Kirk Kaiser Speaker 1
Mickey Eberts Speaker 2
Danielle Young Speaker 3
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Glad you could join us on FM After Hours, the ultimate podcast for all things facility management. We’re here to take you on a journey into the ever-changing world of fm. Don’t forget to check out our gracious sponsor, remediate your trusted partner in fire and life safety, compliance and Granger for the ones who get it done. And with that, let’s dive in.
Speaker 2 (00:21):
Welcome back to the FM Afterhour Show. My name’s Mickey. I’m one of your hosts. I’m joined by Danielle Young. Kurt Kaiser, again, art’s on a family vacation. He’ll be back at some point. He’s going to be, so we got refills, we the break. I’ll start off, let me thank our sponsors, remediate and Granger. It’s fantastic to have both of those helping us out. And today we’re going to go into the second part of what I’ll call staffing and working inside of healthcare, what that entails. So Kirk, want to kick us off?
Speaker 1 (01:00):
Yeah, I think where we left off was talking about vendors and contractors and your non-employee, people coming and working their way in. And so what I’d like to know is just from first person is when you look at the companies that you would sort of invite to be in your facility and do the work, and then well, we’ll start out with that. So how do you pick and determine who gets a invite, who gets on contract or how does, does that all process sort of get vetted down?
Speaker 2 (01:33):
So I’ll tell you what happens and then I’ll tell you what should happen. So typically a facility leader is focused on the problem in front of him or her. So if they’ve got a problem involving paint, they’re asking their peers, they’re researching online, trying to fund local companies to come in and help. Oftentimes there is a list that is sort of just handwritten down and they’ll go to their painter and go, Hey, who can we use? Or they’ll go to their plumber and say, who can we use?
(02:10):
It’s not that that doesn’t work. The problem is one, you’re not insuring quality. You’re not insuring consistency. And to be honest with you, for me, how you stayed in my hospital was you made my life easier. If you constantly made my life difficult, you weren’t staying in my hospital. Okay. So let’s talk about how you create a process that over time makes your life easier. So the first thing you want to do as a facility leader is sit down and draw up. The requirements are expectations that you have for your vendors. Some of them are basic, you talked about ’em earlier. Everybody that comes into the hospital has to have certain shots. Everybody that comes into the hospital has to have a certain background check. Everybody that comes into the hospital needs to be drug free. So those are basics, but at the same time, how much healthcare experience do you want them to have? And is it acceptable that 90% of their healthcare experience was in an ambulatory setting, or do you expect them to be able to work in a level one trauma center? So you need to break that down as a facility leader. You’ve got non-healthcare space, you’ve got medical office space, you’ve got ambulatory space, and then you have your tertiary critical behavioral. You could have anything, right? Behaviorals a whole, that’s actually great. I didn’t even think of that
Speaker 3 (03:39):
Whole other beast
Speaker 2 (03:41):
That you can have fantastic experience working in the most difficult healthcare environments and have no business going into a behavioral health
Speaker 2 (03:49):
Unit.
Speaker 2 (03:50):
No business at all. I’ve walked on a behavioral health unit and had multiple instances where we had a rule. You had to have two people. You had to go together. One of the patients snatched a screwdriver out and was trying to stab me. And to be honest with you, I relaxed. I was supposed to be the one watching
Speaker 4 (04:13):
And
Speaker 2 (04:13):
I zoned out. And the next thing you know, I got somebody trying to stab me with a screwdriver. Luckily they were little and I was able to grab their hand, but it scared me to death.
Speaker 1 (04:25):
Oh yeah. I had one where I was above the deck and guy I was with turned around, went to go do something and somebody took the ladder and was gone. So you were up there? I was up there. I’m like, oh no, where’s the ladder? I mean, so you’re like,
Speaker 3 (04:41):
This is where I live now.
Speaker 1 (04:42):
It’s crazy how fast it goes on in that space.
Speaker 2 (04:46):
Yeah. We had a kid that did our fire extinguisher inspections, very big hospital in Atlanta, and he was the greatest kid when you went on our behavioral health units. The fire extinguishers are in locked cabinets. He forgot to relock one of the cabinets. So then we had what we call it a Dr. Strong or something where everybody responds because we had a patient swinging a fire extinguisher trying to hit people. So just what seems like a minor mistake turns into potentially a life-threatening situation. How long did it take you before you were able to get down?
Speaker 3 (05:32):
It was about
Speaker 2 (05:33):
Five minutes before we found the ladder. I want
Speaker 3 (05:34):
To know where they found the ladder.
Speaker 1 (05:36):
Took it in some room and just put it against the wall.
