5 Effective Strategies to Stay Ahead of Workforce Shortages

Transcript

Hello, everyone, and welcome to today's webinar, five effective strategies to stay ahead of workforce shortages. I'm Jennifer Goetz, the editorial director of Facility Executive Magazine, and this webinar is presented by Limble. Limble is a maintenance management software or CMMS, in other words. With Limble, facility managers and maintenance teams are empowered to make maintenance management and decision making easy with a simple modern platform to manage work orders, assets, inventory, and reporting, everything you need to make maintenance decisions is all in one place.

Before we get started, I'll cover a few house housekeeping items. There will be a question and answer segment at the end of this presentation today. Please find the question box in the dashboard on your screen. This is where you can submit questions for our speakers today.

If at any time you experience a technical difficulty, please send us a message via the question section, and someone on our team will answer you privately.

Now workforce shortages continue to be a challenge for facility executives. A lack of qualified staff hinders efficiency, productivity, product quality, and service by limiting the availability of skilled hands for essential tasks. Overall, workforce shortages can impact an organization's ability to compete. The burning question then becomes, what's the best course of action to not just navigate but overcome this challenge?

Well, we have good news to share. We're going to equip you with the top five strategies that facilities professionals are implementing to overcome workforce shortages along with additional strategies you can put into practice today. Now without further ado, I'm happy to introduce your speakers. Brian Christiansen is a is a self taught full stack developer turned marketer turned entrepreneur.

He started Limble CMMS in twenty fifteen. Limble is a larger success than he could have imagined and feels blessed to be their CEO.

John Rymer has nearly thirty years of facility management experience in a variety of capabilities and in in a variety of capacities and industries. He has worked in numerous sectors, including higher education, high-tech, corporate real estate, data centers, health care manufacturing, and public entities. He and his team use their breadth of knowledge and diverse experience expertise to provide comprehensive consulting and support services.

Erin Bogan has spent her career facilitating change, performance improvement, and technology optimization at growing organizations.

She creates high quality and valuable educational and thought leadership content on those same topics and facilitated the data gathering and analysis that became the state of facilities report our webinar today is based on. So thank you all for joining us today. Erin, take it away.

Thank you, Jen.

So, yes, you all know in a recent survey we conducted at Limble, we found that fifty one percent of facilities management professionals say that addressing workforce shortages is one of their top three challenges. So it's right up there with other things like downtime and breakdowns, dealing with aging infrastructure. And Jen gave a great, lead in about why skilled work workers worker shortages is such a critical, priority and addressing them for, facility managers and maintenance professionals. So just to, like, start right off the bat, I would love to get some thoughts from John and Brian on, you know, seeing the statistic. Are you surprised that this is such a high priority for the facility management field this year?

Definitely not a surprise, because, unfortunately, we've been we've been seeing this coming for well over a decade. We've been talking about it, for quite a stretch of time. We have not figured out how to really bridge that gap.

Of course, you know, we've got some strategies we'll cover today. But, you know, I hate being the bearer of bad news, but, we have not seen the worst of it yet. We still have roughly twenty five percent of our skilled workforce yet to retire by twenty thirty. So, it's not a matter of, like, hey. How can we get ahead of this or get over the hump? It's like, we'll know how do we continue to prepare ourselves to mitigate this gap? And, again, what strategies can we put in place to help us continue to provide the services that we need to?

And I'll just echo that. It doesn't surprise me at all. As I talk to more and more customers that use Limble, this is a a recurring theme that just comes up.

Getting, the right people to be able to come do all the the work that's needed to be done, especially with the right skill set is just, proving to become more and more difficult.

Absolutely. So, you know, it it's a really tough challenge, and it feels like it's being experienced pretty broadly across the industry. So, you know, we're excited to share some strategies, and we have kind of five that we've assessed through our survey. And we hope to kind of give you some great, input on those and actually more than give you more than five operational, like, really actionable, tasks that you can take away and, start using even today. So our two main goals for this webinar today are to discuss those workforce shortage challenges. So what are you facing and get some input from you on, you know, what's, what are the unique things that you might be experiencing in your own organization.

And then also sharing some of those strategies.

How are other organizations dealing with workforce shortages, and how can we dig into some of those strategies to give you some of those actionable takeaways?

Perfect. I'm happy to hop in to learn a little bit more about the survey that you guys conducted. So what drove Limble to decide to conduct this survey?

Yes. There were really several reasons.

Ultimately, as an organization in service to facility management professionals and maintenance managers, we wanna make sure that we stay on top of what's going on in their day to day lives. So, it's our job to help find solutions. We have, such an amazing group of customers and information sharing between them is something that we're uniquely positioned to do. So really hearing from our customers about what's working for them, what's not working for them, and what solutions they're going to need in the future, is really critical for us to be able to do our job and fulfill our mission.

Perfect. So how did you gather data for the survey and really who participated?

Yeah. So we had, we surveyed more than two hundred and fifty facility management professionals.

Some were customers, some were not. They graciously provided input. And so we were able to, ask them what their top challenges were. And then for each of those top challenges, we asked them what strategies they were using to address them. So this this webinar today is focused specifically on that challenge of workforce shortages and the strategies that people identified, for how they're dealing with that.

Perfect. So what do workforce trends look like in today's market for facility management professionals?

Yeah. So this of course, as we go into the survey, you know, there's some basic research that we are doing as well to kind of understand what we might be hearing and give some context to that so that we can then turn around and provide more strategies. So, at the top of the list really comes, you know, these top two bullet points here, really are around, you know, the shifting skill set within the field. So, first of all, there's overall declining interest among younger generations in maintenance careers. It's just not elevated as a career option, for them even though it is a a career that has a lot of growth potential and opportunity.

