LOOKING BACK, MOVING FORWARD

This year, IWFM is celebrating 30 years of the Institute. As 2023 progresses, and with help from our community of volunteering members, we will be exploring the evolution of our profession and predicting its future. However, some members may not be familiar with the Institute’s history, so here is a brief introduction.

In 1993, the Association of Facilities Managers and Institute of Facilities Management merged to become the British Institute of Facilities Management. The FM profession has evolved in the decades since, with the Institute maturing alongside as a membership body, standards setter and professional community.

In 2016, the profession’s workplace opportunity arrived with The Workplace Advantage report. Where once the productivity debate had ignored the workplace, this report quantified the contribution a well-designed workplace could make to organisational performance. It identified workplace and facilities management as the organisational super connector. Ever the champion of the sector’s advancement, we set out to embrace the emerging workplace function as a strand of the profession, foregrounding FM’s impact where it can be recognised for its ability to transform organisations and enhance experience.

In 2018, we rebranded to the Institute of Workplace and Facilities Management and set out to reposition FM as a value creator with even greater potential to support business success. Ensuring leaders fully appreciate the crucial contributions FM makes and optimising its impact will remain at the heart of our mission into the next decade and beyond.

Ablack and white image online of a packed 1950s commuter train carriage shows suited and booted commuters all holding aloft their huge broadsheet newspapers. From a distance it looks like bed linen pegged out on laundry day. Typically, this depiction of fifties media consumption is used to point out that while we may all be “on” our phones these days, it’s the same as it ever was. We all listened to radios, took photographs, wrote letters or made calls in the past; we just use one device for all of that now.

However, smartphones also allow our most intimate communications to reside mere millimetres apart from our most professional. It’s all too possible to erroneously inform Charlie in accounts that the cat litter bag has burst all over the carpet again while your bemused partner receives a message asking if they can process a crucial invoice. Let’s face it, though: the genie is out of the bottle and the interactions this tech has enabled are not going away.

At February’s Workplace Futures, Planon’s Peter Ankerstjerne warned us that any service provider not adopting a mobile-first mindset, making the smart phone the primary interface between organisation and employee, will be out of the game; all data relevant for employees now needs to be available via their mobiles.

We know that this is happening already, with frontline personnel able to feel far more a part of the service delivery community through corporate or even contract-level apps. But it’s about how FM speaks to building end-users, too. Also at Workplace Futures, former IWFM chair Lionel Prodgers spoke of how the growth in consumer use of smartphone apps to remotely control heat, light and access in the home is what will drive similar demand from such consumers in their work environments.

When we look back in years to come, this individualisation of both frontline personnel service communication and end user service delivery is likely to have proved more influential in how this sector operates than anything we’ve experienced recently in terms of building design or pandemic adaptation.