Together is better: four steps for partnering with your workplace services provider

Building positive, collaborative relationships with your workplace services provider is key to creating workplace destinations. With more than 30 years of insight into the importance of these partnerships, Andrew has witnessed how they have evolved over time. “The relationship between the provider and the customer used to be much more transactional and, at times, adversarial,” he explains. Times have now changed: particularly after the COVID-19 pandemic, workplaces have become a strategic lever in business performance and customers are looking for supplier contracts that deliver on value while also incentivising improved collaboration to drive better outcomes.

When managed effectively, outsourcing partnerships should benefit both the customer and their provider, with trust an essential element. “Trust is the most important word when building a collaborative contract—we need to be able to teach and challenge each other and learn to trust one another in that process,” Andrew explains. He sets out four key steps to a successful partnership between an organisation and their workplace services provider. 

1. Establish a common purpose statement

There are several frameworks that can be used to support customer partnerships, ensuring a secure structure is in place from the very beginning to maximise efficiency, results and, ultimately, ongoing and high-performance working relationships.

Creating a ‘common purpose statement’ is an important first step. This is a collaborative process to create a north star, a direction of travel that can be translated into meaning something for everyone who works on site. When supported by a set of guiding principles and behaviours that both buyers and suppliers are encouraged to promote, it ensures that both parties are fully committed to the partnership and able to set priorities accordingly.

Everyone engages when they feel that they will be treated respectfully and fairly. Companies can also use an incentive-based performance model, rewarding suppliers for success as opposed to penalising poorer performance. Technology and data can be vital tools to help measure outcomes and deliver a mutually beneficial commercial arrangement.

The ISS and EY contract—a certified Vested partnership—is just one example of a successful collaboration framework, delivering key workplace services across the Nordics since 2018. “The whole direction and the governance of the partnership is very clearly set out. The client and service teams collaborate as equals in pursuit of common objectives, they remove obstacles and solve together on the move,” says Andrew.

2. Focus on problem solving

When challenges arise in partnerships, workshops and problem-solving incentives help to get ahead of the potential shortfalls whilst spotting opportunities and generating innovative solutions. These range from simple mindset changes for leadership teams—literally swapping ‘but’ with ‘and’ in conversations, for example—to more tactical solutions such as introducing a new technology or curated experience.

Regardless of the situation, Andrew believes that having the right problem-solving process is key. “When a problem arises, the first thing the account teams (customer and provider together) do is sit down and review the agreed behaviours to work out if any of them went wrong and/or contributed to this situation. There’s no thought of blaming the other party, which is quite a significant and very unusual way to think about challenges that arise day-to-day within service delivery,” he adds. 

3. Uphold key priorities

It is impossible to establish a successful partnership in facilities management without fully understanding what the customer hopes to achieve from such a collaboration. A services provider will need to work closely with their customer to understand and challenge what the customer really wants, translating that into outcomes to generate value for both parties.

A recent piece of ISS customer research with 200+ customers revealed that value for money still ranked as the highest priority for customers. However, having a strong relationship with an organisation fully engaged in the broader environmental, social and governance agenda also ranked highly. Customers were equally vocal about working with companies that can help them attract and retain talent while also creating meaningful data to make better decisions in the future.

For Andrew, understanding the customer’s needs helps ensure partnerships are long-lasting. “Customers tend to provide positive feedback and are more likely to continue their relationship when we deliver on the mutually agreed outcomes," he says, adding that "in the last 12 months, a significant number of customers have renewed with us which is a testament to that way of thinking and working".

4. Innovate with intelligent technology and people solutions

With the right contract and customer relationship in place, the world is your oyster, and with the right ‘hypothesis-led technology’ solutions, we are able to produce data and effective analysis through structured processes to allow teams to keep innovating.

Today, we produce so much data, which means that deciding where the real value in the data lies is the trick. As organisations tackle the hybrid workplace, understanding what creates engagement, attraction and ultimately loyalty, is vital. Conjoint analysis of historically siloed data provides the key to new discoveries, new initiatives and better outcomes. Our 'Building on a Page' analytics tool is designed to do just that.

As change at pace continues in the facilities management sector, Andrew is convinced that the future prosperity of workplace service providers is based on creating robust customer relationships. ISS’s access to data will play a prominent role in partnerships going forward, he adds, allowing the business to harness and action the insights it gathers.

When it comes to partnerships, Andrew concludes, ISS’s biggest innovation muscle is its people. Encouraging curiosity in leadership teams, for example, helps anticipate and solve customer problems, while ISS’s operating model sets it apart from the global competition. “We deliver most of our services with our own people, and that’s where we bring real strength to the relationship: by innately understanding the connection between service and the ultimate consumer.”