Speaker 3 (05:40):
Was it a resident or was it a worker? He was like, well, this is mine now. See later, nobody
Speaker 1 (05:44):
Was there. It was a ladder and gone. Yeah, you’re not supposed to leave it at a 10. Right. But you can imagine when you have a tool chest,
Speaker 3 (05:52):
They
Speaker 1 (05:52):
Always have to be locked up. Every retool’s got to be accounted for because in one second. Yeah, it’s amazing how much stuff can be gone. Just you turn your back.
Speaker 2 (06:03):
Yeah, I remember the nurse manager pulling me to the side. She was a very nice lady. I knew her for a while, but she said, Mickey, you’re lucky the way that played out. And I said, what do you mean? And she said, well, it was a female patient. She could have just hid the screwdriver and then hurt somebody later on. So again, small things, big problems. Okay, so going back, so what type of experience do you expect your vendors to have? So you may have multiple lists. You may say, I’ve got these five contractors that I’ll call to work on my non-healthcare space. I’ve got these contractors that I’ll call to work in my less critical healthcare space, but I’m only using two HAC companies to work inside my hospital when they’re in the healthcare spaces. And I trust them and they’ve done the infection control training, they understand what it’s like to work in a healthcare space. They know my facility, they know where switches are, valves are, they know my staff, right? They’re comfortable. So okay, what type of space and then how much experience are they? 24 7. Right? Do they have an on-call system? So
Speaker 1 (07:26):
When you say they, is that a company? Is that the employees of the company? Is that, who’s they?
Speaker 2 (07:33):
That’s a great clarification. I’m talking about the company
Speaker 1 (07:38):
And
Speaker 2 (07:38):
Then you actually have to get them to explain to you how they’re structured. Here’s how I would do it. I would write down an RFQ, all these things I’m talking about. I put ’em on a piece of paper and then I would give it to the companies that want to work in my facility. I’m not calling them and asking them all these questions. And then I’m saying, okay, you have this, you got to get it back to me in a week. And if you just half-assed it on filling out the information, you’re out because I’m not going to chase you. There may be situations where I need clarification. So does the company have a structure that if I have a problem at 11 o’clock at night that my technician can call a number and get a response? So another one is response time. Am I expecting you to respond in one hour in two hours? What if it’s a holiday? Also rates, how much are you charging me per trip? Do you charge me a trip charge? What’s your overtime rate? All of that. So just spell it all out, vet set your list, educate your team, and then hold people accountable. We would do, no, I was a huge believer in delegation. So when I say we, now, I’m talking about inside the hospital, I would have my HVAC lead conduct an annual evaluation with his contractors.
(09:18):
I had my electrical lead conduct an annual evaluation of his contractors. So you may get kicked out.
Speaker 1 (09:26):
So when you call that number at 11 o’clock at night, is there a pre-select list of employees that are allowed to come in your hospital? Or is that left up to the company to who’s going to come out? Or how does that work?
Speaker 2 (09:41):
So typically it wasn’t a pre-select list of people. It was people that they hired to meet certain criteria.
Speaker 1 (09:48):
So you’re leaving it up to them?
Speaker 2 (09:50):
Yes.
Speaker 1 (09:51):
And does that cause problems?
Speaker 2 (09:56):
Can I tell you a time when it did? Yes it will. But also that’s going to be a red mark or a strike against that contract. Contract.
Speaker 1 (10:04):
Okay.
Speaker 2 (10:04):
So when we’re talking about the electrical lead, talking to the electrical contractors, Hey, in September we had a bad experience. We’ve already talked about it. I don’t want Joe out here anymore. He doesn’t meet the, but you control it,
Speaker 1 (10:21):
Right?
Speaker 2 (10:22):
So does that make sense?
Speaker 1 (10:24):
Yeah, it does. Just curious. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (10:27):
Now there may be somebody out there in FM land that has taken it steps further and identified and said it will be this set of people. We were more apt to do that in construction. And it was more around the superintendent and the project manager. So if we, let’s say we were bidding out a $15 million job. The economics are so close, I’m going to charge a 1% fee. I’m going to charge a one and a half percent fee, a 2% fee. It came down to who’s running the job? Can I get Billy? Because I’ve already done four projects with Billy and I know he runs a tight ship,
Speaker 1 (11:15):
Right? Yeah. So if you do a ground up project’s different, that’s contained easily. But if you do a tenant improvement, you’re changing part of a floor plate, you’re doing that and you have a general contractor come in that’s going to manage that for you. Are you just leaving who comes on site to that general contractor? Or are you actively involved in that process too? Or what? So you take the third floor and you’re converting over a wing to something else, right?
Speaker 2 (11:46):
So you’re right. There’s a distinct difference between a greenfield project versus inside the hospital touching different spaces. Even if you have it walled off, they got to come in a certain way, go out a certain way. So I didn’t go down to the point of picking the people. What I did was set the criteria.
