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As Wendy Cuthbert prepares to head out to South Africa as part of Barclays Bank Project Unity, its drive to transform the delivery of FM services globally, she tells us all about it

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If there's one drawback to being seconded to set up Barclays' new facilities management operation in Africa, it's leaving a gleamingly new Mini back in Blighty. But Wendy Cuthbert, global head of facilities management at Barclays Bank, is circumspect about the loss. While she'll be heading south to Johannesburg for a year, the red and white Mini will be heading north to Lancaster University, driven by her eldest daughter.

Cuthbert's year-long secondment, which started last month, is part of Project Unity - Barclays' drive to transform the way FM services are delivered globally. Her aim is to create a global FM operating model capable of supporting the entire Barclays portfolio and ensuring the customer is at the heart of everything FM delivers. And it's a vision that is culminating in Cuthbert outsourcing Barclays' entire global FM services portfolio, across 18 service lines, 56 countries and 5,500 properties.

In June 2012 Barclays signed a framework agreement with FM provider ISS to self-deliver FM services in the UK, the Americas, the Asia-Pacific region and across the rest of Europe - a move away from the previous arrangement where Johnson Controls managed local suppliers. Cuthbert and her team have already gone live in North America, South America, the UK, Ireland, Japan, Philippines and Australia, India, Singapore, the Cayman Islands, Hong Kong, China, Taiwan, Thailand, Europe and the Middle East. Cuthbert's expedition to Africa will see her roll out Unity to 13 countries on the continent including Botswana, Mozambique, Kenya, Ghana, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Uganda and South Africa.

Working with African FM specialist Tsebo (which trades as the more familiar Drake & Scull in South Africa), Cuthbert will initially be on something of a fact-finding mission, establishing the current state of affairs and working with the supplier to achieve the correct delivery model.

She is passionate about each of Barclays' FM outsourcing partners having the right cultural fit with the company, and this has particular resonance in Africa. 'You have to partner with an organisation. You can set up a commercial deal but once the negotiators have walked away you have to make the relationship work. Unless you have similar goals, outlook and beliefs, it won't happen.' she says.

And this is particularly true of contracts of the size that Cuthbert has recently signed. 'If you have a supplier looking at it from a contract basis, it's impractical. We can't know every single event that is going to happen when you're working across this many countries and sites. You have to be flexible and have that willingness to make it work. And as the client, you have to want the supplier to succeed and they must want you to succeed,' she says.

That sense of cultural fit is palpable in the Tsebo relationship. The African FM firm is growing its business alongside Barclays'. The partners are jointly deciding the order of countries to tackle, against both Tsebo's client base and supply chain ability and Barclays' business requirements.

Much of Barclays' work with Tsebo is setting up the infrastructure to develop an FM function in some of the continent's less-developed areas. In South Africa Tsebo is adopting a franchise model, training local people in FM, providing access to computer systems, banking and finance, and underwriting their work for Barclays. The aim is not to create a network of one-man bands but for local people to grow the franchises. 'This is about getting skill sets into countries where many people haven't had the benefit of much formal education. Together, we are setting them up so they are the businessmen and women of the future,' she says.

For Cuthbert, it's about making supply-chain partners desirable places to work, so they can attract the top talent, which can then support Barclays. 'That's about creating career opportunities, treating people well, adopting a collaborative style and allowing them to do what you're paying them to do. If the account is making the correct return, that will make the account appealing and you will have the top talent in that business working for you.' It all makes excellent sense, but it's just not a message you hear very often.

Having already gone live in 26 countries, Cuthbert has learned key lessons that she is taking to Africa. The most important of which is senior stakeholder engagement. 'I cannot overemphasise the need to communicate upwards first and then more broadly, so people understand what we're trying to achieve, the benefits, timescales and what is required of them. And then you need to continually reinforce that communication. People find change difficult.'

Many of the challenges come down to communication. And there are linguistic banana skins at every turn. Hard services in the USA, for example, includes cleaning, whereas that's considered part of soft services in the UK; small works and fabric maintenance mean different things around the world; the understanding of what due diligence means varies hugely - to the extent that Cuthbert's team has created due diligence templates for the African outsourcing programme to ensure the right information is obtained: 'UK terminology doesn't cross borders. You can either obfuscate or translate.'

