As workforce demographics shift and experienced facility professionals retire, the FM industry faces rising safety risks, productivity challenges and major knowledge gaps. In this episode, Associate Professor at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Dr. Jake Smithwick, joins host Wayne Whitzell to break down the data behind the demographic cliff, and what leaders can do now to prepare.
As experienced facility professionals retire and workforce demographics shift, the FM industry is approaching what many are calling a demographic cliff. In today's episode, host Wayne Whitzell is joined by researcher and associate professor Dr. Jake Smithwick to break down the data behind shrinking labor pools, rising safety risks and productivity challenges, and why so many new technicians are entering the field without hands-on experience. They explore the growing gap between generational work expectations, the critical role mentorship plays in knowledge transfer and retention, and how AI can act as a powerful support tool.
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Jake Smithwick: [00:00:00] We're going to have an entire generation. A new facilities technicians and other maintenance folks that have never done this before, that have never been around heavy machinery before. So fatalities are going to go up.
Safety and injuries are gonna go up, productivity is gonna go down, and these are very real things that we're already starting to see today and over the next. You know, five to 10 years is only gonna get, more challenging.
And so now we have to think about what are those next steps to deal with them?
Host: Welcome to Connected FM, a podcast connecting you to the latest insights, tools, and resources to help you succeed in facility management. This podcast is brought to you by ifma, the leading professional association for facility managers. If you are ready to grow your network and advance in your career, go to ifma.org to get started.
As experienced facility professionals retire and workforce demographics shift, the FM industry is approaching what [00:01:00] many are calling a demographic cliff. In today's episode, host Wayne Whitzell is joined by researcher and associate professor Dr. Jake Smithwick, to break down the data behind shrinking labor pools.
Rising safety risk and productivity challenges, and why so many new technicians are entering the field without hands-on experience. They explore the growing gap between generational work expectations, the critical role mentorship plays in knowledge transfer and retention, and how AI can act as a powerful support tool.
Now let's get into it.
Wayne Whitzell: Hello everyone. Welcome again to IFMA's Connected FM podcast. I am your host for this episode, Wayne Whitzell, and I am very excited today to speak with Jake Smithwick. Jake, say hi to everybody.
Jake Smithwick: Hello everybody. Good afternoon, good morning. You're reading whatever you might be listening to this. It's uh, it's wonderful to be here.
Thanks Wayne.
Wayne Whitzell: So, Jake, before I get to your introductions, I, I wanna say how I first [00:02:00] came to know you and, uh, we were both asked to speak at, uh, the Charlotte, or actually it was the, the, the Greater Triangle, Charlotte and, and all the North Carolina chapters for the Carolina Summit. And you batted cleanup, if I remember correctly, for, for all the presentations.
I was just sitting there just listening to everything that you said and your, and we're gonna talk a lot about this. We have a lot to get through here today, but I was so impressed with your ability to handle data and make it easy for people to understand, but also, you scared a lot. You scared the bejesus out of a lot of us with some of your data.
You, well,
Jake Smithwick: it was my intent, but things are afoot. Change is afoot. I'll tell you what,
Wayne Whitzell: yeah, it was, but I. Again, very, very impressed with the way you laid it out. You know, the first thing I thought of is, geez, we have to get you to speak at the Corporate Facilities Council, and we need to get this, this information out there.
But then obviously I've started, you know, researching you and, and, uh, I realized it's Dr. Smithwick, on a couple of different levels here. So, you know, why don't you go ahead and give us your, your bonafides here. Give us a little bit of what it is [00:03:00] you do and, and, and some of these amazing titles you hold
Jake Smithwick: well.
You're, you're too kind, Wayne. I worked for a research group, years ago out at Arizona State University, and, we did some research there. I did some consulting mostly on the owner side. In terms of, project delivery, and a lot of different things around that research and consulting and a variety of different things and, other things as well.
I was also involved in, some, kind of oddball jobs. I was, I exited roof inspections over the summers when I was, a young man years ago. So I've been on, thousands of roofs, throughout the United States, and I would tell you once you've seen one. They're all basically the same unless they're really bad.
In which case it's, well, it depends on how bad they're as to whether or not they're, they're fun to be out there. But, so I did that for a while. But the main thing was, again, the procurement side of things, project delivery. I, I'll tell you what, the I, FMA Foundation has actually been instrumental.
, When I was a student back at a SU, there's some other students that had the IFMA student chapter. They asked me involved, said, sure. What, you know, what the heck? Scholarships, and, you know [00:04:00] how the rest of the history goes. A couple of scholarships. Workplace met all these people, got connected to the research side of things with ifma and , it's just been a truly, these are not just words, but I'm truly grateful for the foundation.
