State of Facilities Conversations: Episode 3

Pete Zuraw: Greetings once again to all who are listening in to our series of conversations on the State of Facilities in Higher Education. My name is Pete Zuraw, and this is the latest in our exploration of issues and ideas related to this year’s, our 11^th, report. We encourage anyone who hasn’t seen the report to grab a copy available on the Gordian website.

This series is intended to go beyond what’s in the report and talk about where the observations of the report lead us and how it connects to the future direction of colleges and universities, and particularly their leaders. Like every interaction here at Gordian, we’re hoping to support you today in your thinking and your work in building better communities by transforming data insights into smarter decisions.

Today we’re joined by someone who is connected directly to the work being done on higher ed campuses, and he’s been thinking about ways to innovate with staffing in order to assure that the campus is operating at the peak of potential. In 2016, after … years leading the facilities organization at Virginia Tech, Mark Helms assumed the role of Assistant VP of Facility Services at the University of Florida, which, if I recall correctly from that Forbes article, you’re now part of the New Ivies, Mark, where he oversees the care of all learning, teaching and research spaces for the university. I’m hoping that today we can tap into your nearly four decades of experience. Mark, thanks for being with me.

Mark Helms: You know, it’s interesting, I only came to work here when I was seven, so it sounds like a long time when you say it that way, Pete, but it’s crazy how quickly it has gone by. Some days I sit back and reflect. There are thoughts of a very young Mark at Virginia Tech and now seeing things that we thought would have been really fantastic if we could have done. What if we could have manipulated data? 
What if we could have looked at things differently then and made decisions differently? Then to see it really all come to fruition, it’s really a fascinating time. 
You know, my 95-year-old mother keeps pushing me —  when are you gonna retire?And I keep saying when I when I quit having fun, and I’m really having a lot of fun.

It’s very invigorating. It’s a great time to be in this business.

Pete: That is the best right? If you can find the fun in the work because it is relentless, it is relentless. I think that’s great because it’s a very human characteristic, the fun and the joy. And I think we want to talk today a little bit about this issue of staffing and people and how we’re keeping people and getting people. So I think that’s perfect.

You contributed some of your thoughts to the State of Facilities this year, and I’m completely grateful for it and particularly because your insights helped inform one of the key observations. The importance of focusing not on replacing people, but empowering them. There’s long been talk about how to just get by with fewer people, but you’ve been focused more on this energy of empowering them. Can you talk a little more about that concept and maybe how it plays out for you and your teams on campus?

Mark: Yeah, I think I don’t know how we expect a craftsman or a lead person or a superintendent to do their job if we aren’t sharing the right information with them. How can they? How can they make that strategic decision if they don’t really understand the finances? If they don’t understand why decisions are being made at my level and they don’t understand the decision. So we’ve really focused on the last four or five years of empowering those folks and getting you know, much like we talk about getting the facilities guys at the table in the C-Suite. We’ve brought those people to the table, you know, with our leadership, so they understand. 
Not, not just their silo, but why? Why does the electrical shop care if the carpenters got a new truck? Why do they care if they got a different tool? Or why didn’t we get the same tool? So we’ve tried to really share all the knowledge that we can and give them a road map to where we hope to get, and here’s what we need from them to help get there. Even the housekeeping staff, you know, who gets up and gets fired up about coming in and cleaning a bathroom every day or cleaning the same entryway every day? But if we can, if we can help those people focus on why they’re doing it right, and pull Simon Sinek in here for a minute, what is the why of why we’re here? We’re here because the students are coming and the parents are gonna be here and what we do every day helps make their time here better. And their memory of you and what they what they send to the world, it makes it a better place. …You’ve probably heard me say this before, facilities folks are not gonna cure cancer.

But if the trash isn’t empty, the floors aren’t clean. The bathrooms aren’t nice. The parking lots aren’t good, the grounds don’t look good, and that researcher doesn’t have a comfortable place to come do his job, he’s probably not going to cure cancer either, so we impact that. And so we really try to from the ground up, you know, encourage our folks to see the bigger picture and the UF umbrella, not just I’m a housekeeper. Be proud of it.

