What Is Grounds Maintenance? (And All the Roles of a Groundskeeper)

Grounds maintenance involves the upkeep of outdoor spaces and greenery to ensure their usability and appearance. While tasks vary depending on the type of facility and its environment, common grounds maintenance duties include landscaping, pest control, irrigation management, leaf and snow removal from streets and walkways, green waste management and athletic field maintenance. 

A quintessential example of grounds maintenance is Bill Murray’s over-the-top character in the 1980 comedy “Caddyshack.” Murray plays Carl Spackler, a dedicated country club greenskeeper tasked with exterminating a gopher wreaking havoc upon the golf course. Sure, Carl’s out-of-the-box maintenance methods (if we can call them that) are exaggerated for humor’s sake, but his efforts actually shed light on the challenges of grounds maintenance and the importance of effective maintenance management in improving a facility’s operational efficiency. 

Different Facilities That Use Grounds Maintenance

Any facility with outdoor space or greenery relies on grounds maintenance to cultivate a beautiful and well-kept environment. Effective grounds maintenance management is essential for the operational efficiency of various types of facilities:

• Residential facilities: Residential properties often have outdoor spaces that require ongoing maintenance to keep the area presentable and accessible for residents. 
• Public and commercial properties: Commercial facilities, such as shopping centers, and public properties, like college or high school campuses and government buildings, both prioritize maintaining well-kept grounds. This not only attracts customers and visitors but also ensures their safety. 
• Sport facilities: Maintaining sports facilities is crucial to ensuring their usability and the safety of athletes. This includes tending to grass golf courses, per our “Caddyshack” example, as well as caring for athletic fields or outdoor courts.
• Cemeteries: Groundskeepers at cemeteries have the delicate role of preserving the facility’s greenery while respectfully caring for the graves of those who have passed. Their work includes grave preparation, monument and marker setting, and general landscape maintenance. 
• Public parks and gardens: Public parks require a grounds maintenance services that continuously beautifies the natural landscape, protects and preserves native vegetation, and maintains equipment and walkways for safe recreational use.

Types of Maintenance Used in Grounds Maintenance 

Grounds maintenance is not a one-size-fits-all task. It requires a variety of facilities maintenance strategies to ensure the safety, functionality and aesthetic appeal of outdoor spaces. Let’s explore the types of maintenance strategies you can implement into your grounds maintenance program:

• Reactive maintenance: Reactive maintenance refers to any maintenance action that occurs in response to an asset breakdown, failure or malfunction. For example, if a sprinkler head breaks, a facility manager would schedule an immediate repair to restore the irrigation system to its optimal efficiency. In this scenario, the issue is straightforward and can be easily fixed, meaning that a more extensive maintenance approach is unnecessary. 
• Preventive maintenance: As the name suggests, preventive maintenance involves any precautionary action taken to preempt asset failures. In grounds maintenance, this could mean regularly scheduling lawn care or hedge trimming to prevent overgrowth and preserve the facility’s appearance. Further, due to the seasonal changes that affect outdoor spaces, planning and scheduling preventive maintenance ahead of time are crucial steps for ensuring the environment’s durability and sustainability. 
• Condition-based maintenance: Condition-based maintenance focuses on tracking real-time or regularly collected asset data using sensors to identify when maintenance work is needed. A certified grounds manager could implement this maintenance strategy into its irrigation system, for instance, by monitoring soil moisture levels within an irrigation system to optimize water usage and conservation, ensuring that vegetation remains healthy without wasting resources. 
• Predictive maintenance: Predictive maintenance relies on sensors, the Internet of Things (IoT), machine learning, data analytics and modeling to predict possible asset faults before they occur. An example of this maintenance strategy could be using sensors and predictive analytics to monitor the performance and degradation of heavy equipment over time. Tracking this data provides valuable insights that generate more accurate predictions of equipment performance and breakdowns. These innovations in maintenance management enable grounds maintenance workers to perform equipment maintenance efficiently, extend equipment lifespan and reduce unexpected breakdowns and maintenance costs. 

Effective maintenance is a context-specific process that requires different strategies depending on the nature and severity of the situation. An efficient and sustainable grounds facility seamlessly integrates multiple strategies into its maintenance program, boosting productivity while simultaneously minimizing repair costs. 

Who Performs Grounds Maintenance? 

