 13-organization group surveyed for the follow-up study, outsourcing accounts for 43 percent of the reduction in on-payroll FM headcount, while 57 percent was the result of a variety of other initiatives that served to reduce total FM heads (outsourced plus on-payroll) by 7 percent. Other initiatives included staffing adjustments to declining occupancy, the shedding of high-tech space like manufacturing, increased amounts of vacant space, and special leasing situations. The highest level of outsourcing was reported in facilities portfolios containing mostly office space, and the lowest for portfolios with significant amounts of labs and other high-tech spaces.
“A common reason given for less outsourcing in facilities that contain large amounts of high-tech (high-weight) spaces (vs. office space) is that there is often a close working relationship between facilities staff and the science or manufacturing groups they support where facilties workers are regarded as important team members in the larger technical enterprise,” writes Westfall. “In other words, in those cases the high-tech space itself is viewed as a critical tool of the technical program, and the relationship between that tool manager (facilities management) and the technical program leaders is not one to be relegated wholly to a contracted-service type of status.”
Core Management Teams
Seven of the 13 organizations reported that they outsource 90 percent or more of their facilities maintenance staffing. Westfall found it difficult to get a handle on the correct staffing level for on-payroll core FM teams where almost everything is outsourced.
“The area of very lean core management staffing seems to be uncharted, ill-defined territory where the management job to be done is reported to shift from a ‘do team’ to a ‘relationship management team’ for which mission descriptions and staffing are not well defined,” writes Westfall.
Seven cases of very lean staffing models exist in uncharted territory. (Graph by Steve Westfall)
One such study participant states: “I’m pretty sure I have the right headcount, but I have discovered that I don’t have the people with the right sets of skills.”
One organization in the original 102-firm study had completely outsourced all 10 services on its service menu but inexplicably still had a core team of 260 people. Westfall cautions against the common mistake of retaining on-payroll headcount that duplicates work that the outsourcing contractors are being paid to do.
By Lisa Wesel
