Top 7 Questions Facility Managers Need to Ask Before Hiring a Facility Services Provider

On the surface, all facility services tend to look the same. As with all surface-level views, the closer we look, the more different things appear. The challenge is, most facility managers don’t know everything to look for. Here are the 10 questions all facility managers should be asking their facility service providers prior to hiring them.

1. What is your guaranteed response time? You can tell a lot about a company based on how fast they can resolve a complaint or a problem on your site. If a provider cannot promise same day resolution, it’s likely they are underequipped. This means they are most likely to make mistakes, while also being less able to fix them.

2. How much experience does the management team have? Employees do not cause poor performance, disengaged management does. While the facility service business can seam easy from the outside, it requires enormous operational expertise to run smoothly. A good facility services management team should have 60+ years of experience combined.

3. Management to employee ratio? It’s critical that your facility services provider has adequate management support to ensure consistent results. A good facility services provider will have a management to employee ratio of roughly _:1.

4. What is your quality control process? Quality is not an accident. It is a byproduct of tight systems. Be sure to ask about the process your potential providers follow to ensure high levels of quality. Try to identify if the processes are redundant, or could easily break down.

5. What is your training program? The best facility service companies have a thorough training and testing program offsite to ensure their team members are thoroughly prepared before ever setting foot in a customer’s facility.

6. How are you able to hire higher quality employees? A great facility service company has unique ways that they attract and keep great employees. If a provider isn’t beaming with pride over the way they hire and keep their employees, it’s likely that they are not keeping the best people.

7. How do you determine price? Price can be deceiving in this business. Higher or lower prices don’t automatically indicate quality. What you want to identify is what % of each dollar you invest in your facility services is going back to your facility. A great facility service company should be putting __% of every dollar you invest back into your property.