The same time, as John mentioned earlier, more the the workforce is maturing and many people will be retiring in the next five, ten years and taking all of their knowledge and experience with them.

In addition, there's so much talk around automation and AI and robotics and how that is gonna impact the nature of the job, which, again, leads into that next one, the rising importance importance of digital skills. Just the nature of the job is going to change. The skill set that people believe they'll need and will need in order to be successful in the role is shifting.

There's a greater emphasis on interdisciplinary skills as a result. So not only do you need to know how to fix things and work with your hands and, but you also need to be able to work with people, respond to customer expectations, you know, work with upper levels of different levels of upper management in order to secure resources. It's just to become it's a very multifaceted role.

And so it requires a broad skill set. And then a shift to more flexible working arrangements that pretty much everyone in every industry is seeing right now in their workforces. There are different expectations now than there were five, ten years ago around, you know, remote working or work schedules.

So all these create a lot of challenges, for for, managers.

So with that, we'd actually love to hear from that's what we found in the research. So we'd love to hear from our participants today about what trends they're seeing. Is there anything not in that list that you're really struggling with?

We'd love to kind of hear what difficulties you're encountering in resolving workforce shortages there. So I think we've got some q and a, available. So just toss your questions in the q and a section, and we can oh, yeah. Here, audience poll.

Thank you, Jen, for pulling that up. So, yeah. So go ahead and and and choose the ones that you feel like you're struggling with the most, and which strategies you're using to to address those. So this is also kind of echoing what we are what we have asked of our survey participants as well.

So if there are things that, that you're seeing, go ahead and select other, but we'd also love to hear this is these are similar this is a similar question that we asked our our survey participants. So, really, let's just echo that and kind of see. Are are you encountering similar things in your day to day?

And you have about, twenty to thirty seconds to respond.

Okay. So it looks like recruitment and retention was the the biggest result with fifty seven percent, followed by pay and benefits at twenty nine percent, and then outsourcing and tech efficiency were both tied.

But there was no, no one chose upscaling, actually.

Mhmm. Yeah.

So it's really interesting. Some of those are very consistent with what we have seen in our survey.

So that's a great segue. This these are the results that we found. Mhmm.

Get to the next slide here.

So you can see how this broke down. So recruitment attention again and retention.

Again, for our survey participants, that was the also the top strategy.

So this kind of gives context to, you know, how how to address the work workforce shortages, depending on, you know, what industry you're in or what, organization you're in, its size, its focus, pretty much, you know, tackling recruitment and retention in a creative way is a top way that people are addressing this. So, at the same time, outsourcing, pay and benefits are kind of right behind that. And then upscaling and tech efficiency also for our survey respondents, fell kind of on the lower end. But for the for the most part, there's not a lot of variation here in our survey results that we did.

So it's it's kind of interesting that people are like throwing a lot of different strategies out there trying to establish, you know, a variety of approaches.

And first, we're gonna start by digging into recruitment and retention to kind of talk a little bit more about some of those actionable strategies. So as we just saw, fifty two percent of our respondents cited that recruitment and retention.

And that makes sense because recruitment and retention is a huge component. You know, you can't backfill open positions if you don't have candidates in the pipeline, if you don't have people that you're bringing in with the right skill set. So, it takes a lot of time and effort and resources in order to do that. So I'll toss it out to, John and Brian as well. So are there any actionable strategies specifically about recruitment and retention that people can take away today? What are you seeing in the industry that people are doing in order to recruit and retain creatively?

Yeah. That's a great question, Aaron.

Really, this kind of ties back to what you even posted up there a few slides before of that declining interest by the younger generations.

You know, when we look at facilities, it's like, yeah. I've been in this for almost thirty years. Some of the folks on here maybe been in even longer.

We've seen our industry evolve, but we're still kind of equated to where we're maybe still in that that teenage years where we're we're growing up, but we've not haven't quite filled in. We were trying still trying to figure out what we wanna do when we get older. And and with that, you've got kind of that, I'll say lack of maturity as a career path and which which still bewilders me, because you've when you look around, there's buildings everywhere. And with those buildings requires facility managers, buyers, building engineers, operators, you know, the demand is there, and the opportunities are great, but we don't do a very good job of communicating and even working whether it's through high school, tech, you know, colleges, or even universities of showing this is a clear career path.

So I think that is one of the first key ways that, you know, we can go and, you know, try to, you know, borrow and steal the skilled labor that exists now, but it's still not gonna be enough to bridge the gap. We've gotta get out there and start, you know, working through those different educational channels to say, look. You can be more than you know, there there are other options than going down the business path or doctor or what have you. Facilities are the great path.

And, and I tell young folks all the time, it's like, you you don't wanna go to a university and and maybe go into all that debt?

You know what? Go get a go get a skilled, you know, skilled job, and you can basically make you know, do a boot collar draw job, making white collar money, and you'd be able to go anywhere you wanna be. I mean, you can develop your own career path. But I think we as an industry need to show them where you come in at this position, and then you can continue to elevate through the that career path, and not just say, well, I'm gonna be, you know, an HVAC journey my entire life.

It's like, no. No. No. There's more that you can do here. Let us show you how to get there.

Now to echo what you're saying also about, just the there's a problem with education. There there really should be, whole tracks at colleges, and and I'm starting to see some. So that is a a trick. Right?

Look at your local colleges or even colleges that are a little bit further away and see if they have a degree there. And if they do have a degree there, talk to the professor and say, hey. We're looking to hire people. You know, if you have a great student, send them our way.

And that's one little hack on helping with the recruitment. The other, hack is there's different communities that are start starting to pop up. Limble, is about to launch our own community where we're gonna allow, all of our customers, but also people who aren't our customers to be able to network. One of the key areas there are job postings.