Speaker 1 (12:07):
All
Speaker 2 (12:07):
Of your people have to have
Speaker 1 (12:08):
All performance based,
Speaker 2 (12:12):
And it was honestly more how they behaved in the hospital than having to get into their skillset. Well, and part of that is in construction. I owned a remodeling, residential remodeling company, construction company for three years. But it’s much different actually performing construction in a hospital. I wouldn’t have the expertise to tell them how to do their work. Now what I did was I had my leads walk through the construction process projects and report back to my project manager. Hey, they installed this upside down. I can’t get to the access panel. Right? Silly example, but true. Oh,
Speaker 1 (13:06):
It happens.
Speaker 2 (13:06):
Right? Exactly. Or a better one is why do I have so many holes in my firewall? What’s going on? So that was a common theme. So you’re not, again going back, you’re not necessarily telling them who some people do. Now we have remediate. We have customers that will literally say, I’ll give you this po if I get shame. We do have that and we abide by it where when we can. Right.
Speaker 1 (13:41):
Quick sidebar, when you have that tenant improvement project going on, right? You’re fixing up a space who controls the barrier? So you mentioned firewalls, right? Who controls the barrier for making sure dust and everything else doesn’t go into the main hospital? Is that the general contractor? Is that the hospital, a third party contractor who sort of the controls that?
Speaker 2 (14:06):
Great question. And it’s all over the place.
Speaker 1 (14:09):
Okay.
Speaker 2 (14:12):
I will say woe is you, if you leave it to the general contractor,
(14:17):
There are companies that specialize in doing that and they’re going to be cheaper than the general contract. And by the way, you’re going to back that out of the general contractor’s fee, right? And this is a really important thing in construction. It matters who the company is reporting to. So even if you force the general contractor to use a specific company that you’re comfortable with for your barriers, if they’re contracted to the general contractor and the general contractor’s paying them, do you think that company’s going to come and run and tell you they didn’t do it right?
Speaker 3 (14:56):
No.
Speaker 2 (14:58):
So we will do a session or two on construction, and I really want R here because he’s forgotten more than I ever or know. But one of the things that I used to do that used to make architects and GCs Matt as hell, was I would have a contract with the architect to me, a contract with the GC to me, and sometimes a contract with an engineer to me specifically the mechanical, because when you finish a project, a tenant improvement or some major floor remodel and you’ve revamped the HVAC, they’ll turn the project over to you. There’ll be problems. And they all know what you don’t know. They work for the architect. So they’re having these little huddles, what are we going to do about this? And they’ll come up with some half-ass solution that unless you catch it, you’re going to live with it. And by the way, getting people back out to do work after you’ve already paid them is difficult.
Speaker 1 (16:00):
That should be another episode or two,
Speaker 2 (16:03):
The
Speaker 1 (16:04):
Construction piece
Speaker 2 (16:05):
For sure. So what I would typically do in terms of how my barriers were managed, I would use a contractor of my choosing to handle my barriers and the documentation around pressurization and things like that. But you don’t to, you can put the onus on the general contractor and spell that out, but you would be surprised how sloppy it gets. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (16:39):
Well, I mean, hospital environment’s tough. Like you mentioned pressurization. That’s a tough thing to manage in a healthcare environment. Just that one topical one.
Speaker 2 (16:51):
I had three or four surveys as a joint commission surveyor go really wrong. There’s a term, it’s called immediate threat to life. And as a surveyor, when you come across something that you think even comes close to that area, you get the head surveyor.
(17:21):
Head surveyors were always nurses or doctors. And so the first thing you got to do is you got to explain it to, you know what, they don’t know what you’re talking about. And then you get on the phone with Chicago and the hospital administration’s freaking out. Chicago’s, they’ve got a whole group of engineers that are asking you a thousand questions. You’re taking pictures. So one of them was, as a part of the survey, as you’re going around, you ask, do you have any active construction projects? Now this to your point, do you send them home or not? Right? It’s one particular hospital had this project going. They didn’t send them home. And the first thing I noticed when I walked up was, I don’t think you have negative air here. You don’t have negative pressure. And then I look over, you take your lighter out. No,
Speaker 3 (18:15):
I was holding back so hard just now.
