IFMA’s World Workplace “Create Your Own Success” will be held Oct. 3 to 5 in Charlotte, N.C. More than 4,000 facilities management and related professionals are expected to attend from 40 countries and every state in the U.S. The attendees represent 2,000 companies in facilities management, IT, PM, HR, engineering, security, real estate, sustainability and energy.
Attendees can learn from more than 100 education sessions. Attendees can earn CEUs and 20 CFM maintenance points. Click here for full details on earning your points.
From deja-vu lessons about emergency preparedness for California wildfires to navigating and utilizing gender differences in the age of #MeToo, IFMA is offering critical seminars for today’s FMs.
Here are some commercial courses that The McMorrow Reports is excited about:
1.07 Grab the Attention of the CEO to fund your projects – Finance for Dummies
Thursday, October 4, 2018 1:45 PM – 2:45 PM
Venue: Charlotte Convention Center – West Wing
Room: 210AB
Does your CEO and CFO speak a foreign language? Do you know how to grab their attention so that they will approve your projects? Do all of those analyses that they request for your projects overwhelm and confuse you? Do you know how to calculate the Payback Period? How about Return on Investment? Have you completed a cost/benefit analysis? What about Life Cycle Costing? The new buzz words and analysis being requested are life cycle costing and total cost of ownership. This presentation will discuss the easier budgeting tools and then delve into the mysterious world of Life Cycle Costing and Total Cost of Ownership. This presentation will demonstrate simple capital budget analysis of payback and return on investment. Then the concept of life cycle costing and total cost of ownership will be presented. Two real life examples will used to demonstrate the principles of life cycle costing. After all that analysis is completed, there are certain buzz words that will grab the attention of your CFO. Don’t miss this presentation that will provide tools to assist you in getting your capital projects approved.
1.01 Make it Count | Real Benefits of Smart Buildings
Thursday, October 4, 2018 1:45 PM – 2:45 PM
Venue: Charlotte Convention Center – West Win
Room: 202AB
As new entrants abound in the exploding smart buildings market, experienced practitioners are working to “find reality” among the quantitative and qualitative promises of merging physical and digital environments. Serving as a trusted advisor to attendees seeking clarity in the evolving field, this session will use a real-world portfolio implementation to explore: 1. Two clear categories of “smart buildings”: Experiential and Operational 2. Implementation realities and solutions to common enterprise pitfalls 3. FM-focused benefits of “smart” – in retrofits and new construction This session will focus on building operations – exploring the journey to a portfolio and building-level “smart” implementation. We will share work completed and results to date between CBRE and TBA Client sharing how new technology enables the team to streamline wrench time, prioritize work orders, increase proactive responses, decrease costs, and ensure up-time. Our session will join leaders from CBRE Smart Buildings and IoT, Building System Integration & Optimization, and TBA Client FM Leaders to discuss what they’ve done, what benefits they’ve seen and how you can experience the same in your own portfolio.
1.11B How Facilities Help Drive Culture and Employee Engagement
Thursday, October 4, 2018 2:15 PM – 2:45 PM
Venue: Charlotte Convention Center – West Wing
Room: 208A
To keep up with the competition, companies must change the way they work and focus on the employee experience. Allstate, an 89-year-old insurance company, confirmed this by opening its first innovation hub in downtown Chicago in May of 2016. By creating a space in the Merchandise Mart, a prime location and evolving tech hub, Allstate was able to try something new. A relaxed dress code, an agile environment and the opportunity to share learning experiences were some of the ways Allstate, and its subsidiary telematics company, Arity, has been able to attract and retain the industry’s best talent. We could not have done this without designing a space that allowed for open seating, collaborative spaces and configurable training rooms, among other amenities. We will present the goals for opening this office in May of 2016. How we went from 125 employees to over 800 in under two years. How we keep iterating on what works to further drive the creation of cutting-edge products. And, how these efforts have been so successful, our office doubled its footprint earlier this year.
2.11A Highlights from the 2018 New Ways of Working Fifth Biennial Global Benchmarking Study
Thursday, October 4, 2018 3:00 PM – 3:30 PM
Venue: Charlotte Convention Center – West Wing
Room: 208A
This session is not to be missed. It will offer insights into workplace trends across the past decade from “The Once Alternative Workplace Strategy Fifth Annual Benchmarking Report (2018).” Based on 10 years of trend data, covered topics will include: workplace strategies, workplace design, work practices, change management practices, where work is conducted, executive sponsorship, and more. The report was developed by a trio of Workplace Evolutionaries (WE), Chris Hood (Advanced Workplace Associates), Kate Lister (Global Workplace Analytics), and Gaby Nagy, Ph.D. (Haworth, Inc.) and additionally supported by WE/IFMA. Check out this month’s FM Journal for more information.