So there are communities that you can join to post, hey. I need, maintenance tech with this type of skill set. And, again, those communities can be found by providers like Limble or I've seen Facebook groups or I've seen Reddit, Reddit posts. There's different areas that you can post to try and, find people.

And sometimes those people even, move to your area. Sometimes you find people wanting to hop from one type of maintenance industry to another, you know, going from, like, food processing to another, more general facility, for example. So if you if you keep your eyes out in those areas, those those you can find some good recruits there. On retention, how and I'll I'll be speaking a little bit more to how we retain in our company, which to be fair is different than, you know, a general, like, manufacturer, for example.

But the a lot of the the core principles are the same. Build a solid culture. Right? Help people understand why they're here.

Help them really understand that without them, the entire facility stops running. They are a key aspect of making everything, work. So we had one customer that did a really great job with us. They, do medical services.

So a whole bunch of, migrants in in the states. And so they have these vehicles they have to drive around to do provide the medical services. And the maintenance manager there made sure to tell his team. It's like, look.

If these trucks don't work, we can't provide health care. So your job is really about providing health care to to those that need it most. And they were able to build a a message and a culture on the importance of the work that they were doing. And that helps people feel that they're coming to work not just for a paycheck, but they're coming to work to actually, coming to work to actually do good.

And so leading with a a strong culture is is a is a big hack, and it's pretty it's, it's very possible to do. Another big thing on retention is allowing people to see how they're going to make progress. And so all throughout my company, we talk about different career paths. And so, for example, with one of our sales reps, we'll say it's level one, two, and three.

And then we'll clearly document what do you need to do to go from one to two and two to three, and how long it may take and the type of behaviors you're wanting and all that so that when, you hire a maintenance tech, they can see how do I become, you know, a level two, or how do I become a team lead, or how do I do that so that they can see, oh, I can actually, progress in this company. And if you know those two things, there's actually a real purpose, and I can see how I can personally grow.

We here at Limble, we have extremely good retention. Almost no one ever quits. And, those are, Erin kinda lost a little bit there because she knows her. Yeah.

She's loving it. But, those two are those two things are really big hacks on, retaining the staff that that you hire.

Yep. That's amazing. I love that. So what I'm hearing, just to kind of sum up, telling the story of the career path. So may helping people, understand that there is a real career path in this field, working with local educational institutions to help you tell that story, using communities to do, outreach you know, go to peers, work with colleagues, locally. And then and as far as retention, building a connection to the mission and then building a a strong, career growth path that you can share with employees. Those are all those are all great suggestions.

And we can move on, I think, to yeah. The next the next strategy, the next most cited strategy in our survey is outsourcing. So forty three percent of our survey participants cited outsourcing as their second top strategy for addressing labor shortages. And this comes with its own kind of, its own set of, you know, management challenges or it's just a different way of managing that work.

What are your thoughts on professionals prioritizing outsourcing so highly? Are there other effective strategies? What might they consider doing more of, and how could outsourcing be fit into a strategy for addressing workforce shortages?

Yeah. I mean, we've seen outsourcing continue to grow in popularity. I don't think that's gonna change. But to try to use outsourcing to offset the the skilled labor shortage, it's it's, maybe a short term gain, but, you know, those contractors, they're in the exact same boat as you, trying to find that skilled labor workforce that doesn't exist.

Now they might have some, you know, internal training and things like that, or or maybe they've got a better handle on recruitment. Great. Leverage it. But if you're saying, hey.

You know what? We can't find the people. We're just gonna outsource.

I don't think you're gonna be able to have success, to really, you know, again, bridge that gap. So, you know, I I would look at, you know, take a step back and reevaluate your organization because I I've seen this where, you know, you're looking at, hey. I'm losing my electrical journeyman. I'm losing, you know, my HVAC journeyman.

It's like, okay. They're retiring, but when I go to rehire to back fill that position, well, okay. That was an electrician. Do I actually need a licensed electrician in house?

And you're starting to see folks, you know, rethink a little, but they've got again, they gotta break out of that fixed mindset and go, what will I want my org structure to look like now and even five years down the road so that as they are recruiting, they're basically preparing themselves for success to align with that, you know, long term org structure, because it really should change and evolve. And then, and again but you're still not gonna have enough hands to turn those wrenches. So this now comes into what we're gonna talk about a little bit later is how do we leverage technology to be a lot more efficient with how we turn those wrenches?

So we'll address that a little bit later.

Yeah. I mean, I'll just echo that that that almost the exact same as you, John.

There's there's, this is a band aid outsourcing.

Outsourcing should be a part of every every healthy strategy, just to be clear. But if you think it's gonna solve the core problem, which is the recruitment, retention, and efficiency, then, you're you're gonna be in fair surprise. And I know this because I've seen a lot of customers who outsource heavily. And unless they do it extremely right, there are so many problems that come from it.

I've seen our customers have to reply before Limble, they they have basically no transparency on what their vendors are doing. They come in and set it up, and then all of a sudden they get transparency, and they get to see what their vendors are doing. And they're like, holy holy shit. Like, those vendors not even doing anything.

They can't even tell me what when the last time they did a PM on this h factor is supposed to be be maintaining. And there's so many, problems that come to light on, from outsourcing that unless you do it right, it's it's really not it's really not a long term solution.

And and, again, every every org should have some form of outsourcing, bringing up, for example, do I need a full time, you know, electrical, expert or what whatnot? You you might not. Right? And in that case, obviously, outsource.

But if you're trying to outsource to replace full time staff, unless you really know what you're doing, it's not, it's not a strategy that I've seen our customers pull off, or or do very successfully. But I will agree with John. One of the biggest ways to help handle all this is just make your existing team a lot more effective, through the use of technology, and we'll talk about that a little bit later.

