Directing Change

Aside from the debates over attracting young people into the FM sector, the stark fact remains that females represent just 35 per cent of entry-level roles in FM, which falls to around 15 per cent for senior-level positions. It is encouraging then to hear that Facilities Director Jennifer McCullagh of FM Sensori is taking a proactive approach to attracting young women into the sector.

She says: “Our HR will do road shows in primarily female secondary schools; they will go into colleges and will outline the entire career progression that you can go through in the sector.”

McCullagh’s career journey demonstrates where a career within the sector can take you. Since joining the company as an Integrated Facilities Management (IFM) Manager in 2021, she has quickly moved up the ranks to head up its FM services division. Formed in 2018 following a joint venture partnership between Designer Group and its parent company Sisk, Sensori provides mechanical, electrical and construction-based facilities management services. It has three main business streams, facilities management, data centre operations and project delivery, covering Ireland and mainland Europe.

McCullagh moved into FM after starting her career in a front of house role where her desire to understand the business led her to embed herself with the technical teams across a portfolio of sites to better understand assets and their impact on the working environment.

“Over the years I’ve had good mentors, people who wanted to share their knowledge and were comfortable about bringing you to sites and letting you shadow them. This way I came to understand all the elements of how everything within a building operated, and the impact on the occupants of the building.”

She eventually moved out of the HVAC business and joined an FM services provider, working on a range of commercial, retail, mixed-use, educational, pharmaceutical and healthcare portfolios, before the opportunity to move to Sensori Group arose. Following an initial role as an IFM Manager, McCullagh was promoted to Head of FM where she implemented process improvements to enhance service delivery and help build strong, collaborative client relationships. She took on the FM Director’s role in 2024.

Remarking on the changes she has seen over her 20-year career McCullagh says: “Facilities management has undergone such a profound transformation. As a leader in the FM industry, you’re continuously adapting and evolving and changing your knowledge to navigate the developments across all the different sectors, not to mention the ever-evolving landscape of compliance and building certification.

“It’s not just about meeting basic safety codes anymore, now there are multiple layers like environmental certifications (LEED, WELL), energy efficiency standards, accessibility requirements, GDPR, and even smart building tech compliance.

“This industry is very challenging, but it’s so exciting because it’s so fast paced, and that’s what keeps people in this business, because you’re learning all the time to make sure that you’re on top of your game, something which is very important to me.”

SENSORI GROUP

Sensori Group offers clients a full turnkey model with different streams of expertise including major projects division for large scale design and build projects, BMS, fully managed security, and mechanical, electrical, and plumbing (MEP) divisions, a team of facilities’ account managers and a minor works division.

McCullagh explains: “All of these areas function across each other. This means that if an FM has a client that requires a major plant upgrade or an office refurbishment, we can rely on the engineers from the other side of the house to fulfil this need. Conversely, if the project team have completed a design and build, it can then move across to the FM model, and we can maintain that building throughout its life. Both sides of the house interact well with each other to maintain client retention throughout the life of the building.”

The FM division operates across a huge portfolio of high value contracts which span both the public and private sector. It has a team of around 150 in-house industry experts – including mobile site teams covering fabric, electrical and mechanical engineering. Sensori Group has also seen considerable expansion into the Nordics this year due to a growing data centre sector in the region, which in turn has led to more demand for full turnkey support services including FM.

Sensori has a strong emphasis on self-delivery, because, according to McCullagh this is easier to control from an Environment, Health, and Safety (EHS) and client risk management perspective. However, as some specialist services must be outsourced, she believes it’s important to support the supply chain in meeting compliance.

“There are some supply chain experts who are extremely good at what they do. They’re the best in the industry, but they don’t have this lean support function behind them with a breadth of expertise that sit within Sensori Group. When they work with us, we like to build a partnership approach where the client sees a maintained standard whether services are delivered directly or through supply chain partners.

“Everything is streamlined to ensure a partnership approach with our supply chain which in turn helps us to be able to offer clients a one stop shop. Clients can ask us to take a building from the basement to the roof level, and everything in between. We also work with soft service partners, for instance for landscaping, cleaning and pest control, so while hard services are Sensori’s core expertise, we have very good supply chain partners that enable us to take on an entire building from an IFM perspective.”