Alpha Mead’s Marketing and Communications Head on the Place of High-Performing Facilities Managers in Productivity Enhancement of Clients

In this What Expert Tells Infoprations (WETI), Olusesan Ogunyooye, Head of Marketing and Communications of Alpha Mead speaks on the essence of creating sustainable insights towards informed decision making by facilities providers and human resources leads of companies for the effective attraction, management and retainment  of talented facilities managers. He expresses his views within the context of the company’s first Facilities Management Talents Outlook, a breakfast session, which will be held on February 13, 2020 at the company’s headquarters in Lagos, Nigeria.

What is the significance of FM Talents Outlook Session?

Like you will see in our communications, the talent Outlook seeks to appraise the current human capacity in the FM market in Nigeria viz a viz the required capacity required to drive the profession to relevance in the face of growing importance of FM in business performance.

To what extent that can improve processes and contribution towards skills and knowledge gaps bridging in the industry?

It seeks to improve skill and development in the market because it seeks to bring together FM leads and HR professionals (who manage FM professionals in organizations) to identify the knowledge gap and co-create ideas to bridge the knowledge gap.

As a leading Total Real Estate solutions company, how would you use the insights from the session to gain stakeholder support towards undergraduate academic programme in Nigeria?

This is actually an interesting question. While we continue to engage the academia on the need to recognised FM as a course of study, the insights from this session will first be used to enrich our training curriculum. It will also  influence  our content creation effort.

Well, that's not as hazy. If FM is responsible for integrating the people in the organization, the processes of the organization and the place where the business is carried out, then it goes without saying that FM is an integral part of business. I think this session will just reinforce that position and make it more relatable to these business leaders that we want to engage. We will release a communique of our findings after the event, in any case.

In other words, you will leverage co-creation platform to deepen the talent attraction and retainment in the industry

Exactly. We recognise that the needs of every industry are different. This kind of forum will help us see the different dynamics of these industries and we can draw a conclusion of how to do that. For example, the way you should appraise an FM in the banking industry should be different from the commercial office space. Also, what's the growth or career path for an FM in a telecoms sector for example.

That reminds me of how some players in the industry are mixing things up while categorising and delivering solutions. What is your stance on this and the way forward?

My stance is that as awareness grows in the market, this delineation will become clearer. 

However, FM is an integrated system. So, I think hard and soft is just an academic way of looking at it. Even if you look at the definition - which speaks to the integration of people to process (soft FM) and Places (Hard FM), it shows that none should exist in the isolation of others. But for academic purpose, it might be necessary to draw the line.  So, way forward for me, is that practitioners, and FM training institutes like AMTC should place emphasis on growing knowledge and practice.