Yeah.

So that's great. So I think, you know, what I'm hearing here too is make you make sure that if you're leveraging outsourcing or vendors for your, you know, to to kind of bridge the gap, make it just that, a bridge. You know, bridging a temporary gap, make it make it a strategy that you can use as a band aid, but not a complete replacement for, you know, the team that you know you need. And then and then being open to, you know, changing and evolving org structure.

So as you have people and skills and expertise come and go every time, you know, rethinking where those things will fit best, amongst the team that you do have. And then, yeah, we will get into the tech efficiency as well. So next strategy is upskilling. We're kinda gonna kinda flip this around a little bit and start looking at the ones that were, cited a little bit less often.

So about a a third of our survey respondents said that they are leveraging upskilling. And by that, you know, what I what I think of as upskilling, I immediately think of, having staff take online courses, getting digital certifications, things like that. But it can also mean developmental opportunities within your organization. So expanding abilities, minimizing skill gaps.

And that's kind of tough because any resources that you spend on internal training, you know, that you need to get pulled from somewhere else.

So what specific recommendations would you give to managers when it comes to building training programs or kind of helping to develop, skills with a new team?

Yeah. I'd say, you know, piggybacking off what we just said about, you know, evaluating your org structure, as part of doing that, you know, again, when you're defining where you want to go with respect to your org structure, now then what you the next step is, of course, is to do that, that's that gap analysis.

So if I know it, this is what I want my work structure to look like, you know, in those positions, what skill sets do they need? Now we look at, okay. Well, what skill sets do I have currently?

And, you know, and we said, okay. Well, some of these might have to go higher outside knowing that that's the shallow pool that we're trying to, you know, fish from. But it's like, how do I then grow within? So that to me, it even goes back to what we even answered earlier.

It's like, well, now we're showing a a career path in development, which is going to help with the retention of those folks that you currently have because it's hard to find new ones, so you wanna keep, the good ones that you do have. So, again, investing in them, providing that training. Now sources for that, you know, and I and then and I would love if you all have good sources, please throw them in the chat because we're all trying to learn here and help each other out. And that's also gonna be one of the benefit of, you know, those community spaces like Limble's gonna, you know, create as well.

Because I'm always searching because I get asked this question all the time. And there are some different online, you know, training where you can, you know, you can you gotta do short bits. I mean, that's the other part is, like, yeah. You I used to do building operator certification. Great set of courses, but it is a time commitment.

And that was, I think, one of the challenges that we might see in today's environment is not being able to send somebody to go take, you know, eight days of classes, maybe spread over a few months. But a good opportunity to provide kind of that general knowledge base, so that's the BOC. And then, again, you can now backfill with some of the online courses.

Many companies have learning management systems. Are you partnering with your HR folks to go and say, alright. This is for this career path. Right?

This position, here's some of the training that we wanna provide. I mean, we're really good at giving them the onboarding of, hey. Here's all our do's and don'ts with respect to our policies, but what about actually educating and equipping? We, as facilities, need to do a much better job of that.

And, again, share those resources with each other. When you find good ones, they say, hey. This has got a great HVAC, you know, training catalog. Let's get it out there.

Let's let our folks start using it because, otherwise, they resort to doing a lot of YouTube. And I run into that quite a bit out there where somebody's trying to troubleshoot something, and they're they're there with their tool bag in YouTube. So, that kinda scares me.

Yeah. The tool bag in YouTube, it is a little terrifying, but that happens all the time. Right?

So so yeah. So there there's a lot of great ways to to attack the the training program. And luckily, this isn't just a a maintenance, problem. This is a people problem.

Every single industry is trying to solve this. And so one of the ways that what I like to do is create, what I call a skill tracker. And, basically, it's just a a simple spreadsheet where you list here's the core things that you need to know in order to do your job well. And then I tie that to that different levels.

So, for example, that level one needs these fifteen skills in order to do the level one job. And then level two needs these, another seven skills. And then level three needs another eight skills. And then for each person that I'm working with, I'll go ahead and grade them on each skill.

And it's a really simple, grading system. One, two, three, and four. One, they're learning it. I'm sorry.

One, they don't know it. Two, they're in the middle of learning it. Three, it's signed off by their direct manager, and then four, it's signed off by me. And so you can look at all of your team and see exactly across all the skills where they're at, and you actually show that to your team members and go, hey.

You need to learn these skills. If you wanna progress in the company here, go learn these skills. And these skills, again, can be anything that you want. So you can have them be hard skills, whether that's like troubleshooting HVACs, or you can have it be more, people skills.

Like, how do you handle conflict, for example, or or how do you deescalate when an operator is freaking out or whatever. It just depends on your unique setup. It's really, really, really, really flexible. But if you have this system and you're tracking everyone and you give the transparency so that your team can see it, all of a sudden, they wanna start going and learning those skills.

And so right next to that, I start building a knowledge base saying that here's videos on this skill or here's a course, that might be an online course given by someone else that really covers, you know, again, HVAC, or or whatever you want it to be. But that system is really effective in in seeing where people are at and helping them move up, the ladder. What I'll also add is a mentorship program, and this is super, super valuable. As soon as you bring in a new tech, pair them, with a mentor with, one of the older techs.

And this does a couple benefits. First is you help learning skills and all of that, but it helps them get integrated into the culture that I talked about a little bit earlier because they get to see, okay. This is this is what it's really like. It's not just Brian saying who we are and Brian saying the culture.

I I actually get a look to my colleague who's mentoring me and see that, oh, yeah. This isn't a this is a culture of accountability. This is a culture of of caring what, you know, what we do what what we do matters. And that, you know, helps them get, ramped up and delivering value to the company, a lot, a lot sooner, than if you didn't do it otherwise.