Pete: It’s one of things that makes facilities work in a collegiate environment so interesting is that you can connect really directly to that mission. You can feel that connection to the students and the faculty and work that’s happening in the classroom or in the research lab. And you’re right. I mean, they’re not doing the work with the beakers, or they’re not doing the work with the software. And they’re not usually providing therapeutic support to the students who are stressed. But it all makes it possible, and it’s so rewarding to see them, and I think that’s great, right? 
You’re treating them like professionals, not automatons in the work.

Mark: They are professionals and, you know, one of our housekeepers told me the other day, he said, “Man, I would really love to get training to run a trash truck.” And I said then by golly let’s make it happen.

So we’re gonna help him out. I don’t know what each individual’s dream is here, but I will assure you it’s more than what they’re doing today. They have a  bigger plan, so anything we can do to promote that, you know about our training programs and other things that we’ve that we’ve put in place here just and again empowering them to be in a better place tomorrow than they are today and hopefully we’re getting a lot of quality work out of it while it’s here.

Pete: We cited in the report some of those examples, specifically examples of things that are kind of more granular, right. The idea of having automated equipment running for a person so they can be watching that while they’re doing something else, or data tracking on commodity usage in bathrooms so that the employee knows whether they really need to go to that bathroom that day if no one has been there because it’s at the end of the building and a hall that’s underutilized, maybe we skip our routine. Are any of those sort of particularly memorable to you in terms of, you know, employees really feeling much more empowered because they have the tools to do the work or there’s some of those that are exciting?

Mark: Yeah, I think you know one example I’ll use is at Florida, we are in the process of blending the housing facilities team and the appropriations facilities team. 
So that’s a that’s a 800 person organization now absorbing and working to bring in another 250 staff members, both housekeeping and professional staff. And as we’ve started to make some of those transitions, people are always anxious. They’re worried about losing their job. There were a lot of talks about, you know, we’re looking for efficiencies, which means to people, oh my gosh, they’re coming after us. 
And so one of the things that we did is look at the current software program they were using. It was very outdated and had not been implemented very well and so to bring them into the fold and let them understand how we were distributing commodities across campus and how ordering a mop or a bucket or some other piece of equipment that they needed, how much easier and more convenient it was on our side. They had people that would spend days trying to get orders ready and take them out and distribute them to buildings. Now it shows up on a pallet shrink wrapped, ready and so the so the employees have really embraced it. It surprised me. They were very resistant at first and now they appear very hungry to be part of it.

And what else have you got? Well, what else are you doing? And so we’re making baby steps. My guess is it’s probably a 18 to 24 month true transition to understand what the  efficiencies are, but already seeing those employees begin to sprout, so to speak, has been really interesting to watch, focusing primarily on housekeeping now bringing in some general maintenance mechanics.

But just to watch their [reactions], what do you mean I can get my work order on an iPad?I don’t have to drive over and get a piece of paper to do a work order? 
It’s been really interesting to watch that  on the robotics, we’re having some good success. I will tell you, I would caution anyone here to be careful how you go into it. It needs to be a slow, gradual, thoughtful process. If you go too far, too fast, I think it overwhelms people. So we’ve introduced it slowly. We’re bringing it in the technology in bathrooms. Who knew you could tell how much soap was in a dispenser, or how many paper towels were left? Or whether the trash can needed to be emptied in a bathroom? So we’re trying to do more with the people we have. 
We’re trying to really, really focus on, again, getting back to empowering that core group of people, that 80% of people who stay forever and not focus so much on that 20% of people that are the constant turnover because they pay $0.50 more at McDonald’s. Let’s invest in the people that that are here and how we make that better.

