You’re the director of engineering for a 120 building portfolio spread out across 5 major markets. In addition to slogging through budgeting season, you just spent a lot of time evaluating different maintenance and fault detection solutions.
But the adoption by the on-site teams has not gone well.
It’s a frustrating place to be in. You went through an exhaustive search and were very impressed with the reporting capabilities of the solution you selected.
You were excited to get a level of transparency you’ve never had before. In the back of your mind, you also figured some additional accountability could go a long way to improving outcomes.
There’s just one little problem. You know if your on-site teams don’t adopt the solution, the reporting capabilities will be useless.
The truth is, from a technology perspective, there’s always a natural tension between serving users and serving managers. It almost always boils down to robustness of reporting versus ease of use.
The natural tension
One of the most common reasons cited by commercial real estate companies for the failure of new technology is a lack of adoption by the end users. Data isn’t inputted. Records aren’t kept up to date. And the value of the whole system is subsequently undermined.
It happens in leasing. It happens in property management. It happens in engineering.
The challenge that portfolios face is the very nature of the beast itself - operators are trained and rewarded on fixing problems in the real world, not behind a screen. Many operators would rather “do the work” than record their activity and log data.
Like the classic salesman, who would rather be making calls out of his rolodex than using a CRM, it’s only natural to resist change when you’ve been doing something successfully for a long time.
But today, no modern organization would dare run their sales department without a CRM, it has become an inseparable extension of the sales person across every industry.
Like it or not, the same is going to happen to operators of commercial real estate.
In an increasingly complex and competitive environment, there is simply too much for one person to remember. Without a system of record, follow-up items inevitably fall through the cracks, crucial information is forgotten, and deferred maintenance becomes a vicious cycle. This all get compounded when there’s pressure to reduce costs and higher expectations from tenants.
All that said, the answer is not to force a solution on operators. In reality, their pushback is often valid.
A real world example
Let’s look at building maintenance from two perspectives: the operator’s and the manager’s.
The operator’s ideal version of the technology revolves around simplicity. Ideally, it would be a checklist that says:
[ ] Elevator Room Check
[ ] Monthly Boiler Maintenance
[ ] Makeup Air Unit Inspections
[ ] etc.
That way, they can keep track of what they need to do, but there’s no extra complexity. They know what is involved in an “inspection” and they know where every makeup air unit is in the building.
But the manager wants so much more.
Under each of these action items, there’s ideally a checklist of tasks. For example, the Monthly Boiler Maintenance might include:
[ ] Exercise temperature & pressure device
[ ] Check fill valve operation
[ ] Check expansion tank system
[ ] Check operation of all safety devices
[ ] Check & calibrate gauges
[ ] Check & adjust fire ignition system
[ ] Check & adjust back pressure valves
Those who have read, The Checklist Manifesto can immediately understand why this level of granularity might be important.
Not only does it ensure that nothing gets skipped, as even the most experienced operators (like doctors, pilots, etc.) can make mistakes, it also unlocks much better reporting.
With this granularity the software can track how much actual time is spent on each maintenance task, which in turn informs resource allocation across the portfolio.
In addition, there’s tremendous value (at scale) in knowing the locations of the equipment in a building, the makes/models, the age and expected useful life, etc.
However, none of this is portfolio-level value matters to an operator that is used to having every day be a new set of unforeseen challenges.
Bridging the gap
Operators often hate operations technology because they don’t see how using the system benefits them personally. If they do proper preventative maintenance, it does impact the wider business of course, but operations is often an environment where there are more pressing and visible needs that get the attention.
At the far end of the spectrum, technology is viewed by operators as a tool for manager to keep a close eye on their work.
With this context, there are three important considerations to maximize the likelihood of adoption.
1. Get Buy-In
This sounds obvious and is often given as advice in articles like this one. But it’s often harder to execute than at first assumed.
The most successful strategies often revolve around showing operators what’s in it for them and meeting them where they are (molding around their existing processes rather than introducing dramatically new workflows).
For example, operators will understand the value of having a single repository of information accessible in their pocket at all time. If such a system saves them time searching for documents when there’s an emergency and reduces the number of back-and-forth trips, they’ll quickly understand the value.
It may also be important to say, tactfully, that what we’ve been doing for 20 years has been successful, but the world around us is changing and we need to change with it. The idea is that it’s not anything an operator has done wrong, it’s just the facts.
2. Make it easy to do “the right” thing
This comes down to selecting the technology. As we covered in the Why Stitching Together Technology Companies Doesn't Work post, legacy providers often have a lot of legacy code that tends of ossify.
“That’s because the decisions that created the tight and complex connections within a software platform were often made years ago. And the people who made those decisions may not still be around, or just as often, do not come over in the acquisition.”
The truth is, a more modern technology can keep things both simple and robust. The trick is often to automate as much as possible for the user and only ask for their input when it’s truly necessary.
3. Human-led onboarding
As important as automation is to the value of a modern technology solution, sometimes nothing beats good old fashioned human engagement.
Perhaps the factor that is most correlated to on-site operator adoption is whether onboarding is supported by a team of engineers from the technology company.
This “client success” relationship is often the bedrock on which the operator’s willingness to learn and adapt rests on. It ensures that the system is setup in a way that makes sense to operators, gives them a real person to ask questions to, and frankly makes the whole process more difficult to ignore.
4. Collaboration
It comes as a surprise to many operators that they can actually suggest an improvement to the client success team and see the technology improve in near real time.
It’s understandable. In no other domain have they been able to collaborate or contribute to the improvement of a system or technology.
But there’s no quicker way to ensure that operators don’t hate operations technology than by actively listening to their needs and iterating quickly on their experience.
Because, while smart building experts are talking about Project Haystack, operators are on the ground just trying to find a basic checklist for what they have to do.
We’re proud to build technology that operators love to use and managers use to gain visibility. Schedule a demo today to see how it works.
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