Message from the Chair
Peter Ankerstjerne
Message from the Chair
Peter Ankerstjerne
Economist and Nobel Prize Winner Milton Friedman said, “Only a crisis, actual or perceived, produces real change.”
The weight of actual crises our world has faced — health, social, political, environmental, economic and humanitarian — could have flattened us; instead, it has inspired courage, understanding, resourcefulness, reform, creativity, invention. It has produced real change.
For organizational leaders, the past two years have been a wake-up call that progressive transformation was needed — from technological upgrades and modernized business processes to reducing negative impacts on society and the environment, and building an inclusive culture focused on empowerment and purpose.
For the facility management industry, it opened the opportunity to lead that long-overdue transformation, steering organizational policies and initiatives toward prioritizing health and safety, adopting smart building technologies, embracing sustainability as an essential business practice, reinventing space to improve the human experience and adapting to a new hybrid work model, which has fundamentally changed the FM market forever.
And for IFMA, it was an urgent call to action, ensuring that our community had what it needed — connection, representation, education, information — to understand and adjust to new expectations. With the support of our members, partners and sponsors who not only stayed the course but joined us in developing useful tools, offering much-needed thought leadership and advocating for the industry, IFMA is stronger than ever.
An experienced management team and talented staff; a highly competent, diverse and international board; and a solid foundation built and sustained by our chapters, councils and communities have not only made IFMA adaptive, but enterprising. Many new — and clearly desirable — benefits and resources were launched this past fiscal year, allowing us to deliver notable financial results and eliminate our debt, including writing off all debt to the IFMA Foundation, enabling them to grow and attract new endowments, grants and sponsors.
Being debt-free is already cause for celebration, but at the same time we are seeing membership numbers rise. After almost eight years of stale, sometimes negative, growth, there has been over a 10 percent increase in membership in a year’s time, including over a 15 percent increase in new members and a 12 percent increase in overall retention. This is a major achievement, attributable to the dedication and contributions of our entire community; but particularly to the resilience and perseverance of IFMA’s professional staff.
Like many organizations worldwide, IFMA delayed or modified certain goals and projects as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2021, the nominating committee for IFMA’s Global Board of Directors recommended that the board’s executive committee — chair, first and second vice chair — remain in office for an additional year to maintain stability and minimize unnecessary risks. This gave us an extraordinary opportunity to implement the strategic initiatives we intended to carry out pre-pandemic.
IFMA staff skillfully and enthusiastically carried out objectives, significantly improving our business, especially in professional development, sales and membership services. Even our events, coping with a longer recovery cycle due to the pandemic, rebounded. We were able to bring our outstanding World Workplace and Facility Fusion conferences back on site, once again facilitating the first-hand learning and in-person connections that are so important to our professional community.
Deeply committed to helping our members thrive, IFMA reached out via surveys, our Engage online platform and one-on-one conversations to find out which types of resources members want most. As a result, members now receive IFMA’s Essentials of Facility Management: Introduction to FM module, a quarterly on-demand educational video and access to select research absolutely free.
With FM roles and responsibilities changing faster than ever before, training to meet new demands should be just as flexible. Designed for FMs who want focused training in a specific FM topic, IFMA’s Core Competency Courses allow users to study only what they need to fill knowledge gaps and build skills. And to pinpoint those gaps, IFMA’s new Self-Assessment Tool helps FMs understand and map strengths across the FM body of knowledge for themselves and their team so they can customize unique learning plans.
Another stand-out area for association growth and broadened industry support is research and benchmarking. IFMA folded the Research and Benchmarking Institute (RBI) back into the association and introduced a new research model to benefit the industry globally. Launched in October 2021, IFMA’s Research Advisory Committee is conducting novel research surrounding ongoing FM transformations. Comprised of academic and business-oriented researchers, the international panel of multidisciplinary subject matter experts will examine the global trends, influences and innovations shaping the future of the industry.
Just as FM professionals are harnessing dramatic changes in work and workplace to create elevated user experiences, IFMA is staying true to its Vision — to lead the future of the built environment to make the world a better place — and its Mission — to advance our collective knowledge, value and growth for facility management professionals to perform at the highest level — elevating experiences for our members, conference attendees, course and credential students, association and corporate partners, and industry professionals around the world.
The FM industry is poised for change, and IFMA is ready to take a lead in not only driving this change process but more importantly making sure that our members and associates have all the knowledge, tools, training and research needed to adapt to the new world of work.