Pete: Yeah, some people around the country have been talking for some time about the un-politically correct notion of the aging of the workforce that provides these services. And there’s also been the competition with other businesses pulling folks away from places. So on this challenge of finding new talent, I shared with you a relatively recent Wall Street Journal article and it was early June, had a title with something like Gen Z Plumbers and Construction Workers are Making #bluecollar Cool. This idea that there’s this new generation coming up that are that are excited about this work in a way that we haven’t seen in a while, there’s been a lot of talk about that. This spring it really kind of picked up right around the time we released the report. I’m curious on your thoughts about the article, whether you’re seeing that and maybe your thoughts on the impact it might have on the industry or if you’re seeing new, younger faces showing up that are that are potentially technically savvy to talk to you as a follow up to your notion about robotics?

Mark: Yeah, we do. We are seeing a different caliber of person showing up and applying for jobs. It gets out pretty quickly that you’re doing something different, right? That, well, they’ve got robotics. We’re flying drones all over the place now. 
We’re using LIDAR on all the underground work we’re doing. We’re actually drawing attention of our own students who are suddenly becoming more interested in what we’re doing. You know, it used to be, how do you get a mechanical engineer into an energy plant to take a look? Because that’s where they’re probably gonna spend a lot of their career, right? How do you how do you get them to understand that it’s dirty, it’s noisy. How do you pique their interest? And so we’ve been working with the with the College of Engineering, we are working with the College of Design, Construction and Planning, and we’ve got a great learning lab right here. Don’t send them to Jacksonville to see a construction project. We got $2 billion worth of construction work going on here on this campus. Let’s pull them into our campus. Let’s let them see what we’re doing, and it’s generating a different look and the blue collar on social media. 
You know, Pete, I think you were in a conversation with a group of us when we first met back in 2016 or 2017. And I asked a question about social media in front of a group of our peers. One other thing the peer group said, yeah, we’re tapping into that and I think you may recall a comments from some of my counterparts maybe like, “Hell no we’re not doing that!” Hey, it’s the world today, right? And we engage students by what we tell them we’re doing. I think that social media has kind of piqued a little interest, and who doesn’t want to go to a YouTube video to figure out how to change the rear differential on a ‘69 Ford Mustang? I guarantee you there’s one there and somebody had a ball putting it together. So it’s life, right?

Pete: Right. That’s where I remembered how to tie my bow tie when I have to tie one every four or five years too. Exactly the same thing, right? I totally get that.

Mark: There’s a great one on how to  fold your suit jacket and not wrinkle in a carry-on too, so hey.

Pete: Thank heavens for the digital world. 

Do you think that this means that we’re looking at a trend that’s gonna start seeing this filling those coffers? I saw a number that said we might need another 650,000 plumbers in this country by 2027 or 2028. I mean, is this new hashtag generation gonna save us or do we have to pull on other things to really either accelerate it or draw people out of other generations that might still not be fully jumping in here?

Mark: It would be really interesting to, you know, we focused in K through 12 education so much on STEM learning and the next group of kids that go to higher education and that and that’s all well and good. But I think we’ve been short sighted in not offering another track. Not every kid, not every child, certainly, even with my children, there were, there were certainly, you know, my four children. There were a couple that were very interested in going to college. There was another one who was more interested in the gear ratio between a 383 stroker and a 350 Chevrolet engine and how you know, the kid can’t balance a checkbook, but he could figure out pressure ratios out in his head. So you know, they’re there, and I think they’re hungry and I think we’ve kind of abandoned them. And so that’s one of the reasons we’ve set up this new fast path career program for our folks. 
We could take a housekeeper who wants to learn, who’s interested in giving some of his or her own time, and we could take them through and have them journeyman level in five years. And that’s all here working for us. The on-the-job training happens with us we’ve started to see folks come into some of those jobs that didn’t really have the college path but didn’t have somewhere to go. And now we’re seeing some of those bubble up through our workforce and it’s been interesting to see. We’ve gotten some really smart kids who are now, you know thinking beyond driving the trash truck. But we’ve got a couple of young folks that we used as interns who are now here working full time, doing some great things with us on our engineering side.

So I think we’ve got a great resource right here. Let’s not lose sight of it.

