6th EuroFM Research Symposium
Article Type: Conference review From: Facilities, Volume 28, Issue 1/2
16 and 17 June, 2009, Amsterdam
The Eighth European Research Symposium in Facilities Management (EuroFM Research Symposium) was held at Amsterdam in June 2009 and ran in parallel with the Business Conference, as part of the European Facilities Management Conference 2009 (EFMC 2009). Participants, as is customary with the EFMCs, were able to attend and walk between both the symposium and the business conference sessions. This enabled them to gain a flavour of what both research and practice from across Europe, had to discuss about current FM issues and the future challenges for the FM profession.
The Research Symposium, comprising of a large congregation of academics from across Europe, was arranged around four key themes. Three existing themes from the previous Symposia (Workplace Management, Performance Measurement and Operational Issues in FM) were revived alongside a new theme: sustainability. The key issues discussed were the service performance, usability of facilities and workplace management. The application of FM research into business was deemed important, as was the repositioning of the profession as strategic- one engaging and dealing with the core business of the organisation as opposed to building service management only.
The new sustainability theme was comprehensively discussed in the relevant session where unpredictability of the human element (both users and decision-makers) emerged as a key idea. It highlighted the need for the Human Resource (HRM) team to work closely with the FM team for any sustainability targets to be achieved since maximum savings and performance enhancements were seen as the result of human endeavour, and not technology.
There was frequent mention of the significant role of this “human factor” in most of the symposium sessions. Surprisingly, however, none of the research papers in the Symposium discussed the role of end-users, technology managers and decision-makers’ behaviour in shaping FM policy, facility usage and technological implementation directly. It is hoped that the future symposia organisers would endeavour to include organisational behaviour’s role in FM as another pertinent theme.
The Amsterdam Symposium was hosted by the International Facility Management Association and the European Facility Management Network (EuroFM) and will be followed next year by the EuroFM Research Symposium 2010 in Madrid.
Zehra WaheedSchool of the Built Environment, Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, UK
