The Importance of the Right Healthcare Facilities Manager
Hospitals and hospital groups are intricate systems. In order to keep them running smoothly on a daily basis, it is important to have a strong facilities manager. Your facilities manager must plan, analyze, and react to this very complex behind the scenes environment. Most of the work done by facilities managers ensures that a healthcare organization’s operations are not disturbed, even during the most taxing events. The work done by facility management leaders, when performed properly, will be almost undetectable to patients and staff. A facilities management executive’s number one goal is to ensure continuous hospital operations. Let us explore the reasons why choosing a strong leader as your facilities manager executive is so important.
The Importance of a Facilities Management Executive
The Facilities Manager is tasked with the administrative management of the facilities, equipment, and buildings of the organization. This type of healthcare leader must execute these tasks while controlling costs, ensuring the safety of the facility, managing projects, and their schedules, and maintaining the value of the organization’s assets such as equipment and buildings.
Hospital facility managers may collaborate with external service contractors when the organization is working on building and renovation projects. They will also work on projects such as designing floor plans in order to make them the most effective. Your facilities management leader will oversee processes to ascertain that they are being executed properly, to the full extent of the law, and effectively.
Facility managers work alongside multiple departments to ensure technical issues including hygiene, occupational health, and fire safety are kept to a minimum. This means that they work directly with leaders from various departments such as utilities management and electrical engineering. As such, facilities managers are not dealing with the issues personally, but working with leaders within the organization to delegate tasks to the best-suited personnel, or contractors when the need arises.
Because a facilities management leader touches the many departments of the organization including food services, parking, landscaping, laundry/linen, housekeeping, supply chain, he or she must have a significant amount of coordination and flexibility. Due to the crossover in responsibilities, a skilled facilities manager needs to keep abreast of guidelines, regulations, and standards that affect all departments and aspects of the healthcare system.
Whenever capital planning, facilities improvements and new builds come into play, a higher-level operations leader needs to be put in place. This leader must have strong collaboration skills, both within and outside of the organization. When new projects are being thought out and executed, facilities leaders need to work with architects and designers to ensure that their plans make sense for the organization; that they are not just good in theory, but that they will work well in practice.
Facilities managers often have to speak with public authorities to sort out issues with local ordinances and laws. They also have to collaborate with hospital staff in order to complete projects on time and on spec. Finally, they need to make predictions of the setbacks that could cause both financial and time losses and put plans of action to assuage the situation if and when the unexpected does happen.
How to Find the Right Facilities Manager for Your Healthcare Organization
Finding the right facilities manager for your healthcare organization can be a daunting task. Bringing on the wrong talent for this type of position, especially during times of change such as expansions, can have a significant impact on your organization’s bottom line, the quality of patient care, and patient satisfaction. As such, it is imperative that the person placed into a position of facilities management has a full understanding of your organization, has the experience and certifications necessary for the position, but most importantly; this person must be committed to helping you achieve your healthcare mission.
Because the team at Summit Talent Group has extensive experience in healthcare, we understand the needs and challenges that hospitals and healthcare organizations experience while working to achieve their goals. As such, we work differently than other firms. As a boutique executive search firm, the team at Summit Talent Group only takes a select number of engagements at a time. That means that we do not delegate our searches to less experienced team members, but that the principal you speak with is the person leading the search.
Our team will take the time to fully understand the goals, strengths, and challenges of your organization so that when conducting the search for the ideal facilities manager, we are able to identify those who are more than a good match on paper. Our goal is to help you place the person who will be the right fit for your organization and its mission.
If you would like to speak to one of our principals about your facilities manager needs, contact us. We look forward to getting to know you, your organization, and to assist you with your executive search needs.
Business Manager, Summit Talent Group