CHICAGO—The people who provide facilities management have been getter older, and officials from JLL have launched an initiative to recruit young people into the profession, and also discover ways to retain and further develop their talents.
“I don't see the same amount of people flocking to the trade schools where we typically find potential employees,” Chris Pesek, executive vice president and director of integrated facilities management at JLL, tells GlobeSt.com. The average age of facilities management professionals is now 49, according to a recent JLL study, even though the general working population averages 43. This puts many firms at risk of having to eventually spend an inordinate amount of money on recruitment and retention.
Pesek believes that recruiting members of the millennial generation holds the key to keeping the profession fresh and well-stocked with talent. However, most millennials still think of managers as nothing more than building superintendents, and don't understand that smart building technology now allows real-time facility monitoring and control. This and other factors gives professional managers access to powerful analytic tools that can have a big impact on a company's bottom line and even shape its culture.
A modern-day manager with the right monitoring tools and controls, for example, can gauge and maximize the amount of natural light that flows into a workplace, or perhaps track the use of hundreds of chairs in real time to measure precisely how employees use office space. Therefore, instead of just passively ensuring that a building has enough heat or proper air pressure, managers can now analyze volumes of data and discover whether “the built environment is reflecting the needs of employees,” Pesek says.
“But it's not seen that way,” he adds. “And the challenge for us is to bring notice to our industry. Right now, there's an information lag.”
JLL surveyed 207 North American post-secondary students and young professionals that studied relevant fields such as science, math, engineering, business, accounting, and architecture. But only 1% said they thought they would enter the field of facilities management. And even though 43% said they had at least heard of facilities management, just 25% of students aged 21 to 24 had. Furthermore, even among those who had heard of the profession, very few understood what it entailed.
The respondents told JLL researchers that they preferred recruiters who used direct methods such as offering internships as opposed to those who relied on company websites or brochures. And JLL has decided to adopt more direct methods when training those they do recruit into the field.
“We've got to be better mentors and we've got to be better coaches,” says Pesek. To foster individual growth, the company has deemphasized the use of Power Point presentations and other somewhat passive methods when teaching its managers. Instead, most instruction consists of designing special experiments and challenges for each individual.
The strategy, he adds, is tailor-made for millennials, who deplore micromanagement. “You have to let people explore and learn some things for themselves.”
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Brian J. Rogal
Brian J. Rogal is a Chicago-based freelance writer with years of experience as an investigative reporter and editor, most notably at The Chicago Reporter, where he concentrated on housing issues. He also has written extensively on alternative energy and the payments card industry for national trade publications.