Speaker 2 (18:18):
I couldn’t help it. Yeah, that’s funny. That would’ve been funny. But there was a burn unit right across the hall. So now you got a problem because contaminating an area right outside of a burn unit, and by the way, burn the patients in the burn units. They’re some of the most immunocompromised patients there are. And in a lot of cases, they’re in horrific pain. So you don’t want to make it worse. So that was one of those instances where I had to bring joint commission corporate in the middle of it and just to make sure that I understood how to handle the situation. And essentially what happened is they have to fix it immediately and they have to demonstrate, sorry that it’s fixed immediately. And the negative air machine was unplugged. That’s what it was. So they said, well, we plugged the negative air machine in. Okay, well that’s great, but I mean, how did it get unplugged? What happened? Get to the root cause of it. So you don’t let ’em off that easy. You push ’em and make ’em put a process in place that they’re validating that there’s negative going to.
Speaker 4 (19:46):
Yeah,
Speaker 2 (19:47):
And essentially what I made them do was put an alarm on the negative air. So if it went positive, an alarm went off and I made ’em do it before I left. Yeah,
Speaker 1 (19:56):
Right.
Speaker 2 (19:57):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (19:59):
So relative to staffing, you talked about, let’s go back to your time as a joint commission inspector. When you would walk into a facility and someone was using either their own employees or outsourced employees, did that make any difference to you for an area or a topic? Was there an inherent conflict of interest of your
Speaker 3 (20:23):
That’s a good
Speaker 1 (20:24):
Question. Managing the inspections and managing the repairs and managing the maintenance or nothing.
Speaker 2 (20:30):
I had opinions, and again, I’m not trying to offend anybody out there, but I deal with, I’ll have somebody say it’s not right for someone who does the inspection to do the repair, whatever.
Speaker 1 (20:48):
Everybody does that. The elevator guy does that. The fire extinguisher guy does that. Everybody does that.
Speaker 2 (20:52):
The key is, and now is there a business logic to saying, I want someone different to do the inspection, to do the repair, maybe, right? It depends on the ethical nature of the company. But from a joint commission surveyor, I didn’t care. What I care about is your hospital safe and compliant from a life safety standpoint and an environment of care standpoint,
Speaker 4 (21:21):
Right?
Speaker 2 (21:22):
So environment of care, your safety committee, your emergency management, sorry, damn, I punched it. We’re looking at sterilizers, holes in walls, cleanliness, things like that, right? Life safety, fire alarm, fire suppression, doors, dampers. I could usually tell what was going to happen from the document review. You would see people who tried to insource things. And then this is where art and I differ, and I would tell you, and you heard me say earlier, and I hope he watches this, he’s forgotten more than I’ll ever know.
(22:11):
The difference is I’ve been to way more hospitals than he has and actually surveyed more hospitals. So I saw a tremendous bunch of different variations as to how people do and prepare for a survey. Oftentimes when someone would insource a life safety issue, part of their program would be fantastic, and then there would be a gap and you would say, what happened here? And they would go, well, we had a snowstorm or we had a flood. So the weekly fire pump inspection got missed. So I’m not sure if I’m answering your question, but yeah, I didn’t care if they did it in house or not. What I would do is I would spend more time validating that the in-house people had the credentials. I would actually make them demonstrate it to me. Typically, when you pay somebody to do it, they’ll give you that information in their report. A lot of times when people insource things related to life safety, they don’t give you the information. Even if they did it right. They give you misleading information, confusing information,
Speaker 4 (23:28):
Which
Speaker 2 (23:29):
By the way, aggravates the hell out of a surveyor. We only have an hour and a half to do a document review. And if you have four to eight generators and you’ve got three fire pumps, and you’ve got all of these complicated systems that we have to go through, if I’m having to teach you how to set up your documentation, it’s problematic. Where if you’re using a vendor, you should be in a better shape. Now, there were situations where I was with a joint commission, and I probably not supposed to do this, but to the side, I would look at the director and go, you need to get somebody else. Their documentation’s messed up, the director’s stressed out, they’re calling the company and they’re asking for clarification. The company’s not getting back to ’em. So they’re going to get a finding, even though they paid for the work to be done, change companies. Well, who should I use? I’m not getting into that, right? Can’t talk about that. But I’m a firm believer in challenge your staff, grow your staff, but make sure you don’t set yourself up for failure in things that are absolutely critical to keeping your patients staff and visitors safe.
(24:58):
That was always my worst nightmare.
Speaker 1 (25:00):
Yeah. So just another sidebar, when you walk in and you see the perfect report, right? Nothing’s wrong, nothing’s broken. If you have a thousand fire doors and nothing’s been wrong with the fire door, you just get the rubber stamp on it. Is that, oh, yeah. They dive into the, oh, is
Speaker 3 (25:18):
That a red flag?
Speaker 1 (25:18):
It’s a huge red flag,
Speaker 3 (25:19):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (25:20):
Yeah. I mean, it’s a brutal environment, right? I mean, brutal. I don’t care whether your dampers getting cycled on and off through power through, I mean, emergency generator stuff through, I mean, so stuff’s always breaking into hospital.
