Over the last few decades, the facility management profession has grown increasingly digital. Roles and responsibilities have been revolutionized by the widespread adoption of emerging digital tools, making technological aptitude a necessity for facility managers.

FM is now a fundamentally technological trade. But in the context of digital transformation in practice across FM, it is more of a buzzword than a reality.

The pandemic caused a seismic shift in the way people work, catapulting diverse industries into an age of increased digitalization. When it comes to the design, construction and maintenance of facilities, however, there is still work ahead regarding digital adoption. The industry is at a disadvantage in terms of digital transformation largely due to the challenges and/or perceived challenges of onboarding new technology. Although there are challenges associated with onboarding new digital tools, the advantages far outweigh them in the long term.

Digital transformation is more important than ever

The post-pandemic age is marked by volatility, uncertainty and ambiguity – from increased material costs and supply chain woes to widespread labor shortages exacerbated by the Great Retirement. A 2023 NFPA Industry Trends Survey on the skilled trades found that 45 percent of respondents said a shortage of qualified workers will be their biggest challenge at work this year.

Amid this chaos, digital transformation is key to maintaining a resilient workforce and overall organization. There is an appetite from employees to engage in increased technology: 68 percent of NFPA’s survey respondents felt a desire to work with innovative, nontraditional tools on the job site.

An experienced FM knows that people are an organization’s most valuable asset, so investing in digital transformation is a critical way to engage employees and enable better performance and productivity.

Roadblocks to digital adoption

The two primary roadblocks stalling digital transformation in the FM world are:

  1. resistance to change and
  2. onboarding and training.

What organizations hope to gain in efficiency they might lose at first as employees overcome this hesitancy and training gap.

Resistance to change is mostly a mental obstacle. The average age of an FM is 49.5 years old, and 23 percent of FMs have been in the profession for more than 20 years. As a result, the profession is often hindered by loyalty to the traditional way of doing things. It can be difficult to pitch a new tool that will break employees’ normal workflows, and most digital tools need to see widespread or complete adoption before they can deliver their full value. Initially, this may cause frustration or confusion as employees adjust to more innovative digital methods. This hesitancy to change often stops organizations from trying at all.

The second challenge lies in onboarding new technologies and training employees to effectively leverage them. Organizations that rely on thousands of sheets of paper tucked into walls of file cabinets could be overwhelmed by the thought of moving to a digital format. Depending on the gap between traditional methods and more efficient digital ones, it can take a significant amount of time and effort to transfer information into new systems and train employees. This can lead to an initial dip in productivity as the organization grows familiar with new workflows.

Yet the need for digital transformation is clear despite these obstacles; 17 percent of skilled trade workers believed that a lack of job-enabling technology was one of their biggest challenges on the job site in 2022.

To combat these challenges, organizations need a clear plan of how new digital tools will meet the needs of both the business and the employees using them each day. The value proposition must be clear to be welcomed, and the technology should ideally have a user-friendly interface to streamline training as much as possible. Additionally, it is critical to foster widespread buy-in from all relevant employees to see the full value of the implemented tool or software. Once FMs have conquered these challenges, they can focus on discovering the benefits and opportunities of digital tools. There are dozens of use cases for digitization in the FM world, but here are three examples: generational knowledge transfer, documentation and collaboration.

Generational knowledge transfer

The Great Retirement is compounding widespread labor shortages: it is estimated that 75 million baby boomers will retire by 2030. These retirement rates hit the skilled trades industry especially hard given its aging workforce.

A primary concern of this mass wave of retirement is the loss of institutional knowledge between generations. There are several ways digital tools can provide value in this sense. Without technology, newcomers might gather tidbits of wisdom from veterans through in-person interactions or company training sessions. With digital tools, however, seasoned employees can easily create a sharable knowledge base to share industry expertise with new employees. Creating a future-proofed digital repository ensures that expertise will not disappear from the organization when its employees do.

Future-proofed documentation

Facilities are built for longevity. Throughout their life cycles, they might change ownership, undergo renovations, weather natural disasters or completely change their functionality. Some facilities stand long enough to see multiple generations come and go. Therefore, it is critical that the people in charge of overseeing and maintaining these structures have tools that can also stand the test of time.

Digital tools provide strategic benefits in this regard. Internet- and cloud-based applications and software are far more future-proofed than physical materials, which can be lost, damaged or simply worn down over time. Digital tools evolve alongside a building and can retain critical knowledge amid staff turnovers.

Within centralized, digitized hubs, original design and construction teams can leave notes and important information, such as project-specific variances and authority having jurisdiction approvals, for future FMs to reference during inspections, renovations and more. This creates a useful reference guide for the organization’s future FMs. Instead of wondering why a particular design decision was made, or whether an aspect of the building is up to code, FMs can seamlessly consult this digital information repository. Additionally, with digitized codes and standards, they can compare different editions of the code and easily spot what has changed over the years with interactive change indicators.

Real-time collaboration

Digitals tools can also ensure FMs are involved early enough in the design and construction process to capitalize on their value. FMs provide helpful insight on the long-term maintainability, safety and cost of operations of a structure. Too often, however, they are brought into the process too late to advocate for greater long-term benefits in the facility. As a result, short-term cost effectiveness may reign over decisions that would generate cost savings in inspection, testing and maintenance over many years.

New technology can enable teams to collaborate on building plans and progress in one centralized location — whether they are on site or not. With increased visibility into the activities of designers, architects and engineers, FMs can provide strategic input on things like equipment selection and mechanical systems before it is too late.

Tackling the digital shift

In every industry, digital transformation is met with hiccups and bumps in the road. FMs would be remiss to act as though technology is a silver bullet for all business and collaboration woes. As workforces adapt, there will be hesitancies related to change, onboarding and training. But there is a reason that digital transformation remains a popular buzzword: it is evolving all aspects of the working world.

For FMs, new technologies can better enable generational knowledge transfer, facilitate more efficient collaboration, improve documentation and more — all of which helps FMs prioritize the success of their organizations and the resiliency of their facilities. The key is finding the right tools that are worth possible initial setbacks. To foster buy-in across the organization, leaders need to ensure new digital tools have a clear and relevant value proposition and are easy to use. Digital resources should be intuitive and helpful, not a burden. Digital transformation is on the horizon. Now it is just a matter of who will be ahead of the curve and who will be behind it.