Success Stories, Tips & Tricks

5 Steps to Building a Culture of Facility Services Excellence

By Armando Lezama

There are many factors that go into making facility services organizations successful. One thing stands out among the rest: a culture of excellence, in which people work collaboratively to achieve common goals, and never rest on their laurels.

While businesses of all types strive for excellence, embedding it into an organization’s DNA can be as challenging as it is critical. Many customers engage UG2 to help them affect the cultural change needed to deliver superior facility services. Here’s how we imbue a culture of excellence:

1. Hire, Train and Groom the Team

It all starts with people. We make sure ours are PHDs: passionate, hard-working, and dedicated. UG2 staff, whether long-time employees or recently onboarded, are treated like family. We expect a lot from them and invest a lot in them, from coaching and extensive training, to the advanced technologies and comprehensive playbooks they need to be successful. They go the extra mile for our customers because we go the extra mile for them.

2. Cultivate Listeners and Innovators

Listening is key to understanding customers’ needs and building strong partnerships. Every single one of us takes the time to listen to our customers, no matter the topic or when the conversation arises. Hearing what customers have to say also encourages thinking about new ways to optimize processes, technologies, and services. We actively encourage and embrace these innovations.

3. Foster Accountability

To affect a culture of excellence, you need to hold people accountable. We set ambitious and well-defined expectations based on each client’s KPIs, such as work order completion, safety, customer experience, and janitorial quality inspections. Not only do we measure how UG2 is performing against those KPIs on a continual basis, we share that information with all employees, often displaying results where they clock in and out of the customer’s site. This helps ensure that we’re all working towards the same goals, keeping performance at the forefront of everyone’s mind, and fostering positive change.

4. Be Transparent

True accountability requires full transparency. We share our successes with customers, which is always a pleasure. But just as, if not more, important, we also share and take ownership of any shortcomings. Not only is it the right thing to do, it’s how we determine the course corrections and adaptations needed to continuously enhance service delivery.

5. Engender Trust

Trust is the reward of a culture of accountability. We earn our customers’ trust every day by teaming with them to raise the bar and working hard to exceed expectations. We become a de facto extension of our customers’ facility services organizations, and truly take their goals on as ours. Everyone, from our on-site staff to our C-level executives, plays a role in ensuring our customers receive best-in-class service delivery.

UG2 was founded on a culture of excellence. We built it into the fabric of the company – into how we support employees and engage with customers. For many clients, we become an agent of cultural change. Contact us today to find out how we can do the same for your organization.

Armando Lezama
Vice President, Operations