The, the wonderful, frankly, blessings that they've helped, helped myself and certainly many others as well, just to, get the word about there, about what FM is. And I've had, several other students, that have worked with me that have also been, uh, fortunate enough to, to be with the foundation. And, fast forward 10 years later now, I'm a professor at the University of North Carolina.
Charlotte, the last, 10 years or so, I've been doing almost probably 80, 90%, full-time, research in facilities, management, benchmarking, procurement, some other things, you know, here and there. But, at the end of the day, we know that FM is, certainly the built environment and there's lots of things that connect to the built environment and , it's been a lot of fun.
So it's, uh. It's been great.
Wayne Whitzell: Yeah. And, researching you a little bit more for this podcast. I noticed that one of the doctorates that you, you hold is a doctor of philosophy and, I I find that very [00:05:00] interesting. It's, it's actually pretty interesting 'cause I have a very close friend of mine, who's also a, an IFMA leader, is a Christian Paia.
He has a master's in philosophy and he also went into the construction side. I know you teach this as a associate professor at, uh, university of North Carolina. But it's an, an interesting combination, and I think in some ways it's almost to deal with some of the challenges in that industry. One has to have a firm grip on the metaphysical some days.
Jake Smithwick: Yeah. It's, uh, I, I, that's, yeah, it's, it's kind of interesting for sure. I mean, there's a lot of different things that we encounter as facility professionals and a doctor of philosophy is, so a little bit of misnomer. It's more about how do we look at a situation, how do we resolve that? And certainly philosophy is involved with that, but philosophy is not, my core background at all, but that's what the PhD is in.
So we'll take a looking at,
Wayne Whitzell: well, sure. So I mean, that, that dovetails with everything that you do in terms of, logical thinking through process, taking things to their end result, , and using red herrings and logical fallacies to get our budgets passed sometimes,
Jake Smithwick: right.
Wayne Whitzell: So [00:06:00] yeah.
Jake Smithwick: Prior too.
Wayne Whitzell: You're right. I've got my, my business book's visible in the podcast here. But if you look up, I've got the philosophy ones kind of tucked in way up top Nice. Because I don't wanna scare anybody.
Jake Smithwick: Nice, nice.
Wayne Whitzell: What's up there? But, uh, yeah, I think it makes logical sense and I, I also think too, what I think you demonstrated in your presentations is just my conversations with you, is the ability to think in the third person.
So there, there's sometimes when people get really wonky about data and they become academics is, I've noticed they oftentimes will lose the ability to communicate co complex ideas and abstract ideas in a concrete, simple way. That's why I think you're such a value to our industry. And I'd like to see you, and the researcher doing get out there even more.
And I was enticed to take a class from you, and I'm so sorry. I forget the other gentleman's name at Fusion. , It was an AI workshop.
Jake Smithwick: Oh, yeah. Ken Sullivan.
Wayne Whitzell: Yes. The combination of you two guys was just fantastic. And I highly recommend anybody to, to take that. And I guess you can kind of see we start pulling all these threads together here.
We've got, [00:07:00] ai, we've got, designing construction. We've got your time out in the field, we've got teaching, the next generation. All these things kind of pull together and you see kind of a, i I think that affords you the opportunity to see a big landscape of the industry and what's happening.
So it's kind of a, a really interesting to have all those roll up into one human being that also can communicate those ideas. So with that. I'd like you to start talking to me a little bit more about the things that we spoke at, or you spoke about at the Charlotte Summit and some of the things that you think as a subject matter expert.
Tell us some of the things that you're seeing and things that we should be aware of right now.
Jake Smithwick: Yeah, absolutely. So it's. It's really kind of interesting that, so a lot of this data, you know, I'm not by any means an economist by training or any other, uh, sort of the word. Um, I've taken a couple of economics classes, always thoroughly enjoyed it, but I'm not a trained economist or, or anything like that.
But to kind of give folks that lay the land, and the reason why I bring that economics [00:08:00] perspective is that, you know, when we look at data and um, it's, we're really fortunate and, you know, facilities manage of what I find that. If you're thinking about solutions for a facilities professional, it needs to make their job easier, faster, better yesterday, and that applies to professional solutions consulting.
It also applies to the resource side of things, and if we aren't delivering things that can help folks, jobs be easier. Help them get those budgets passed, help them run their facilities more efficiently, then certainly that raises questions as to, you know, what's, what's the value of the research.
And certainly, I don't mean to dismay or, , dismiss other research out there for sure. But specifically for FM research, it has to be real world. Applied and hands on. And so when you think about the data that's out there, um, everything that's, you know, we, we kind of look at, and perhaps we'll go through some of that in a little bit, but a lot of the data we look at, especially when it comes to the workforce, to the built environment and where the next five or 10 years available, it's all [00:09:00] publicly available, right?
