Maria Vickers is Associate Director of New England Facilities Services. She is responsible for providing facilities services, safety and security, and meeting support to corporate offices of various sizes across New England.

“It’s Just Another Manic Monday” – The Bangles

8:00 a.m.
Connect to the corporate network. In the post-pandemic hybrid workplace, there are very few colleagues in the office at the beginning and end of the week, so I am working from home today. Check with Facilities Services (FS) staff in offices, make sure everything is operational.

Prepare and deliver last week’s occupancy statistics to office managers. Since we always use an office registration tool to securely manage occupancy, data about who has entered the office is at your fingertips. The process of associating each name with a service and then plotting the results is mostly manual, but has become rather routine, so the task is quickly accomplished.

Onboard new recruits. Send ‘Welcome’ messages from the FS team mailbox to new colleagues starting today, which include a brochure providing detailed information about the office and the assistance available from Facilities Services. Connect with each new hire to schedule on-site health and safety orientations and access card delivery.

09:00
AV checks. Receive reports from on-site staff regarding the status of meeting room technology in each office. Since the IT departments are no longer on site, it is the responsibility of the FS team to provide audiovisual and technical support for the meetings, so we are running full tests on Monday mornings. Provide instructions on simple fixes (eg reboots) and coordinate further testing or vendor support as needed.

Take a cup of coffee. Blessed coffee.

10:00 AM
Contact the telephone service provider and IT telephony team to receive a root cause analysis of a recent service outage at one of the offices. Luckily, this site’s customer service team operates primarily via email, but the lack of phone capabilities was a big issue for a few days. Update the SitRep and communicate findings to key stakeholders.

11:00
Call a meeting of Hartford business leaders to discuss the upcoming project: This office has a large daily team on site who will retain their assigned seats, but ‘hybrid’ colleagues will move to ‘agile’ seats “. Cleanup logistics is today’s topic of discussion. After the meeting, write a communication about the office cleaning process and planning.

12:37
Oops, I forgot lunch again. Take a yogurt and an apple out of the fridge.

1:00 p.m.
Join the meeting to create a new ticket in our enterprise service request system. Terms like drop-down menus, autofill, required fields, and workflows are rolling out of our collective brains and learning to play together. After the meeting, I create a workflow for the new ticket to travel after submission. Have fun with shapes.

Wait, what time is it???

2:30 PM
Meet with the Market Manager to review the status of FS operations at all New England Market offices. Review FS items to present to the line of business leaders at tomorrow’s monthly meeting.

15:00
Monthly meeting with the property manager (LL representative): adjustments to the concierge’s scope, window washing schedule, various maintenance items, clarifications on the recycling program.

3:42 p.m.
Receive a panicked message from a customer about coordinating an on-site customer meeting. I provide her with room reservation instructions, parking and dining information, and pandemic protocols for visitors; she has all of this information at her disposal, but sometimes facility services include a little hands-on, and that’s okay. I alert FS office staff and arrange for them to register visitors with building security.

4:00 p.m.
Take a few minutes to review the annual updates to the FS disaster recovery plan. The updates were written last week, but I wanted a few nights between them and my last check just to make sure I captured everything correctly. Good to Go – Send to FS Regional Director and Operational Resilience Team.

Check tomorrow’s schedule and get ready for staff meetings. Tuesday is a work day, so I check my briefcase to make sure I have everything I need.

Update my daily to-do lists and check off today’s accomplishments. It was a good day, not too manic after all!

If you would like to share your day in the life story, please contact the editor at jen@groupc.com.

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