Speaker 2 (25:38):
It would throw up a huge red flag and it would put me on high alert
Speaker 4 (25:43):
Because
Speaker 2 (25:45):
I’m not going to say I’m automatically thinking these people are unethical, but if they’ve got a perfect document review, the building tour should match that.
Speaker 3 (25:57):
I feel like it would also put you in a situation that makes you feel like you should dig a little deeper. In general, if you see a report that’s perfect. It
Speaker 2 (26:05):
Looks too good.
Speaker 3 (26:06):
Yeah. Show me your perfection. So
Speaker 2 (26:10):
One of the things that the Joint Commission does, and I mean I admire the Joint Commission, they’re under a lot of pressure. They have a very short amount of time, whether you’re talking about a clinical surveyor or a doctor physician surveyor or the life safety code surveyor. They have to cover a lot of ground in a very short period of time. They learn and they change their methodologies to reflect what happens in the field. So one thing they do is your smoke detectors had to be tested on an annual basis. So I go through your smoke detectors, none of them have failed. You got a thousand, none of them have failed. Show me last year’s inspection. Now I’m looking at two years and none of them have failed. So now I’m asking questions, Hey, who’s checking into this? Are you sure this company’s not just giving you a report? Are you sure they’re actually testing your smoke detectors? I’m not going to cite ’em, but I’m going to ask them questions in an attempt to make sure they’re thinking about what’s going on in their facility. It’s much better to have a failure to fix it,
(27:31):
To retest it, to show that it passed. And if necessary, somewhere in the middle of there, do an ILSM,
Speaker 3 (27:38):
Right? I feel like that should also bring up a red flag for the hospital itself, that if you’ve got a report that’s perfection for two, three years, I would be asking, I don’t want to go out and find repairs that I need to fix by any means, but two years of a perfect report, I would be like, what’s going on here? Are you actually doing it?
Speaker 2 (28:00):
So a common discussion might be your report’s perfect for two years. The facility director goes and calls the company, comes back and says, oh, okay. Here’s what they do. If it fails, they just fix it and then pass it. And so then I’ll have a discussion with the facility director and say, okay, look, my preference, I wouldn’t do it that way. I would document what actually happened, demonstrate that it was fixed, demonstrate that it was retested, right? Just show the documentation. The documentation.
Speaker 1 (28:41):
And to that point, NFPA now outlines you have to keep repair records for a lot of different things because of that. To be able to show that, yeah, you actually had failures and you fix those.
Speaker 2 (28:52):
And you’ll run into some weird interactions with some facility leaders where they’re like, I want a clean report. I mean, we get that. I don’t want any failures. I want a clean report. Okay? And I’ve had discussions with customers to say, are you sure you want to do that? Here’s what I would do. No, this is what I want. And then I’ve also had customers that say, I want a bloody report. And normally the reason that is, is because they’re pissed off because they’ve been asking for funds to fix
Speaker 4 (29:27):
What they
Speaker 2 (29:27):
Know is wrong. And if they can get an official bloody report, they feel like they’ve got a better chance. Or it gets into what you said earlier where you look at ’em and go, I told you so with the board member right? Now, again, I’m going a little bit off track here, but here’s another piece of advice. If you’re in the middle of a survey, never ever, ever badmouth your administration to the surveyor. The surveyor is going to ask you questions and they’re going to find things, and they’re going to ask you things like, well, what’s your plan to get this fixed? Especially if you have a repeat issue. I’ve found seven penetrations. I’ve been up in the ceiling three times. Right? You got an issue. You don’t have a above the ceiling program.
Speaker 4 (30:22):
Yeah,
Speaker 2 (30:23):
I’ve been asking for it. I’ve been asking for it. What do you mean you’ve been asking for it? Oh, I talk to administration all the time. Who in administration? Well, I report to the C ffo. Okay. Well, I mean, what do they tell you? Well, we don’t have the money. They got to buy a new blah, blah, blah for clinical. You’re going to get a, this is what’s going to happen. I’m going to score a leadership finding against your hospital administration. Remember, these reports go to boards, right? Yep. You don’t want to be responsible for getting your hospital administration a leadership finding. I mean, what I would tell you then, this is brutal. If you work in a hospital and your administration knows you have life safety issues, and they’re blatantly not giving you the funds to fix it, and you’ve done your job, which means you haven’t blown something out of proportion, you’ve explained it well, you’ve given them, you’ve went and got multiple bids, scope, clarification, and it just keeps happening. Go somewhere else, find another job.