Death of the Commercial Lease and How It Can Delight Your Employees!
Thursday, October 4, 2018 3:00 PM – 4:00 PM
Venue: Charlotte Convention Center – West Wing
Room: 205
When people talk about Space As a Service, you immediately think about WeWork, Knotel, and other community shared space providers. While these companies provide tremendous services, the typical Enterprise/Business needs to think more broadly when truly taking advantage of the paradigm shift in how Commercial Leases will be executed in the future. Furthermore, truly successful companies will not only take advantage of the flexibility and cost savings, but also create a more compelling work environment for employees. Real Estate is the single biggest fixed expense for a company! Companies need to make commercial leasing/buying decisions based on future growth and headcount projections often with limited or optimistic data projections. Unfortunately, this can severely limit a company’s future flexibility. At the same time, the modern employee has vastly different wants and needs from their workplace. The days of mahogany desks in large offices are ending. For many years, large companies have tried to move employees out of the office (on the road or working from home) to reduce commercial footprint and costs. However, this virtualization of the workforce had many unforeseen and negative consequences. Recently, companies have moved towards more open, shared space or neighborhood seating approaches. For the most part, these changes were all driven by cost reason, and didn’t fully consider the impact on employee experience and engagement. Companies, however, no longer need to look at real estate/space as purely a cost center. This case study and discussion will outline a 4-step plan for companies to understand how to manage their space and utilize technology and services to turn your space into a variable cost while engaging with and creating experiences employees expect.
2.10 Emergency Preparedness – No More Flying by the Seat of Your Pants!
Thursday, October 4, 2018 3:00 PM – 4:00 PM
Venue: Charlotte Convention Center – West Wing
Room: 207A
With so much focus on headline scenarios like active shooter, most organizations are not prepared for the more common events, such as power anomalies and HVAC failures; which can have a significant impact on productivity, customer satisfaction, and the bottom line. In this session, we will provide five simple steps for developing an Emergency Response Management (ERM) Program and preparing the FM department and the organization for all that goes bump in the night.
3 Global Construction Costs: Understanding Emerging Trends, 2018
Thursday, October 4, 2018 3:00 PM – 4:00 PM
Venue: Charlotte Convention Center – West Wing
Room: 201AB
The Quantity Surveyor, also known as a Construction Economist, or Cost Manager, is one of a team of professional cost and contact advisers to the construction industry. Quantity Surveying (QS) is one of the RICS’s 17 Professional Group, along with Facilities Management (FM). QS’s are traditionally professional specialism are traditionally focused on the initial capital expenditure phase of a building or facility, which involves the feasibility, design and construction phases. But QS’s can also be involved with the extension, refurbishment, maintenance and demolition of facilities, and globally extend across all real estate sectors and infrastructure markets. Increasingly QS’s working with FM’ers are having an impact on whole of life costs. This presentation will examine research in Construction Costs across the globe, providing an understanding the basics and emerging trends with reference to: • Standards of measurement, such as the IPMS and ICMS • Data resources, such as the BCIS and publications • Market insight, such RLB intelligence • Life costing, where QS and FM’er meet
3.11A Revelations and Calculations about Circulation
Thursday, October 4, 2018 4:15 PM – 4:45 PM
Venue: Charlotte Convention Center – West Wing
Room: 208A
Are you correctly calculating circulation for today’s modern work environments? If not, you may be experiencing significant challenges to accommodate the space program within your floor plate, and possibly putting your company at risk when purchasing, building, or leasing a space that is too small for their needs. Understanding how to anticipate the correct circulation factor is even more important as workplaces become more open and designed to purposefully encourage “collisions” and spontaneous encounters. In today’s workplaces, circulation is regarded as a welcomed design element to facilitate connections, rather than its former mundane job to simply move people from elevators to offices to egress stairs. Yet many brokers, architects, designers, and facility managers are using 20th century circulation factors for 21st century workplaces. Come to this session to learn why circulation is often underappreciated and incorrectly calculated, and how you can anticipate the full benefits of tomorrow’s connective spaces.
3.09 Millennials in the FM Workplace: The Benefits, Challenges and HR Pitfalls
Thursday, October 4, 2018 4:15 PM – 5:15 PM
Venue: Charlotte Convention Center – West Wing
Room: 209AB
This will be a panel presentation on the upcoming talent gap, and engagement of YP in the FM profession. The below is a previous abstract, with this panel focusing on recent hot topics (last year was millennial myth busting) in order to engage the audience. It is well documented that a large percentage of the current workforce is either set to retire or approaching retirement age. This turnover requires important consideration of how best to replace these workers, bridge the gap between generations during this transition to avoid meaningful loss of knowledge and skill, and develop new leaders for the coming decades. Both BOMI and IFMA have cited Property and Facility Management as a profession at great risk from this turnover, requiring deliberate attention toward the training and development of the next generation of qualified professionals. Many believe this “attention” requires a mix of academic program, professional industry training and certification, and on-the-job career development to ensure top talent is effectively recruited and retained. This moderated session will feature a panel of young FM professionals in a discussion and debate representing a variety of sectors. The dialogue will range across a series of topics important for FM today and critical for tomorrow, including leadership, cross-training, recognition and reward, career advancement, skill building, the role of technology, recruitment and the academic experience. In addition, the panel will discuss the initiatives that IFMA is undertaking through its Young Professionals Task Force to support and foster growth for Young Professionals.