Pete: Right. Develop, develop your own talent. 
One of the things we talked about in the report, this idea of creating programs like yours, obviously a little bit easier in a place with 800 or 1,000 employees instead of a place that’s got 75 or, it’s a much smaller institution.  But the message is the same and I think that it’s an interesting idea to kind of see how you develop those things and maybe even if you’re a smaller school, could you possibly kind of bundle together with some other schools in the area and try to develop talent that way or partner with this place for yours?

Mark: Yeah, Pete, you know we’ve talked about this before too. Plagiarism in this business is OK, right? Don’t reinvent the wheel. If somebody’s doing something that’s working, go ask him about it. And I assure you, that the University of Florida would share with you. We’ll tell you where we struggled. We’ll tell you where we were successful. Is it going to be the perfect fit for you? Probably not, but it certainly gives you a template to work for from instead of trying to develop it all yourself. You can’t, it’s just too much work. There’s too much great information out there.

Pete: I guess I wanted to ask you whether you thought the newer people coming into the business, is working with them different, is training with them different, is the culture of the shops changing with these new faces? Is that  happening because the work is changing? And that’s actually like four questions so I apologize. If you remember any of those questions can you answer any one of the things I just asked you about the change that’s coming.

Mark: Yes, yes and yes. Yeah, I think the workforce is changing. Every person that walks in the door is gonna have a smartphone in their pocket. You know, we still have guys that and some of that older generation that don’t really wanna go there. They’re late in their careers and they just aren’t interested in it. Everyone that walks in the door is already going to have some level of technology savvy, right? And so it’s working for them in some sense. Most of them are probably using an Apple wallet or some way to pay or some way to do something else and so this generation is exposed to it. It doesn’t scare them, right? It’s like part of life, not whoa, why are you doing that to me? And so I think…we’re finding that they’re a little more creative. You know, work order systems. I’ve implemented a couple different ones, the same one at a couple different schools and it wasn’t some IT specialist from the university IT shop that really got it and helped make it successful. In one case it was a PM technician that went ohh, I get this. Now he’s in the IT world and works for an ACC school and has a great job. And he was a great PM mechanic. He is a fantastic CMS operator. So don’t think that you don’t have the talent. Don’t think necessarily you have to go out and hire some new skill set. You may have it, and it may come from somewhere you’re not expecting.

Pete: Yeah, some of the smartest people I’ve ever met have worked with me inside departments on campuses, right? Just really, really smart people that, to your point earlier, just weren’t interested in physics class, but they loved, you know, the work that they’re doing, the craft that they were doing, and they applied all of that insight and wisdom and intelligence in a very different way than a PhD track. 
And it’s been, it’s been benefiting every institution I’ve ever served.

Mark: So to go back to your blue collar question and your young lady in that article that was social media savvy. She certainly appears to understand her trade. She’s gonna have an up on somebody else. Because it’s when you get into this next level of management, it’s those soft skills, the communication skills and those sorts of things, that that become impactful as much as the knowledge about what’s happening, it’s that it’s that ability to communicate and talk to others. What a great opportunity that communication, and she’s getting feedback. Some of it’s great, some of it’s probably terrible, but she’ll bring something to the table and the next level that a guy who’s just focused on making sure black to black, white to white, doesn’t do. She’s basically trying to educate people about her trade. So what better person to have in a leadership role and trying to bring the next generation along, than somebody that spent the last two years on social media trying to teach some homeowner how to hook his receptacle up? I mean, it’s just bringing a whole other skill set. It’s great. It’s exciting, even for the old people.