Speaker 1 (31:37):
And for the place you’re at, if you document that you went and put in a request to go get funding to get something fixed, right? If the CFO says no, at that point in time you do have a giant get out of jail free card. It’s like, I’m not saying bring it up to the joint commission inspector, but it
Speaker 2 (31:56):
Just doesn’t work that way though. Yeah, it really doesn’t. As you think that, I’m not saying it never happens, right? But on a whole, man, humans protect themselves, right? People protect themselves. So I mean, I’ve had it happen to me where, not in the joint commission sense, but I do remember a very specific case where I put in for capital a motor for an air handling that served the or,
(32:29):
And we actually did what’s called condition-based maintenance, which we had sensors on the certain components of the motor, and we would measure certain things, vibration, things like that. And we would get reports back that would say, green, it’s in good shape. Yellow something, it’s getting worse. Red, you need to deal with this right away. And so I had all the information that said, we need to replace this. Kept getting kicked down the road, kick down the road. Saturday morning, the air handler fails. Everybody freaks out. CEO’s calling me because there’s somebody traveling in from Dallas to have a surgery. We’re not going to be able to do the surgery because this, we need this one room. I’m trying to, and we solved it. We got a motor, we went and picked up a motor, brought it in, had it put in. But the next morning when I’m talking to the CEO and the CEO, and my boss was the CFO is drilling me, the CFO never stepped in and said, oh, this was on the capital list. We just didn’t, didn’t approve it. Now when I got back to my boss’s office, I was like, son of a bitch, why didn’t you
(33:44):
Jump in here? Come on, man.
Speaker 1 (33:48):
What’d he say?
Speaker 2 (33:50):
Well, I didn’t remember.
Speaker 1 (33:54):
That’s where you and I are different. I would’ve told the ceo, I put it,
Speaker 3 (33:58):
I’m very similar to you. Well, I told you so,
Speaker 1 (34:02):
Been like,
Speaker 3 (34:04):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (34:04):
And maybe that is the right thing to do, right? Yeah. I don’t know. But by the way, I didn’t stay there long.
Speaker 3 (34:10):
That’s probably good. Probably a good thing you didn’t.
Speaker 2 (34:12):
Yeah. I don’t want to work in an environment where it’s a hundred percent reactive, and that in and of itself happens way more than we realize. Being a facility director, manager, it’s really difficult. So going back, I mean, full circle, I feel like I’ve taken this all over the
Speaker 1 (34:33):
Place. No, it’s all good. It’s fun.
Speaker 2 (34:37):
I always thought of things like, I’m going to do this to make my life easier. I created a paint program. So when the administrators would ask me, can you paint my office? I’d have a spreadsheet where it was, and I had socialized this, right? Your office is an office. It gets painted once every seven years. My focus is on the patient rooms and the public areas. That worked about 95% of the time.
Speaker 4 (35:05):
Every
Speaker 2 (35:05):
Now and then you’d have somebody to pitch a fit, and you’d go, okay, fine, I’ll paint it. Whatever. Leave me alone.
Speaker 4 (35:10):
Right? Yep.
Speaker 2 (35:12):
Yeah. How are we doing on time?
Speaker 1 (35:15):
We got about 10 minutes left, it looks like. So yeah,
Speaker 3 (35:20):
I really enjoy hearing your guys’ stories.
Speaker 2 (35:22):
He’s got way more than I do. I don’t know. I’ve never been trapped in a ceiling. That’s pretty cool. Oh, I got plenty of good stories.
Speaker 1 (35:29):
I’m just dunno how many are reader or viewer appropriate
Speaker 2 (35:35):
After hours, man.
Speaker 1 (35:35):
Oh, it is after hours. That’s awesome. Oh my gosh. I got to tell a quick story. So we talked about snow control last time, right?
Speaker 2 (35:45):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (35:45):
So my first job was working for a chemical company doing the chemicals for snow removal. And you talk about employees and directions you give them and stuff. We were talking about that relative to snow control. And so we went to the city of Eau Claire, Wisconsin, and we were going to treat their salt so that their salt could work at a lower temperature. And so they had a big huge pile of salt. And then the storms coming in, get it done, get it done, get it done. But not a lot of guidelines other than we got to work at cold temperatures. So one of the things we did is we would go get a coloring agent to put this treatment on the salt so it would grab sunlight.
Speaker 2 (36:23):
And
Speaker 1 (36:23):
So I’m like, do you have a color you want to use? And he’s like, whatever. Just get it treated like the snow’s coming tomorrow. And so went out and figured a good dark color so it got purple dye and put it in this solution that we were treating the salt with. And about fourth of the way done treating this giant pile. And this guy comes running out like screaming, stop. And you would’ve thought someone died, right?
