Ed Sullivan

Yahoo! Says It's Dumping Work-At-Home For Collaboration

Ed Sullivan — Tue, 07 May 2013 21:31:45 GMT

It’s surprising that the edict came from the tech industry, where competition for talent is fierce. But there it was, in a memo to all Yahoo! employees: “Beginning in June, we’re asking all employees with work-from-home arrangements to work in Yahoo! offices.”

Estimates of the number of people who work from home vary widely. But whatever the number, telecommuting is widely seen as an employee-friendly move. It provides workers with flexibility to juggle work and home lives, to avoid nasty commutes, and to live where they want.

Telecommuting is also corporate-real-estate-friendly. Telecommuters are part of a pool of workers who don’t come into the office every day, allowing companies to reduce the size of their office portfolios. And removing millions of drivers from the roads certainly helps cut greenhouse gas emissions.

The biggest objections to telecommuting have always been about risks. Managers worried they couldn’t know if off-site employees were really working, putting productivity at risk. Employees feared that no one could see how hard they actually were working, jeopardizing their chances for advancement.

Concerns about telecommuting (“speed and quality are often sacrificed”) were among the reasons Yahoo! decided to end the practice. But more of the memo was devoted to the opportunities created by having employees come into the office: “Some of the best decisions and insights come from hallway and cafeteria discussions, meeting new people, and impromptu team meetings.”

Regardless of what you think of an outright ban on telecommuting, it’s clear that Yahoo! sees the workplace as a tool to help its turnaround effort. That’s the real story for facility managers. The notoriety of the memo can be an opportunity for a facility manager to get some face time — with HR, with the CEO, with business unit heads — to talk about the role of the workplace in the organization’s strategy.

FMXcellence 2013 Recognizes Facility Managers Who Add Value

Ed Sullivan — Tue, 02 Apr 2013 14:32:12 GMT

There’s a lesson to be learned from this year’s FMXcellence honorees, but the lesson may not be obvious. (Click here to read about the honorees.)

This year’s honorees were recognized for very large projects or programs. The enterprise real estate group of TD Bank Group helped meet a corporate commitment to carbon neutrality by creating an enterprise green building program that has produced three net-zero energy use buildings and more than 65 LEED certified buildings. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has undertaken a broad-based sustainability effort that ranges from fostering a culture of sustainability to use of green technology in construction and retrofit projects.

Some programs that earned FMXcellence recognition this year started small and had to prove themselves. That was true at BAE Systems, where a utility cost takeout initiative that began with one building has since been recognized as a tool to help business units across the organization. The energy efficiency program at HEI Hotels & Resorts got rolling because top management was shown the payoff from individual energy upgrades.

Then there were programs that couldn’t start small, simply because the task at hand was enormous. For the New York City Department of Education, the goal of SchoolStat was to rate conditions of buildings in a 130 million square-foot portfolio. When Georgia Tech purchased the former Atlanta Olympic Village, there was nothing small about the decision to seek LEED-EBOM Gold certification for the 800,000 square-foot facility.

These diverse efforts have one thing in common. The facility department identified a way to add value, then took action. Sometimes the first step was small, other times it was a doozy. What really counts is taking the step.

Glenborough Uses A Structured Approach to Evaluating Energy Saving Measures

Ed Sullivan — Mon, 18 Mar 2013 14:13:46 GMT

For the past decade, Glenborough LLC, a full service real estate investment and management firm, has focused on improving the energy efficiency of its portfolio. Today, the average Energy Star score for one of the firm's buildings is 84. Click here to learn more about how Glenborough uses a structured approach to evaluating energy-saving measures across its portfolio.

Hurricane Sandy: Emergency Preparedness Plans Saved Money, Survey Says

Ed Sullivan — Tue, 26 Feb 2013 22:22:00 GMT

An emergency preparedness plan is an insurance policy. And like any insurance policy, it doesn’t pay off until something bad happens.

There is no stream of cash from lower energy costs, no gains in comfort, no staff time saved. Without such immediate gains to point to, it’s more difficult for the facility manager to justify the time and money required to develop and maintain — by practicing and updating response measures — a plan.

But emergency response plans do pay off when they’re put into action.

In response to a Building Operating Management survey, facility managers with buildings affected by Hurricane Sandy said that their disaster planning improved their response. And preparedness measures sometimes saved a significant amount of money: 16 percent of respondents said savings topped $100,000.

