By Elizabeth Dukes
Did you know only 8% of people actually follow through on their New Year’s Resolutions? It’s time to give up on the diets, the workouts, and the mystery of how you’ll suddenly turn into a Wall Street guru, in favor of making resolutions you can actually fulfill at your facility.
Like the Eagles said, the theme for this year is “Take it Easy.”
- One Love, One Platform: You can’t manage an office — whether millions of square feet or a few thousand — via emails and excel spreadsheets. It’s time to move all that brilliant info into one piece of software up in the cloud. Ditch the endless back and forth and make life simple again.
- Share the Love: It’s time to collaborate and communicate with other departments like HR, IT, Security and even those corner office executives. Share the data, share the planning, share the reporting, and share the love of keeping the whole workforce marching to the beat of the same drum. Plan the next happy hour at your place and let these other departments into your data. Sharing is caring and hoarding data gives you a heart attack. Don’t do it. Knowing when the next hire, next hardware upgrade, or change in security protocol is coming is critical. You can decide to share the data, and bring people together.
- Get social: Don’t worry about changing your Facebook profile. This is about enlisting your employees to help solve problems, not just whine about them. What if instead of answering the same question 100 times about the change to the parking policy, employees could share their tips on how, when, and where to park after you post it? Your workforce is already doing it on social media every day. With a little guidance, you could expand your FM team’s support exponentially by having them work together on the problem. Host a Twitter or Facebook chat and let the power of the workforce do the heavy lifting for you.
- Less training, more doing: If you’re about to deploy some old-fashioned solution that will take 6 months to implement, think again: Studies show that most users won’t use a platform that’s slow, clunky, or a pain to learn. Try the 14-day software diet: If you’re not trained after 14 days, put down the thigh master and send it back.
- Get Smart: Let 2016 be the year you resolve to make everyone around you smarter. You can’t get there without a platform that can give you real-time data, 24/7, and report that make it easy to plan the future. That’s what your team needs, and what it takes to get a seat the executive table. If it’s not as easy as pressing a button, you’ve got the wrong tool.
Work smarter, not harder. That’s what 2016 is all about.
Elizabeth Dukes is the Co-Founder of iOffice, the leading IWMS software for the commercial real estate industry and workplace leaders everywhere. At iOffice, Elizabeth champions iOffice’s mission to use technology to empower the workforce and the workplace to reach their full potential. With more than two decades of experience in the field, Elizabeth and her co-founder Don Traweek founded iOffice recognizing the need for a robust, but easy to use software solution to manage the complex tasks and reporting for facilities management. iOffice works with fast growing clients including Hess, Ricoh, University of Michigan, Zappos, Adobe, BMC and more. Elizabeth is co-author of the book Wide Open Workspace, which chronicles the whirlwind changes that have occurred over the last 10 years in how people work, where they work, and the very future of the office and the workforce.