Grounds maintenance is a diverse field that encompasses a variety of concerns, environments and seasonal conditions. Therefore, professionals in this field require a wide range of skills and work experience to effectively manage outdoor environments. Let’s go through the most types of grounds maintenance workers and their skill sets:

• Landscaper: Landscapers assess, design layouts and maintain facility grounds to improve aesthetics and functionality. Their broad role includes maintaining landscape design areas, planting flowers, assessing drainage and runoff systems, restoring natural areas, applying pesticides and fertilizers, and managing equipment and asset repairs. 
• Greenskeeper: Greenskeepers specialize in maintaining golf courses. In addition to general maintenance tasks like lawn mowing, sodding, irrigation and aeration, they cultivate a playable course for golfers. These responsibilities include setting flagsticks, raking bunkers, repairing divots, caring for ponds and managing green speed. 
• Arborist: Arborists ensure the health of trees and public safety through horticulture practices such as planting, pruning, tree removal, insect and disease treatment, transplanting and emergency tree care. 
• Irrigation technician: Irrigation technicians specialize in installing and repairing irrigation systems that automate the watering of greenery. Their expertise ensures vegetation receives the appropriate amount of moisture, conserves water and saves time and labor costs. 
• Custodian: Just like maintaining indoor facilities, custodians in this context must continuously maintain outdoor spaces through duties such as clearing walkways, picking up litter, emptying trash cans, and maintaining outdoor structures and spaces like parking lots. 

Grounds Maintenance Use Case 

Now that we’ve covered the basics of grounds maintenance, let’s take a closer look at how Carl handles his gopher problem in “Caddyshack.” Carl employs a series of extermination tactics in his attempt to kill the gopher. First, he tries flooding the gopher tunnels with a hose before resorting to shooting the gopher with a rifle. Finally, Carl plants animal-shaped explosives around the golf course in a last-ditch effort to outsmart the gopher. Despite his efforts, however, the gopher survives the explosion, leaving the golf course in ruins. 

While Carl is ultimately unsuccessful in completing his maintenance task, his dedication and perseverance are evident. He demonstrates innovation and adaptability in the face of hardship, pivoting his approach and devising new strategies. That said, it’s clear that Carl’s maintenance strategy is both inefficient and disorganized, creating significant waste and safety hazards in the process. Let’s examine some areas of improvement in Carl’s maintenance approach: 

• Reactive versus proactive maintenance: Carl confronts his maintenance task reactively rather than proactively. While a reactive approach is suitable for minor, easy-to-fix issues, it’s not practical for more complex problems. Reacting to more significant problems can result in higher maintenance costs, increased labor time and potentially greater damage to facility assets. Taking a proactive approach could involve setting up barriers, planting gopher-repellent plants like daffodils or marigolds, and eliminating gophers’ food sources by removing weeds and excess vegetation. These alternatives are more efficient, cost-effective and safer than Carl’s drastic measures.
• Lack of structured maintenance procedures and protocols: From the get-go, it is clear that the country club lacks established maintenance procedures or protocols for dealing with gophers, something that is surprising for a grassy facility prone to such infestations. Without clear guidelines, Carl is left to his own devices, resulting in haphazard and dangerous extermination techniques. Effective grounds maintenance programs should have detailed procedures and protocols in place, ensuring the maintenance crew can work efficiently and safely. 
• Ineffective and wasteful use of resources: Carl’s excessive extermination methods demonstrate a lack of resource management and efficient use of facility assets. A well-managed maintenance program would ensure that resources and assets are appropriately allocated, reducing waste and enhancing operational efficiency. 
• Poor communication and coordination: A lack of clear communication between Carl and his supervisors leads to a dangerous situation where he detonates explosives on the golf course — while people are still playing! Of course, Carl should never have resorted to blowing up the golf course, but the absence of communication and coordination are also to blame for endangering the health and safety of everyone on the golf course. 

How Facilities Management Software Can Help 

Integrating a computerized maintenance management system (CMMS) software into your grounds maintenance program can enhance operational efficiency and help prevent the kinds of missteps Carl makes in “Caddyshack.” Coast is equipped to address your unique grounds maintenance workflows and needs, offering robust facilities management features that streamline maintenance procedures and asset tracking, ensuring your facility operates at maximum efficiency. 

Coast is built to empower businesses with unparalleled customization options, allowing facility managers to: 

• Choose which fields appear on work order forms and control who on your crew can view them
• Customize checklists and maintenance procedures to align with your facility’s standards
• Modify parent and child location fields to fit your organizational structure 
• Rename fields to accommodate the labels and terms familiar to your grounds crew

At Coast, we understand the importance of reliable communication and collaboration between facility managers and their grounds technicians. Coast allows you to send messages, announcements and documents seamlessly, eliminating the hassle of tracking communication across multiple platforms. Accessibility and user-friendliness were main priorities in our design, making it easy to manage work orders and inventory anytime, anywhere, through a single dashboard on Coast’s mobile app. This ensures your team can efficiently communicate and track operations, no matter where they are on the facility grounds. 

Still deciding if Coast is the right solution for you? Sign up for a free account to try it today.