One reason for those savings is that more than half of the respondents affected by Sandy had a dress rehearsal a year earlier in the form of Hurricane Irene. That storm led two thirds of those facility managers to make changes to their plans. The pay off: 22 percent of respondents who felt the impact of Irene said they saved at least $100,000 by altering their emergency preparedness strategies following that storm.

Those savings raise interesting questions. Could the weaknesses revealed by Irene have been identified before that storm hit? Would better plans have softened the impact of Irene for facilities that adopted new measures after that storm? How much could the impact of Sandy have been reduced with better planning?

The survey can’t answer those questions. But it does offer evidence that a rigorous approach to disaster planning can pay off if that plan is needed.

Facility Managers Have A New Motivational Strategy: Gamification

Ed Sullivan — Wed, 23 Jan 2013 16:26:18 GMT

In our society, competition is everywhere you turn, from our political system and economy to sporting events and the television shows that pit singers, dancers, chefs, and even those trying to lose weight against one another.

For facility managers, the natural human impulse to compete is like free cooling. It’s a widely available resource, something that facility managers can make use of, with a little bit of effort. That’s because competition can be a powerful motivational tool.

The idea is simple: Take something you want people to do and turn it into a game. Competition among teams — for doughnuts, points or whatever — drives behavior.

The idea of pitting teams against one another to achieve some goal is one aspect of a concept known as gamification. It’s been used to get employees to do everything from saving energy to participating in health and safety training.

From what I’ve read — and there’s a lot you can read if you do a search for “gamification” — a key to long-term success is engagement. If employees are engaged, you won’t need big prizes to get them to compete. Whether your audience is employees, tenants or students, the goal is to connect with them. And a game doesn’t work very well if it isn’t fun.

Competition isn’t the whole story about these games. Cooperation — teamwork — is also at play. After all, no one wants to let down other members of the team.

Gamification may have a value for facility managers entirely apart from results any competition might bring. Facility managers are often the enforcer, whether of schedules or set points. Trying to figure out what would make a game fun is an entirely different way of thinking about the people in your buildings. Even if you never develop a game, the exercise of putting yourself in your occupants’ place could give you insights that pay off for a long time to come.

More Energy Efficient Tenant Build Outs Is Project Goal

Ed Sullivan — Mon, 17 Dec 2012 19:28:00 GMT

Over the past decade, many commercial real estate firms have seen the light about the virtues of energy efficiency. But the base building is at best half the story of energy consumption in commercial buildings. And tenants, which may use 50 percent or more of the energy in a building, often focus far less on energy efficiency than owners and property management firms do.

Now there’s an effort afoot to transform the way tenants build out space. Spearheaded by the Natural Resources Defense Council’s Center for Market Innovation, the initiative aims to demonstrate why and how tenants should make their space very energy efficient.

The non-profit group has been working with tenants to develop a process for identifying and justifying high performance tenant improvements. CMI staff works with the tenant to identify measures that will reduce energy use by 30 to 50 percent compared to a standard code-compliant build-out.

What’s striking about the project is that it doesn’t stop at the design stage. For each of the build-outs, a measurement and verification plan is developed. What’s more, the facility staff is involved in planning the build-out; operations is part of the dialog when options are evaluated.

The project has produced a series of resources available online. One document lays out a 10-step process for building out high performance tenant space. Another explains how to use energy modeling, determine the extra cost of high-performance measures, and develop a financial analysis to evaluate options based on capital and operating costs. Detailed case studies — two done with more on the way — report on what was done in specific spaces and how much those measures cost, and present payback and net present value analyses. Tools are available online to help with financial analysis and energy modeling. Click here for links to download about those resources.

Efficient Building Operations At Heart Of Government Efforts To Combat Climate Change

Ed Sullivan — Tue, 27 Nov 2012 19:21:00 GMT

One thing that President Obama can’t claim a mandate for is action on climate change. Obama never made the topic a high-enough profile issue in his re-election campaign to claim broad popular support for his ideas on climate change.

But the push for U.S. action on climate change is far from dead. In the wake of Hurricane Sandy, New York City’s Independent mayor, Michael Bloomberg, cited the importance of addressing climate change in endorsing Obama for a second term. And a week after the election, the California cap and trade initiative — the world’s second largest, after the European Union’s program — went live.

