Facilities departments are constantly changing. New equipment is installed, products and procedures are updated, personnel changes, budgets are reduced, and new goals and initiatives are introduced. Technology changes how work is assigned and tracked, and how processes are implemented. All of these changes require facilities teams to work differently and adapt.
Whether new initiatives and changes ultimately succeed often depends on the people expected to carry them out every day. None of the benefits of a change are fully realized if the people responsible for implementing the change do not understand it, believe in it, or have a meaningful opportunity to help shape how it works in practice.
That is where staff engagement becomes an important component of successful facilities leadership and organizational change.
Healthy Green Schools & Colleges defines staff engagement as the active, meaningful, and generative involvement of staff in a change process. Within the broader HGSC change model, staff engagement specifically recognizes the importance of involving facilities operations and maintenance staff in programs and initiatives designed to create efficient operations, enhanced learning environments, and healthy, green schools.
To make engagement meaningful, it must go beyond informing and create opportunities for employees to contribute what they know, raise concerns, test ideas, identify implementation challenges, and help something improve.
The HGSC change model identifies three particularly important benefits of staff engagement: increasing buy-in and reducing resistance, leveraging staff expertise and insight, and creating a more collaborative culture. This can lead to increased retention and better employee satisfaction with their jobs.
Staff Engagement in Practice: Chicago Public Schools
At Chicago Public Schools (CPS), an existing facilities management tool has become an opportunity to recognize strong performance and create a new form of staff engagement.
The CPS Facilities Team created its Champions Club to recognize employees who consistently demonstrated strong performance over a four-month period. Using data from CrowdComfort, the team looked at the number of days employees worked and the percentage of their assigned daily tasks they completed. Based on those criteria, 54 facilities employees were recognized as Champions.
For Rob Christlieb, Executive Director of Facility Operations and Maintenance at Chicago Public Schools, investing in CrowdComfort has allowed the Facilities department to support and engage their staff in new ways. “One of the reasons we started using CrowdComfort was to validate the work being done by our people” shared Christlieb. “It gives us a record that the work is being completed, the photos showing the work are uploaded, and teachers and staff can see there is evidence that the work has been done.”
That documentation created greater visibility into the work happening across CPS facilities. This visibility created opportunities for recognition. “We realized that the data stored in CrowdComfort could also be a way to engage and motivate the team,” said Christlieb. “Instead of only having the data to show that people are doing the work, we can use it to celebrate the people who are doing the work really well.”
The Champions Club uses CrowdComfort data as an opportunity to identify success, reinforce strong performance, and make employees’ contributions more visible. CPS brought the first group of Champions to the district’s central office to celebrate their accomplishments and provide employees with visible recognition for the work they perform every day. “We want people to know that we see the work they are doing and that it matters,” Christlieb shared. “The recognition grabbed the team’s attention, and we hope to make the Champions Club an annual program.”
The initiative provides a useful example of how the most effective staff engagement can be found by looking at the systems already in place a little differently. A tool originally intended to document completed work can also become a way to celebrate employees, strengthen motivation, and create more opportunities for improved employee satisfaction.
Assessing Staff Engagement in Your Own Department
For facilities leaders, strengthening staff engagement can begin by examining how employees currently participate in change. Consider the following questions:
- When a new operational process is being developed, at what point are frontline employees brought into the conversation?
- What opportunities do employees have to identify problems or recommend improvements outside of formal supervisory conversations?
- When employees provide feedback, how do they learn what happened as a result?
- What small, manageable opportunities could you create for employees to contribute without adding significant demands to their workload?
- When was the last time employee feedback caused your department to change its original plan?
Successful change requires strategy, resources, communication, and committed leadership. It also requires the experience and participation of the people closest to the work to ensure that initiatives succeed.