It's not like we have this, this black box of data that we pull from it. It's all out there. But the challenge here is how do you tell a story. How do we understand what, what that state is suggesting us today, where things might be going in the future? Because as you look at the changing, uh, workforce, demographics, I see it every day in my classroom, but broadly speaking, at the overall demographics of our country and really in certain parts of the world, we are in the midst of a huge, demographic and economic shift.
And so to think about that, I think I, I think we all feel in our bones that, you know, things are changing. We know that there's. The baby boomers and other folks are gonna retire, but we're now, we are in the front lines of this shift. And, um, the more we can think about that, the more we can be aware of it.
But more importantly, the more we can do something about it and know what's coming down here in the next five to 10 years, that'll certainly be a really beneficial for, for everybody.
Wayne Whitzell: A lot of times we see a lot of people armchair quarterback when they see [00:10:00] trends and they, they like to, which is one of my pet peeves, to take one data point and then extrapolate an entire theory. Out that data point. And the challenge we run into is everybody's kind of coming from their own and their stakeholder position.
What's in it for them or how will this affect them? And I think with these kinds of big trends here that we see is it's really critical to look at, yes, look at the big drivers, look at the things that are causing them, but really define what a solution is and what, what an end goal is that we're trying to get to.
I think one of the biggest things that, we talk about the workforce and so forth is your slides that you had about population decline as it relates just in general to the economy and let alone to our industry, I think was pretty staggering. And I, I think, we've heard so much growing up, especially, you know, on, on Gen X and, and so forth that you hear a lot about.
The, the fears of overpopulation and, and resource, uh, allocation in, in the world. But what I think we're actually seeing, and is some countries, it's, it's already in the spiral, is this, uh, population decline. Can you [00:11:00] just talk, talk a little bit about how that relates to this issue of workforce?
Jake Smithwick: Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, there's, there's been other countries set. You know, in some regards the United States, that's where I live, there's been other countries that have gone through what the United States is about to go through. So there's certainly, historical lessons to look at.
For example, Italy, South Korea, Japan, in some regards. Germany, they have a relatively older population, and so that's driven by World War ii. And there's other, you know, historical things that have kind of driven that. You can look to all the countries to see what the impact has been. And now it's our turn in terms of, the way math works, is our turn to, to go through some of that.
But one to kind of boil this down to practical standpoints and really a good way to illustrate this is that when you look at the data that's just happened over last five years, so certainly COVID.
Caused the issues that we're seeing today in terms of demographics and workforce, but in many cases it actually [00:12:00] exasperated it, it, it made it accelerate, um, in terms of what was already happening. So lemme give a, a brief example of that. So, prior to COVID in the construction and facility management workforce, there was about 7.6 million people that that worked there.
COVID happened. As we all remember it, it shut down. A lot of people were let go and left, and uh, so we dropped down by about a million people, so we lost about 15% of our workforce as a result of. Well, as you know, that, construction and other related, fields were, was counted as a crucial industry.
And so they reopened back up. People started coming back into the workforce, and if things relatively speaking, , picked up back to where they were, it took a little bit of time. But, compared to other downturns in the economy, this was a very rapid, now, at least for construction and facilities.
But here's where things get interesting. When COVID happened and the people that left the workforce, it wasn't a normal or an even distribution of people that left the, the workforce, like old people, middle aged people, and [00:13:00] older people. The people that primarily left the workforce and did not return were older people, more experienced people.
And so when the world opened back up here, you have all these people coming in. Now we gained back about 70 10% of our original workforce, but after you do, the latest data about this, which is about six to nine months old as of today, we have 8.3 million people working in this space. New construction, facilities built environment, and yet.
We see that productivity is down, there's all sorts of other issues down. And part of the reason for that is that when you do all the math here, the net impact is about 20 to 30% of the entire workforce that's working in construction facilities are what we call green. In other words, they've not really done this before.
So what's the impact of that? Well, there's a couple things. Many of you, depending on your age here, normally when we be, kind of in person, I don't know if I did this exercise with, with with you when we're in person, but one of the exercise I would do [00:14:00] is to think about, you know, how many of you, in high school or middle school had like a woodwork class or a metal shop class or, you know, something like that, heavy machine in class.
And, uh, many, the older folks, uh, almost everybody would raise their hand. Oh yeah, I had that. It was awesome. It was great. I asked that same question to my, my current students. And other younger people. Younger and it's, I'd say probably less than 10% most of the time. So the fact that we have 20 to 30% of our, our folks here that are now in the space that have likely never been around this heavy machinery or equipment or facilities that at the risk that they're exposed to is quite significant.
