Building Protection Compliance Consumes Most Managers' Timetest

By Dave Lubach, Associate Editor

January 2015

Which regulatory/standards compliance area is your highest priority?

About one-half of survey respondents said building-protection issues, such as fire safety, worker safety, and electrical and HVAC systems guidelines, rank as their highest compliance priorities. Areas such as accessibility, environmental protection, and public-health concerns are also important, but because building codes often address and affect these areas, they receive more attention.

What is your primary challenge in ensuring department compliance with regulations and standards?

To ensure successful compliance, managers must continually revisit the way they devote department resources to the process. By a narrow margin, respondents cited budget restrictions — 35 percent — as the primary challenge in ensuring compliance with regulations and standards, with 33 percent citing staff limitations and 28 percent citing time constraints.

“We find that people are being asked each year to do more and more with less and less, whether that’s time, resources, or dollars,” Camplin says. “What we’re finding is a lot more of the proactive organizations are starting to use risk-based management type of systems to tie these compliance programs together into a management structure that can be tied into overall organizational goals. You’re fighting and trying to convince the people who are holding the purse strings that this program is important.”

What is your leading resource for staying informed on changes to regulations and standards?