Many people wonder what is meant by the terms "facilities management" and "facilities services". If you check out the dictionary, the word "facility" means a place, an amenity, or a piece of equipment that is provided for a particular purpose, such as a washing machine. An alternative meaning is the ability to do something very well, such as "she has an extraordinary facility for understanding children".

Used as a noun, the word "facility" simply means a place or piece of equipment. This can be a building, an office, a suite of offices, a factory, a floor within a building, a group of buildings, a washing machine, or even an open space such as a park.

Responsibilities associated with facility management, or facilities services, typically include a wide range of function and support services, including janitorial services; security; property or building management; engineering services; space planning and accounting; mail and messenger services; records management; computing, telecommunications and information systems; safety; and other support duties.

Facilities services providers take care of all the above, and more, which allows the operator of a business, office, or even park, to carry on with their business in the knowledge that the actual place that they work within is being cared for and kept up to date and secure by the facilities services providers so that the operator doesn’t have to worry about such things.

Let’s face it, when you are a top-level accountant or lawyer with offices in the City of London, you don’t want to have to worry about who is going to clean the office after you close for the day. So you simply employ a facilities service provider to take care of all that while you get on with what is important.

You might operate a golf course. You need the grass mowing, trees and shrubs pruned, the lake kept clean, a lot of golf balls retrieved from the lake (!), signs replaced as they age, the outside of the clubhouse painted, a car park attendant, and a 101 other things that require people who have different skills but that you don’t have either the time or the inclination to advertise for in the local paper, interview them, take them on, draw up their pay slips, pay their wages, and all that palaver.

A facilities management company will take all that off your hands leaving you free to run your golf course, attract new members, organise competitions, and all the important stuff which is what brings in the money, and leave all the nitty-gritty to someone else.

It has many benefits. You don’t have to worry about what to do if a cleaner falls sick and can’t come in and clean the bar – that’s a problem that the facilities manager has to deal with. You’re paying the management company their fee and that one is their problem, not yours. It only becomes your problem if your facilities management company fails to handle it, and if that happens once too often you will no doubt dispense with their services and employ another company.

A facilities manager has a wide range of responsibilities. Traditionally it only covered janitorial services, security, and mailrooms. However, today that has expanded considerably as facilities have become much more complex and larger and often rely on computerised and electronic support systems that require considerable expertise and ability to operate, and also repair when they go wrong.

Facilities managers have to contend with the corporate cost-consciousness that exists today, and as one writer put it "Facilities professionals are being asked to contain costs while achieving maximum beneficial use - that is, to achieve more with less." The responsibilities of a facilities manager also include compliance with many of the laws we have today which didn’t exist 30 or 40 years ago, such as carrying out a fire risk assessment of the premises, PAT testing (Portable Appliance Testing) to ensure that electrical equipment that employees are required to use is safe, and even EICR testing which does the same thing but is concerned with the actual electrical wiring in a building.

All of these things are legal requirements in one sense or another. For instance, PAT testing is not a legal requirement, but ensuring that electrical equipment is safe. Without PAT testing, how can you possibly know?

These are just some of the reasons that many businesses simply hand the whole thing over to an outside facilities provider, while they get on with doing the important things which is what makes the business a success.