Yeah. That's great. I I love that. So I'm and I'm also hearing echoes of, like, that retention recruitment and retention piece too, where you're if you're building skills, you can hire more for potential and you can and you can bring people in and actually start to develop those skills and help them move, along that career path as well. So I like that a lot. And then, just to summarize, you know, the gap analysis, which sounds very similar to the skills tracker that you were talking about, Brian, to, you know, really putting down on paper what skills you need, and then tracking your team through that development.

Leveraging, training and certifications for retention as well. So that's a, you know, that's kind of a a a benefit, which we're getting gonna get into pay and benefits as well, but that is something that's maybe non monetary that could be very valuable.

And then also curating a knowledge base helps, you know, as as you are have people leaving the workforce or identifying resources that are really helpful, putting that all in one place for people to to reference. So yeah, you guys posted a lot more than that, but just kind of boiling it down. I think that's, a lot of really helpful things here too. So so next, we, we also asked about technological efficiency, and we've made some promises that we're gonna talk about.

So kind of circling back to that, another third of our respondents said that they are, used like, really investing in technological efficiency to help bridge the gap. So if you have some, techno a technology platform or other tools that you can use to make some of the administration of the job a little easier, a little less time consuming than it frees up time, for your team, to be able to do more work. That's the idea. So everyone's been talking about this.

It's AI. It's there's all sorts of things around, like, machine learning and so many emerging technologies. Sometimes it can kinda make your head spin.

So, you know, what would you tell what would you tell team members who are thinking about this as a strategy, and what are some ways that you could begin to drive more technology efficiency I'm actually kinda disappointed that that's only ranking at thirty six percent.

I mean, that really should be number one by far, because like we've already talked about, there's there's not enough hands out there, and we already, know, you know, the top the other, what, three, four strategies are all, you know, revolve around, okay, how do we get those people and how do we keep those people?

I've we've gotta leverage technology, and I think, ultimately, you know, taking advantage of the technology that we have literally sitting at our doorstep and even more excited about what's coming, to help us be a lot more efficient and with how we operate.

I mean, sadly, you still have more than half of your organizations or more than fifty percent reactive.

A good reason for that is because while they don't have technology in place like a CMMS, like LUMBL, and so they're doing a lot of, you know, reactive firefighting, run around like chickens with their heads cut off, and that is extremely inefficient. I mean, I've done, you know, multiple assessments and analysis. And when you just sit down and see all the wasted time that goes in with, reactive maintenance, that really is one of the first key areas that we have to change. And and, again, that's a whole another presentation of how do we, you know, evolve and get out of that reactive firefighting, but technology is a very, very key component to that.

And so, again, take going from that reactive maintenance to, yes, preventive maintenance, but it's still very labor intensive. Ultimately, we need to move towards, you know, incorporating the different, metering and data monitoring devices that are doing that analysis so that we go more towards condition based maintenance so that we are basically doing the right maintenance at the right time and and, again, maximizing the utilization and efficiency of our resources.

The second part of that is going to be, you know, I've gotta make sure I'm managing everything that we do within facility and operations through a robust CMMS.

I mean, I have presented on this multiple times, and I will flat out tell folks if you do not have a robust CMMS system, you will fail. You're gonna stay in reactive firefighting. Your spreadsheets, everything else you're doing isn't going to work. So you do need to have a robust system set up, and you and it's not just even getting the right system. It's also how do you use it because it is it's it's a business tool. So you've got you have to know how to wield that tool well so that you can drive those business decisions on a day to day basis than, of course, your long term strategic.

And without that in place, you're gonna stay in that reactive firefighting mode.

Yeah. I I couldn't agree more. And I've seen literally thousands of people convert from not having the CMMS or having a a really crappy non robust CMMS to having, Limble, which obviously I'm biased, but just go look at us, on g two and whatnot. That that'll tell the story. I've seen the before and after of of no systems or crappy systems to, like, real technology, and it's just it's a complete night and day difference.

Some of our customers have as high as a forty one percent productivity increase. And when you look at it, it's like, do you actually have to backfill something you just lost?

Potentially, no. And so having, like, the right techno, technology efficiency, it it is so, so effective. The other thing that a lot of people don't realize is this also is a communication tool. When you have the right like, in the specific on staffing challenges, one of the biggest headaches is just convincing your boss to let you hire someone.

You know? Not even, like, how do we find them? It's you know, your boss might just say, hey. Do we really even need to backfill this person?

A CMS actually gives you that information when you say, hey, we're completing all these work orders. We're doing all these PMs or, you know, our staff is logging x hours. If we don't backfill, we're not gonna be able to do these PMs and that's gonna cause these problems. And so, not just the efficiency you gain from the technology.

Technology helps you across almost every single area, to not needing as many when you do need them. You have a story to tell to actually get the funds to do it. And then when you do hire them, you have the accountability system to make sure that they're effective. And so, again, obviously, I'm biased, but I like CMMS's, and I think they're insanely important.

And, I think every company should have them. And then there's a whole bunch of new technology coming down the pipe, some of it that we're creating ourselves that are next to CMMS that help procure parts better, manage vendors better, just do a whole bunch of other great stuff. But if you're still stuck on paper when some of the newer technology comes out, it's gonna be even harder to, get that, adopted. So, now is the time to to get it in place. And if you don't, you're just gonna fall farther and farther behind, and it's gonna get harder and harder, to actually start getting the advantages that that come from all the different, technology that's out there.

Yeah. That's amazing. So the big thing I'm hearing is use it. Use something. You there's too many good technologies out there that could be too, effective to not use, to not have, a tool like this in your toolkit.