So the long-term impact and how that affects us as up and coming future facilities leaders is that we're going to have an entire generation. A new facilities technicians and other maintenance folks that have never done this before, that have never been around heavy machinery before. So fatalities are going to go up.
Safety and injuries are gonna go up, productivity is gonna go down, [00:15:00]and these are very real things that we're already starting to see today and over the next. You know, five to 10 years is only gonna get, more challenging. So I know this is a, not meant to be a totally dark, outlook here, but the reality is here, this is what's coming.
This is the reality that we face ourselves. And so now we have to think about what are those next steps to deal with them?
Wayne Whitzell: Well, this is hence, hence the reason why you use the term demographic cliff in your presentation.
Jake Smithwick: That's right.
Wayne Whitzell: You know, there's, it's not hyperbole. I mean, it really, we are, we are talking about a cliff.
And for those of us in the industry, out in the field here, we see that, I forget who it was. It was another IFMA buddy of mine that, used the term. We're seeing a lot more battlefield promotions.
Jake Smithwick: Yes.
Wayne Whitzell: So we see it's not uncommon now to see a coordinator hired and within a year they're in a FM, and then within another year they're in fm.
And I've seen with my own eyes in less than another year, they're a senior fm. Yeah. Now granted, these are probably for some of the big three because what their position is is look, we're gonna hire these green [00:16:00] as you describe the green kids, to be a coordinator with zero knowledge of facilities.
But we've got an international conglomerate behind them as a backstop in case they run into trouble, we can kind of back them up. So I think it can work in those kind of environments, with the third party providers. But, when you're talking about an in-house position and bringing somebody in, that, that is, is really not bringing even a basic knowledge of, I think the previous generation is one of the things we had because of our free range capability as kids.
Was, we knew what the limits were in personal interaction from the playground. We knew how far to push things. We knew how to problem solve in a group. We knew how to not get everything that we want. And, and I, listen, I, I think one of the mistakes that we've made in the past, is sometimes we lean hard into the difference between the generations and we draw these kind of distinct binary.
Lines between things, and I think we overdid it with the millennials. My personal experience, again, coming from personal experience, was that they're very hardworking, very lovely, very dedicated people to, to work with. I [00:17:00] didn't get that same experience that you would hear from, from everybody, and I think some of that was manufactured.
And created, and it's just the difference in viewpoints that people have sometimes that that's exacerbated. But when we look at, at bringing these people in, and not only that, they're not only coming without the knowledge of pure facilities or even just, uh, in some cases, the ability to think in that dis for that away.
I grew up, programming on a Commodore Victoria. Nice. So, so I had to think in terms of basic right. This before that and this before that. That marks almost everything I do in life. But now all of that's been automated, so sometimes we just come with this, the lack of the ability to think through those things that way.
And then you have the changing perspectives on the workplace from, from them as well. So that's a, a different kind of culture. So forget the raw knowledge. Talk to me about the changing perspectives on what the workplace is with the new generations coming in to the mix.
Jake Smithwick: Absolutely. Absolutely. So, I think, by way of example, there is [00:18:00] another, study that had come out.
This was from Suzy Welch. She's a professor at, I think it was Harvard. And so they, they actually did a research study about literally Gen Z, that's our upcoming workforce. Either my current college students, other newer folks that, don't necessarily have to be in college, but newer folks that are coming to the workforce and the study they did involved, about 45,000 people. So this is not like your mom and papa survey. This is like a legitimate survey. And what they did as part of the study, they looked at HR managers, hiring professionals, and they, what they don't understand is what's important to those folks that make these hiring decisions, what their key motivators as it were.
And they looked at, for Gen Z folks, in other words, the new hires. Their primary voters. And typically for years on end, you would see that in general, there's rough alignment. Obviously younger people have different perspectives and, you know, motivations. But in general, if you wanna get a job, you find people that have similar characteristics, what you're looking for, and it's well [00:19:00] alignment.
Well, this recent study that was actually, they published it about a month ago. But what they look at here is the top three, traits that hiring managers are looking for are achievement. They've demonstrated success. They can be successful. Number two was. Learning or a desire to learn new things, build our skill sets.
And number three, here was the desire to work just an, an innate interest in working, building something, doing something more that that's what the HR folks wanted. The Gen Z people, it was almost like completely opposite perspective about what they, what was important to them. Number one to Gen Z people was wellbeing or self-care.
That was their number one thing. And that contrast to achievement, which is what the HR people, number two for gen Z is were creative self-expression. And number three here is helping others locally. And so when you look at what's, what's important to current HR folks compared to what the Gen Z folks are interested in, there's a lot of misalignment in terms of what people [00:20:00] perhaps value from that standpoint.
