Among the many lessons American business learned from the pandemic lockdown, the need for more flexibility in facilities management is right near the top. Not only do employees appreciate, and in some cases now demand, remote or hybrid (part remote, part in-office) positions, companies worldwide have begun to realize that what they once considered a fixed, per square foot cost for facilities may in fact be a way to gain/retain top talent, enhance productivity, and further the mission of an organization while zeroing in on budgetary bloat to maximize ROI.
The term coined to describe this emerging flexible facility trend is adaptive facilities management, and it invites a holistic appraisal of organizational needs that is rooted in actual usage and existing conditions data rather than a static FTE/occupant cost or square footage metric.
Whether your goals include sustainability and ESG, providing healthier buildings for your team, or finding new ways to reduce costs while increasing buy-in from your employees, data-driven decision making at the highest levels cast facilities managers (FMs) in a new light as integral to employee wellbeing and institutional growth. Enacting adaptive facilities management strategies can provide everything from significant utility savings to strengthening the bond/buy-in among employees.
At its root, adaptive facilities management invites an organization to assess facilities as a value add for the company, rather than strictly by its functionality, to help meet mission goals.
Data collection, sharing, and collaboration across often siloed teams and providers drives the efforts, and the most successful early adopters have reported surprising results. For instance, research conducted in 2023 by the Real Estate Board of New York found that peak office attendance had returned to just 73% of pre-lockdown levels at midweek, and on Fridays dropped precipitously to 43%. A facilities and procurement team, armed with that data, could make serious inroads toward savings.
Beyond mere attendance and occupant density in a facility, tracking energy & water consumption with smart sensors and scheduling regular usage assessments (like GPRS’ water loss surveys and video pipe inspection reports) can save up to 20% by showing exactly where waste can be cut. And these are just the tip of the iceberg of how capturing accurate existing conditions and usage data can help facility managers.
When you translate that data into creating adaptive partnerships with your service providers and vendors, the savings can be significantly more.
The Building Blocks of Adaptive Facilities Management
Below is a list of some of the processes that can be used to create a comprehensive adaptive facilities management strategy and process:
Define your CRE and company goals/mission; then create facilities management strategies to address it. One size does not fit all, and many organizations find that a hybridized approach that creates a portfolio of vendors and service providers working in partnership with the FM team allows them the greatest agility.
Understand the fluid and fluctuating demands of your end users’ needs from the facility. If only 43% of the workforce is in office on Fridays, are they concentrated in specific departments or buildings? How could you provide for their needs while reducing energy consumption for the buildings as a whole due to reduced demand?
Assess internal FM strengths and where outsourcing could be beneficial from the standpoint of the value-add, employee engagement approach. Very few organizations have the ability to handle the majority of the facilities workload without significant vendor support. Just make sure that support supports your mission.
Identify what components of your FM strategy are variable cost depending on usage/demand and track them to bridge the knowledge gap among teams, vendors, and stakeholders. Further, what and where can you monitor needs and usage to provide additional data points?
Increase focus on, or build, your procurement team. They should be experienced, expert operators from various disciplines who can leverage their specializations to give your FM strategy the holistic flexibility it needs. An unexpected upside of a multifaceted procurement team is that they may impact your ability to create highly specialized, situation and KPI-based RFPs that focus on solving problems rather than merely ordering a service.
Create collaborative, partnership-based service agreements with your vendors that allow you to scale upwards or downwards, and up your communication game with your providers so that they expect and are prepared for fluctuations.
Start thinking of your vendors and service providers as a portfolio: each should be exceptional at what they do and bring you the best ROI, rather than taking a one-size-fits-all approach that just paying one entity one time is easier. It may be easier, but it will likely not be more cost effective.
Consider attaching KPIs to your vendor partnership agreements so that if the providers buy-in and help you meet your goals, they are rewarded. You can even get so granular as to add sourcing controls into your agreements to help avoid incurring costs by requiring providers to utilize specific technologies.
Drawbacks to Implementing Adaptive Facilities Management Strategies
Retooling how we think of FM’s role requires buy-in from the top down, so being able to demonstrate the processes of adaptive facilities management on the myriad of factors it can impact can help managers gain stakeholder support. Once you can show the cost savings of implementing collaborative service level agreements and a portfolio approach to vendors and service providers that is backed up by data, you may find it easier to get senior leadership on board.
Like most of the building-centric industries, facilities management providers still operate with a traditional cost per square foot mindset, so they may need to be sold on the advantages to them of seeing your more flexible vision through.
Organizational size and scope can impact the math for agreements and what is available to leverage for partnerships. It’s important to remember that smaller organizations/facilities will likely require more vendor outsourcing than less.
Regardless of size, the adaptive approach to facilities management may require more oversight which is why you need a multidimensional team that is committed to a common goal. It is also why software solutions that allow you to aggregate your data into a single source of truth that can be referenced by various departments are gaining importance, like GPRS’ SiteMap® for existing conditions documentation and layered infrastructure mapping.
Plan for pushback, both from the investment standpoint and perhaps a “we’ve always done it this way” point of view from senior personnel. When you achieve top-down clarity about why and how data-driven collaboration and adaptive facilities management are integral to talent retention, growth, and sustainability, the data-controlled, adaptive facilities management strategy may help you bring your organization fully into the twenty first century.
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