The Maintainers - The Unsung Heroes of Recreation Facility Management

Words Mick Foran

This article originally appeared in the Australasian Parks and Leisure Journal (Winter 2016)

My background of many unhappy years working inside a large department

store, studying Leisure Management and then working with young people as an outdoor educator for a decade left me uniquely unqualified to take on a new role in 2005 as an outdoor education facility manager.

Whilst I had passion and youthful enthusiasm in abundance, I quickly learned that I had much to learn. As the saying goes, 'you don't know what you don't know'. Eleven years on, I

know more than I did then but am still learning every day.

My workplace is Bornhoffen - Police-Citizens Youth Clubs Queensland's (PCYC) Leadership Development Centre in the spectacular mountains of the Gold Coast hinterland. It has group accommodation for up to 190 people, fourteen buildings, two commercial

kitchens and is set on a 98 hectare former dairy farm. The property is adjacent to the World Heritage rainforest listed Lamington National Park.

For those that don't know, PCYC is a non-profit community organisation. Whilst the PCYC concept exists in most Australian states, each state is its own independent organisation. PCYC Queensland has a unique partnership with the Queensland Police Service where it

provides police officers to fulfil the role of manager of our 54 clubs across the State. Our organisation has over 1,300 civilian employees and relies on the efforts of many hundreds of volunteers.

PCYC Bornhoffen is a wonderful place to work - a spectacular natural environment and working with a very passionate and talented group of people. As a Leadership Development Centre, our purpose is to inspire young people to be self-aware, to build

their social skills and to contribute positively to their community. We work with over 10,000 people and more than 150 different schools and community organisations each year

providing outdoor education and leadership development programs for young people as well as group accommodation and retreat facilities.

I consider myself working in a social enterprise. According to the British Columbia Centre for Social Enterprise, a social enterprise is 'a revenue generating business with primarily

social objectives whose surpluses are reinvested for that purpose in the business or in the community, rather than being driven by the need to deliver profit to shareholders and

owners.'

Every dollar we have to spend has either been earned through fee for service delivery in the marketplace or the occasional windfall from a hard won grant or hands-on fundraiser.

For us, putting our prices up to full commercial rates is not an option when it would mean that many of the young people and families who most need our services would have no

chance of affording them.

Sometimes, when I see what some of our colleagues in government spend money on, I just shake my head and mutter into my double-shot cappuccino. I do believe that if you have had to work hard to 'earn' every dollar, it makes you more discerning about how you invest every dollar. Anyone in small business reading this will not need any convincing. Because our budget reality is so tight, it does make me acutely aware of our spending decisions and priorities.

One of the main things that I have learnt in this 'fiscally-restrained environment' is that facility maintenance is largely invisible and, therefore, often underestimated by both individuals and organisations.

We usually only feel the pain and the true cost of facility maintenance when there has been under-investment over a period of time or when problems escalate to a critical point.

So what am I talking about when I use the term facility maintenance? I am taking a broad view.

• It is the cleaning staff who create the cleanliness, order and hygiene that we take for granted. In most workplaces, the staff lunch room is the single place that the cleaning

  staff don't have daily responsibility for...and we all know what can happen there. Take a moment to extrapolate that trend to the rest of your facility or park and you'll get a picture of how quickly hygiene and presentation issues might begin to escalate without your cleaners.

• It is the maintenance staff who fix things when they break or wear out (who does change those light bulbs when they fail and, by the way, why did somebody install that light there so it is almost impossible to access?). More than that, there is a whole lot of routine and preventative maintenance that is required to keep things structurally sound, well presented and to preserve the life of the asset.

• It is the grounds maintenance and gardening staff who are continually mowing the grass, controlling the weeds, picking up litter and doing countless other tasks to improve functionality and/ or presentation of the turf, playing surface or gardens. And in the fast growing season (six months of the year in our case), repeat again and again and again.

• It is the parks and reserves rangers who maintain the walking track networks that allow people to experience and appreciate natural areas that would otherwise be inaccessible to most of the population. Lamington National Park adjacent to our site has over 160km of constructed walking tracks. When a large tree falls and obstructs a walking track 12km away from the trailhead, rangers have to hike out to the site carrying chainsaws and tools, clear the obstruction and then carry it all back home again.

• It is the catering staff who organise the food, meet customer needs, handle a myriad of special dietary requirements and do the enormous number of repetitive tasks of washing up, cleaning, sanitizing and stock rotation that are required to keep a food business running smoothly and safely.

• And it is the office-based administrators who have to deal with the mountain of compliance paperwork, answer the enquiries, get all those supplier invoices approved and paid on time and, most importantly, make sure that everyone's pay gets processed.

  
  

These are just a few examples. There are countless others that could be mentioned.

As individuals and organisations, we tend to get motivated and excited about new developments, innovations and major facility improvements (with accompanying major budgets). The vast majority of the work undertaken in recreation facility management (and indeed in society generally) is cleaning, maintaining, keeping things operating, extending

the life of assets and keeping safe what is already there. This is done through the discipline of many tasks repeated over and over. For the most part, it's undertaken by the lowest paid workers in organisations.

The 'maintainers' probably don't often make the pages of this journal. There are not usually awards for maintenance team of the year. The work of the maintenance team does not usually appear in glossy brochures, get highlighted on the website or get many mentions in the e-newsletter or annual report.

Yet if you look at any robust evaluation of your facilities and services, you will quickly see how critical the 'maintainers' work is to your organisation's continued viability and the outcomes you achieve for the community.

That's why I think 'the maintainers' are the unsung heroes of recreation facility management.

If this idea has resonated in some way with you, then here are five practical things you could consider doing if you are not already:

1. Get to know who the 'maintainers' are in your organisation - if you can, get to know them by name and thank them sincerely for their work from time to time.

2. Find out some of the detail of what they actually do by observing or working alongside them sometime if you can.

3. If you have influence in your organisation, find out one important thing that you can start

doing (or stop doing) that the 'maintainers' know would make their job easier or more effective.

4. Consider how to acknowledge the maintenance that is undertaken (and the people who do it) when reporting your annual performance internally and externally. There is a huge volume of work and effort that goes into keeping things operating that may be going unrecognised.

5. At budget time, don’t look for an easy slash in this area - by all means, look carefully at your spend and eliminate genuine waste or inefficiencies - but if you are a facility-based service, then facility maintenance is an essential part of maintaining your capacity to do what you do.