Consistency and Connection are key components cultivated on your campus every day. But are you overlooking facilities management?
In a private K-12 environment, community is everything. Administrators, staff, teachers, parents, and students are all forging unique connections, fostering cohesion and belonging, and making school feel like a second home for everyone.
Over the past 18 months, we’ve grown to appreciate that distinctive feeling more than ever. And at a time when facilities management (FM) has moved front and center in our thinking about campus safety, it’s essential that the private K-12 community can look to their FM staff as a true part of the team.
UG2 has a deep history of working with K-12 schools and with building partnerships with FM for all of our customers. We recognize two major elements that are important to making your FM a good fit for your private K-12 school:
- Low turnover or no turnover. In an office building, seeing familiar faces for facilities management is nice, but in a school, it’s crucial. Staff, students, and parents love getting to know “their” people.
At the private K-12 schools handled by UG2, students often greet our cleaning crews by name in the hallways, and even practice their Spanish language skills with them. They know our FM people as well as they do the school secretary, cafeteria employees, or favorite bus driver. One school even dedicated two yearbook pages to their favorite UG2 team member. That kind of connection builds trust and community ― but it’s simply not possible when you have high turnover, because not only are students and staff unfamiliar with FM employees, but they also don’t make the investment of effort and time — understandably assuming that FM workers might be gone soon.
- School pride. FM employees — especially when they know they are there for the long term — will become part of the community and feel a sense of belonging, just as much as alumnus, staff, teachers, and students do. And when you feel proud to work somewhere, you care more. You work harder. That’s what we see at UG2 with our FM teams that handle private K-12 schools and their campuses. They use the phrase “our school” because there’s ownership and a sense of responsibility not just to UG2 or their managers, but to the entire school community.
On every private K-12 campus, facilities management is an important part of ensuring that buildings are cleaned and well maintained. But that should be the foundation, not the endpoint. The right team will fit into your community, not operate outside of it.
Value of an Experienced Partner
UG2 takes pride in the longevity of our relationships with our employees, and that translates to deeper connections between our teams and the facilities that employ them. Nowhere is that more apparent – or important – than the private K-12 communities we serve.
For more insight, check out our blog for an upcoming post that will discuss how a proactive approach to facilities management can help your private K-12 campus in ways you may not have anticipated.
As you think about how to keep your campus and your community safe and healthy, don’t hesitate to get in touch with UG2. Our UG2 ReNewSM Cleaning4Health and Engineering4HealthSM programs are designed to ensure you have what you need, no matter what return-to-school strategy you’ve chosen. We have experience being part of private K-12 environments, and we take great pride in being part of the schools we serv