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SUPPORTIVE RELATIONSHIP
Thanks to Carillion, the new FM service team had just three weeks to manage the transition across an estate supporting 11,000 employees. The Bristol contract helped set the model for a rapid transition, with planned training sessions for everyone involved in FM delivery and teambuilding sessions for cleaners, front of house staff and engineers. In addition, an external consultant provided customer service training on DLG’s brands, values and mission, alongside various events designed to bring everyone together as a team.
According to Iles, from the outset the DLG property team was collectively defined, with deference given to expertise ahead of job title or seniority. All team members operate under the same brand and operatives wear the same uniform, no matter what their role within the team. Successful features of Ascot and Mainstay’s services have been adopted, such as Mainstay’s HR documentation and Ascot’s health and safety ‘toolbox talk’ format. The partnership agreed on all systems and processes as well as format of documents, reporting styles and the data library.
There is a notable lack of formality and high level of trust among the parties. This has helped the team to build a collaborative relationship – a supportive approach that has resulted in strong results across 28 key performance areas.
Says Iles: “The overriding principle is that we are one team with one strategy and one mission, and we have rolled this approach out as we deliver transformation to all our other sites. The KPIs and SLAs have all been exceeded, with 95 per cent first-time fix on reactive tasks and 98.3 per cent of all emergencies rectified within four hours.”
The property team didn’t lose one person during the Tupe process, due in part to the sensitive handling of a very challenging situation. Says Lennon: “Within a couple of days [of the Carillion collapse] it was quite clear that ex-Carillion people were not getting clear messages, so a note came from me as [then] Head of Property to every member of the team affected, with the message being, ‘don’t worry, we are looking for a new solution and you’ll be part of that’.”
Senior people from Ascot and Mainstay were positioned at DLG’s core sites, says Iles, “to put their arms around the property teams. From that first week of mobilising we’ve operated in the same way as Bristol – which is best in class. We’ve mirrored that with a transformation programme on all the sites, with the building maintenance technicians (hard services) and workplace managers (soft services) making sure we offer the same customer experience for staff and visitors.”
After more than 30 years working within the financial services industry, Mark Lennon was inspired by Ascot’s passion for its work to join the company. “For me, an industry that is ripe for revolution is the FM sector,” he says. “It was frustrating meeting senior FM professionals who didn’t understand the importance of data and how it can be used to drive improvements to the workplace experience for their clients. There are plenty of academic studies that demonstrate a correlation between the workplace experience, employee engagement and increased worker productivity. The FM industry is well placed to make a significant contribution here, but the industry has been slow to adapt.”
