Real Estate Investor Magazine South Africa April 2014 | Page 53

MANAGING

BY GAYE DE VILLIERS

Taking FM seriously
RICS promotes strategic facilities management to business

F

acilities managers share a global need to prove
the value of Facilities Management (FM) to
board level directors, a new global RICS (Royal
Institution of Chartered Surveyors) report reveals.
Launched recently (29 January 2014) in Washington
DC, the Raising the Bar: City Roundtables Research
Report (Phase II) calls for innovative new dimensions of
measurement to prove FM’s effectiveness and its impact
on productivity and profitability.
This will give facilities managers the tools they need
to engage with business leaders around the world, who
are currently too often divorced from and disinterested
in FM. This is due, in part, to facilities managers
being denied access to board level. The research found
these barriers, which prevent the practitioners from
“acting more strategically”, are consistent across both
geographies and industry sectors.
Authored by Occupiers Journal Ltd, the report builds
on findings from RICS’ 2012 research, Raising the Bar:
Enhancing the Strategic Role of Facilities Management
(Phase I), which provided robust evidence for highperforming organisations to introduce FM as a strategic
management discipline. The research also provided
recommendations to support leading FM practitioners
in becoming more strategic.
The latest report considers prev ious
recommendations and surveyed FM professionals
across six continents and 12 economically different
cities, including London, New York, Hong Kong,
Sydney and São Paolo, where they identif ied “A
Dozen Challenges” to the profession answered by “A
Dozen Recommendations” to the FM market.
Johnny Dunford, Global Commercial Property
Director at RICS said: “After staff, property is the
biggest expenditure of most businesses, hence the
importance of integrating FM within the overall

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business strategy. This research proves that there can
often be too many layers between senior FM staff and
the CEO. Change cannot be made until FM is taken
seriously at board level and to achieve this the industry
must raise its profile with business leaders.
“As a global body acting at all levels of the
industry, RICS is uniqu