Sustainable Facilities Management: Trends & Technologies
Wednesday, 1st June 2022
Facilities managers (FMs) keep our working environments safe and comfortable. They try to ensure that the physical assets of a workplace—including cleanliness, security and maintenance—are all up to standard. However, the role of a facilities manager is evolving. With climate change an increasingly urgent issue, businesses are increasingly concerned with achieving their ESG (environmental, social and governance) criteria.
In this article, we examine how technology is transforming the world of sustainable facilities management and what the most impactful trends are likely to be.
What are the benefits of sustainable facilities management?
Smart facilities management, with its data-led approach to monitoring and reporting, is more efficient and less wasteful.
Here are some of the key benefits:
A lower carbon footprint. Optimise your building’s power management with continuous monitoring and automation. Energy hungry systems, such as HVAC, climate control, and lighting, can be optimised so they’re only used when needed. Plus, smart facilities management tools can lower energy consumption by linking and responding to building indicators that vary throughout the day, such as occupancy, viral risk, and indoor air quality.
Waste reduction. Sustainable practices are data-driven. This means a more predictive and proactive approach is taken to jobs like cleaning and maintenance. Resources are focused on where they’re needed while equipment is consistently maintained to a good standard. This avoids waste right now and reduces the need for costly repairs down the line.
Optimised work environment. A sustainably managed building is also a healthy building, in which air quality, water standards, security, and employee comfort are all optimised. Together, these factors add up to a better work environment, a more productive workforce and, subsequently, real-term benefits for your business.
Sustainable facilities management is about the clever allocation of resources. Utilising smart technology provides FMs with all the data and relevant insights they need to make smarter, more sustainable decisions for their building, their workforce and the planet.
What are the most important sustainable facilities management trends and technologies?
In 2021, Pebble magazine asked experts what their predictions were for the key sustainability trends of the year (and beyond). We’ve highlighted three that we believe are the most pressing trends for facility professionals today:
Greater data transparency. In the future, companies will have no choice but to be open and honest to the public and investors about their climate footprint. Employees are also demanding more from their workplaces. During our research, in which we surveyed 2,000 UK employed adults, we identified a serious appetite for transparency when it comes to healthy building data.
Air quality. The need for good indoor air quality (IAQ), with minimal levels of pollutants, optimal ventilation, and correct climate control has really come to the forefront of people’s minds during the pandemic. When interviewed, we found 61% of employees would feel safer if air quality was improved in their workplace.
Using smart technology to prevent waste. Consumers want reusable, refillable packaging and products to minimise waste. This is likely to impact how we manage our workplaces too. We expect an increased likelihood of employees demanding their workplaces allocate materials and resources more efficiently.
We know that governments are recognising the importance of meeting sustainability targets. For example, from June 2022, in the UK, all new buildings will need to reduce their carbon emissions, by 30% in new homes and 27% in commercial buildings.
But what more can businesses do?
How can you take sustainable facilities management further?
Don’t be limited to just complying with current standards. Use smart facility management technology to trailblaze best practices and get professional accreditation, attract forward-thinking investors, and stay competitive in today’s rapidly changing market.
Earn recognised certifications for your business. Increase the commercial value of your site by earning well-respected certifications in building health and sustainability, for example, LEED, BREEAM, WELL and RESET.
Attract investors. Making sustainability your top priority is key for meeting (and surpassing) your ESG goals—which are crucial for attracting and maintaining investment. Focusing on sustainable facilities management will help you expand your business horizons in the future.
Stay competitive. To attract new talent, businesses need to be proactive in creating and maintaining a sustainable, healthy environment for their staff. In our 2021 report, a huge 39% of participants stated that the healthiness of their workplace would influence their decision to join a new company.
If something’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well. But improving the sustainability of your workplace is not without challenges.
What are some of the challenges facing facilities managers currently?
Change, even the good kind, comes with obstacles. For facility managers, the move to a more sustainable workplace can be tricky. Here are some of the factors that need to be considered:
The right technology. It’s clear that improving the sustainability of our workplaces requires smart technology. But which to choose? Of course, you want any smart tech to be reliable, and from a trusted company. You also need technology that can give meaningful, holistic insights on healthy building performance indicators all at the same time, 24/7.
Installation and maintenance. To gain site-wide, real-time information on the sustainability of your portfolio you need discrete sensors that can be placed anywhere, are easy to install, and require very little maintenance. Managing a truly sustainable building requires a wealth of data. And legacy solutions, with their sporadic approach to data collection, cannot provide what is needed.
Visualisation and interpretation of data. As a facilities manager, you have many demands on your time. Even if your chosen technology does provide you with data, it’s not very useful to your business if it doesn’t provide you with meaningful and relevant insights.
Cost. At the end of the day, no matter how lofty the ambition, a business needs to balance its books. Technological solutions can come with a hefty price tag—especially if they are inefficient and high maintenance.
But it doesn’t need to be this way. At Infogrid, we’ve been working hard to create scalable, smart, and high-performance solutions for the sustainable workplaces of the future.
How can we help facilities managers overcome these challenges?
We’ve helped plenty of companies substantially improve their sustainability credentials.
Here’s why they chose Infogrid:
Our sensors are scalable and zero-maintenance once installed. We provide thousands of best-in-class, wireless IoT sensors that can be effortlessly installed in a matter of hours. Our clever sensors can be fitted in any building, of any size. For example, as you read this post, hundreds of sensors are providing engineers with real-time data on moisture levels and leak detection at the iconic British heritage site, the Royal Opera House, in Covent Garden.
Visualisation and interpretation of data. With Infogrid, it’s possible to gain insights from hundreds of sensors, all automatically monitoring and reporting, 24/7. Run your building more efficiently, improve compliance, and get ahead of maintenance issues with our insightful and intuitive reports, all accessed from our customisable dashboard.
Cost-effective. We can transform your site’s sustainability credentials with cutting-edge technology and our proprietary AI platform—all at a fraction of the cost of existing providers. The Royal Opera House ROI, for example, was achieved in less than 3 months.
We’re trusted, we’re recognised, and we’re growing. The strength of our product means our expanding portfolio already includes blue-chip clients and products across the globe. We want to be the global go-to provider for connected devices in smart buildings and this is being recognised. For example, we recently raised $15.5 million of Series A funding led by Northzone.
Choosing to invest in the right smart sustainable facilities management system has material and long-term benefits—for the planet and your bottom line.
What are the key outcomes of effective sustainable facilities management for business?
The benefits that you can expect from improving your building’s environmental sustainability metrics are substantial.
Here are just some examples from our clients:
A retail company saved 800 tonnes of CO2 per year with our energy efficiency boosting technology.
We helped a bank lower their water consumption with our automated pipe monitoring systems, saving them $1 million a year on their water bill.
With our wide-ranging air quality monitors, we helped an analytics company reduce their virus risk by 80%.
Our smart technology helped a facility management business save 81% of labour time on compliance.
We helped a supermarket save $1.6 million a year on energy costs, by optimising the use of their HVAC system alone.
Interested in finding out more? Sign up for our free demo, here.