These day, the effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is a bottom-up affair, rather than a top-down federal initiative. One example is the energy-benchmarking programs that have sprung up — under the aegis of climate action plans — in cities like New York, San Francisco and Washington, D.C., as well as in the state of Washington. These programs are based on Energy Star's widely used Portfolio Manager tool.

Another example is the U.S. Green Building Council’s slow but steady progress in raising the bar for energy efficiency for certified buildings, and in connecting certification for new buildings more closely to energy performance. LEED is a good example of the old saying, nothing succeeds like success. The more buildings that have LEED certification, the more that other organizations want to get their buildings certified. The result is likely to be growing influence for LEED efforts to reduce carbon emissions.

The key for both LEED and the energy-benchmarking programs is to focus on actual energy use in operating buildings. Getting serious about energy performance takes more than designing and upgrading buildings for efficiency. It takes starting with the end in mind. The real question is this: What does it take to make a specific building operate more efficiently? Facility managers who start looking for answers to that question may find it leads to a great career opportunity, as this month’s cover story shows.

One Way Facility Managers Can Persuade Top Management to Fund Energy Upgrades

Ed Sullivan — Mon, 22 Oct 2012 15:09:00 GMT

You’ve heard this old question: If a tree falls in the woods, and no one hears it, does it make a sound?

Here’s a facility management version: If a project reduces energy costs, but top management never hears about it, does it save money?

In reality, the answer is yes. But in the minds of the CEO and CFO, the opposite is true.

In this case, perception can be just as important as reality.

Energy efficiency upgrades should be what’s known as a virtuous circle. In other words, energy savings beget investments in energy efficiency, which beget more energy savings.

In a recent survey of facility managers, we found evidence that is happening. About half the respondents said top management is often willing to pay a premium for energy efficient products. Call them Group A. Of those facility managers, 73 percent said they always or most of the time monitor energy use following upgrades and report the results to top management.

By contrast, among facility managers who said top management was rarely willing to pay an energy efficiency premium — Group B — only 49 percent said they always or mostly monitor energy use and report the savings from upgrades to top management.

I’m certainly not going to say that lack of feedback about upgrade results is the only reason top management is less willing to invest more upfront to save energy over the life of the product. Nor do I think that reporting energy savings will move a company overnight from Group B to Group A.

But I do believe feedback is crucial in developing and sustaining top management support for energy upgrades. Of course, facility managers and energy consultants have been saying that for years. But the survey provides striking evidence of the link between facility management feedback and top management attitudes — a feedback loop that makes for a virtuous circle of energy efficiency.

Innovations in Facility Products and Practices Bring Energy Saving Opportunities

Ed Sullivan — Thu, 04 Oct 2012 19:52:00 GMT

Brand new technology. Familiar products that keep getting better. Fresh ideas about design and operation. Taken together, these developments have multiplied opportunities to reduce energy use.

Keeping up is almost a full-time job. A range of products that didn’t exist or weren’t ready for prime time a decade ago — from LEDs to fault detection software to windows that change color — are transforming the market. Over that same decade, many established technologies have gotten much better. And the industry’s knowledge of how to operate buildings efficiently has grown by leaps and bounds.

Meanwhile, top management has become more aware of the energy performance of buildings. Some companies are concerned about climate change. Others want a stamp of approval in the form of LEED or Energy Star certification. Still others are required to use those rating systems. And some are just looking to save a few bucks. Regardless of the cause, the interest in efficiency has opened boardroom doors to facility managers looking for funding for energy upgrades.

The interest in improving the energy performance of buildings has created a virtuous circle: A growing market for energy efficient products attracts money to develop even more efficient products, which further expand the market for efficiency. Investors in Silicon Valley have caught on; so have established building product suppliers. The result has been an acceleration of energy efficient product introductions.

To me, these developments seem closer to the beginning of an era than to the culmination of one. If that’s true, the pace of innovation will go on accelerating over the next few years, bringing more opportunities for facility managers to improve building performance as a way of adding value to the organization. Staying up to date will be a challenge, but there’s no better time to start than now. Checking out our October issue coverage is one way to do that.

Critical Facilities Summit for Data Center, Hospital, Lab Infrastructure

Ed Sullivan — Mon, 17 Sep 2012 16:22:12 GMT

It could be a server room that has turned into a data center. Or it could be an old data center that now supports growing functions like e-commerce. Maybe it’s a hospital where robotic operating suites can’t afford to be offline for the few seconds allowed by code. Or maybe it’s an R&D lab where the research has become increasingly critical, though the infrastructure hasn’t been updated.