Speaker 4 (36:49):
He’s
Speaker 1 (36:50):
Like, you have to get rid of this and get a different color. We’re like, well, why? He goes, remember he is in Wisconsin, right? Green Bay Packers. He’s like, if I put purple salt on the streets, he goes, I will lose my job. He was dead serious. So we shut down the operation day. He’ll get a whole different color. Oh no,
Speaker 2 (37:12):
I believe it. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (37:13):
That’s awesome. He was freaking out that we had, he’s like, I’ll put this in the rural area.
Speaker 3 (37:18):
I was going to say, did he end up using that purple stuff?
Speaker 1 (37:21):
Yeah. We’re like, Hey, you told us you didn’t care what color?
Speaker 3 (37:24):
Oh my God.
Speaker 1 (37:25):
So we went and got dark green and that he
Speaker 2 (37:27):
Was all
Speaker 1 (37:27):
Happy
Speaker 2 (37:27):
Here.
Speaker 3 (37:28):
That’s
Speaker 2 (37:29):
Great. I believe that too, man. You go up in those areas,
Speaker 3 (37:34):
Football is life. Yeah,
Speaker 2 (37:38):
Much sillier story. But I worked in Pittsburgh a lot and I worked in this hospital and the guy that I reported to is when I worked for Sodexo, the Falcons were playing the Steelers. Now I lived in Atlanta at the time and just traveled in, and this was when Michael Vick was the quarterback. And so we made a bet it was a hundred dollars. And back then the Steelers were way better than the Falcons. The Falcons won. The guy wouldn’t talk to me for two weeks. He wouldn’t talk. He was so mad. I’m like, man, come on. I don’t really care. Keep the money. Right? But it’s so important to, I mean, it’s interesting how that works in certain communities. Well,
Speaker 1 (38:23):
Where you’re in Kansas City,
Speaker 3 (38:25):
It’s in our blood. It is. I mean, come
Speaker 2 (38:28):
On. Exactly. Look at this.
Speaker 3 (38:30):
It’s Red Friday, baby.
Speaker 2 (38:32):
I get in trouble all the time because I forget to wear the clothing on the appropriate days because at the office, we will wear either blue for the Royals
Speaker 3 (38:44):
Or
Speaker 2 (38:44):
Red for the chiefs. And I forget every time
Speaker 3 (38:47):
I’ll send you a text reminder.
Speaker 2 (38:48):
I need that. We need
Speaker 3 (38:49):
To get you a Chief’s mickey shirt,
Speaker 2 (38:52):
A chief’s Mickey shirt.
Speaker 3 (38:53):
There you
Speaker 2 (38:53):
Go. What is that
Speaker 3 (38:54):
Mickey Mouse wearing a chief shirt.
Speaker 2 (38:56):
Oh, that be perfect for you? Yeah, I just have the Mahomes jersey.
Speaker 3 (39:00):
Hey, that’ll work.
Speaker 2 (39:01):
Yeah, no, I have the stuff I just for forget to
Speaker 3 (39:03):
Wear it. We just need to wear it,
Speaker 2 (39:04):
Right?
Speaker 1 (39:05):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (39:06):
That’s awesome. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (39:07):
So we got about, we’ve had this topic now for two sessions, right? So if you were to boil it all down, let’s take that new facility manager coming in. What advice do you give that person relative to staffing and the people that they want to pull on their team, and then again, the people that they want to supplement or augment with their own employees. What’s the advice you give to that person?
Speaker 2 (39:31):
So one, go understand the benchmarks. Understand your facility, understand the benchmarks to survive. I would start out with making sure you had good contractors, plumbing, H-V-H-V-A-C, and electrical and focus your, because usually you’re understaffed, so focus your team on things that take the noise down, right? So make sure the grass is cut, usually using a vendor for that. Have a way to pick up trash, take care of your paint, work orders your holes in the wall, work orders and work with your team on being customer facing.
(40:17):
Teach them how to deal with nurses. We talk about facilities management being tough, man, nursing. Oh my gosh. Those typically ladies are under so much pressure. And so when you’re dealing with them and they’re telling you they’re hot or they’re cold or they need this or they need that, teach your team how to handle that. Find a solution. You got to be a solution finder. So okay, know your benchmarks. Teach your team to be customer facing. Take care of the noise, which is usually low priority work orders. And then over time, find your people on your team that have promise or what’s it called? Drive and drive them into the trades. And then you can start doing some of the trade stuff yourself and educate your administration on where you are in staffing, where you want to be, educate HR on what your pay scales should be. Don’t depend on the report that they got from some clinical staffing or advisory company on what your pay should be. Take control of that. Create the rules for your contractors. Make ’em. It’s always good to have a public execution every now and then, right? So when you just to remind your contractors, you’re serious.
(42:01):
So periodically shoot one in the foot, let it be known you’re not behaving the way you’re supposed to. You’re out for three months. I’ll talk to you in three months. Shake it up a little bit.
