LANDSCAPE & GROUNDS MAINTENANCE
NAVIGATING THE ELEMENTS
Dean Pearson, Senior Operations Manager at OUTCO, discusses how changing seasons demand a culture shift in outdoor facilities management.
Maintaining outdoor spaces requires far more understanding of the environment, climate and external conditions than just planning to a strict calendar. Effective management of external environments requires organisations to recognise two key realities: our seasonal patterns have fundamentally changed, and the regimented culture of internal FM cannot simply be exported outdoors. As we start to look ahead to autumn and winter, keeping these realities in mind is key to successfully managing your outdoor estate and ensures the most productive relationship with your contractors.
The shrinking calendar: From four
seasons to two Historically, grounds maintenance followed a predictable, bell-shaped curve linked to ‘growth degree days’ – a metric widely used in farming and horticulture that links the expected pace of plant growth to likely temperatures and external factors. There was a slow tail-off in autumn, a dormant winter, a gradual spring reawakening, and a plateau of active growth in the summer. Today, we’re seeing that predictable curve being replaced by erratic, "up down up down" weather cycles and prolonged stagnation in external environments.
In other words, we have effectively transitioned from a climate of four seasons to just two; autumn and spring have shrunk, while summer and winter have expanded. This volatility is making traditional horticultural calendars increasingly obsolete. As an example, you might experience a 22-degree week followed immediately by an unseasonal frost, causing early-blooming plants like daffodils to emerge in February only to be wiped out by snow in April. Because of these extended growing periods, the traditional spring downtime we once used to prep borders no longer exists; grounds maintenance teams are now constantly
22 | TOMORROW’S FM
battling active growth at all times, all while dealing with day-to-day requirements of external FM management.
Looking ahead to this winter, we can anticipate a particularly volatile period. The World Meteorological Organisation has warned that the next phase of the world’s periodic El Niño weather pattern could be one of the strongest on record, with the Met Office predicting this could produce a milder start and colder end to the British winter. At the best of times, unsettled seasons have become the rule - this year could be even more erratic.
The culture clash: Internal vs.
external FM mindsets This volatility presents a unique challenge to the world of FM, where it collides head on with a culture that is highly regimented and standards driven: One of the biggest hurdles in modern grounds maintenance is overcoming the traditional internal FM mindset that’s often guided by industry standards such as SFG20 that dictate strict service frequencies – for both statutory and non-statutory compliance (i.e. if a schedule dictates that emergency lights must be checked on a Tuesday, they are checked on a Tuesday, regardless of the weather or any external factors).
The fundamental error many FMs make is assuming the outside operates just like the inside. You simply can’t manage a living, external landscape with the same templated, standards-based mindset used to maintain a boiler tagged with an asset number. Outdoors, teams are dealing with growing, living organisms and highly variable conditions. Meanwhile, aside from wear and tear, indoor assets pretty much stay as you’ve left them. Even inert outdoor assets like bike racks or pavements (which will probably not have a useful asset tag connecting them to an orderly digitised management platform) will require a dynamic approach as they’ll be interacting with natural
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