Coronavirus and our profession 

News

  • COVID-19

19 March 2020

Virus

We live in challenging times. In the space of a week, our daily routines have changed dramatically.  

As workplace and facilities managers, you are among the principle agents for managing an organisation’s response to issues like coronavirus. You have most likely been working flat out in recent weeks, helping your workplaces, colleagues and loved ones to adapt at pace. 

We’ve been adapting, too. On Monday we took the difficult decision to move our national conference back by six months - to 25 September - and have since postponed a number of regional events and face-to-face training courses.  

We’ve closed head office until at least the end of March, but we are fully operational and very much open for business. We continue to stand ready to support your professional development in any way we can throughout these testing times.    

New coronavirus guidance

Best practice in risk and business continuity management requires those with responsibility for safeguarding their colleagues and the public to stay informed and up to date. 

We’ve collaborated with our Risk and Business Continuity Management SIG to bring together advice and resources to help you in that responsibility. We would like to extend special thanks to the chair, Dave Cooke, and his committee for their work on this with us.  

It doesn’t claim to be a definitive guide to everything, but rather a prompt on some key issues. Please take a look and let us know what you think (contact details are at the bottom of the web page). 

Rising to the challenge 

Sometimes in times of crisis, people and professions come into their own and positive change can happen.  

As a workplace and facilities management professional, you are responsible for many of the levers which can create a great workplace experience, whatever the setting.  

Some organisations will be trialling remote working for the first time at scale, realising the benefits as well as understanding the challenges of prolonged remote collaboration, and discovering new approaches that can be applied in a ‘business as usual’ state.  

You can enable and support work which can help maintain and even increase productivity, support positive cultures, and demonstrate positive impacts on health and wellbeing.  

The preparatory work we have carried out in recent years has enabled us, with little notice, to activate home working with great efficiency. Like any business continuity approach, it only works if you plan for any possibility. 

We hope you will find our guidance and resources useful.   

Please keep those hands clean, look after one another, and most of all, stay safe.