So, yeah, that's great. And and use it and then spend spend the time when you do make that choice about, you know, what you want your platform to be. Make sure you spend the time to invest and, like, set it up well. Use it strategically, and that can save you a lot of time and just help you do more with less.

One of the other things that I think is really interesting that we found in the survey, that we'll cover here is that current what we found, like I said at the beginning, we surveyed both customers and non customers, for this survey.

But when we asked them that initial question about what are the big challenges you're seeing, that you're dealing with, the the the respondents who were current customers of Limble were significantly less likely to cite workforce challenges. So forty six percent of Limble customers chose it as a top challenge compared to non customers where sixty six percent of those respondents, said that workforce challenges were an issue. Again, this is a challenge across the board, but, I think this kind of speaks a little bit to that efficiency you gain, where it's maybe a slightly less painful for if you have some of those additional tools that you can leverage to try to gain some more efficiency out of the team you do have.

Any other thoughts, comments on those? I think we've kind of that just kind of echoes and reinforces and validates, you know, what you both were saying.

I'll add I'll add one thing.

Some people may be thinking is, like, this sounds like a lot of work to get going. Mhmm. That used to be true, you know, five, ten years ago. That's not true now.

A lot of our customers get up and going, like, within a couple days and then start seeing an ROI within just a matter of a month or two. So don't like, technology used to be intimidating.

If you pick the right vendor, it's not anymore.

And so, don't don't let the past of of bad implementations and bad software scare you away from being able to get the results here.

Mhmm.

Yeah. Well and to your point, I I think, Aaron, the I see this contrast, and, I'm not surprised.

You know, you really it really does just, you know, validate the points that we made on the previous slide deck of, you know, once you have that technology, yeah, you will see the benefit.

And to Brian's point, it can seem overwhelming, to implement a a robust system.

You know, what we see because that's a large part of what, you know, we do is help customers, you know, gather data, implement, set up their best practices, etcetera.

You know, data is always gonna be your first challenge, but you know what? Don't let that necessarily inhibit you. There are paths that you can take to at least start putting in those placeholders, and then you start backfilling the data even after the fact. And I and I will you know, I'll I'll get I'll get my plug to Limble here. It's really, really easy to import data, and even to update data within Limble. My team loves, you know, using that.

But then, you know, I need to build out my PM standards. Now I need to integrate full in data. It's all part of putting that implementation path together, and you don't have to do it all overnight. It's just it's, again, it's building blocks, you know, and do it in phases. It is you know, it's that whole how do you eat an elephant one bite at a time. You just gotta have a plan. So build a plan, work the plan, and and you will see a night and day difference.

You know, and the other thing with the technology too, and I'm sure a good part of the efficiency gains, is gonna come through leveraging mobile technology.

And I know that, you know, when I was working with clients is seven to ten years ago, it was a little bit tougher challenge to get the technicians to adopt, you know, using mobile devices. Because, again, the average age of your of your, technician is in that mid upper fifties.

But, you know, in the last handful of years, I've seen that change drastically as well. Whereas a much easier sell, to have them adopt using mobile devices because, well, I don't care how old you are. You're, you know I mean, I'm I'm playing, you know, scrabble on the phone with my mother-in-law. So everybody's living in these in these, you know, mobile devices. So it's a lot easier for them to accept it, especially when you have easy to use intuitive interfaces, and that really is key. And then there's other things you can do to, you know, to optimize, like, QR code or assets, things like that that make it much more efficient and easier for your technicians to utilize these systems to do to capture their work, to communicate, etcetera. So, absolutely, lots of big opportunities here for gains.

And that brings up actually an interesting point to go back to retention. Good technology actually retains your staff. If you force them to use really crappy software or sticky notes or whatever, especially the newer generation that's used to, you know, TikTok, Facebook, all that, they're gonna go, you're insane. Like, why are you making me write all this down?

You know, I when was the last time I used a pencil? Never. Like, like, retaining retaining the the young younger generation through good technology, is is really, really, really important. So it'll make them work faster, and they'll be less likely to leave, just because their their their life, their job is is easier.

So so that is a a really, really, really important part. The other thing I'll also add about just implementing is and I think John talked to you about this a little bit is you don't have to start with everything at once.

Do the whole wall, crawl, walk, run.

Get in and just add even if it's only ten assets, just pick your top ten that's the most important and just start with that. And I've seen a lot of customers who are drowning in work, and they had no time to set up. But then we we laid out a plan like that with them, and slowly but surely, they were able to get ahead of all the the reactive work they were doing because they just started with just a few assets. And every month, they were adding, like, ten more assets until they finally that it started to tip.

And, what I mean by tip is the the the reactive work just started disappearing because they were finally getting the PMs done. And then all of a sudden, they had more time, and then they added more assets. I did more pms and they had even more time and then they added more acids and more pms and before too long they were you know, I think it was like eighty five percent, you know preventative and fifteen percent reactive and that's, like, a beautiful, beautiful spot to be. And so, you you can most definitely, get this done even if you don't have a ton of time.

Back to the original question though or question five here, why do you think we're seeing such a significant contrast?

It's for a lot of the reasons that we're saying here. Like, technology just makes life significantly better, and it it it shores up or improves, every single area, not just workforce shortages, not just recruitment, not just retention, but it'll make your life easier and better too on how you communicate with your boss and and, how you may how you decide which, you know, capital expenditures to do and just tons of different things. So setting up technology is is absolutely critical, and you can see it in the number share when you, when we do the survey that Limble customers respond different than non customers. And and if even if you don't like Limble for some reason, go get a different CMS. Like, it's such a core thing that, you you really gotta have one in place.

Mhmm. Yep.

Right.