Pete: Yeah, it’s one of the reasons I’m excited about that new program that APPA has developed, right? The invest in success program that is focused on those soft skills, it’s focused not on technical skills. We’re pretty good, I think, at teaching people how to work their way through the process to be a master electrician, but it’s that communication, it’s that interaction skill and I think you’re really touching on something there, right? The more digitally active we are, the more important the communication skills are, because you can’t be really clumsy in that format. You really have to be intentional about it, otherwise you’ll find yourself in a very bad place very, very quickly and suddenly a lot of people are in the very bad place with you because the way the way that communication works, and I mean it seems like it’s a really important set of skills to focus on, particularly I think also in Higher Ed where the customers are so complicated. They’re so needy at times. 
They can be unbelievably demanding and to have this mediation skill is really, really valuable so that I love seeing that program being developed. I don’t you guys have really tapped into that resource yet with APPA’s program yet I don’t think, but have you heard anything about it and what it’s doing?

Mark: We have heard a little bit about it and I’m gonna put a plug in for Pete here while we’re talking, too. I think it’s been really great the way you have utilized the Gordian platform to now pull in APPA and NACUBO and other folks because honestly we’ve all worked in our own little silo where we’re comfortable and, you know, I think it’s great that we’re challenging those folks to come to the table and that we’re all trying to do the same thing, right. We’re trying to create a productive environment to educate and we’re trying to do it economically and so we’re all  striving for the same goal, and we probably overlap a lot more than anybody gives us credit for.

Pete: Yeah. I thank you for raising that issue. This notion of collaboration amongst the silos, and particularly when there’s often animosity, functioning between facilities organization and finance organizations, or sometimes the planning team or the PD and C team fits separately right? There’s a battle there, and yeah, everybody has really great information trying to find their way. APPA, NACUBO and SCUP all have the Rethinking the Framework for Collaboration project that’s going on right now. That and trying to kind of find better and stronger ways to do that integration and it’s the same communication that you were talking about with the folks inside the department or how to talk to each other, how to share information better, more constructively, more helpfully. I think it’s huge going forward, and it is part and parcel of this digital world where and you can’t avoid people anymore and you can’t say things that you don’t really mean and get away with it.

Mark: Yeah. Because somebody’s watching, somebody’s gonna have a video of it, or somebody’s gonna, you know, we play a lot behind the scenes with social media. 
It’s amazing what we find out about our buildings, about something that’s not working right, something that looks bad. Sprinkler head that’s broken. It’s incredible how much information we pick up, and we got a couple of folks that monitor, you know the parent groups and you know, what are the parents thinking? Those are the folks that are spending the money, right? What do I need to do to make them happier or make them more comfortable about leaving their kids? And so it’s an interesting dynamic, and it’s an exciting time to be in this business. I’m maybe more excited than I’ve ever been.

Pete: It kind of leads me to my one final thought, which is there’s a lot of excitement right now about the arrival of AI and I think we’re still trying to figure out what it means. We have a new generation of people coming in who are going to be digitally native. They’re soon to be AI native, whatever that means. I guess I’m wondering, do you think that’s the next evolution and in your head is this on your mind? Is it going to be also additive to employees or is it gonna be one of those potentially replacement of employee kind of technologies? Or do we even know?

Mark: You know, we’re pretty heavily invested in some digital twin conversation and some machine learning artificial intelligence…And I think it’s gonna become a complement, too. I don’t think it will replace people, but I think what it can do is make us more efficient, so if the artificial intelligence in one of my chiller plants for example is working as it should be, I  don’t have to send the mechanic to that building anymore to do things. There’s a whole lot that can happen right at a desktop after an alarm goes off that there’s, you know, the hot, cold calls we used to send everybody at that. That’s old news, you know, don’t you don’t have to send someone out. We have changed our workforce enough that the  skilled mechanic, the skilled building automation person can be monitoring it from the from the computer side of it. And there are folks out in the buildings that they can say, hey, I don’t think this is responding correctly. Go check it. So I haven’t sent a high dollar mechanic across campus, I’ve sent a general maintenance mechanic who’s in a zone to do the day-to-day things. I can send him over to confirm for that computer expert that what he sees is correct or not. And so we’ve streamlined that quite a bit and will continue to work in that direction.

