Perfect balance

TOWERING ACHIEVEMENTS

One of the most distinctive portfolios of CBRE GWS are the towers and skyscrapers – an area of expertise for Andrews. They’re a demanding environment from an engineering perspective – for instance the challenge of pumping chilled and hot water around 30 or 40 storeys of a building. What’s also distinctive is that these buildings have potentially 8,000 occupants at any one time with multiple stakeholders and a multitude of requirements from landlord and tenants.

Explains Andrews: “We often work for the landlord as well as the tenants in these buildings. Providing services for both leads to so much more value, as when the landlords and the tenants are working on the same page, the building wins collectively.”

Interestingly, the business is bringing a number of learnings from the towers to a major retail client which involves a huge, transformational piece that aims to improve the client’s guest experience.

Says Andrews: “In the retail world you have the shopping centre, and you have the occupiers, and the shopping centre won’t achieve its aims of guest experience and generating footfall while also addressing issues such as driving down carbon if the retail occupiers and the landlord are not aligned. Like the towers we aim to promote a collaborative approach.”

FUTURE THINKING

According to Andrews the current concerns of clients are in achieving ESG, meeting net zero targets and adopting the right technology, with AI and data now an increasingly part of the mix. He advocates starting with the right data, which for some FM clients can involve a complicated legacy.

“I think some of the challenges are that people have got existing technology and have tried to overlay a form of smart technology for a quick win. But our advice is to ask what it is they are trying to focus on. What’s the strategy to get there? And then we can build the right solution using meaningful and relevant technology.” Like many in this situation, simply adding isolated bits of technology with no real clear strategy behind it has led to a lot of complications. Andrews advocates beginning with the data, because without this fundamental in place to begin with, you’re never going to get the outcomes you want, and the danger of overlaying different technologies is that they might not integrate properly.

The widespread adoption of AI within the sector is also going to influence the FM employment landscape, believes Andrews.

“We have a number of Performance Managers that work with the data and tech to drive dashboards for clients. These roles didn’t really exist two or three years ago, and over the next five years, there will be roles created in the FM space that didn’t exist previously. These new roles are also driving changes with our delivery, moving from industry standard maintenance to a reliability focused maintenance approach.

“I don’t see it being technology replacing jobs. I see the fact that we’re going to need new roles as FM evolves. I’m confident technology will work alongside people to enhance and change the working environment.”

Looking to the future for CBRE GWS, Andrews confirms that whilst the UK is currently its most mature market globally, he feels there’s still plenty of opportunity where customers begin to understand the value they can add.

“We often get customers saying, ‘I didn’t realise you delivered this service and could help me in that area’, or ‘I thought this opportunity would be too small for GWS’. Which I understand, as CBRE has such a diverse breadth of services. There is a huge amount of value we can deliver across the entire real estate lifecycle.

“As long as we continue doing what we’re doing, concentrate on our core values of being customer centric, empowering our teams, and investing in future talent, then I’ve got no doubt, we will continue growing and evolving our services.”