10 Reasons Why Your Maintenance Building Services Are Problematic

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If you’re in charge of maintenance services in your company or organization, then you know how challenging it can be to make sure everything stays in working order. Buildings are complicated structures with an array of different systems that must work together seamlessly if they are to serve their purpose optimally. The smaller the building, the more intensive its maintenance needs to be. However, individual small buildings usually don’t have a dedicated maintenance team on site, which makes things difficult for say, a company that owns several smaller office buildings scattered across the city. In such cases, you need to implement some clever strategies and procedures to make sure things keep going smoothly. There are various challenges and roadblocks when it comes to building maintenance services. Here are ten reasons why your current maintenance services might be problematic as well as five suggestions on how to fix them.

Your current maintenance provider is unreliable.

If your current maintenance provider isn’t reliable, then that can have an impact on your entire maintenance schedule. Even if the work is done well, you can’t be sure of when it will be done or whether it’ll be done at all. Even if you have a maintenance schedule, it’s unlikely that your contractors will stick to it. Sure, there might be some good reasons for delays, but if you have a consistent pattern of delays, then that’s a problem. Keeping your maintenance services on schedule is vital if you want to keep your buildings in good condition. If they fall behind on maintenance, they’ll soon start causing damage rather than preventing it.

There’s a lack of qualified staff and workers.

Without skilled, knowledgeable staff on your maintenance team, you run the risk of not only doing poor work but also causing damage while they’re doing it. If you hire low-skilled workers who don’t know what they’re doing, then they’re going to be a danger to themselves, as well as your buildings. On top of that, they might not do a good job, meaning you’ll have a higher repair bill in the future. It’s hard to know if workers are qualified for their jobs unless you have full control over the hiring process. If you don’t have that control and your contractor hires low-skilled workers, then you have no way of knowing.

There are too many different contractors on site and they don’t communicate well with each other.

A single multi-skilled contractor may be a great option if they can do all the necessary repairs and improvements. They’ll be more expensive, but they’ll also be more efficient. Alternatively, you may decide to hire separate contractors for each task. That is, you’ll hire a contractor for plumbing, another for electrical, another for HVAC, etc. However, if you hire multiple contractors for each type of work, then you risk them not communicating well with each other. They may not coordinate their work schedules or they may get in each other’s way. They may not even be aware of each other’s existence on site. Good communication between contractors is crucial to making sure that the work is done well and efficiently.

Equipment is old and no longer working effectively or efficiently.

When your contractors use old and inefficient equipment, it’s going to take them longer to finish their work. It may also cause them to make mistakes and use more materials than necessary. It may even cause some of your buildings to malfunction because the equipment is so old it’s breaking down all the time. It doesn’t matter how skilled your contractors are if they have faulty and inefficient equipment. In fact, the equipment may be causing the contractors to make mistakes, which can end up costing you more in the long run. It’s hard to know if your contractors’ equipment is old and inefficient unless you have full control over the maintenance schedule.

Building updates are either too expensive or infeasible.

Do you know what buildings in your area are going to be demolished next? Are you aware of planned road expansions, new train lines, or utility line upgrades that will affect buildings in your company? If you don’t have a handle on those things, you’re unlikely to be able to take advantage of the opportunities afforded by them. There may be ways to update buildings more cheaply or easily, but you won’t know about them if you’re not aware of what’s going on. It’s unlikely that your contractors are going to tell you about such opportunities, even if they know about them. It’s more likely that they’ll tell their dispatcher that the buildings need whatever maintenance was already scheduled. In such cases, you need to find ways to stay in the loop by gathering information yourself.

Maintenance services were neglected for too long, so now you need to make up for lost time.

If you’ve been neglecting your building maintenance for a while, you’re going to have a backlog of work that needs doing. You may even have work that can’t be done because equipment has broken down and critical workers have left the company. You may have work scheduled, like roof repairs and upgrades, that have become less urgent because of the current economic climate and low interest rates. You’ll probably find that all this backlogged work is putting a strain on your contractors, leading to delays and poor work. You may also be paying more than you should for certain jobs because of the backlog. If so, you need to re-schedule everything and prioritize work so that the most urgent and important jobs are done first.

Your building is simply too big to be effectively serviced by a single team, even if that team is very large.

Even if your current maintenance team is very large, they may not be able to service all of your buildings effectively. In fact, a large team may be more likely to suffer from poor communication and inefficient processes than a small one. It’s harder for a large team to stay in the loop about what’s going on at different buildings. They’re also more likely to have poor communication between different groups within the team. A large maintenance team may be able to handle the work at a given building, but they may not be able to handle multiple buildings effectively. To solve this problem, you need to break up the team into smaller units that can handle different buildings. You also need to make sure that the teams stay in the loop with one another and that they have clear goals and objectives.

Conclusion

If any of these issues sound familiar, don’t worry. As we said, they’re common. Luckily, they’re also easy to fix. Once you’ve identified the issue, you can take steps to improve the situation. If your current maintenance provider isn’t reliable, then you can hire a new contractor with a proven track record of reliability. If there’s a lack of qualified staff, you can hire new workers or train current workers. If there are too many different contractors on site, then you can work with your contractor to assign them to specific buildings. If your equipment is old and inefficient, you can use equipment repair as a bargaining chip to demand upgrades from your contractors. If building upgrades have become too expensive or infeasible, then you can re-schedule your work or find ways to do the work for less. If your building is too big for a single team to effectively service all the buildings, then you can break up the team into smaller units.