FMs: Turn Intention Into Action For More Sustainable Buildings
TFT’s Rachel Cakebread discusses the role of facilities managers to help buildings meet their sustainable performance potential.
The drive for more sustainable building solutions now impacts every corner of the property industry. As wider awareness of buildings’ environmental impacts reaches occupier organisations and building users themselves, the market demands a higher standard of sustainable performance from commercial property they lease. Meeting those needs can entail upfront and management costs for owners and investors, but there are two key benefits to acting on the issue as soon as possible. The first is enhancing the value of an asset both now and in the future. The second is creating better resilience against future change – in terms of new legislation, deepening of market sentiment and of course climate change impacts on buildings.
TFT’s recent research on Redefining Building Performance surveyed 200 industry decision makers on their priorities and challenges to enhancing the commercial value and resilience of their property portfolio. We found significant awareness of the growing importance of sustainability as a driver of commercial performance, but that understanding and action against it was inconsistent across the sector. In particular, our research showed 90% of respondents predicting stricter environmental sustainability standards in the near future, but only 68% considered environmental impacts an important focus for building investment decisions. We know many occupiers prioritise sustainability factors when choosing a space to let, from an operational costing perspective but also to deliver against ESG objectives and protect corporate reputation.
The FM role can play a key part in turning ambition into action, ensuring that well designed spaces perform as they should throughout their life, and helping occupiers use buildings to address their needs in the best way. These are five key areas in which FMs can support better building performance:
1. Energy + net zero
FMs can help building stakeholders understand current performance through active metering and monitoring of energy consumption within the building. Quality data is key to helping the industry bridge the ‘performance gap’ between design intention and energy use in occupation. If the FM shares in-use energy performance data, it’s clear how to optimise systems for the best occupier and energy outcomes. For instance, finding opportunities for reducing fossil fuel use, and understanding potential for future adaption to net zero operational carbon.
2. Procurement + waste
Analysing FM supply chain impacts is central to not only improving sustainability in-use, but also improving wellbeing outcomes too. Considering the toxicity, embodied carbon and associated waste from building products can drive better practice in procurement. This should also include circular economy principles, in which materials are re-used at their greatest value, and creating a waste management system only for materials that cannot be repurposed, reused or recycled.
3. Occupier engagement
POE (post occupancy evaluation) is central to how we understand occupants’ requirements of a building. Planning in the right measurement of the user experience, and feeding those insights in to a maintenance or optimisation plan, can ensure the building is being managed to account for those needs. This is increasingly important in today’s highly competitive and flexible property market, with shorter lease lengths and huge choice available, occupiers have never had more scope to vote with their feet if a building doesn’t meet their needs.
4. Wellbeing
Building on the findings from POEs, improving the user experience includes, crucially, ensuring that all building users feel safe and healthy in their space. Awareness of health and wellbeing was an increasing focus but this has been accelerated by the pandemic. Providing scalable interventions to improve productivity, safety and comfort in buildings is within the FM’s scope. On a practical level, this could cover task lighting, thermal comfort control, biophilic design or greening of space, and policies to enhance cleaning regimes and clear emergency response procedures.
5. Climate and functional resilience
The FM can establish building management practices that support climate resilience of space (overheating, flood risk, extreme weather events), and assess current performance and identifying opportunities to enhance building management response. SuDS or external greening interventions can support UHI (urban heat island) reduction which would otherwise exacerbate negative impacts on building systems like air conditioning. Identifying where building functions can be adapted or made redundant will also support future resilience and flexibility of the asset into the future.
BREEAM in-use and LEED O+M (Operations and Maintenance) are third party certification schemes that can also be used to guide FM decision making. These encompass and promote sustainable management practices, as well as benchmarking the building itself. Key to use of these schemes and above recommendations is to what extent an FM can form strategies for managing a building, gathering the right data and improving it. Starting from the basis of one of these certifications, FMs can understand what they are doing right currently, and where they need to improve to achieve their building’s performance potential.
