Blueprint for Success: Organizational Change

Recently, we released a white paper entitled Blueprint for Success: the 5 Steps to Digitizing Building Operations and Improving Returns at Scale.

In the last two Blueprint for Success videos, we covered automate manual processes and implementing insights to increase NOI.

Now that there have been some early wins, it’s easy to be pleased and move on. But there’s an important next step to recognize that technology needs to be part of the organization and each individual’s career and professional development.

The risk of losing out in the zero-sum game of commercial real estate is simply too high. In this video, Derek Cedarbaum covers why and how to embrace organizational change.

Video Transcript

Hi, I’m Derek Cedarbaum, welcome back to our five-part series, Blueprint for Success. This is part four, organizational change.

In part three, we talked about how we can leverage new technologies and more data-driven approaches to delivering value within the organization.

Now, you have some of these early wins, folks in the organization have perked up, they’ve seen some cost savings here, they’ve seen some new revenue there, but there’s still some level of skepticism. They think: “that’s you, that’s your job, your building, you’ve done it, it’s over. We have to return to our core focus of how we build and run our portfolio.”

Folks might suggest: “this is a great tool, but I’m too busy, to really do my job well, I need to focus on these three or four things. And that’s it.”

Sometimes, it’ merely a generational thing. You’ve got engineers that have been literally inside the same few buildings for four decades, asset managers that have been working in the same spreadsheets for two or three decades. Changing from that to something new and a bit more complex, at least on the surface, is a difficult thing to maneuver.

Yet, you see it time and time again in industry after industry, such as BlockBuster losing out to Netflix or Blackberry loing out to iPhone. Yes, those were technological transformations, but it was also the refusal of the organizations to take a more technological approach to the products and services they offered.

Bringing it back building operations, where you’ve got things like maintenance and repairs done on pen and paper, manual checking of equipment, not really knowing when, where, what was done by some of your third party vendors on your elevators, chillers, boilers and whatnot. Not knowing exactly what they charge and why, not knowing what was done and what was not done.

Things like training new employees; they’re spending 6-12 months getting onboard even though they might leave in a year or two.

Doing forecasting by taking historic growth of costs in the average asset you own or CPI or some other standard marker for growing expenses year over year without truly knowing what were the drivers within that specific building? What was the data that you can use to get you to that more advanced approach to operating your portfolio?

At Enertiv, we think that the technology piece being installed and implemented into your buildings and your company is a prerequisite. But without looking at the technologies being introduced by management, ownership and clients, and saying “this is something that needs to be part of my life, part of my career and my professional development,” then you as a company will lose out in this zero-sum game of commercial real estate to those organizations that really integrate these technologies from an organizational perspective.

Now, there’s textbooks upon textbooks on theory on the best way to approach organizational change, but the first step is accepting it is a necessity for your firm, it is a necessity for you as an individual, and for the generations that will come after.

We’ll talk about this a little bit more in part five, where we’ll take it to its conclusion. For now, I’m Derek Cedarbaum and I’ll see you next time.