In organization after organization, facility managers find themselves responsible for critical spaces that are becoming even more critical. It’s a challenging position for facility managers to be in. As the in-house experts on the physical infrastructure, facility managers have to ensure that the cooling, power, ventilation and other services will meet the users’ needs.

But meeting those needs isn’t enough. There are plenty of examples of critical spaces that are overbuilt, at least for current operations. It’s up to facility managers to focus on costs, both construction and operating costs — factors that the users of the space may be far less concerned about. To make it all work, facility managers need every ounce of expertise they can muster.

The challenge of doing all that is why Building Operating Management will launch the Critical Facilities Summit next year. The event is designed specifically for facility managers and others responsible for the design, construction and operation of data centers, hospitals, R&D labs, and other types of critical facilities. The Critical Facilities Summit will offer practical advice on topics ranging from reliability to energy efficiency to teamwork.

The event will be held at the Charlotte Convention Center, Oct. 21-23, 2013. To learn more, click here.

Size of Workstation Should Align with Corporate Culture

Ed Sullivan — Tue, 07 Aug 2012 14:11:09 GMT

Anyone who thinks that cutting costs is the only reason to give employees less space should consider what Facebook did when it moved into the old headquarters of Sun Microsystems.
Sun, one of the tech stars of the 1990s, designed its headquarters with private offices for software engineers. Not large offices, but offices with walls and doors so programmers could have quiet while writing code. That strategy was intended to make employees more productive while helping Sun recruit software talent, which was also being courted by other tech companies.

Sun is gone, and Facebook now owns its old headquarters building. Gone too are most of the private workspaces. Instead, the floor plan is dominated by pods made up of four small desks pushed up against one another. The primary reason isn’t cost control — the company doesn’t scrimp on perks for employees. What drove the design is collaboration. Like many other companies, the social networking giant believes that its employees are generally more productive working together than in isolation. (See Open To New Ideas.)

That strategy would go nowhere if employees didn’t buy in, especially in companies that face competition for the best talent. To get that buy-in, companies have to give employees something in return. Things like compensation and company status are a big part of that “something,” but so is the image of the workplace itself.

Younger employees in particular are often looking for a cool place to work. A workplace alone can’t make a company “cool,” but the work environment has an impact on the way employees feel about their employers. That point is worth considering even for companies that are only looking to slice real estate costs when they pack more people into less space. If denser workspace is in your company’s future, there are many steps — from offering views of the outside to providing LEED-certified space — that may help turn the negative of less space into the positive of better space.

Life Cycle Cost Analysis Can Prevent Deficit Spending

Ed Sullivan — Tue, 07 Aug 2012 01:30:14 GMT

Pity the poor politician who has to defend deficit spending these days. After a period in which deficits were gradually brought under control, the last decade has seen the return of enormous budget shortfalls.
When critics lambaste deficit spending, the biggest complaint is that we are saddling future generations with costs that we should be paying ourselves. We’re stealing from our children, the argument goes.

I doubt that many top executives are any happier about federal deficits than the pundits who decry Washington’s freespending ways. Yet many organizations practice their own form of deficit spending when it comes to buildings and building products. They set budgets that leave facility managers with no choice but to purchase products that will wear out sooner or have higher energy costs than alternatives on the market. The reason: Those products cost less today.

So we build buildings without lighting controls, without the most efficient chillers, without enough insulation. We don’t commission buildings. We don’t train the people who will operate the buildings.

And those are just energy-related costs. What about the carpet chosen on price, even though it’s going to ugly out prematurely because it can’t handle the traffic the space gets? Or the cost-driven shortcuts on a roofing project that put the roof at risk of early failure?

Of course, as a facility manager, you can’t singlehandedly stop an organization from running a facility deficit. But you can keep up the effort, thankless though it may be, to educate top management about the realities of life-cycle costs. It’s a lot of work to do the financial analyses involved and to develop effective presentations. But if you’re worried about government deficits, you might channel some of that energy into an attack on deficits closer to home.

Low Energy Star Score Is an Opportunity to Save Energy

Ed Sullivan — Mon, 04 Jun 2012 14:53:29 GMT

What would you do if you benchmarked a building using Energy Star’s Portfolio Manager and got back a score of 42? Or 22? Or 2? I’m not sure how many facility managers would clap their hands and run to the CEO to announce the good news. But it is good news, albeit of the good news/bad news variety.
In some ways, a very low Energy Star score is indeed bad news. It means the organization is spending a lot more on energy than it should be. And there may be a risk that top management will decide to shoot the messenger when the facility manager reports a low score.
The good news? A very low Energy Star score represents a very big opportunity to reduce energy costs.