So my advice is, and kind of what I'm seeing here is that as Wayne, you kind of alluded to that there are things that. Our respective childhoods, myself and yourself that, um, a lot of younger folks haven't necessarily been through. And so what we're seeing on other types of projects that there is, really interesting things out there that we haven't really seen before in the workplace.
So, for example, you may have a situation where we have a manager or some sort of, you know, high level supervisor that might be in their mid fifties and their direct report is in their mid thirties. 20, 30 year difference. And so when you think about these two people here, they're at, you know, fundamentally different stations of life.
You know, the older person is after work. They have the flexibility to go out, take a nap, rest, whatever they wanna do here. Older folks, or excuse me, younger folks, what are they doing after work? Picking up the kids. Running home doing what they have to do. And so there's different perspectives on what that is here.
Now, in this differences here, [00:21:00] there's challenges because we had different things that we're concerned about, but also there's huge opportunities for the younger folks to really seek out and find those older people that have tremendous amount of experience. And like I tell my students that when you go to your first job site.
I want you to find the oldest person and the meanest looking person that's been there for a long time. That might be kind of a, a crochety. Find them and become their best friend because they know more about facilities and construction management than probably anybody else in that organization. And the more you can learn from them and gather what they're, they have to do, it's a huge benefit.
Last thing I'll say about that here too is that I've talked to a number of, uh, facilities folks in the last, uh, few months here that I forgot who it was, but they said that. About half of my FM technician workforce is gonna be retiring within, uh, I think it was two or three years. Half the workforce is gonna retire in two, three years.
Folks, if you find yourself in that position, this is like red alert status. Like we, we can't let [00:22:00] this go here because what we need to do is capture that knowledge. Literally, I would strap a, a video camera on that person's head, had them walk around the facility and talk about, here's how I maintain things.
Here's where everything's at, here's what's finicky about this particular system. Because once they're gone, folks, it's so much harder to capture that.
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Wayne Whitzell: And on a positive side, if [00:23:00] you're an ambitious young person, that to me is a, an opportunity to get involved in the career now because you used to have to wait for somebody to retire or die.
Yeah. To move up the ladder. And now it's like, well, how many more minutes do I have?
Jake Smithwick: Yeah.
Wayne Whitzell: So I, I as you're, as you're talking through that, I think I saw the same article or an expansion on that article, and I think it was Susie Welch who said this also is that HR and the current managers and leaders do not want you to bring your authentic self to work.
They want you to bring the self that's going to drive the mission of the organization to work.
Jake Smithwick: Yeah.
Wayne Whitzell: And I think that one of the things that we've created and technology has created, I think unfortunately. Is, it used to be we would have these water cooler experiences, right? We had three channels.
If you're as old as I am or he didn't have streaming, and, and so there'd be these tent pole cultural things. Map polls that everybody would kind of rally around and talk and you had these common experiences. But now literally that experience has gone to a solo singular person. I have my own [00:24:00] crafted, or whether it's one I choose, or whether it's one that's algorithmed at me, I now have a personalized experience of, of a personalized life experience.
So when something is dissonant to that. It's very hard, I think for younger people to adjust to that because they have such control over the IO port on their brain,
Jake Smithwick: right?
Wayne Whitzell: So I, I think when they bring that to work, sometimes they're, they want to be authentic and everybody's telling them to be authentic.
And all these 21-year-old life coaches are telling them to be authentic. And then they come and it's like, no, you wanna, you need to align with the mission of the why of this organization. You can. Potentially influence that. Why, but not the minute you step in the front door. Yeah. And that's a skill I think that we've unfortunately haven't taught that group of folks.
I think that we've allowed the algorithms to, to, to run that, and you might often hear me say in some of my leadership classes is that I think there's an epidemic of, I know.
Jake Smithwick: [00:25:00] Mm-hmm.
Wayne Whitzell: Oftentimes you'll say something to someone and they'll say, oh, I know, I know, I know. And I, I started asking, well, why, why do you say, I know.
Do you think that I, I'm, I think that you might not be smart enough because that's not what I'm doing. I'm communicating to you and sometimes I might be doing that in front of someone else because I want them to hear what I said to you. Yeah. Or I wanna know that you know, that I know that, you know.
Right. But the way it's taken sometimes is I know all of this stuff and I, and I'm not stupid. It's, it's almost like the inability to, well, I always say this, the most intelligent person in the room is often the person does not have to let you know that he or she is the most intelligent in the room.
Jake Smithwick: Yes.
Wayne Whitzell: Right. And, and knowledge used knowing it's a lot of things used to be really sexy. Right. It's like I can tell you all the stuff off the top of my head, but now I know the sum total of human knowledge at 15 seconds.
