Two years after facility management organizations faced the most significant disruption to the way they interact and business is conducted, facility managers find they are left with a major problem.

Before the pandemic, FMs were confident they knew what the culture of their organizations needed to be in order to drive business performance and ensure employee satisfaction. Facility managers felt they could articulate the underpinnings of the culture and ensure their organization embodied those values.

Now, post pandemic and with the advent of the hybrid work environment, managers find there have been large-scale shifts in the culture they created and institutionalized. It is not the same as it was before. The challenge they have now is how to recreate the cultural ideals that made their organizations thrive when staff worked together consistently and shared a common understanding of those basic principles.

Facility managers know organizational culture is crucial to creating the best experience for employees and the well-being of the organization, but how do they make it happen again?

The dictionary definition of culture is: “the ways of life for a population that are passed down from generation to generation.” Adding meat to the definition, culture is secured by the collective norms of behavior exhibited by the individuals within the organization. Translated for a facility department, it is the set of behavioral norms and unwritten rules that shape how employees interact and get work done. A simple version facility staff often use to describe their organization culture is “the way things work around here and how we treat one another.”