My Monday – A Day In The Life Of A Facility Manager

Management Maria Vickers is the Associate Director of New England Facilities Services. She is responsible for delivery of facilities services, safety and security, and meeting support in corporate offices of various size throughout New England.

“It’s just another manic Monday” – The Bangles

8:00 AM
Log in to the company network. In the post-pandemic hybrid workplace, there are very few colleagues in the office at the beginning and at the end of the week, so I’m working from home today. Check in with Facilities Services (FS) staff in the offices, make sure everything is operational.

Prepare and deliver last week’s Occupancy stats to office leaders. Because we are still using a desk registration tool to manage safe occupancy, the data on who came into the office is at hand. The process to match each name with a department and then chart the results is mostly manual, but it has become rather rote, so the task is quickly accomplished.

Onboard new hires. Send “Welcome” messages from the FS team mailbox to new colleagues starting today, which includes a booklet providing detailed information about the office and support available from Facilities Services. Connect with each new hire to schedule onsite health and safety orientations and access card delivery.

9:00 AM
AV checks. Receive reports from onsite staff regarding status of meeting room technology in each office. Because IT services are no longer onsite, it falls to the FS team to provide AV and tech support for meetings, so we do comprehensive testing on Monday mornings. Provide direction on simple fixes (e.g., reboots) and coordinate further testing or vendor support as needed.

Grab a cup of coffee. Blessed coffee.

10:00 AM
Connect with telephone service vendor and IT telephony team to receive root cause analysis for a recent service outage in one of the offices. Luckily, the Customer Service team at that site operates mostly via email, but the lack of telephone capabilities was a heavy wrench in the works for a few days. Update SitRep and communicate results to critical stakeholders.

11:00 AM
Convene meeting of Hartford business leaders to discuss upcoming project: this office has a large daily-onsite team who will keep their assigned seats, but “Hybrid” colleagues will transition to “agile” seating. Clean-out logistics are today’s topic of discussion. After the meeting, draft communication on desk clean-out process and scheduling.

12:37 PM
Oops, almost forgot lunch again. Grab a yogurt and an apple from the fridge.

1:00 PM
Participate in meeting to create a new ticket in our enterprise service request system. Terms like drop-down menus, auto-populate, mandatory fields, and workflows tumble out from our collective brains and learn how to play together. After the meeting, I create a workflow for the new ticket to travel after submission. Fun with Shapes.

Wait, what time is it???

2:30 PM
Meet with Market Lead to review status of FS operations in all New England Market offices. Review FS items to present to the line of business leaders at tomorrow’s monthly meeting.

3:00 PM
Monthly meeting with property manager (LL rep): adjustments to the janitorial scope, window washing schedule, various maintenance items, clarifications on the recycling program.

3:42 PM
Receive a panicked message from a customer about coordinating an onsite client meeting. I provide her with room-booking instructions, info about parking and catering, and pandemic protocols for visitors; she has all this info available to her, but sometimes Facilities Services includes a little hand-holding, and that’s OK. I alert the office FS staff and arrange for them to register the visitors with building security.

4:00 PM
Take a few minutes to review the annual updates to the FS Business Recovery Plan. The updates were written last week, but I wanted a few overnights between them and my final check just to make sure I captured everything correctly. Good to go – Send to Regional FS Director and Operational Resilience Team.

Check tomorrow’s schedule and prepare for staff meetings. Tuesday is an in-office day, so I check my briefcase to make sure I have everything I need.

Update my daily to-do lists, and check off today’s accomplishments. It’s been a good day, not too manic after all!

If you’re interested in sharing your day in the life story, please reach out to the editor at jen@groupc.com.

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