Jake Smithwick: Exactly.
Wayne Whitzell: So it's it's wisdom. I think is what we need to be cultivating as leaders. And you touched on it right at the beginning, you said seek out that person, that mentor.
And [00:26:00] it's amazing how often you talk to people later on in their careers and you say, who was it? Or was there a who, what, what was it? I think people will ask, you know, was it that promotion? Was it that, and no point to No it was. That person that took me under their wing or in that tough time at work, they helped me through.
And we, I think we, we don't push that enough on people. We tell people to be these go-getters, ambitious self-starters and, every man and woman is an island. And not realizing the power in that kind of mentoring that's, that's just available to people these days. Now let's weed AI into this with mentoring.
Now we obviously know the value of a personal mentor, right? You know, maybe you talk to a young person, you say, who do you look up to? At that point they might say, Kobe Bryant, or whomever, right? But later on in life, it's that chemistry teacher that you had in high school, right?
That, that who gave you the interest in biochem engineering or something. Right? But talk to me now, because ai, I think as a virtual mentor, I think a lot of people are looking to. To AI [00:27:00] for that deep, deep research. So it's right, which we do in, in, in, in the AI tools, but looking there for answers instead of the personal experience.
Now, I, I can tell you, I think there's some value in that, but talk to me about the pros and cons maybe of, of the integration as, uh, AI as a workforce multiplier, both as in productivity, but in mentoring too.
Jake Smithwick: Yeah, absolutely. It's, it's really quite interesting. When I kind of think about AI and we do our, you know, our workshops and d different things about that, , I don't like to refer to it as artificial intelligence.
I mean, that's what it's called. That's the name of it for sure. But, I think a better way to think about that really to, extract that value from AI is to think of it as augmented intelligence, as almost as a companion that can help you do something that can help you research something that can help you.
Think about something in a different way can certainly be beneficial. I mean, anytime there has been a new technology that has come out in the last a hundred years, think about the Ford, manufacturing plants or the internet or whatever you wanna think about is that there's always that [00:28:00] initial concern that, oh, there's gonna take away jobs.
And yeah, it is, people are going to lose jobs. That is for sure. But also. The opportunities that are reveals to us and new positions that we've never even conceived of certainly is a huge benefit. As we seek to understand what these tools can help us be more productive, we, and frankly on, on our personal lives, how can we use that to, to make our lives, you know, a little bit easier, , a little bit, , less stressful will certainly be, , a good thing.
Certainly there's limits on that. You know, social media, there's all sorts of data and research on what data that they, social media could leads to a lot actually more stress and more mental health, concern an standpoint. One of the biggest challenges that I think we see here is that it is really, AI is probably probably the first tool where if you have more experience, more life knowledge, the value people get out of AI is far greater compared to somebody that you know, maybe doesn't know as much, which is interesting [00:29:00] because, you know, you would think it would be the opposite.
I think the reason why that happens is because in, as you have more experience, we know how to ask better questions. We know how to prod. We know how to poke, we know what to look for. And when the AI gets something like that, it's almost like when an expert is with an expert, we can delve even further into the subject of panier.
So, I mean, kind, kind of final thought about this here is that when you think about our current. Workforce situation and what's happening to the future is that I, I think construction facilities, certainly our jobs are gonna , be affected by how we think about AI and how that affects our day-to-day work.
But more than anything, I think this is gonna be, , I'm gonna say a savior per se, but it's more than anything as a way for us to help lessen the impact that's coming. From the impending of workforce shifts that can help us do these things here that we don't necessarily like doing. But if it can make that easier for us, take care of those things that we previously hadn't thought about, , that will certainly be [00:30:00] a great thing.
And you gotta keep in mind here is that AI just came out, when did chat? That was November of 23, I think it was 22. November of one of those years. And so it's been out for about three years now and we've already can do all these things here. You give this, you know, five more years, you know, 10 times the amount of data centers and what's it gonna produce.
Be just incredible. So I'm very excited about the future. There's certainly things that we're concerned about, but I think the net benefit to humanity is going to be just incredible for sure.
Wayne Whitzell: Yeah. So, so let's look at some. You already touched on a couple of prescriptive countermeasures. I'll call them. I won't call them solutions, I'll call them countermeasures at this point that we can do.
One is, is mentoring. And I think that an organization could set something up and say, look, as we bring on a new hire, we're going to pair them with someone in the organization. Now I can see HR getting a little scared about that because you know, here you might pair somebody up with a gruff 55, [00:31:00] 60-year-old who might not have the dexterity.
And and nuance maybe sometimes to, to understand that because they might be very gruff in their perhaps, um, generalized, right. This an engineer talking to you. No, that's not the way you hit it. And then that might offend someone younger who's not used to being talked to like that. Yeah. So I think having external mentoring with people that are adept at mentoring maybe.