A low score almost certainly means the organization has never made energy efficiency a priority. It may well be that funding has been hard to come by for upgrades, staff training, even regular maintenance.

By providing objective evidence of energy inefficiency in relation to comparable buildings, a low Energy Star score can be a big help to a facility manager trying to make the case for even modest investments in efficiency.

What about getting egg on your face? Even the most successful facility managers have to deliver bad news to top management from time to time. Doing that — being up front about problems — is a big part of what makes them successful.

Of course, savvy facility managers also come in with a plan to remedy the problem. That’s the beauty of a low Energy Star score — it’s a sign that there are lots of opportunities to reduce energy costs, likely including many low- and no-cost measures. And once the CEO sees the bottom-line impact of lower energy costs, well, let’s just say it could be the start of a beautiful friendship.

FMXcellence Recognizes Facility Departments for Adding Value

Ed Sullivan — Thu, 05 Apr 2012 15:04:37 GMT

It’s easy for facility managers to think of themselves as having a bricks and mortar job. This year’s FMXcellence recognition program shows how accurate that view is — and how limited. Behind all the heavy equipment and sophisticated technology of the projects that received recognition, you can see the other side of facility management — the so-called “soft skills.” Even if those skills aren’t “hard,” that doesn’t mean they are easy to master.

• EMD Serono, Inc., was honored for design and construction of a 140,000-square-foot R&D lab. With high-performance chillers, air-handling units and building envelope, the project earned LEED Gold. Just as impressive is the culture of safety created for the project, which resulted in no lost time recordable injuries over 370,000 man hours.

• At Munich Reinsurance America’s headquarters, an upgrade project cut energy use by 40 percent compared to the average in the 10 years before the project. To justify the HVAC, energy management, lighting and other technologies involved, the facility department worked closely with finance to justify the project and identify incentives that the company could take advantage of.

• The effort to transplant new chilled water and emergency power systems into the infrastructure at Crouse Hospital meant more than new switchgear, chillers, generators and cooling towers. Ensuring patient safety required a communications plan involving hospital administration, clinical and operations leaders, and physicians and caregivers.

• Software was far from the whole story in the creation of a Web-based work order system by the Office of Security Programs (OSP) for the Architect of the Capitol. It took negotiation, process analysis, education and two-way communication to make the project a success.

For these facility departments, and many others, facility management goes far beyond the physical facilities. If your department has added value to your organization, consider applying for FMXcellence recognition.

Bad News in Facility Management? Tell Top Management — Now

Ed Sullivan — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 15:10:09 GMT

It certainly wasn’t good news: There was a serious fire in my son’s residence hall, which forced students to evacuate at 4:30 on a Sunday morning. But I can’t consider it bad news that the university emailed parents within hours to let us know what happened.

Sending that email was not only the right thing to do, it was also good rumor control. For one thing, it let parents know that no one was hurt. It also told us that the dorm would be closed for at least a few days and that arrangements were being made to house students temporarily.

The email got me thinking about the way facility managers report (or don’t report) bad news — bad news like a delay in a project or higher-than-expected energy costs.

For facility managers, the question isn’t just who you tell. It’s also when you tell them. Clearly, hiding bad news is a bad idea. But you can seem to be hiding something, even when you aren’t, if you don’t have a reputation for being upfront with bad news.

That’s true partly because of the way rumors spread.

After the fire, the first estimate was that the dorm would be closed at least a few days. The next day, the university reported that it would be at least a couple of weeks before the dorm reopened. Several days later, we learned the dorm would be closed the entire semester.

I believe the university was giving us its best estimates all along. Some students are skeptical. The rumor is that some student overheard someone from the university saying, on the day of the fire, that the dorm would be closed for months.

I don’t trust rumors like that one. But imagine I’m a CEO. Two weeks ago I heard from the head of a business unit that a restacking project was running behind schedule. Four days later, the facility manager reported that the project would be a week late. Yesterday, the head of the business unit told me she’d heard the project would be a month late.

Actually, the project will be two weeks late. The facility manager knows that, but hasn’t updated me. So what am I going to believe?