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What’s your definition of facilities management? In this Higher Ed Careers interview, Winnie Kwofie, former associate vice president of facilities development and operations at California State University East Bay, describes her career path and research on women in facilities management. She offers tips for institutions that want to support female leaders and talks about a program she created with colleagues to increase the presence of women in facilities management leadership.
Mary Guiden, HigherEdJobs: When people hear “facilities management,” it is often equated with a definition of men who work in the trades and positions like groundskeeper, plumber, and custodian. How do you define facilities management and what are the lesser-known roles in this realm?
Winnie Kwofie: At a university, facilities management encompasses people, architecture, the planning needed to organize how people flow within the buildings, the aligned processes, technology, and how all those components support the university’s academic and business goals.
When someone walks into a building on campus, they don’t think about who’s behind the scenes, who helps keep the lights on and make sure rooms are ready for students to have a class, or if someone’s using new technology.
If you drive to campus, there’s a road that brings you to campus — that’s facilities management. We’ve got to do the landscaping so that you’re not going through the bushes when you’re moving into the dorm. That’s facilities management.
You get out of your car when you get to the parking lot. You’re not stepping in dog poop, right?
At night, it’s well-lit, you can get out of your car, you walk to campus, you go to your office, your lights work, your air or fans work, your computer works, and the carpet is clean.
Facilities management is not just a custodian, it’s not just an electrician, you have architects and engineers involved, and, in some cases, work with external organizations such as the health department and state fire marshal to ensure the campus meets all building and health compliance requirements.
Guiden: Tell us about the path that led you to your role in facilities management and your background in engineering.
Kwofie: After graduating with a civil engineering degree, I practiced for about five years and went back to school for my master’s degree in engineering and a master’s in business administration. I took on a project management role on a community college campus after I completed my MBA. That’s how I discovered facilities management.
I was overseeing the construction of a building in San Francisco, working with the design team. Our customers included faculty, students, administrators, and facilities management staff. There was always tension among the different groups.
When we opened the facility, we had no place to store paper towels for custodians. They never even thought about it. Because when the architects were designing the space, they designed it based on academic programming.
Those programming needs come from the faculty or the users, so they tell you we need a certain number of classrooms, but nobody thought about how the classrooms would be cleaned. How will we get access to something in the ceiling if it breaks?
So, we were caught up in this tension of “nothing is going to work.” That’s when I started getting very intrigued about the facilities management profession and I subsequently took a related job with another university.
In that new role, I began bringing all these groups together. I remember one meeting where I met with facilities management, most of them worked in the trades. They were all men. I was the only woman, and everybody was leaning away from me. I’m sure they thought: “What the hell is this woman doing here?”
I said, “My goal is to make sure that we bridge this gap among all of us.”
I knew that we could figure out how to make the project work. And then, with my encouragement, everybody started leaning in. I wasn’t sure what I said to get them on board, but it was good. It was great.
We began inviting facilities management to our design meetings. And that’s how my role in facilities management evolved.
Guiden: Women are underrepresented in the field of facilities management leadership. What factors are contributing to this disparity and what needs to change to fix it?
Kwofie: In my research, two main factors came up. The first issue is that facilities management is not defined as a field or career path.
I am not sure if we have even 10 institutions in the U.S. that teach about facilities management. So that’s a start, high school students don’t know about facilities management.
The U.S. Department of Labor describes the field as “non-traditional” for women, so you’re facing sexism from the start. If you’re a person of color, you’re Black, you’re facing racism.
Faculty and staff in colleges don’t understand facilities management. A participant in my recent study — who graduated with an engineering degree — started applying for jobs after graduation. At first, she didn’t consider any of the facilities management jobs at the university.
The job center director asked her, “Do you know anything about boilers?” And she said, “I designed boilers.” And here were all these facilities management jobs that she had overlooked because she had never heard about these roles in college.
It’s through my curiosity that I ended up in this profession. This field can be so invisible and, if it’s invisible, women will not find it.
Even though we have facilities management organizations and associations, I don’t believe they are reaching out enough to young people in the job market. They’re not marketing this profession.
Q: What success and accomplishments have you made through the program you helped to create, Women in Facilities in the Cal State U system?
This program stems from two things I’ve talked about. One was that there were few women in the field, and two, in 2020, our annual University System Facilities Management conference was moved online.
My colleague, another woman from one of our campuses, was asked to do something like a TED Talk. She decided to talk about her life as a working mom and how there was no lactation room in the building at her institution. She had to use the restroom to pump.
The online chat lit it up. Women were weighing in about all kinds of things they’d experienced. I emailed one of our university system leaders, a woman. And I asked her, “Would you put your political clout behind us if we launch a facilities management group for women?”
She allowed us to do just that.
We created a curriculum that provided an overview of what the facilities management profession is about, going beyond the definition.
I used my job description as an example and asked: If I want to put somebody in this job, and help this person become a successful leader, what does that person need?
We created an overview of facilities management, outlined how you can lead in this realm, how to be a supportive and effective manager, what the career paths are, what the org chart looks like, and how you communicate with others about facilities management. Then, we brought together staff and leaders from across our campuses. I brought in deans to talk about how they interact with facilities.
We talked about how women in facilities management are perceived, and how to give women more visibility. Some of these women had never had that because there are hierarchies at colleges and institutions. If I want to talk to the provost, I go through my manager and their manager, and we need to break those barriers.
Create those relationships so you can call and say, “Provost Mary, we are supposed to design this project and we want your perspective on it.” You don’t need to go through your manager because once you go through your manager, the interpretation changes, and it makes your work difficult.
We used tools like True Colors, a personality assessment, so that our members could learn more about themselves, how they think, and how they interact with others. One of my professors held a workshop on imposter syndrome, and trust me, it made life so much easier for those who participated.
And, most importantly, we had a session about working in a male-dominated environment.
A lot of these women from our first cohort of training, six months after, 80 % of them had been promoted at work. We didn’t anticipate that. But we saw that some of them applied for positions that, previously, they would have been reluctant to do so. We gave them the tools to feel empowered.
Q: What can institutions do differently to encourage more women to pursue facilities management leadership positions?
Institutions can let people know what facilities management is. We can make it tangible.
We tell people to go to law school, medical school, or engineering. Why can’t we do that for facilities management?
We know that some professions feed into facilities management, including engineering, architecture, and construction management. Faculty teaching those courses need to elevate this profession and market the career path of going into facilities management.
Showcase facilities management as a profession and highlight what it could be like as a career.
Q: What keeps you inspired to work in higher education, especially in facilities management leadership? You’ve said that you landed in higher ed “by accident.”
I love learning. I love working in academia for many, many reasons. May is my favorite month when I see students graduate.
I defended my dissertation in April, and I was so excited to walk during our commencement in May. My inspiration comes from being able to imagine what could be better, and I have a lot of ideas.
One time, someone asked me, “Are you always restless?”
I wasn’t sure what they meant, but they said, “You always seem to have something on your mind.”
That’s how I inspire myself. I don’t want to be bored. So, I find the next thing to work on and the next thing and the next thing. What can we tweak with this program? What can we do this weekend to advance our cause or project?
That mindset has given me so much joy in facilities management because of how the profession is. The field also offers so many opportunities, especially for women. There are more opportunities to change the culture. And being on campus to see that if we do our job well, we can see the students appreciating what we’ve accomplished.