How can you tell if your facility manager is doing a good job?

If you’re the owner or executive of a business with little or no facilities management experience, you may be wondering how you can evaluate your facility manager. Hopefully, you’ve hired a responsible, competent, and honest person to take on that role, but you’ll want to be able to measure the individual’s performance.

Strong Leadership Skills

This area is probably the easiest for an owner or executive to measure. A great facility manager needs to have the same leadership skills that any other executive must possess. This includes the ability to listen and communicate well, to challenge the status quo and foster continuous improvement, and to create strategic value that supports the overall business.

Excellent KPI Results

Here’s where the rubber meets the road. Evaluate your facility manager in terms of established KPIs, which can be set, tracked, and reported through a CMMS.

Select the KPIs that are priorities for your organization, and make sure your facility manager understands the goals that must be met within a certain period of time. The following KPIs make an excellent starting list:

1. Check team’s performance against SLAs
2. See if preventive maintenance tasks are completed on-time and reduce breakdowns
3. Compare estimated completion times against actual completion times for work orders
4. Evaluate balance of workload across technicians
5. Measure resolution times, especially in cases of safety issues and critical equipment downtime
6. Analyze work order requests and identify root causes for repeated problems

External Evaluation

Every once in awhile, it may be helpful to bring in a third-party to evaluate your facilities team. The APPA’s Facilities Management Evaluation Program (FMEP) offers companies a customized evaluation by an expert panel of peers using industry criteria.

The evaluation includes a self-evaluation based on APPA criteria, an onsite evaluation, an oral report, and a comprehensive written report. The organization hand picks peers familiar with the industry, education level, and physical characteristics of your facility.

Although this program evaluates facilities management as a whole, it should give you some measure of how your facility manager is performing based on third-party criteria and expectations.