Significant changes have accelerated and shifted the FM industry’s future direction. For example, workers no longer need to come to the office to be innovative, collaborative or productive. Digitizing assets and operations provides opportunities to close gaps and develop new services. Several concurrent environmental crises have made us aware of buildings’ massive ecological footprints, which must be reduced, mitigated and remediated. Buildings’ impact on people's health and well-being has amplified facility management’s role in creating cleaner, safer environments. In summation, these inflection points create vast opportunities for those facility managers amenable to developing new mindsets, business models and services.

Workers do not need to come into the office.

The COVID-19 pandemic shifted many knowledge workers into distributed workers. Before the pandemic, the average number of work-from-home (WFH) days doubled every 12 years in the United States. In 2019, approximately 5 percent of all workdays were WFH. Now roughly 30 percent of all workdays are WFH — a sixfold increase corresponding to 30 years of pre-pandemic growth compressed in a little over two years.[1]

Evidence does not support that knowledge workers (approximately 45 percent of the workforce and growing[2]) must come to the office to be innovative, collaborative and productive. Innovation exploded during the pandemic. A recent study by McKinsey & Co. showed that business formation (registrations of new businesses) increased during the pandemic along with patent registrations — filing activities grew across the 150 authorities according to the World Intellectual Property Indicators.[3] These advances “required people collaborating remotely, leveraging technology in different ways, and being bolder with innovation, automation and digitization.”[4] How can facility managers integrate emerging technologies like avatars, avatar-based virtual worlds and persistent video to create digitally integrated physical spaces to transform working environments into places people clamor to use?

Digitizing assets and operations provide opportunities for new business models and services.

Unsurprisingly, the pandemic catapulted many organizations — including FM organizations — into a digital-first orientation.[5] Before the pandemic, studies identified that FM practitioners had relatively low technological knowledge and were complacent about the profession's digital future.[6] The FM industry is now rapidly digitizing assets and operations. Digital technologies are critical for developing solutions for the industry's most vital challenges in occupant health and well-being, pollution control, energy and materials use, and more. Technology uptake is now catching up with other digitally enabled industries. A 2021 assessment of the global PropTech sector identified 2,045 companies in 66 countries that raised US$12.05 billion in funding from 1,809 investors for new technology solutions.[7]

The digitization of the FM industry will enable organizations to reinvent industries, substitute products and services, craft digital businesses, reconfigure delivery models and create new value propositions. The digitization of the FM industry will also transform required skills and competencies. With robots, digital assistants, chatbots, digital avatars, VR/AR headsets and other interfaces, we are amid a cobotic revolution in which workers work alongside machines. As technology automates and augments, technology enables FM organizations and workers to do things that were once impractical, requiring new skills and competencies.[8][9] How will FM operations transform in ways that support individuals' ability to control the information that is shared? What skills and competencies will facility managers need to be successful?