Thank you. That's yeah. It's interesting to see the differences in how, how, you know, the strategies differ between, you know, where you're at in the kind of, like, technological spectrum, and your adoption of some of the technology. So that's great insight.

So, the last, strategy that we haven't talked about yet is increasing pay and benefits. This one kind of came in right in the middle, forty one percent.

But, of course, it's it tends to be one of the first things we think about when we are recruiting or struggling to bring people in the door. It's like, oh, do we just need to pay them more? Is that, a viable strategy? So as we think about that, what are some strategies for improving pay and benefits, but also acknowledging that not all organizations are gonna have the resources to just be able to throw more money and more, you know, more benefits at the problem. And, you know, that might not even solve really solve the problem in general anyway.

What is your take on this as a strategy, and what are some actionable, strategies to make the, you know, kind of compensation programs more attractive?

Yeah. I mean, to answer this question, it's, you know, are there things that we can do that, you know, when increasing pay and benefits isn't an option?

It's gonna have to be an option.

I mean, even something as simple as, you know, I I've got a a friend of mine who manages, you know, a a pizza restaurant. And he's like, you know, with what I now have to pay just to get somebody to work the counter has drastically increased just in the last handful of years. So, I mean, that is the de facto standard. And I think our biggest challenge is is is maybe making that, making that plea within your organization of why does facility and maintenance folks need to have their pay increase just like all the other departments trying to do the same thing. So, and the other challenge that we run into is that, yeah, I might have had Joe working for me for the last thirty five years, and he's exiting at x amount.

But the and and, and, yeah, Joe's living with a lot of great knowledge and experience. And now I've got this young person that's maybe only got a few years experience, and they're asking to make as much money as Joe or more, and management's gonna have sticker shock. But that is the state of the market, and it also you know, Joe wasn't getting paid enough. I can tell you that because we've done a very, very bad job in facilities throughout our, you know, our whole life cycle as a as a industry of quantifying, communicating, and selling the value of what we do because they view us as, you know, just we're just maintenance.

We're glorifying janitors. It's like, no. We do so much more. And, and that's a drum that I beat routinely and a very common topic is how do we quantify, like Brian said earlier, capturing that data within your CMMS so that you can use that, you know, that information to go and justify resources, justify reinvestment, but then using that same information to actively and passively sell the value of facilities.

Because if we continue to lose on that battlefront, we're going to always struggle in recruiting and also getting reinvestment of replacing assets as they reach end of life, which is another huge challenge, and that's a whole another discussion in itself. So I know we've mentioned earlier that was kind of another little topic that we're working on, is, again, how do we sell the value of facility management? So, absolutely, that will be another discussion for another day.

Yeah. We need to do a whole webinar on that. We need to do a whole webinar on capital, you know, expenditures, how do you replace it. Like, there's a lot more. And, for everyone watching, just, you know, check it out. We're gonna be doing a whole bunch more in the future. So if you liked this webinar, we're gonna provide a lot of other great content.

But, yeah, I I I would I would agree with you again, John. I do think the pay and benefit needs to be higher. The problem really comes from the communication of selling that. And so when and I know this because people come ask me for money all the time as as a CEO.

It it happens often. And if they just go, hey. We need more money. The first thing I go is, what's the ROI?

And if they go, well, we just need more. The the market says we need more. I go, well, that's a good good data point, but how does that impact us today?

And if, you know, my team comes back with, you know, spreadsheet laying out all the different data points on how if we don't do this, we're we're gonna lose this money. Or if we do do this, then we'll gain this money. Then all of a sudden, it it makes my job as the approver of the budget or approver of the increased pay to go, hey. This is this is a no brainer.

And so just being able to sell it is is very, very, very, very important.

The other thing that you can do is, like, let's actually go get some market data to to see. And so this is where communities and other things come into play. You can talk with your other communities and figure out what is the average rate for maintenance tech in this industry, in this area. And you may find that you're just actually already under.

And in that case, that's another data point you can take, and it's not you just saying, hey. The market you know, we can't find anyone good. Instead, you go and say, hey. I checked out, you know, ten of the plants around here, figured out what their average you know, what they were paying because I'm part of a community where they'll tell me that.

And we you know, we're twenty five percent under. And, you know, do you want do you want twenty five percent worse staff than others? Well, that's what you're paying for. And those type of data points, go a long way with the right type of management.

Sometimes you just get really crappy management. I don't know how to fix that. But, hopefully, you have good management that if you bring a case and say, hey. Here's where we're at.

Here's where we need to be. If we don't if we don't do these things, then this is gonna cost this or this or this. And Then all of a sudden you're having a real conversation where you're you're not just thinking about your staff, but you're thinking about the company. And that's a really healthy conversation where you're trying to make everyone win.

And so those those are hopefully some actionable, tips on how do you, how do you convince people to increase the pain benefits? Because I do think on average, they're just low. And, and I think it does need to be increased or else we're gonna just continue to see workforce shortages.

Yeah. So maybe, what I'm hearing is just a tough pill to swallow that this is probably something that as facility managers and maintenance managers, we need to get good at making the case for that, that increased pay and benefits, getting more of those resources because the team deserves it. And to the extent that you can give yourself resources to help prove that, that's just gonna help you make, make all of your, workforce and retention efforts that much, easier.

So I think that's, incredibly helpful.

Yeah. As as leaders in the facility management and maintenance manager space, we need to take that unsung and turn them to sung. We need to shed the light. We need to be the the the advocates for them showing the the good work. And Mhmm. If we do that, the pay and benefits increase will follow.

Yep. Absolutely.

Wonderful.

Okay. So I think those are we've covered all of the five strategies.

And, you know, I think next up for us is some q and a. So I wanted to leave a little bit time. We have a few minutes.