4.11A Redefining Experience: Friends, Fit, Food, Find, Fix, Feel
Friday, October 5, 2018 8:00 AM – 8:30 AM
Venue: Charlotte Convention Center – West Wing
Room: 208A
Organizations who compete for talent are increasingly seeking ways to put people—and productivity, connectivity, hospitality, and community needs—at the center of the workplace. Today, we live in an unchartered world where the convergence of the smart phone and its rich app landscape, virtually unlimited bandwidth, and cloud computing power, has yielded a world where—with a swipe of a screen—we can organize most of our life’s activities. Employees, tenants, and their clients are beginning to expect this same experience in the workplace. We found a way to create a memorable experience within the built environment. Our case study will explore how the technology revolution is transforming the landscape of the workplace and what the benefits are that this is having for the enterprise: ? Amplifying a company’s own brand and culture ? Attracting and sustaining top talent ? Improving workforce engagement and workplace effectiveness To our client, amplifying brand and culture were essential. Our facilities management approach still focuses on opportunities for cost savings, and now also focuses on the employee experience.
4.09 Blockchain for FM and RE – Is This for Real Yet?
Friday, October 5, 2018 8:00 AM – 9:00 AM
Venue: Charlotte Convention Center – West Wing
Room: 209AB
The annual investments in R&D on Artificial Intelligence are immense, ranking into billions on a global scale. The results of these innovations are gradually reaching into the realms of Real Estate and Facility Management. One of the first proponents of the use of AI has been discussed for some time now: predictive analytics. Beyond these types of applications of AI, we now see new types of software applications emerge which incorporate the use of AI and Machine Learning. Interesting types of applications emerge around the principle of speech recognition, which allows software developers to design completely new principles of interactions with users: not by touch but by voice and other means. In this session we will explore what is happening today in ‘no-touch’ applications and how that can be applied in our field or RE & FM.
4.12 Mobile Movement: The Technology Behind the Next Facility Management Transformation
Friday, October 5, 2018 8:00 AM – 9:00 AM
Venue: Charlotte Convention Center – West Wing
Room: 205
Research has shown that facilities teams spend, on average, nearly one hour per day searching for information. This translates to greater overtime costs, reduced productivity, unnecessary repairs, and a lack of emergency preparedness. It’s clear that managing facilities information—warranties, maintenance logs, equipment lists, as-builts, and more—quickly gets out of hand without the right technology. For the range of challenges facility teams face, existing tools (like a CMMS) simply don’t go far enough. But modern mobile technology is set to transform the way facility managers work: from how they respond to emergencies and work orders to how they conduct training and compliance inspections. In this presentation, audience members will learn how modern facility professionals manage their information—in the cloud and with the help of mobile devices. Attend this session to learn how organizing critical building information in a cloud-based archive boosts productivity for facility managers and their team.
5.04 Healthy Buildings, Improved Experience
Friday, October 5, 2018 9:15 AM – 10:15 AM
Venue: Charlotte Convention Center – West Wing
Room: 207D
Workplaces are quickly evolving to be more sustainable and provide more amenities to improve the wellbeing and productivity of employees- what does this all mean for a facility manager? Maureen Ehrenberg, internationally recognized leader in the facility management field, will moderate this interactive roundtable discussion featuring panelists whose perspectives range from academia to corporate real estate. We’ll engage the audience during the discussion to determine their current understanding of factors that affect workers’ productivity levels in the workplace. As part of the FM team, you can elevate your role by raising these issues to management and offering solutions that make the buildings healthier for all end users, impact the experience, increase productivity, and ultimately the bottom line. We’ll discuss the powerful link between healthy buildings and increased productivity and measurement. Dr. Joe Allen, professor and researcher at Harvard University, will discuss the COGfx Study 3 currently underway in office buildings across the world and how productivity is impacted with changes to the work environment- including air quality and noise. Bob Best, who leads sustainability efforts for JLL’s IFM practice literally wrote the book (“SMART, Green + Productive Workplace” – 2018) on how organizations can combine smart buildings with sustainability concepts to make employees healthier, happier and, in the end, more productive. He will focus on what this all means for FMs. Don’t miss this conversation that will help you consider the health of your buildings and how your management teams will consider the economics behind the changes to the human experience that your FM team will impact.
