When you run an organisation of any size, there are an awful lot of jobs that need to be done that you either cannot or do not want to do yourself. These include what are known as both hard and soft services.
Hard services are usually technical in nature, and in the case of facilities management cover things that cannot be removed from the building such as plumbing, heating, and lighting. Those are things that need maintenance and repair, but that you cannot do yourself.
Soft services, on the other hand, cover things that by and large you could do, but don’t want to do. So they cover things such as cleaning the offices, grounds maintenance, security, mail management, catering, office moves, managing internal relationships, and so on. If you are running a business, you have far too many other things to look after than deal with soft services, so you can call in someone else to do that for you.
There are lots of
soft service providers out there whose business is to take care of the jobs that you don’t want to do, such as the office cleaning. If you only run a small business with offices containing, say five rooms, you would probably hire a local cleaner to come in once a week or however often you need him or her and pay them in cash at the end of the week.
However, if you have a complete office building over ten or fifteen floors with dozens of different rooms, that’s a job for a soft services company who will hire however many cleaners are needed and take care of all the cleaning for you. That includes providing stand-ins if one of their cleaners goes sick or on holiday so that your business continues to run smoothly without you having to worry about any of that.
If you were running an organisation such as a prison or a school, you would hire a soft services company to look after all the catering. They would order all the food for your canteen, provide chefs to cook it, deal with the washing up etc., so that you simply don’t have to worry about it.