Creating the best possible workplace

The article was originally co-authored by Emil Skab Hassing and Claus Frigård Christensen. 

With advanced statistical analysis, you can provide detailed insights into how your organisation should focus its facility management spending and resources to maximise value for money.

Most companies are concerned with creating a good workplace for their employees in order to attract new talent, improve productivity and retain existing employees. Therefore, companies use considerable resources and energy to establish a facility management solution that caters for and supports employees in their daily work while ensuring that buildings and premises are well maintained and presentable.

Research shows that companies investing in employee experience outperform competitors that do not invest in this when it comes to a range of business KPIs, including revenue and profit (Jacob Morgan, The Employee Experience Advantage, Wiley 2017). An attractive workplace can be a key part of a great employee experience – as well as supporting job satisfaction and productivity and helping companies attract and retain employees. And while service levels for some facility management services, such as security and technical maintenance, are largely defined by business requirements or by manufacturers, most services have a relatively high quality range that they can be operated within. This applies, for example, to internal service, canteen, quality of premises etc.

Often, service levels (and costs) are not rooted in the actual needs of service users

Most companies experience challenges when it comes to prioritising resources in terms of where they create the most value for the employees.

Companies often use two methods, which can create challenges:

• They set up user forums where a selected group of employees represent the rest of the company.
• They conduct user satisfaction surveys to measure employee satisfaction with each service area.

The challenge of these two methods is that they are either based on a limited group of people, or that they simply measure satisfaction with the specific service without knowing whether the individual employee actually experiences the specific service as important.

Optimise your service solution by using fact-based initiatives addressing the specific needs of your users

Implement has designed a method to analyse and optimise companies’ facility management service solution; the Data-Driven Improvement Approach. By leveraging facts, the method enables companies to clearly prioritise resources where they create most value for service users, i.e. the employees of the companies. At the same time, it identifies and prioritises concrete improvement initiatives. Overall, the method results in three distinct end products:

1. Clear, fact-based prioritisation of improvement areas

The method ranks each service area in terms of perceived importance (effect) as well as user satisfaction.

Using advanced statistical analysis, the method allows you to quantify the effect on overall user satisfaction when improving each service area. Based on these results, you can clearly prioritise the service areas where improvements will be most valued by your employees. In other words, the analysis identifies where to prioritise – and where not to prioritise – resources to create as much impact as possible on employee satisfaction with as few resources as possible.

2. Detailed insight into concrete improvement

The method identifies and prioritises concrete improvements mentioned by service users.

The concrete improvements are based on an intelligent keyword analysis of free text fields from the survey that tracks the extent to which specific observations are mentioned by employees. In addition, positive themes are analysed and ranked, enabling identification of specific elements to maintain in the service solution.

3. Segmentation of service users

The method segments the users into groups sharing the same service preferences and characteristics.

The segmentation is based on statistical analysis identifying employees with a similar pattern in service user satisfaction, i.e. employees who appreciate the same things in the service solution. This enables you to target improvements and communication to specific service user segments with different service needs.

Implementing the Data-Driven Improvement Approach

You implement the approach through a three-step process:

1. Design and complete the user satisfaction survey. The user satisfaction survey is designed to enable the relevant statistical analyses and address the service scope of your specific organisation.
2. Analyse the responses. You perform a statistical analysis based on structural equation modelling to create a prioritisation matrix, and you perform keyword analyses to identify concrete improvement levers that create as much impact as possible for your employees.
3. Make change happen. You document the results, including prioritised and tangible improvement initiatives, before heading into implementing the changes. Make sure to follow the changes closely in order to create learning loops. Workshops with end users and/or service providers are highly valuable in this phase.

The detailed insight into effect relative to employee satisfaction as well as the consolidated specific feedback will enable the establishment of very concrete efforts and initiatives, including the opportunity to relocate resources between services to increase employee satisfaction without increasing costs.