Chapter 7. Delphi Method for Validating Sustainable Maintenance Strategies

The Delphi Method is adopted for this study to validate sustainable maintenance strategies for government office buildings in emerging economies. The method entails selecting a panel of experts to confirm and verify whether the conceptualised strategies influence sustainable maintenance for government office buildings in emerging economies. The findings of the Delphi study revealed that the conceptualised strategies do influence sustainable maintenance for government office buildings; however, experts were not entirely satisfied that employee participation had an impact on sustainable maintenance. However, due to employee participation being part of the research gaps, it was necessary and important to include it. The detected variability in the responses of the experts was because of no or limited studies exploring employee participation as a critical factor, hence the scepticism and why it was included for this study. Employee participation plays a fundamental role in the maintenance task execution and control stage of maintenance, limited or no role of employees in the decision-making of maintenance operations has led to poor scheduling of maintenance tasks and increased maintenance backlog.