EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Social Sustainability Through an Outside-in Lens

Overview

Facility management (FM) plays a critical, yet often under-recognized, role in shaping social sustainability. Through 36 in-depth interviews with FM leaders and practitioners across six global regions, this study explores how FM contributes to community well-being, inclusion and resilience beyond the physical boundary of the workplace.

The findings show that FM already delivers significant social value through everyday operations, including workforce management, procurement, space use and continuity during disruption. However, this contribution is often implicit, unevenly recognized and structurally constrained.

Key Insights

  • Social sustainability is already implicitly embedded in FM practice, particularly through health and safety, dignity and working conditions, and accessiblity and inclusion.
  • Outside-in FM is a capability, grounded in understanding workforce realities, community context and regional conditions.
  • Facilities often function as social infrastructure, supporting community well-being and resilience.
  • ESG (environmental, social, governance) frameworks frequently under-capture FM’s social contribution, particularly outside Europe and the U.K.
  • Barriers to social value are structural, including cost-center positioning, procurement models, governance exclusion and measurement gaps.
  • Regional context matters, shaping how social sustainability is expressed, enabled or constrained.

Six Key Levers

The study introduces the FM Beyond Walls framework, which positions FM as a place-based social system operating through six key levers:

The framework highlights the importance of outside-in capability and identifies structural enablers and constraints that determine whether social value remains fragile or becomes scalable.

Maturity Pathway

The findings have created a progression that organizations can use to assess maturity, providing a roadmap for moving from implicit to strategic social value.

Implications

The research suggests that advancing social sustainability in FM does not require new intent, but new structures. FM leaders need earlier involvement in decision-making, procurement models that reward social outcomes, and measurement approaches that reflect lived experience.

For IFMA and its members, the findings reinforce the opportunity to:

  • Reframe FM’s value proposition
  • Take an outside-in capability perspective
  • Influence ESG and social value discourse
  • Strengthen FM’s professional identity globally

NOTE: Throughout this report, a distinction is made between social impact, social value and social sustainability, highlighting how facilities management already creates meaningful social impact beyond walls, but that only part of this impact is formally recognized and sustained.

International Facility Management Association (IFMA) supports over 25,000 members in 140 countries. Since 1980, IFMA has worked to advance the FM profession through education, events, credentialing, research, networking and knowledge-sharing.