Research & Survey Services

Getting good facilities and corporate real estate information through research takes time and effort but it also requires the ability to access other facility organizations who are willing to contribute their information.

If you need to know something, the easiest way is to get an independent third party to do the facilities research for you, whether it's a straight forward survey, a detailed interview based process or benchmarking. Not only will a third party like FMinsight be able to get the facilities related information needed because they can assure confidential, your organization will accept the results more readily because they are developed by an independent, recognized Facility Management consultant organization. This is very important if you are using information for a facility business case.

When it comes to services, we provide three types, but when in doubt or if there is something else you need, contact us for a discussion about what you need and how we can help you.

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• Private Research
• Benchmarking
• Satisfaction Surveys

Our research services can be provided in combination with our traditional facilities management consulting services provided through Strategic Advisor FM Consulting.

Private Research

Whether you are in Facility Management or a supplier to the facilities / building industry, research can be very valuable to help you influence others within your organization, make decisions or simply provide information you can use for your own facilities or service operations or initiatives.

Since we are a third party and maintain strict confidentiality, we are able to gather information that you wouldn’t be able to. We also have a global reach and profile, so it is easier for us to find and target specific organizations that should be involved in research where a certain profile is needed, or to gather input from a wide range of organizations from our various channels.

We work with you to understand your purpose and then develop questions that will get the information you need. We also conduct interviews of targeted facilities organizations to gather more details and nuances as needed. Once the information has been compiled, we do analysis and segmentation so the results are developed in a way you can use to meet your goals.

Where the results are meant to support a business case, we can help you develop a compelling set of data and help you write an influential business case that gets support for your initiative.

Benchmarking

Measuring facilities results is the best way to improve what you are doing. This is the core of almost all quality management systems. Benchmarking is a form of measurement – where you measure against something else to see where you are lagging, identify the areas and take corrective action. This is the essence of benchmarking.

Even if you think you are doing everything right, how do you know unless you compare? No organization is the best at everything and the same is true for yours.

So, if you aren’t benchmarking, you can’t possibly be doing everything you should be doing.

Standard Benchmarking

Standard benchmarking is a broad based comparison with a large number of other organizations and facilities departments. While it gives you good information on where you compare to the average, you don’t usually have enough information to make informed decisions to improve your facilities services delivery. Standard Benchmarking may tell you which direction to go, but it can’t tell you how to get there.

It is still an important part of many improvement processes. Our surveys and polls are in fact a form of benchmarking in very specific, focussed areas. In fact, we often use other sourves of large-scale published facility and corporate real estate benchmarking as the initial basis for comparison when we help clients but we can also do benchmarking specific to your needs. The important thing is to use this type of benchmarking as a guide - and take it one step further.

Strategic Benchmarking

Strategic Benchmarking goes beyond standard benchmarking. While standard benchmarking can tell you which direction to go, Strategic Benchmarking helps you figure out how to get there. It isn’t just about comparing numbers, it’s about a process to target problem areas, identify solutions and implement changes that will get better results for your facilities team and your organization..

Standard Benchmarking is part of the process, but Strategic Benchmarking digs deeper into specific facilities areas to look at the practices. It involves a select number of other organizations to compare your facilities practices against and includes a more in-depth survey that covers practices in addition to numbers. We also do interviews to get even more details and the nuance around their facilities delivery methods, organization, practices, process, tools and other factors that makes them leaders in a particular area of facilities and corporate real estate.

This is typically best for very specific issues or topics, not a broad based review. Usually, you pick a key area in your facilities responsibiliteis that may have been identified through standard benchmarking and after doing a Strategic Benchmarking exercise, identifying where you need to change and implementing those changes, you may choose to move on to the next most important area. Strategic Benchmarking typically looks at these three key areas that drive efficiency and effectiveness in facilities and corporate real estate:

• Procedures
• Systems
• Resources

We help you pick the right areas and then we conduct an in-depth exercise to get you the information, analysis and advice that helps you. Since we are a third party and maintain strict confidentiality, we can get the involvement of others who may otherwise not want to share information with you.

Customer Satisfaction Surveys

Getting input from your users or occupants is an important part of managing facilities. It provides you with first-hand information about what you need to do differently and what is working.

While you may feel it’s a risk to ask for their opinion, you will be better off in the long run. Getting input provides you with information you need to influence others within your organization or to make better decisions. Doing it right, however, with questions that provide insight on issues you can act on, is critical and a failure of many satisfaction surveys.

Survey Development

We can help you develop survey questions that get the information you need to act on. Even if you don't use our survey administration services, you can develop and administer surveys for a wide variety of purposes, including quality assurance, customer or tenant satisfaction, transaction satisfaction (i.e. work order or projects) and more. It's important to get it right if you want to use the information instead of simply looking at numbers. We've seen questions that don't help or badly worded questions that improperly influence the response, including negative responses. The most important thing is to develop survey quesitons with analysis and action in mind.

By developing an effective survey, you can get the information you need, even if you use a paper based survey or use telephone calls to get the results, such as for a project or transaction related survey.

Using the right techniques and well developed questions that provide you with information you can actually use to make improvements or act upon, we will develop questionnaires that work.

Administering your Surveys

We administer your customer / occupant satisfaction surveys for you, including helping with the analysis and action plans. Your surveys will be private and appear with your own branding. Our knowledge and experience in Facility Management enables us to develop better surveys to meet your needs.

The process is simple. We work together to develop the questions and options that are facilities related, using a number of different survey techniques, including drop down lists, ranking, matching and even importance scales.

You provide a file with names and email addresses and we send out special emails with your personal or corporate message, inviting the recipients to participate, along with a unique link for each participant. We can follow-up automatically at set times with recipients. You can also include links in work order close-out emails or on your internal website.

Our related consulting services are a useful companion to a survey initiative. We can work with you to analyze the results and develop action plans and communications back to participants after the survey is completed.