So if Ms. Mentor match program is fantastic for that, getting involved in nfma. Let's say, um, a, a mandatory mentoring of your younger people. Let's say connecting them with an industry association, whether it's at their engineering, if they're involved in facilities, if mug, you know, crew, any of these other organizations to get them connected with, with network.
And then I think education. And I think one of the things that. I would do is I would put new people through the EOFM course, uh, through ifma Essentials of Facility Management. I think that would put somebody light years ahead. Now, I know some of these organizations have their own training programs that they offer, but getting them connected to the industry and realizing what they're [00:32:00] part of with people who have.
You know, built these tremendous tools like Mentor Match and so forth, I think is a very big value. So right there, there's three or four things that are countermeasures that, that, that we could do to, to connect these people with something that's gonna help them. Now, in terms of the AI tools that, that are available, that are out there, I see a lot of stuff come out from AI that.
I guess this harkens back to the wisdom comment I made earlier, is that we see a lot of knowledge flowing, but that secondary, tertiary, quaternary, uh, ripple effect of some of these things that we do with ai sometimes, especially how it affects people, especially when we see very ambitious young people that, that want to promote very quickly through things and they may have requisite knowledge, but sometimes may not have.
The ability to think through how it will affect them. And if they only paired that with a mentor and the mentor said, okay, great, I great idea. Okay, I see what you're trying to do here, but the way you're going about it, it won't work because of [00:33:00] something technical or something cultural, or you need to watch out for this person here.
You might offend them with this. Here's how you slow roll this. All of that nuance and all of that stuff that does not currently exist in AI exists in another human being with that experience. So when you said find that. Older, salty weathered, uh, sinuous, uh, person who's been through this. There's a reason why I think you led with that, because I think that's probably one of the biggest levers we can pull
Jake Smithwick: Absolutely.
Wayne Whitzell: In helping the situation.
Jake Smithwick: Yeah, absolutely. And it's really interesting you brought up the mentoring thing. One of the research projects we're actually doing with ifm. Is, we are actually interviewing ifma chapters right now that have mentoring programs. In fact, I've got a PhD student, she's doing her dissertation topic.
It's literally, a facility management mentoring framework, for FM because there's a lot of really good ideas out there, but there's no, what we've found, what we've not found so far is one cohesive strategy that brings all these different pieces together. So, it is building on prior [00:34:00] research about looking personalities of facilities, people.
How do we find mentors? How do, what's the science behind assigning people together? Make sure it's a positive experience.
It's funny, Wayne. We did another research study, a couple years ago with ifma and we asked people. We asked him about, you know, different measures of job satisfaction. Are you happy? Do you feel secure? Do you wanna stay here for a long time? You know about five or six different things we looked at.
It was incredible. Every single measure of job satisfaction, those that had mentors were above everybody else in terms of their overall satisfaction with anything that you look at. So clearly having a mentor positively impacts. Work and I would assume your personal life little 'cause you're not stressed about work, so therefore personal life is also better.
But having a mentor is just, it's really hard to put a value on that because long run, 10, 20, 30 years from now, it will certainly make a difference. And the research, the data bears that out and I feel totally confident in [00:35:00] that's certainly a valuable thing to look at too.
Wayne Whitzell: Yeah, it's, it's such a great topic.
There was, I dunno, I think it was last issue. CFCs Magazine I wrote in an article on leadership, heavily focused on mentoring and how to select a mentor from the other side. Okay. It's one thing, you know, you just feel great. You got somebody that wants to help you, but you should really, I think, find somebody who is more pedagogic, did I pronounce that right?
In their approach. And someone who, I think I said that you look for someone with the emotional limp, someone that's been through it. Yeah. Because you don't want somebody that's in it for, you know, social media clout or something that's, they've gotta be in it for you and really get involved in your situation.
, It can't be this, I mean, I guess suppose you could, if you're only comfortable with kind of a casual two ships passing in the night kind of mentoring, that's fine, but. But the real mentoring happens when it can go from crying on their shoulder to venting on them to saying, I've got a big, pitch to do tomorrow to the C-suite.
Can you look at this presentation and pick it apart? [00:36:00] Yeah. And they, and points in between and I must say I know a lot of people who currently do that for a lot of mentees and a lot of people who would be very, very good at it. So we're flush with people like that in our organization and people that are willing to do that.
, And in, in terms of your, your research that you just kind of touched on, maybe let's just, you know, expand on that here as we're kind of closing down here. IFMA's got a tremendous amount of data and benchmarking reports and so forth, and, you know, how can the collection and, and what's being collected right now, other than, you mentioned the, the mentoring, , research, what's being collected and what has been collected that can really help us here.
