SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA JOB MARKET : TECHNOLOGY’S CHANGING FACE : THE EVOLUTION OF THE OFFICE : TO INCREASE PRODUCTIVITY, COMPANIES ARE TURNING TO FACILITIES MANAGERS
In more than one office in Southern California, a new computer system may be obsolete almost as soon as it is installed. And the next new system for that office may use a smaller terminal, a larger printer, a different set of wires and cables that somehow must be accommodated.
Faced with this challenge are those who work in the exploding new field of facilities management--the task of keeping the high-tech office running at peak efficiency.
Over the past decade, this specialty has emerged to keep the up-to-date office a comfortable and productive place to work. Other jobs have also opened up in the related areas of ergonomics and industrial design.
A sort of general overseer for the workplace, a company’s facilities manager must coordinate the work of interior designers, space planners, ergonomics consultants, architects, real-estate brokers, telecommunications contractors and furniture vendors, while understanding the jobs performed by all of the firm’s employees.
“In one day, you can deal with the president of the company to the janitor and everything that goes in between. You can be in a suit one moment and then have dry wall on the whole back side of you and not know it,” said Lanette Bartholomew, senior regional facilities manager for Cerritos-based FHP Health Care.
Bartholomew is responsible for 45 corporate and medical offices in California. The company created the facilities management position eight years ago.
Growth in the field has been tremendous. The International Facilities Management Assn. has gone from 40 members in 1980 to 8,000 a decade later, with a growth rate of 35% over the past three years. UC Irvine recently started offering a certificate program in facilities management and may offer a master’s degree in the future. It would be the first such program on the West Coast.
Bartholomew, 28, started her working life as an interior designer, with a degree from the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising in Los Angeles.
That is just one route to achieving a career in facilities management.
A 1990 IFMA survey showed that 40% of respondents in the field majored in business. Others were schooled in engineering, liberal arts, architecture and the sciences.
Telecommunications, energy conservation, personal computers and automation are the growing areas of interest most often tackled by facilities managers, survey respondents said.
“The key word for the ‘90s is ‘change,’ ” said Bartholomew.
Indeed, by the end of this decade, companies may be able to mail letters containing tiny videotapes, predicted John Holly, a Hawthorne consultant. Telephone lines that transmit television pictures will be common, he added.
“People will be able to hook themselves up with the Library of Congress and say, ‘I want to see Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech,’ ” Holly said.
Holly specializes in another field that is expanding because of evolving technology: ergonomics, the science of adapting equipment so that it can be easily and safely operated by workers.
“It used to be that virtually all the openings in ergonomics were in government and academia,” Holly said. But when he ran a job-placement service last October for a national convention of the Human Factors Society--an association of ergonomists--he found that 47% of the openings were in industry, 32% in the computer field and 10% in aerospace.
Most ergonomists, Holly said, hold degrees in experimental psychology or engineering.
“If you’re going to get very far, you need a master’s or a Ph.D. in one or the other,” Holly explained.
But medical doctors, physiologists and even anthropologists have found their way into the field, he said.
A growing number of ergonomics consultants helps design computer work stations to reduce the possibility of repetitive strain injuries, or RSI, which can be disabling. Once a malady associated only with assembly-line workers who spend the day making the same motion over and over, RSI is increasing among white-collar employees who punch keys for hours at a time.
“In the ‘90s, you’re going to see another big leap: much more time in front of the computer,” said Rani Leuder, an Encino consultant who specializes in putting together “safe” work stations.
Another byproduct of office evolution is a call for industrial designers to create the right furniture and equipment.
The industrial design department at Art Center in Pasadena is suddenly attracting attention from manufacturers of office desks, chairs and machines. The training is general--graduates are supposed to be able to produce ideas for anything from a vacuum cleaner to a rail car. Three years ago, however, Steelcase and Xerox both started sponsoring projects for student designers there.
An example: “One project for Xerox was the secretarial work station of the future, five or six years down the line,” said Martin Smith, associate chairman of the center’s industrial design department. “They had identified that the secretary will have access to so much information that she will no longer be just a secretary, but much more a part of the management team.”
The students proposed a “super workstation” with a built-in copier.
“You didn’t run to a copier, because it was there in the desk,” Smith said. “You passed the item through an image reader and it would automatically be networked to a larger copier and through a distribution network.
“What we’re talking about,” Smith said, “is furniture that needs to be electronic. There isn’t a company doing this yet, but there will be.”
BEGINNINGS
Lanette Bartholomew is senior regional facilities manager for Cerritos-based FHP Health Care. She is responsible for 45 corporate and medical offices in California.
“I started out as an interior designer. At that point in my life, I found myself working for the facilities department. That’s when I was introduced to the field. Knowing construction, design, architecture, real estate and being a great politician ... if you can master those, then you have the makings of a good facilities manager.”
