Strategizing for success

Every day, I’m inspired by the effort American Society for Health Care Engineering (ASHE) members put into their work to make our facilities safe, effective and efficient. Your tireless efforts motivate me and the entire ASHE team to make sure that we’re providing you with the support you need to meet the challenges of today and tomorrow.

The ASHE board met last year to update our strategic plan to ensure ASHE is addressing the most pressing issues while meeting member needs and staying true to our mission, vision and values.

The updated plan includes three strategic imperatives: professional reputation, career development and operational excellence. 

In addressing professional reputation, we’re aiming to increase awareness not only of our members’ professional skills and value, but also of our entire profession. An organization’s understanding of a facility manager’s reputation within their field will be even stronger if the organization understands the importance of the profession itself.

Similarly, we want to focus on career development to make sure our members have access to education to sharpen their skills and increase their organizational value. We are also reaching out to engage young people in considering facility management as a career. ASHE is pursuing strategies to develop a career ladder with multiple entry points, provide education and programming to bridge the gap between graduation and a professional’s first job, and offer guidance for navigating the levels of facility management up to the C-suite.

Operational excellence will underpin all of ASHE’s strategic developments. The first step will be for us to reach consensus in defining operational excellence. We need to drive our own operational benchmarking rather than allow outside organizations and accounting agencies to pressure our operations to meet their numbers.

We will also continue to work on long-term goals that we know are important to our members, such as regulatory issues and advocacy. 

We must adapt our playbook to meet the new challenges, rule changes and competition. I believe this strategic plan will continue to strengthen the partnership between ASHE and each of our members. 

To learn more about these changes, go to the ASHE website and download the Futurescan publication.