Fresh start

VALUE ADD

The new brand will be rolled out by around the end of this summer with a new website, emails and brand guidelines. Legge also explains that a wide scale internal survey was carried out within both organisations to determine the values of the new group. They came up with TRUE, which stands for:

• TRUST
• RESPECT
• UNITY
• EMPOWERMENT

He says: “I’ve been around this industry a long time and these values are true to our heart and rememberable. We want our people to be proud of the brand and be a champion of its principles.”

With this in mind diversity and inclusion is an area he’s very focused on and aims to develop even further. The group has invested heavily in HR with the recruitment of a high-level HR person to drive cultural changes within the business.

Explains Legge: “We want to start developing and growing our people, with talent management, succession planning, and giving opportunities to people within the organisation, so they can see their way up from the ground floor including opportunities to grow and develop through leadership programmes.

“I don’t want people leaving this group to go to a competitor. I want them to grow within this organisation, and I want us to be the employer of choice with people wanting to come and work for this organisation.

“This approach is also about our customers, as we don’t want to lose them due to bad service. I like what OCS has done with its net customer score where they operate an interview once a year to score performance so we’ll roll this out across the whole group as a differentiator between our competitors, and help ensure we are focusing on our people and our clients.”

ESG is also something they are also focusing on now, with the creation of an ESG team within the combined organisation that will look at its own ESG credentials as well as offering a service to customers, which includes for example advice on achieving net zero.

MEASURE PERFORMANCE

As Legge explains OCS had already done a lot of work on enhancing its KPI programme by using dashboards, something the new group will adopt and there will be a heavy investment in an IT programme which is being supported by CD&R who can offer advice on roll out.

Says Legge: “The new tech will enable us to be able to track a lot more of the data both internally to help our own processes and systems and also if customers ask us for the data we can give it to them in a format they can use and is meaningful.

“Everyone talks about tech but you need to do something with it, so we want to focus on how we’re going to enable our technology offerings to help our customers become more efficient, and how it can help them with cost. The rationale is if we can be more efficient as a business we can be more cost effective in terms of the services we provide and more innovative in some of the products we provide.”

DOING THINGS DIFFERENTLY

Looking at the main challenges for the FM sector Legge is conscious of costs going up but acknowledges there is only so much FM providers can pass through to their customers. He believes it all comes back to doing things differently, with the better use of data, IoT, and robotics.

Says Legge: “We’re working as hard as we can to come up with new ideas and solutions and better ways of working. It all comes back to what does the customer want at the end of the day and ensuring that what we offer is fit for purpose.”

“In hard FM, building management tools have evolved which can track assets so whereas a few years ago engineers would have to go out and check everything – now they only go out to make checks if the system tells them to. What we need to do now is work out as an industry how to use that in cleaning, as it’s so people orientated it’s more complex.

“People cost a lot of money and with higher wage bills if the customers don’t want to pay for as many people, we need to determine how we can be more efficient on the ground.”

FORWARD THINKING

Looking to the future, Legge says he’s excited about the new challenge and points out that having been in the industry 27 years – this is the third big project he’s done. He sees it as an opportunity to not necessarily be the largest player but the best in class.

“I’ve people around me who are enthusiastic, excited about the future and want to create something in the market that is different, that is agile, that has a vision to drive through change and has customers that talk about us as not only a safe pair of hands but at the forefront of innovation.”

Ultimately explains Legge, the new look OCS wants to continue to working with customers as partners and evolve these relationships, “to help create a legacy for the future that moulds and changes how FM works”.

Of the two brands he acknowledges they are at once very different and yet very similar, and his job is to bring the passion and the drive to take the business to the next level. Given his previous successes there is not much doubt he can do that and he now has the resources and the right investors in place “whose culture is all about people”.

As he’s keen to point out: “Watch this space’ we’re moving very quickly and we’re on a mission to disrupt the market.”