Construction productivity in the UK has declined by an average of 0.1% per year since 1997.
Let that land for a second.
Over the same period, UK manufacturing productivity grew 3.5% annually. The wider economy managed 0.6%. Construction... went backwards.
And according to the latest RICS Construction Productivity Report, 22% of UK construction firms never measure productivity at all. One in five. In a £390 billion industry.
You can't improve what you don't measure. That's not a motivational poster... it's just maths.
But here's where it gets interesting for anyone running FM or property operations. Because facilities management sits right on top of this problem. Every reactive job, every planned maintenance task, every contractor visit... it all feeds into (or drains from) the productivity of the built environment.
And most FM teams are measuring the same way the construction firms aren't. Or worse... they're measuring activity instead of outcome. Jobs raised. Jobs closed. Response times hit.
None of which tells you whether the work actually made the building run better.
For what it's worth, the fix isn't complicated. It's just unpopular. You need structured data flowing through a single system. You need to know what was done, by whom, how long it took and whether it resolved the issue. And you need that information without chasing three people and a spreadsheet to get it.
Construction has been stuck in the 90s for nearly 30 years. FM doesn't have to follow it there.
So... what does your team actually measure?
#workingcleverly