Building a foundation for staff benchmarking

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There is no one-stop metric for health care facilities staff benchmarking. While the American Society for Health Care Engineering is exploring ways to address this need, facilities managers need to be able to articulate their team’s capabilities.

At a minimum, this means knowing the square footage and age of facilities being served and the services being provided. This data can be gathered from the annual budget report, life safety drawings, as-built drawings or by the facilities team performing the data collection. The No. 1 recommendation in this area is to not assume the historical records are 100% accurate. Facilities managers should perform a “gut-check” verification before accepting any dataset.

The next step is to determine the number of full-time equivalent (FTE) employees, their specialties and approximately how many hours are spent in each property category. It’s important to remember that this isn’t just a matter of counting bodies but of allocating labor hours. That might mean one heating, ventilating and air-conditioning technician might be allocated as 0.7 FTEs to the hospital and 0.3 FTEs to the business occupancies.

Additionally, knowing what services each employee is performing is important. Documenting how many labor hours are needed to keep the facility in compliance versus how many are spent in maintaining the infrastructure versus how many are spent completing requested services will help to justify which hours are necessary and which are used for noncritical services.

Knowing which properties staff are responsible for and the services they are performing will help ensure a successful team. If it makes business sense to bring on more staff, put the case together and sell it to leadership. If a staff reduction is necessary, be clear and consistent on what the team will no longer be able to perform internally and how that will impact the expense sheet. Knowing the data and using it to tell the story is what benchmarking is all about. For help, access the tool in the “ASHE Resources” box above.

Jason Tate, director of facilities at JLL in Las Cruces, N.M.