Facilities @ Management

2.19 About the Many Human Factors in Facilities Management

Christine Sasse

People make facility management. Facility management makes people.

Two banal sentences? On no account. They reflect the experience we have had in the Sasse Group since our company was founded almost 50 years ago. At the very beginning, the founder, Dr. Eberhard Sasse, and his team went to a Munich bank branch to clean there. Overnight, they removed the dirt and waste left there by customers and employees. A work that is measured almost exclusively by the result. Those who carry them out remain invisible. When the night is over, they are gone.

That sounds like “interchangeable.” After “low value.” After “any.” None of these attributes, however, strike at the core of this activity at the lower end of what we now call facility management. The young entrepreneur Sasse learned this at an early age. He saw that the good business opportunity he had seen for the leap into self-employment had to evolve. That she needed added value.

One of these added values was the alert mind of his team (and himself). With open eyes and curiosity about the business of the first customer, they discovered opportunities to offer additional services. At the same time, they recognized that the newly acquired application knowledge from the bank can also be transferred to other sectors of the economy. Today, we would call this a “learning organization” – a characteristic that is generally not expected of companies in such a simple ...