RICS Award backs performance research

01 March 2012

Dr Matthew Tucker, Senior Lecturer in Facilities Management at Liverpool John Moores University has been awarded the first ever Fulbright-RICS Research Award which will see him working in the United States.

The award will allow 30 year old Tucker to carry out a research project in the USA for four months next year, linking in with Professor Kathy Roper from Georgia Institute of Technology. The research will be titled: ‘Measuring facility management performance through customer and employee engagement: a framework for improving customer perception of service delivery.’

Tucker’s research will develop a customer performance measurement system for FM, focusing on how it can diversify into the US FM sector. It is hoped that this will help promote the strategic importance of customer performance measurement in FM, and act as a call to arms for further original studies in this area.

Commenting on his award Tucker said: “I am delighted to have won this research award. FM is a rapidly growing industry, increasingly recognised at the strategic business level. The delivery of FM services is centred on people, and the customers receiving FM services. Customer performance measurement – the process of capturing, measuring, and improving the perception of FM customers – is a vital component within an FM organisation’s overall performance measurement framework. My research project hopes to provide more insight into this.”

The judges were very impressed with Tucker’s achievements so far in his career and thought his ideas for his research were innovative and an asset to the FM industry. His background is in service improvement and specialises in strategic FM research, with a particular focus on customer satisfaction, environmental sustainability, organisational behaviour, and workplace productivity.

The Fulbright-RICS Research Award is given to one outstanding academic or professional each year to undertake research into different aspects of land, property and the built environment in the USA.