6.05 FM Utilizes the Research Capability of the Student Chapter
Friday, October 5, 2018 10:30 AM – 11:30 AM
Venue: Charlotte Convention Center – West Wing
Room: 208B
In a changing facility management (FM) environment, a large chapter has identified the importance of innovation in its survival and success. They identified the need to have a research capability and identified and utilized the student chapter at Arizona State University as their research arm. A visionary FM knew that the facility had a roof replacement requirement [$800K]. Even though the Facility manager and facility team opted to go with the traditional roofing consultant design approach, the visionary recommended and steered the team to utilize the chapter’s research capability. The researcher used a totally different approach. With 25 years of experience in the roofing industry, the researcher had developed an approach that utilizes performance information, competes different roofing systems against each other and assigns the expert vendor responsibility for both the roof design and installation performance. The approach moves the owner FM professional’s job to one of quality assurance and the FM associate’s job to quality control. The researcher identified the top performing roofing contractors in the Phoenix Valley and they competed with four different high-performance roofing systems. The lessons learned from the roof installation is that FMs no longer need to have technical knowledge of facility systems. Expert FM Associates can provide quality roofing systems without being directed. The FM Associate managed their own project despite numerous attempts by the traditional FM team to take over the project control. The researcher was directed by the traditional FM group to do certain tasks that were not needed. The researcher and FM Professional’s biggest challenges were the resistance from the FM professionals at the site. The roof was successfully installed with very high performance and value.
7.11A Cracking the Code to Deploying an “Unassigned” Workplace Strategy Crack the Code of Successful Activity Based Work
Friday, October 5, 2018 11:45 AM – 12:15 PM
Venue: Charlotte Convention Center – West Wing
Room: 208A
For over a decade, CRE organizations have globally deployed “unassigned” workplace strategies. Often these programs result in low levels of environmental satisfaction and professional performance. In this highly-interactive session, using a blended learning technique, we will begin by capturing the experience of our audience. Based upon these data, we will showcase organization intelligence collected during dozens of workplace redesign projects and insights drawn from peer-reviewed articles in the cognitive and economic sciences to identify issues affecting unassigned workspace success as well as those linked to wellness and agility. The research information ties unassigned workspace success primarily to organizational and sometimes, national cultures. Cross-cultural perceptions of environmental control have a significant effect on the success of unassigned workspaces and management styles (opinions and practices) drive responses to unassigned workspace scenarios. Nonverbal communication and the quantity of alternative work locations also influence the success of unassigned workspace strategies. The session will feature straightforward, practical design and management recommendations that increase the likelihood that unassigned workplace strategies are successfully implemented. We will explore best practices of successful adaptations using the lens of the evolved “pattern language” introduced by Alexander. To conclude we will highlight the “Five Key Steps to Insure Successful Adoption of an Unassigned Strategy” and lead the audience through a “pop-up” exercise designed to deepen their learning and spur connections with others facing the similar issues. Our goal is to provide evidence, a powerful framework, and confidence to attendees implementing unassigned workplace strategies.
7.04 Navigating Gender Differences in the Workplace
Friday, October 5, 2018 11:45 AM – 12:45 PM
Venue: Charlotte Convention Center – West Wing
Room: 207D
With increasing awareness and navigating gender in the workplace, we will discuss how men and women can learn to work together to achieve optimal results. It is imperative to cultivate our gender intelligence to effectively collaborate with the opposite sex. This dynamic panel, comprised of 2 men and 2 women, will give situations and objective views to different scenarios. You will hear from both on how to change your mindset to understand each other’s perceptions.
7.12 When the Smoke Clears: How Planning Enabled Business to Continue During the Northern California Wildfires
Friday, October 5, 2018 11:45 AM – 12:45 PM
Venue: Charlotte Convention Center – West Wing
Room: 205
How ready are you for a big disaster? As a small business, when we undertook the ISO Business Continuity Management Systems certification, we knew it would be a challenge and that it would help us plan for business interruptions. However, until we experienced a real emergency and office closure, we did not appreciate how much it actually helped us prepare for what came to be known as the most destructive fire in California history. FEA’s Santa Rosa office was part of the evacuation area for the northern California wildfires that raged in October 2017. While our facility remained intact, buildings all around burned to the ground and the surrounding areas were inaccessible for weeks. Through business continuity planning, we were able to maintain business operations with little interruption. Key elements from the business continuity management system developed through our ISO certification allowed us to weather the storm. Using the lessons we learned through that experience, we will share the key planning efforts that allowed us to maintain communications and business operations during the event and through the aftermath.