The state of facilities has an impact on both the staff who work in the space and the people who visit it. As such, it’s important to maintain it and make sure that it is functioning optimally.
Service providers are an integral part of any facility’s daily functioning. So, to assess whether your service providers are upholding an adequate standard of work, you need to conduct facility quality assessments. Doing so will help you to identify areas of improvement in your facility and to prevent more costly maintenance projects from happening later on.
The Framework
A facility quality assessment is a useful way to evaluate your service providers. These assessments can include cleaning quality audits and maintenance quality audits that can ensure your facility is being serviced well.
Here is how you can effectively assess your service providers with facility quality audits.
Create checklists for each process
It is important to be clear on what the expectations are of service providers. In order for the service providers to be able to deliver on these, and for you to assess them, you need to draw up detailed checklists consisting of all the things they need to do.
This can for example be for areas such as maintenance, cleaning, waste management, security services, and so on.
Agree on the sections, questions and scoring for the checklists
It is important that the assessments are a collaborative effort. Transparency around the different sections, questions and how the scoring of items works is crucial. It gives service providers a clear picture of what you expect of them.
Furthermore, it gives the service providers the opportunity to communicate their barriers so that expectations are fair and realistic. Clarity on this enables your service providers to meet goals more easily and removes any mistrust of the process.
Turn scoring into grades with sanctions and bonuses
A facility quality assessment will show areas in which service providers are excelling as well as areas that need improvement. By developing a grading system, you can encourage successes and discourage shortcomings through bonuses and sanctions.
Facility quality assessments help identify problem areas and ensure that corrective measures are introduced quickly. This is especially important as subpar maintenance can lead to more costly issues later on. Not only can it be a health and safety issue, but it can impact your revenue if your facilities are not well-maintained.
Create a schedule for conducting quality assessments regularly
Creating a schedule for when quality assessments take place helps you and your service providers to stay organised. It can be used to set deadlines for when you expect tasks or processes to be completed. By doing so, you eliminate the need for unnecessary communication and it also ensures consistency in your service providers’ work.
Track follow-up actions
Now that you have drawn up your checklist, conducted the audit, assigned grades and proposed solutions, it’s time to track those. Implementing strategies is great, but it’s crucial to follow up to check whether follow-up plans have been actioned.
Further, it is important to track if those actions are doing what they are intended to.
Go through the assessment scores and results
As with the development of the checklists before conducting the audits, it is important that the results portion is also collaborative. Positive feedback encourages service providers to continue good work and negative feedback can serve them to correct shortcomings. And, it can provide another opportunity for service providers to communicate any unexpected challenges they faced when doing their jobs.
Final Thoughts
Consistently assessing service providers' quality is essential for high-quality facilities management. Now that you know how to assess your service providers’ quality in your facility, perhaps consider a digital management solution to make this process easier.
If you're looking to implement a mobile platform for your facility quality assessments, we've got you covered. Falcony | Audit is easy-to-use, fast to set up, has customisable workflows, vast integration possibilities and more. Contact us for more information or test drive the platform yourself:
We are building the world's first operational involvement platform. Our mission is to make the process of finding, sharing, fixing and learning from issues and observations as easy as thinking about them and as rewarding as being remembered for them.
By doing this, we are making work more meaningful for all parties involved.
More information at falcony.io.