Pete: Very interesting to see as AI develops, which  capabilities and capacities it’s going to help augment and accelerate, right? How much information? But I think something that’s very passionate to me and to us as a business is it’s all gonna continue to rely on data, right? It’s all gonna be about if you’ve got good data and good information. You can’t make good decisions with bad data and bad information. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a person or a computer or a piece of software.

Mark: And so  you’ve got to get the data right, you’ve got to start collecting asset data and others, you have to make that data as pure as you can. We’re not gonna all get it right. It’s not gonna everyday be right, but the metering and the different kinds of things that we do and we look at every day, they have got to be right or all the rest of this doesn’t matter, right? If they’re not, if they’re not communicating correctly.

We have a young man that works with us, has been here, started out as our industrial safety guy in the building. He is the guy around the shops making sure everybody is good. He’s really just a sharp young man. He wanted to expand his career. He’s done some other things with us. He’s been heavily involved in our CMS and he’s really just a very talented young man. He comes in and says, hey, look, I think I’m gonna get my PhD. I told him, that’s really exciting. What are you gonna get your PhD in? What are you thinking? And so, he says, I’m going to do it in molecular biology. So he’s now a year into the program and his research is based on trying to forecast how different proteins would react in a particular situation. And he said it’s not at all different from what you’re doing, right? It’s all about being able to forecast with the data you’ve got. And so he’s here, he’s a PhD candidate, he’s working.

He’s now in his second year and he’s working on our digital twin stuff in the back because to him it’s just data. He doesn’t care whether the air handler comes on or not, he just cares about how the data moves inside our system. So it’s been really interesting to watch folks here bloom and we will continue. I drew my career here to push out opportunities for people to grow, because I think that gives them self-worth and value and it certainly makes me feel better, you know and so I think we’re reaping the benefits of that right now.

Pete: Yeah. Like when I asked you to join me, I said a couple of things. One was, I thought it would be like a 10 or 15 minute conversation and we have blown right through that time frame. But I said I was interested because I knew how invested you were in people. And it has been fun sitting here with you for this last half hour or so, watching you smile so much as you talk about the people that you work with and how important they are. And I think that that’s such an important thing for people to take away. It’s what we were focused on when we’re writing the report. 
It’s the thing I was hearing from other colleagues of yours as well. This value in investing in the people that you work with and the returns you get from that, their excitement, their enthusiasm, the quality of work that happens, it’s just been really interesting to hear you talk about that stuff today. And I’m so grateful that you were willing to be here with me to have this conversation and to share it with everybody else. I know that what’s happening on your campus is not necessarily the specific set of solutions for everybody’s campus, and there isn’t one simple solution to anything right, let alone staffing and team building issues. But it’s nice to dig a little deeper and have you share some of the things that you’re doing in your journey right now, which, as you just said, will continue for as long as you can keep people smiling, which is fantastic. And I love the opportunity to to explore how to move beyond just the observations we had at a high level and let you offer some insights that really connects that lived reality to beyond just the data that we’re putting on. So thank you for that. I really appreciate it.

Mark: Absolutely. It’s been a pleasure. When I’m out with other leaders, I try very hard to emphasize that it’s not what I have done. It’s what we have done and it’s not me that’s made the difference, it’s the folks that are around me and I value the opportunity to work with these folks every day and I think they reciprocate and I think that’s huge. I think we’ve got to give credit —  I don’t repair the steam lot in the middle of the night. But it’s important that I recognize the guy who did because we move forward today, we take another step forward toward that, you know, curing cancer because he sacrificed his time with his family and came out and did his job last night. So Pete, it’s been a pleasure.

Pete: Thank you so much for all of you listening. Please keep your eyes peeled for our final conversation this summer. We’re gonna journey into the finance officer realm to hear how CFOs are thinking about the future.

Until that next time, we hope, as I said at the top, that you’re spending some of your time focused on transforming data insights into smarter decisions that are going to aid you in building the best possible communities. Communities that are enthusiastic and excited, just like the one we’ve been describing. Thank you for being with us. 
Please stay safe and always be kind to everyone.

Mark: Absolutely.

Pete: Take care, everyone. Goodbye.