Category: Design and Construction

Are Office Investments Keeping Up with Attendance Demands and AI Shifts?

U.S. companies are increasing expectations for employees to work from the office, with 89% of respondents in CBRE’s 2026 Office Occupier Sentiment Survey requiring at least three in-office days per week, up from 78% a year earlier. Despite the focus on office attendance, only 14% of companies are making major improvements to their space, suggesting […]

Your Front Door Is a Performance System: Managing High-Traffic Entrances for Reliability and Efficiency

Every day, thousands of people pass through building entrances without a second thought, until something goes wrong. A malfunctioning door during peak hours isn’t just an inconvenience; it disrupts operations, creates safety risks, and slows critical building flow. For facilities managers overseeing high-traffic environments, such as hospitals, retail centers, corporate campuses, transit hubs, and more, […]

Under Construction: Top Facility Projects of July 2026

Facilities Management Advisor’s “Under Construction” series highlights some of the latest, most interesting facility project announcements every month. New Life for Vacant Office Return-to-work mandates and other factors have helped the office market rebound post-COVID, but there still remains a lot of unused or underutilized office space across the country. To revive vacant properties, many […]

When Documentation Fails, Facility Operations Pay the Price

Every construction project generates a large volume of critical information including drawings, O&M manuals, submittals, commissioning reports, warranties, and test records. Once the project is complete, that data often gets scattered or never fully makes its way to the facilities team. As Paul Petroski, a senior facilities leader with the Department of Defense, noted, “Drawings […]

workplace safety

OSHA-Compliant Doesn’t Always Equal Up-to-Date

Walk through almost any facility and you’ll see hard hats, safety glasses, first aid kits, and other personal protective equipment (PPE) in use every day. The gear is there, employees are trained, and everything appears to comply. But here’s the question many employers never ask: Is compliance enough? What some facilities managers don’t realize is […]

CBRE: Data Center Supply Can’t Keep Up with Demand

The global data center market is expanding as demand from artificial intelligence (AI) uses outpaces available space capacity, pushing vacancy rates toward historic lows despite a wave of new supply, according to CBRE’s Global Data Center Trends report. Global supply reached 16 gigawatts (GW) in Q1 2026 across the 16 largest data center markets, up […]

Making Electrification Projects Work: Lessons from Large-Scale Retrofits

In a city like Chicago, electrification rarely happens in isolation. Large retrofit projects are almost always delivered in occupied buildings, alongside active operations, and under pressure to modernize multiple systems at once. The projects that succeed understand this from the start. Electrification works best when treated as core infrastructure—the backbone that supports building automation, electric […]

After a Facility Fire Is Out, the First 48 Hours Set the Recovery Path

A fire scene can look calmer once the trucks leave: the flames are out, the alarms have stopped, and people want answers, access, and a timeline for reopening. That moment calls for a slower, more controlled pace from facility teams. Recovery should account for fire residues and odors that may affect the building, HVAC system, […]

The Design Strategy Behind Effectively Scaling Workplace Culture Across Offices

In a single office, workplace design often reflects a company’s identity, but within a multi-office portfolio, it begins to define it. As organizations grow, it’s less about how individual offices perform and more about how they work together as a whole to establish a cohesive and consistent culture. Without a structured approach, each office starts […]

Under Construction: Top Facility Projects of June 2026

Facilities Management Advisor’s “Under Construction” series highlights some of the latest, most interesting facility project announcements every month. Smart Factory for Futuristic Planes JetZero, an aerospace startup developing futuristic “all-wing” commercial and military aircraft, has broken ground on a massive smart factory on more than 600 acres in North Carolina. The 8 million square-foot facility represents […]