How To Ensure Your Building Maintenance Is Dependable

Keeping any building in good condition and correctly operable for the people who live or work there can be a major task. We don’t often think about this when driving past a random building in a city, like an apartment block, but those often have people working around the clock (or on call) to ensure the safety, functioning and sometimes security of the place is assured.

This of course goes double where commercial activity and purpose is concerned, or in public buildings that encounter a fair amount of foot traffic each day. If you’re planning to ensure your building maintenance is cared for in such terms, it’s smart to consider your options.

How might you ensure your building maintenance is dependable fi stepping into this role, then? Well, that first means learning how it works, such as when the security patrols are timed, when the services of the elevators are considered ,and emergency plans. Then you can make improvements where appropriate.

Let’s discuss the main priorities you could have, and how to perfect them:

Managing Commercial/Public Areas Cleaning

It’s best to begin thinking about cleaning schedules that account for peak usage times and manage them, as opposed to solely following a standard routine that might work for smaller spaces. Your commercial or public areas could see constant use that may need to be accounted for while baked-in to the schedule.

Keep in mind that lobbies and entrance areas might need multiple touch-ups throughout the day, but your storage areas or less traveled spaces could work with weekly deep cleans. Spend time measuring the traffic patterns and adjusting your approach accordingly, which allows building managers to find success in having flexible cleaning teams that can shift focus based on real-time needs. With the Janitorial bidding calculator, you can assure someone will always be booked onto the correct job when it’s most needed.

Security Protocols Review

Walking through your building at different times of day will help you understand how security needs should be implemented alongside the rigors of daily use. That is because what looks secure during business hours might cause openings or issues during quieter periods that you wouldn’t notice otherwise.

Access control systems need fresh evaluation in line with that, because those who have access are vulnerable to social engineering, and some of the important automated systems could require testing. The last thing you need is for a resident or staff member to accidentally cause a security shutdown because the protocol wasn’t clear or the detection systems were faulty.

Maintenance Reports, Requests & Assignments

The first thing any building manager should consider is how to curate reliable maintenance reports and also introduce pathways so their staff can better file them. This way the most emergency needs can be found immediately, and those that can be booked for a later date will be.

That also means having protocols in place to better assign tasks or make notes on them. Some building manager software suites can help with that, depending on your niche, such as if you have to care about residents or leased commercial spaces or not.

This way, if you don’t have staff on hand, you can always rely on the contractors you call in privately from time to time. That could prevent a proactive maintenance team member trying to fix something out of their skillset where they could be placed in harms’ way, like trying to grapple with a plumbing issue before the electric circuit has been properly handled.

Curating Building Management

Building management is an interesting process, because a great deal of the quirks and processes you manage will depend on the use and structure of the building itself. For example, if you care for a converted building, perhaps an old town hall or church, you may need to book in cleanings for the bell in the towerhouse at the top.

Or, you may need to work with historical preservation authorities or private entities to ensure that the preservation of materials is still in play. If the cellar of your building opens up into the public sewage network with tunnel access, you may need to give access to city workers on a consistent basis, perhaps sometimes with short notice. That latter event might mean having a measure in place by which you verify the credentials of anyone coming in.

As such, learning all you can from those who have come before you, as well as researching the needs and legal obligations of the building, will be a complex but ultimately helpful use of your time.

Feedback Reports

You can only be in one place at once, and you don’t have eyes in the back of you head. That’s something of an issue when we’re dealing with a building that could have multiple floors or even multiple sites on one campus.

For that reason having live feedback reports to hand can be great. You might assign a designated manager or janitor in each zone where tenants or those holding various leases for use of the building can submit an official report you’ll look to. An online maintenance system with various categories of access and emergency response need can help you prioritize these requests over the course of the day. Better yet, if a tenant or someone similar can take pictures of an issue and submit them, like a dripping pipe in one of the halls, that could be great and pre-warn you if you weren’t going to care for that space until tomorrow.

With this advice, we hope you can feel more confident stepping into building management duties. These are among the most difficult, complex and sometimes even bewildering roles to have, because you may not have trained for the specifics of this building, and there can be so many varied uses it’s unbelievable.

However, with some reliance on dependable and logical management flows, as explained above, we have no doubt you’ll nail your role and keep that building ticking over for many years to come.