In terms of navigating these choppy waters with population decline with the workforce, and what's, what's going on out there?
Jake Smithwick: Yeah, great. Great question about that, Wayne. I think there's a couple things that, we're just so fortunate to be involved on so many facets of different research. There's the operational side of things.
So like the benchmark reports that we're getting ready to redo North America here, so that's coming out. If you have data on a facility when a free copy, final [00:37:00] report, definitely participate in that. 'cause everybody gets that. There's other benchmarks throughout the world as well.
We just wrapped up Asia. We're doing that right now. Middle East is coming online, Africa's coming online, and so there's a lot of operational, technical, like janitorial costs, maintenance costs, things like that. There's also other studies at the IFMA salary and compensation report.
So look at salaries, benefits, what's it look like to be an fm? We did that about three years ago, is extremely insightful, but all this research happens because. People participate, may provide their insights and that allows us to, as research to go through and, you know, look for those patterns.
As to what's going on. The salary survey in particular, led to probably three or four other major initiatives directly because of what we saw inside of that, like the mentoring thing, actually from the data standpoint, we saw something, it was like, wow, that's interesting. We looked through, we checked, everything's like, wow, that's incredible.
To actually get data that's consistently across the board about the value of a mentor, for example, was, just incredible. So there's many things coming down the pipe. I know IFMA has a number of, [00:38:00] social media, advertisements and other things coming out about these upcoming research studies.
But, I guess my. Ask plea encouragement would be that when you see a request for, if a research to come out there to participate, provide your data because it's all of our industries. And, by participating, it certainly, what's the phrase that, when not when tides go up, all boats also go up and provide, providing our data is a great way to do that as.
Wayne Whitzell: Yeah, that's a, that's a really good point with, I think with data is we've got folks that like data when it verifies their cognitive bias. And then there's other people that, uh, see the data and they say, oh, geez, this is,
Jake Smithwick: I knew it.
Wayne Whitzell: This is reality and I've got to adjust my reality to this and, and to incorporate it.
And. One of the great things about having that kind of participation is I see the, the people that have participated in this or where the data came from or the size of the sampling and so forth, and, and it, it provides a lot more value. And I think even beyond the fm department is when we go to do budgets or capital [00:39:00] planning and so forth, if we have solid data from an organization like this with the sample size and representative organizations, it makes it a lot more.
Valid and vital to some people's eyes and look at Absolutely, this is where we got this number from.
Jake Smithwick: Yep.
Wayne Whitzell: So it, it's, it's gonna only benefit all of us in the industry by, by getting that participation. So I will also continue to shout that from the rooftops for you as well. And with all of that now, I, I wanna plug.
Pluggy Jake here with, in terms of getting you some, some exposure here with some of the other components and other organizations. I highly recommend if you're a component out there looking for a great topic, a great program, reach out to Jake, through either LinkedIn or through his contact information.
I guess we can drop that in the description of the video here when we drop this. It's hard for me to ex explain that, just the, the fear that we had and the, you know, I don't know and it makes, I think, but when you say going off a cliff. Then you show these charts and these graphs, which are very well done, by the way, they weren't these wonky, you know, crazy things.
It was, it was the shape of the graphs alone. You say, now look at [00:40:00] this shape. Now look at this shape. And everybody's puckered up and said, oh, wait a minute. That's a little scary. So if you're looking for great programming and you're looking for a great topic from, an engaging speaker, I highly recommend you all reach out to us.
To Jake there. So Jake, I'd like to close with this. Is there anything I, I should have asked you that you think we should know about? Or did we cover it all? What do you think? Are we, are we closer to the bullseye here?
Jake Smithwick: No, I think it's great. I mean, there's, there's definitely concerns about, you know, what the future looks like and concerns the standpoint that it's changed, but,
truly, honestly, and super excited about the Vira. I I think the best is yet to come is so many regards. It's gonna be a little bit rough here, for the next few years as we kind of navigate some of these challenges. But net benefit, long run I think is gonna be incredible. IFMA again, is a fantastic organization for so many reasons, and, it's been a lot of fun.
And Wayne, I sincerely appreciate you and your efforts and the rest of the team here to host us. And, this has been great and I greatly appreciate it.
Wayne Whitzell: Well, fantastic. Well, thanks again, Jake, for being our guest. And, everyone look for, future connected [00:41:00] FM podcasts on topics that affect your world.
And with that, thanks.
Host: Thanks for tuning into the Connected FM podcast. If you enjoyed today's episode, please take a moment to rate and review the show because it really helps us reach more listeners just like you. And don't forget to hit the subscribe button so you never miss an episode. See you next time.