Outsourcing

Outsourcing has plenty of negative connotations but Cuthbert, who has engaged in several outsourcing projects in her career, is swift to dispel the myths. 'There is confusion between outsourcing and offshoring. You can't offshore a cleaner to India because you need to have the person in the country doing the job. FM is all about people, and outsourcing is about keeping the people delivering the services but putting them in the right environment and with the right organisation to support and grow their career,' she says.

Cuthbert uses the example of Barclays, which has limited opportunities for facilities people: 'If you work for one of our suppliers, you have a greater opportunity to develop your career, working in an organisation where the core business is facilities management rather than financial services. I see that as a positive.'

Barclays pays its cleaning staff 10 per cent above the London Living Wage and is one of the scheme's founding partners. But this is not a philanthropic gesture. Retention rates have dramatically increased (for catering staff this is now 77 per cent compared to an industry norm of 54 per cent, and cleaning staff retention rates are 92 per cent compared to the industry norm of 35 per cent), meaning that the company spends substantially less on recruitment and training.

Cuthbert is candid about the business case. 'More companies don't adopt the London Living Wage because they don't look at the whole business case - if you go to your board with just the increase to the salary bill on the table, without taking into account the reduction in recruitment and training costs and turnover, it's difficult to justify.' As a result Barclays is working with fellow founding partner KPMG to create template business cases for the London Living Wage to encourage others to adopt it.

At a recent debate organised by the British Institute of Facilities Management's London region, Cuthbert surprised the audience by declaring that she invites suppliers to strategic boardroom discussions. But Cuthbert is equally astonished by the audience's disbelief. In the past Barclays' new CEO Antony Jenkins wanted to understand how FM worked from the customer's perspective. Cuthbert's solution was to bring the supplier's account director, a helpdesk operator and Barclays retail branch managers into the boardroom to show him how the process works.

Getting time with the CEO of the UK's largest bank to talk FM is due in no small part to Vivienne Grafton, Barclays' managing director of corporate real estate services, who manages Barclays' entire portfolio on a global basis. Since joining the bank in 2010, Grafton has developed a robust global operating model that works alongside the bank's business strategy, driving value today and shaping how the business will operate in the future.

Careers office

With two daughters starting to explore career options, Cuthbert was disappointed that facilities management wasn't presented as an option in their careers offices. As someone who fell into FM through IT, she is keen for it to be presented as an exciting option to attract the best talent in order to alleviate the ticking time bomb of ageing FMs.

Cuthbert considers a two-fold solution: a strong, unified, representative body that is arguing the FM case, and a clearer qualification structure. For the latter, she cites the example of the procurement profession, which has the instantly recognisable and understood Chartered Institute of Purchasing and Supply qualification. There is not a desirable, simple FM equivalent at a high-enough level, she argues, and this undermines the industry's professionalism and ability to attract the right talent.

With talk of the merger of some of FM's professional bodies now in the open (see page 58) Cuthbert wants to see a united, strong voice arguing for facilities management. 'When there were articles in the press about the students at the University of Sussex demonstrating against FM outsourcing, there was nobody representing our industry at a senior level, explaining the counter arguments,' she says.

The South African secondment is set for a year but, sitting on the 30th floor of Barclays' Canary Wharf office, Cuthbert admits it's something of an unknown quantity until she's on the ground: 'It could be more, or it could be less. But, for some reason, my South African visa was originally for 24 years, so maybe that's indicative of a longer stay...' She might be away from her Mini for some time.

Qualifications:

MBA, City University Business School BSc (Hons), Analysis of Science and Technology (with Genetics and Cell Biology), University of Manchester

Job History:

2011 - present

Global head of facilities management, Barclays Bank

2008 - 2011

Head of CRES-UK, Barclays Bank

2006 - 2008

Director of general services EMEA, Credit Suisse

2001 - 2006

Head of retail and supply chain facilities management, head of special projects & IT (property), Sainsbury

1997 - 2001

Group IT director, Swan Hill Group (formerly Higgs & Hill)

1987 - 1997

Head of IT customer support, international research analyst, Newton Investment Management

1984 - 1987

Metals analyst, Shearson Lehman (latterly Lehman Brothers)