Transform Your Facility Management with These 11 Sustainable Strategies
At a time when sustainable facilities management has become starkly important, facilities need to be environmentally mindful both during the building and design phases as well as throughout operation. Building owners need to adapt designs that enable future reconfiguration, reuse, as well as salvage of building materials in order to achieve sustainability goals for their structures.
A sustainable facility program will allow you to demonstrate quantitative improvements in your business, but only when you tactically implement it. Further, sustainability concepts are evolving in the face of emerging challenges. So, innovation, too, holds the key to sustainability along with the knowledge of the implementation process.
Well, implementing a sustainable program in facilities involves a series of steps that include adopting designs that can decrease carbon footprint, using non-toxic materials, paving way for green space, and adopting energy-efficient electric and lighting systems. Further, they extend to complying with accepted air quality norms and recycling. While this was just a snapshot, we go into the details below.
Sustainability in Facilities Management – Key Considerations
Enterprises should successfully incorporate sustainability in the foundation of the firm to make it succeed. Your facility’s must-win plans must be closely related to its sustainability plan. With the below-mentioned steps, we will empower you to implement a winning sustainability facility management program.
Assess Current Practices
The first step in implementing a sustainable facilities management program is to assess current practices. This involves examining the existing energy and resource usage, waste management practices, and sustainability metrics for your facility. The audit should identify areas that need improvement and provide a baseline against which progress can be measured.
Also Read: Top 9 Facilities Management Practices
Set Goals and Targets
Based on the assessment, set specific and measurable goals and targets that align with the organization’s overall sustainability objectives. These goals could include reducing energy consumption, waste generation, and carbon emissions. It is important to ensure that the goals and targets are realistic and achievable.
Develop a Sustainability Plan
Create a comprehensive sustainability plan for your facility management program. It must outline strategies and actions needed to achieve the goals and targets. The plan should also identify the resources and budget required for implementation and include a timeline for implementation and clear responsibilities for each action.
Engage Stakeholders
Engage and involve all relevant stakeholders, including employees, tenants, customers, and suppliers, in the development and implementation of the sustainability plan. This can include providing training and awareness programs to build support and buy-in. It is important to communicate the benefits of sustainability and how everyone can contribute to the program.
Embrace Eco-Friendly Cleaning
One of your main duties is to maintain clean, well-kept facilities. However, the majority of conventional cleaning products include dangerous substances that could endanger your staff, clients, and contractors.
By using eco-friendly cleaning supplies, you may limit the number of hazardous chemicals that your facilities release into the environment and the exposure of everyone who uses them and lives nearby.
Implement Recycling Practices
Recycling is a crucial component of increasing the sustainability of your buildings since it saves energy, prevents waste generation, and lowers CO2 emissions
Some ways you can implement recycling include recycling fluorescent tubes by returning them to manufacturers for safe recycling. Next, batteries are harmful and should not be disposed of in a landfill. Similarly, it takes a hauler to properly remove and recycle oversized equipment. Provide haulers with detailed information about the materials you want recycled so they can show up with the right equipment.
Ensure vendors support Green practices
Engage vendors who employ eco-friendly materials and energy-saving equipment when your buildings need repair or maintenance. Also, you should make sure the vendors you employ have knowledge of the low-energy assets and other resources your facilities contain.
Determine the degree to which the individuals who provide goods or services to your place of business are committed to protecting the environment. This would demonstrate their involvement with your business and support your sustainable business vision.
When choosing green vendors, assess the knowledge, credentials, values, and distinguishing characteristics of the vendors. Giving your business to vendors who support sustainability initiatives demonstrates your commitment to the environment and environmentally friendly buildings.
Sustainability Audit
Doing a sustainability audit is an important step toward creating a sustainable future in facility management. They enable driving a thorough analysis of your facility’s existing procedures that considers your environmental effect and makes recommendations for activities to support and put into action sustainable practices.
Sustainability audits reveal which hard and soft facility management services are worth improving, advancing, or getting rid of in order to achieve higher sustainability levels.
Create a Culture
The facility manager shouldn’t be responsible for all aspects of sustainable facility management. It should involve the cooperation of all personnel inside the company. This is why it needs to become part of the corporate culture.
Establishing rules and procedures that all participants must abide by is one strategy to promote this culture. This could involve resource management, massive e-waste recycling, and station upkeep during and after employment.
Drive Sustainability Analytics
Continuously monitor and measure progress towards the sustainability goals and targets. This can involve tracking energy and water usage, waste generation, and greenhouse gas emissions, and reporting on progress to stakeholders. This data can be used to identify areas for improvement and celebrate successes.
Analytics will help you have answers to crucial questions such as where your facility is wasting energy. It will assist you to straightaway arrive at the specific equipment that is causing energy loss. So, you would be better positioned to determine the causes of losses. Similarly, repair, maintenance, and replacement decisions would all be data-driven.
Review and Revise
Last but not least, regularly review and revise the sustainability plan and initiatives based on performance data and feedback from stakeholders. This ensures that the program remains relevant and effective in achieving sustainability goals over time. It is important to be flexible and adapt to changing circumstances.
Conclusion
Facility managers are realizing the value of technology in facility management. The generation and simplification of data on all facilities and assets using technology tools, such as a CAFM system, will also assist facility managers in creating actionable strategies.
Artificial intelligence-based technology makes it easier to do all monotonous and repetitive facility management chores. You can also use a bespoke facilities management app with strong sustainability features.
Facilities management sustainability can be a laborious task that necessitates careful planning. Nevertheless, after you establish your organization’s sustainability objectives, adhere to the advice in this post, and use technological tools in the process, you’ll put your business in a good position to reap the rewards of sustainability. To make technology your partner in implementing a winning sustainability facility program, connect with FieldCircle team today.
