Key Takeaways: Lower-carbon materials can reduce a project’s embodied carbon, but teams need to plan for their suppliers, lead times, and documentation. Setting sustainability targets early helps guide design, procurement, and material choices throughout the project. Regularly checking substitutions and design changes against those targets helps prevent sustainability goals from slipping during construction. When people talk about innovation in construction, they usually mean the visible kind: prefabrication and modular assembly, digital modeling and clash detection, robotics on the job site and headline-grabbing new materials.
Read This » Inside Season Five of Facilities In Focushat does it really take to keep a healthcare facility running? Season 5 of Facilities in Focus, hosted by Managing Editor Mackenna Moralez, went behind the scenes to explore the people and systems that make patient care possible.
Read This » How Facility Managers Can Strengthen Emergency Preparednessey Takeaways: Cloud-based plans, digital building maps and predictive alerts can help teams coordinate faster and prepare before a crisis escalates. Involving tenants, property owners and facility managers early helps identify risks and make the financial case for preparedness. Regular scenario exercises and full-scale drills reveal gaps and help organizations improve plans beyond basic compliance. Technology plays a growing role in critical event management.
Read This » Your Building is Trying to Tell You Somethingey Takeaways: Recurring repairs, complaints, and workarounds are early warning signals that deserve root-cause investigation. Track temporary fixes with an owner and deadline, and assess outages by their impact on operations—not just downtime. Use risk-focused maintenance reviews and regular building walk-throughs to prioritize action before small issues become costly failures. I have walked enough hotels early in the morning to know that buildings are terrible at keeping secrets.
Read This » Designing for People, Not Just Buildingsnbsp; Most people don’t really think about facility management until something goes wrong within the building.
Read This » AI: Taking Out the Garbageo you have reliable data? Not long ago, maintenance and engineering managers heard that question in just a handful of conversations.
Read This » 7 Facilities Management Models for High-Performance Teamsey Takeaways: A centralized planning hub prepares work orders, schedules, parts and job plans in advance, giving technicians more time for maintenance and reducing operational disruption. Reliability-focused teams use asset and failure data to prevent recurring problems, improve maintenance strategies and reduce unplanned outages. Hybrid staffing, lean daily routines, cross-site leadership, FM-operations partnerships and technician development can improve coordination, consistency and workforce capability. High-performance facilities management teams rely on intentional organizational structures that make work predictable, reduce reactivity and strengthen collaboration between facilities management, operations and frontline maintenance personnel.
Read This » How Inclusive Playgrounds Can Shape More Equitable School District Policiesey Takeaways: Inclusive playgrounds support students’ sensory, social and emotional needs, making play spaces an important part of a district’s broader learning environment. Treating accessibility and universal design as core infrastructure helps districts build inclusion into capital plans, project standards and budgets—not just individual playgrounds. Early community engagement, inclusive procurement and post-occupancy evaluations can make equity a measurable part of school planning and governance. Inclusive playgrounds are often celebrated as visible symbols of equity, places where peers can swing, spin and explore side-by-side.
Read This » Plumbing Upgrades Improve Restroom Sustainability and Safetyey Takeaways: Modern plumbing upgrades can improve infrastructure longevity, energy efficiency and alignment with sustainability goals such as LEED and WELL. Restroom layout may influence handwashing: placing lavatories near the exit can encourage users to wash their hands before leaving. Owners should consider Legionella and other waterborne pathogen risks and consult experienced plumbing professionals about mitigation options. Upgrading plumbing systems can help owners and managers ensure that restrooms and their fixtures are operational and reliable, but increasingly, they are viewing these spaces in facilities in terms of broader issues.
Read This » How the WELL Coworking Rating Supports Workplace Wellnessey Takeaways: WeWork is pursuing the WELL Coworking Rating across more than 300 locations to create a common baseline for workspace quality and well-being. Building owners can use the rating’s principles to assess building performance, set measurable baselines and identify opportunities to improve workplace health. Wellness is an ongoing operational priority, supported by consistent maintenance and cleaning practices, occupant feedback and workplace design that promotes health and productivity. Organizations across the country have started implementing the coworking rating across their facilities profile, working to achieve the credential. WeWork, a leading global real estate platform, recently committed more than 300 locations across five continents — about one-half of its global portfolio — to pursue the rating.
Read This » Why K-12 Schools Need Funding for Healthy, Safe Facilitiesey Takeaways: School facility staff need adequate funding, support and resources to fix problems such as leaking roofs and broken HVAC systems before they threaten health or disrupt learning. Resilience plans should address the climate risks most relevant to each community, including flooding, extreme heat, wildfires and hurricanes. Sustained improvements depend on collaboration among school communities, facility professionals, health experts and policymakers, as well as treating facility funding as an investment in students and communities. While there are many challenges in making K-12 schools consistently healthy, the Healthy Schools for Healthy Kids Summit participants identified a path forward in pursuit of this goal.
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