The Road Ahead for Facilities Management

The workplace is changing in unprecedented ways. It’s not unreasonable to speculate that in the near future, a much smaller number of people will travel to a location every day and work in an assigned office or cubicle. According to one recent article:

"New and emerging technologies are transforming the type of work employees perform, as well as where and how work gets done. As the nature of teams becomes more complex, organizations need to become more agile and collaborative than before. More people do their jobs virtually or remotely and at various times of the day. This is resulting in coworkers having fewer face-to-face interactions and communicating increasingly through email, instant messaging and conference calls."¹

In our experience, companies are migrating to more agile workplaces in order to recruit a new generation of talent, retain existing talent, create a more collaborative workplace, reduce square footage and contain real estate costs.

Achieving these results requires companies to provide their employees with a high level of service. This is more challenging in an agile workplace than a traditional business environment. How do you deliver regular and accountable mail to employees who are in a different place each day and/or might not be in the office at all? How do you make people who may only come to the office two days a week comfortable? How do you schedule and effectively utilize shared conference space? Where and how do you store personal and work related items?

These and other complex challenges that facilities management (FM) executives are facing will be explored in a soon-to-be released survey report by Canon Business Process Services: “The Road Ahead: Facilities Management Challenges and Opportunities in 2018.” The report, created and implemented in conjunction with Facility Executive magazine, is designed to help FM executives:

• share what they consider to be their top priorities
• clarify tools and techniques that might provide an edge in achieving their goals
• identify facilities management activities that present the greatest challenge to success
• uncover possible hidden opportunities for driving continuous improvement in delivering exceptional support services

In the meantime, feel free to visit the Facilities and Logistics Management Services page of our website for insights on industry trends and best practices including case histories, white papers and more.