Why The New Normal Demands Beyond-Normal Cleaning And Disinfection | Facility Management Services
Facilities management encompasses a range of disciplines and services to ensure the functionality, comfort, safety and efficiency of a built environment — buildings and grounds, infrastructure and real estate.
Facilities management is divided into two basic areas: Hard Facilities Management (Hard FM) and Soft Facilities Management (Soft FM). Hard FM deals with physical assets such as plumbing, heating and cooling, elevators. Soft FM focuses on tasks performed by people such as custodial services, lease accounting, catering, security, grounds keeping.
Facility management services market is set to witness a healthy CAGR of 10.25% in the forecast period of 2019-2026.
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The pandemic has businesses reeling and trying to balance the fear of lost revenue with the question at the heart of their reopening plans: How do we protect the safety of workers from the invisible threat of COVID-19? The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) has provided guidelines, but for most organizations they do little to calm the fears.
There needs to be a focus on how businesses can transition these guidelines into actions that protect the health and safety, legal, and economic implications of their business and employees — and it starts by bringing facility management to the boardroom to discuss with company executives not how they’re heating the building, but how they’re going to save lives.
But How Can Facilities Monitor Social Distancing?
Measuring temperature, oxygen levels, and the physical location of people is another key aspect. Facility management need information on people’s physical location in relation to others to determine if there is social distancing, and may require a device that can track temperature, heart rate and oxygen saturation level to provide insight into unnoticeable symptoms.
Retail facilities have been especially hard hit. Shopping malls are likely going to be shuttering in suburbs all across the country, as store closures grow in number and landlords capitulate. A recent report from Coresight Research estimates 25 percent of America’s roughly 1,000 malls will close over the next three to five years, with the pandemic accelerating a demise that was already underway before the new virus emerged, according to CNBC.
People put a lot of trust in a facility's leadership. If you are responsible for a facility, that's a lot to take on. And facility leaders will ask: how can I guarantee that people (team members, team leaders, students, patients, clients, customers, guests — our colleagues, our families) in my facility won't get sick? That's a natural thing to ask for.
Disinfection Is Now Everyone's Business
Before the outbreak of COVID-19, disinfection may not have been a core competency of your business. When you compared the benefits of facility service providers and in-house cleaning, that was likely a factor. Now we are here, and your business' core competencies may not have grown to include disinfection, but your business' core needs have now changed drastically. Cleaning and disinfection are now a priority, if not a clear requirement, for maintaining healthy spaces in a facility.
The Full Facility Scope of COVID-19
Infection prevention happens in an environment. That means factors beyond direct disinfection have an impact, such as indoor air quality. For instance, humidity is known to affect droplet size, which can influence how far an airborne droplet travels before dropping, or how fast droplets accumulate on a surface. As you step back and consider the physical changes to spaces, like adding plexiglass shields, or 2 signs that encourage traffic patterns that support social distancing, it's important to consider the role of facility assets.