Jen, is there a method for the q and a? Where do people go to do that?

So, yes. First of all, I just wanna thank you, Brian, John, and Aaron for this presentation today, and I wanna thank our audience for sending in questions if you have. As a quick little reminder, the q and a is at the dashboard on the bottom of your screen.

So I'm gonna get us started with a couple questions. So it looks like Marie is asking, how can facility managers advocate resources and support from senior management to address workforce shortages effectively?

So, basically, she is trying to give us, you know, our description for kind of that next webinar topic.

But it again, it did continue to beat that drum of selling.

The biggest part of it is, even with something like, you know, trying to, like, Brian mentioned earlier, we need to make that ROI justification. Unfortunately, within facilities, we're pretty much always gonna lose that battle on the return on investment. Because what we have to do is show that the corollary of, okay, it's it's not the can you afford to invest in, let's say, you know, replacing that chiller? The the flip of that is, well, can you can you afford to not to?

And so I think that really is more of us identifying not just the cost because that's all that upper management hears is that, oh, you're overhead necessary evil. I mean, all those things that we've been called to saying, okay. Here is the potential risk, and here's the potential production loss. So, right, that's a much larger number than to, let's say, replace that chiller.

So, yeah, that chiller cost me two hundred fifty thousand dollars. But if we don't replace it and we continue to have more downtime, here's the impact to production, here's the impact to quality, here's the impact to operations.

Those are big dollar signs. So if we don't do a good job of understanding that relationship and then communicating it, we're we're gonna continue to be stuck at that, hey. You're a cost center. So, again, that is that that's another great discussion for us to definitely have here hopefully in the near future.

And I'll I'll expand on that. I would say even go talk to your production team and see where where their worst costs are coming from and being able to you as the maintenance team help them avoid that, which often is preventing, you know, breakdowns and whatnot. And now all of a sudden you have a different story. It's not just the main just the maintenance team going and talking about it. It's the maintenance team and the production team advocating to, invest in a specific area to increase production. And as soon as you're starting talking more about, hey, how how to make money versus save money, there's something psychological about that that flips that just is received a lot better.

And so I I would advocate, like like, talk with your your colleagues in the other departments like production and and see what you can do. Now this varies from facility managers to, you know, maintenance managers or plants and whatnot. You may be like, hey. I, you know, I I run a a school.

Right? And, like, I'm doing all the maintenance of the school. You know, how there there isn't really production, like, you know, there aren't production lines at schools. Right?

And so you have to figure out in your specific area, what is the biggest thing that they care about most? Is school is it school is it student satisfaction or or or, you know, it could be a wide range of different things. Right? But figure out what matters most to them, what metric they want to move, and then tie the equipment replacement or whatever investment you're wanting to do to improving that metric.

So, again, in, like, manufacturers, it's gonna be what they're producing in In schools, maybe it's, you know, student satisfaction or something else like that.

In higher ed, it's rest life.

Okay. It's the it's the housing. I don't know what it is you think it'd be education, but, yes, they get a most of the help you come because, you know what, the hot water is not working in my dorm.

So Yeah.

And why and maybe that's that's what it is. It's like, hey. Investment causes, you know, way less requests coming in and or we'll be able to respond way quicker to it or whatever. Again, when you figure out the why of the person you're trying to convince, it can go a long way for you, building the ROI to to impact their why. Absolutely. That's that's super, super, super helpful.

Perfect. And it looks like we have time for one last question.

So Gregory was wondering, are there are there ways facility managers can collaborate with other departments to address, shared workforce challenges together?

So, basically, trying to maybe cross train, that would be an interesting one.

What I usually do in partnering with other departments and and encouraging that is especially as as facilities, we are a support entity of those other departments.

So I actually encourage, you know, you know, facility managers and directors to meet with those other key department stakeholders at least once a year to identify what are they trying to achieve. And, usually, you do this around that, you know, the whole goal planning for the next year, that goal setting time frame Yeah. And say, hey. What are you trying to achieve this next year?

And, you know, they're gonna say, well, let's see. With respect to facilities no. No. No.

No. I I'll figure out the facilities part. You tell me what you guys are trying to accomplish, and then also what are some of those challenges or potential inhibitors to you being successful in meeting those goals. And then let me figure out as the facilities person, how can we come alongside you to make to help you be successful?

And I think with that, you start developing that partnership, and then you're then you're also gleaning a lot of very useful information that you could use to feed into your budget, into your, you know, goal setting that you're doing. And then, ideally, you're gaining additional champions that can help you when you go to put forward your budget. The other departments, you know, basically lobbying on your account saying, no. No. No. We need facilities to do this, and here's why.

Yeah. I know. I echo that same thing. It's getting on the same page with your with your other departments, to be able to try and move certain objectives, like increase in production or whatever, is super, super helpful. And then you can address the the weak points, which in this case would be workforce challenges. And so if you're if you're coordinating with them, that that is I mean, it's a superpower. And and and, you know, John mentioned once a year, I'd even advocate more than that.

The the communication is super, super impactful.

Mhmm.

Absolutely. And we actually do have one other, comment. Actually, a suggestion that came through. The University of Texas at Austin facility services department actively pursues partnerships with vocational trade slash technical schools, and we sit on, their advisory boards to ensure that we have a say in their curricula curriculum, from Oscar. Just added that comment in there.

Yep. Great addition. Great.

Well, thank you. It looks like we are out of time. You know, thank you again so much, John, Aaron, and Brian for this webinar today, and thank you for our audience for joining us and, of course, to Limble for sponsoring this webinar.

A recording from today's session will be made available on our magazine's website, facility executive dot com, and at limble CMMS dot com. Thank you, everyone, and have a wonderful afternoon.

Thank you, everyone. Thank you.

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