What Facilities Managers Need to Know: Trust But Verify Your Commercial Contractors

This is the next in a series of posts highlighting the 13 trends, technologies and best practices essential for facilities managers, from the ebook What You Need to Know to Succeed in Facilities Management in 2020.

Facilities management has often been a relationship-driven world where contractors and FMs work together because of history

and trust. But today, the environment is moving from a ‘handshake’ world to one ripe with risk and compliance issues. For better or worse, potential litigation is something that needs to be factored into most decisions and business processes.

Most FMs have a story of how a contractor relationship deteriorated, leading to unforeseen trouble. And as facilities management becomes more data-driven, it’s essential that vendor relationships be based on objective, quantifiable performance metrics. With facilities work having a powerful impact on a company’s brand (by driving one’s “brand uptime”) there’ll be no excuse not to have the best performing contractors doing your work.