Speaker 4 (42:14):
Here’s
Speaker 2 (42:15):
Another thing. We didn’t talk about this at all, but this is really important, a time saver. So often what happens is a facility leader is doing something, their administrator comes down and says, Hey, I need to get the nursery taking care of board members such and such, blah, blah, blah. We just got a hundred thousand dollars donated and I got to get this done fast. So you’re like, okay, so you walk the administrator and she says, I want the handrails replaced. I want this painted. I want new cove base. And you’re writing. And you’re writing and you’re writing. Okay, so here’s what happens. They have a rule. They got to have three quotes. So the facility leader calls three companies, schedules three meetings, does three walkthroughs. Don’t do that. Take 10 minutes, type it on a Word document, have one meeting, three companies, come to the one meeting, one walkthrough. All questions come in email, all answers go in email. Everybody’s included in the questions and everybody’s included in the answers. You have to have your price here, and by this date, no exceptions, you don’t give me your price, you don’t get to play. That’ll save people a ton of time or in the middle of that stressful conversation with your CEO, who asked you to do this in an unreasonable amount of time. Say you’re going to let me skip the three bid thing, aren’t you? And then go to your favorite contractor who bails you out every single time. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (43:38):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (43:40):
And then do you take for those mechanical, electrical, plumbing, MEP stuff, like the critical, say the critical three, right? If you’re in a decent sized facility, do you have 2, 3, 4, 1? What
Speaker 2 (43:58):
Do you always two. Always
Speaker 1 (43:59):
Two. Okay.
Speaker 2 (44:00):
Always two.
Speaker 1 (44:00):
Yep.
Speaker 2 (44:01):
Yeah, at least two. I didn’t like to go more than two because it got confusing, and you always had to be careful too. Your staff will have favorites,
Speaker 4 (44:10):
So
Speaker 2 (44:11):
You need to make sure that they’re their favorite for the right reason. Right? It’s not because they’re taking ’em hunting or taking ’em fishing or whatever, that never, right. But yeah, no, I would have two, just simply because you don’t always want to have all your eggs in one basket. Yeah, that’s just important. Right? Now, I did violate that rule one time where I only used one mechanical engineer for seven years when I was at a hospital, but the reason I did that was because they made a mistake. There was a mistake made in a construction project. We all had a meeting. The mechanical engineer stepped up and said, I made the mistake and here’s what I did, and here’s what I should have done. And so we solved it. It was easy peasy instead of, I don’t know what happened.
Speaker 1 (45:01):
Right. I can imagine certain things like a architect, it’s problematic to have more than one. I mean, a lot of times,
Speaker 2 (45:09):
How
Speaker 1 (45:09):
Do you keep current asbuilt who’s keeping ’em working with other people’s stuff? I mean,
Speaker 2 (45:13):
Yeah, do they know your strategic plan?
Speaker 1 (45:16):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (45:16):
Right.
Speaker 1 (45:17):
That’s
Speaker 2 (45:17):
A good point.
Speaker 1 (45:17):
Yeah. Well, cool. So for next time, what are you guys thinking?
Speaker 2 (45:23):
You know what, I’d like to get some feedback. We’ve got some listeners. I really appreciate it. I’d love to get some feedback for some topics on what you guys might want to talk about. If I’m pressed now, I would say we would do the construction conversations next.
Speaker 1 (45:38):
Yeah. So do we put up something on the bottom of the screen that says, email your stuff? We All right. So if I point and go like there, and then it’s just going to appear there how this works.
Speaker 3 (45:48):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (45:50):
You’re the master at this.
Speaker 3 (45:51):
I mean, we have socials where they can leave comments. So
Speaker 1 (45:54):
Check
Speaker 3 (45:55):
Out our socials and then make sure that you leave comments and you can DM us and let us know what topics you want to hear if you have a guest that you want to shout out. I know throughout the rest of the season, we’re going to be pulling people to be guests. Guests on here. So yeah, just interact. Tell us what you want to hear. These guys and art are full of so much information, and it’s just a blasting in here listening and picking their brains. So it’s your guys’ turn.
Speaker 1 (46:21):
Art, you’re great today, by the way.
Speaker 3 (46:23):
Yeah. It’s such a good job, buddy.
Speaker 1 (46:24):
I think it’s his best performance. He’s not even here to defend himself. It’s great. We love you, art. All right. Thanks a lot, guys. Yeah, thanks.
Speaker 3 (46:34):
Thank you so much.
Speaker 1 (46:34):
Thank you for hanging out with us on FM After hours. Make sure you follow us on all of our social media platforms for your regular dose of Facility Insights. As always, a big shout out to remediate and Granger for their gracious sponsorships. Catch you next time on FM after hours.