In facilities management, peer-to-peer connections are among the strongest found in any industry. These relationships are sustained by a shared mission to “roll up our sleeves” and “get our hands dirty” while tackling the complex operational, technical, and organizational issues facing educational and commercial properties.
While the unique challenges of this field promote strong bonds, they also contribute to persistent recruitment and retention challenges—among both management leaders and skilled tradespeople. According to Gordian’s survey of higher education facilities management leaders, 61% of respondents reported vacancies in more than 5% of their staff positions.
Without robust talent pipelines, the nation’s top universities, public assets, and private organizations risk countless financial, operational, and safety challenges related to delayed maintenance, inadequate groundskeeping, and stalled longevity planning. However, there is a way to support facilities management leaders on the frontlines and inspire the next generation of talent leveraging artificial intelligence (AI).
Transforming Efficiency and Resource Allocation
Hovering at 44 years old, the median age of building maintenance, janitorial, and service employees points to an aging workforce. As these workers near retirement, high turnover, workplace stress, and stagnant wages continue to pose barriers to attracting new talent. Amid staffing shortages, those who remain employed see their responsibilities expanding. For example, maintenance workers in higher education are now responsible for more than 100,000 gross square feet of building space, up from around 85,000 in the early aughts, and this continues to drift upward each year.
Digital technologies can help realign and redirect facilities managers’ responsibilities back from this tenuous threshold by improving productivity and efficiency. Advanced building maintenance systems reduce time spent on manual monitoring, allowing staff to prioritize critical issues over routine tasks. In addition, AI-driven building controls that monitor energy usage and occupancy can help predict needs, enabling leaders to allocate labor more effectively, from low-occupancy sites to high-need areas. Productivity gains also occur at a more granular level, such as a team member using AI tools to condense a string of maintenance requests into a single, easily referenceable to-do list.
Enhance Training, Collaboration, and Knowledge Transfer
Within facilities management, first-hand experience and on-the-ground insight are invaluable. These insights often hold as much value as formal training or technical knowledge. However, high turnover and staffing challenges mean that this knowledge may disappear when employees leave the organization.
The industry is ripe with software systems that are uniquely adept at preserving critical insights, streamlining onboarding, and fostering robust organizational management. AI-driven workflows on top of these systems can identify out-of-date or inconsistent information in training materials, standardize training templates to align with organizational standards and compliance requirements, and condense longer materials into concise summaries for quick reference.
With advanced knowledge management platforms, facilities management leaders can develop centralized libraries of essential resources such as technical workflows, operational manuals, and safety guidelines, enabling teams to quickly find answers and complete tasks using the most up-to-date standards.
Ensure Career Longevity and Future Investment
Amid tightening budgets and persistent cost pressures, organizations are looking to optimize facilities and infrastructure expenses, with some forgoing new expenditures altogether. Aligning facilities goals with broader organizational objectives is one of the clearest paths to demonstrating value and safeguarding future funding.
AI can support this initiative through advanced analytics and actionable insights. By leveraging digital twins, building controls, and sensors to assess energy usage, teams can not only identify efficiency and sustainability gaps but also translate these findings into language that communicates financial impact or organizational risk. When facilities insights are understood as instrumental to the organization’s future, facilities teams can be the first in line for new budget allocations that support competitive wages, industry-leading training, and sustained recruitment initiatives.
Looking Ahead
Hands-on work is an essential component of the facilities field. But this hallmark of the trade does not mean workers cannot use technology to optimize workloads, demonstrate value, and ensure career longevity. Facilities leaders have powerful tools to navigate the uncharted waters of widespread staffing shortages and talent gaps.
Key to this endeavor is cultivating the proper foundation for digital transformation and AI integration, such as migrating paper or manual-based work processes to digital workflows. Facilities leaders must also work closely with IT teams to ensure all facilities systems are authorized, vetted, and align with privacy, data, and governance standards, and all outputs are reviewed by staff for accuracy before implementation.
Ensuring that AI integration delivers real impact is critical. This is achieved by using industry best practices, peer research, and historical data to establish operational benchmarks and performance metrics.
Digitization and leveraging AI to bridge the facilities talent gap is not only a strategy to address today’s staffing challenges but also a means of upskilling facilities talent with the tools to work smarter in the workplace of the future. In doing so, facilities leaders enable a crucial mindset shift—from “How can I do more with less?” to “How can I add value to my organization with the resources available to me?”
Lalit Agarwal is the CEO and president of APPA – Leadership in Educational Facilities.