The themes for World Facilities Management (FM) Day over the last few years have evolved aptly to reflect the ever-changing current socio-cultural and economic realities reflected constantly in our built environments.
Back in 2014, it was ‘Enabling business excellence’ at a time when most companies had shrugged off the longer-term impacts of the 2008-2009 financial crisis. By 2020, when the global pandemic was declared and companies raced to digitise processes, the theme for that year’s World FM Day was ‘Digital Transformation in FM’, and was followed by ‘Managing FM in a Changing World’ the next year when the full economic effects of the pandemic hit businesses.
This year’s theme, ‘Cultivating belonging through built environments’, comes at a time when facility managers are being reminded that creating a strong sense of workplace community is essential to retaining a shrinking talent pool of experienced managers.
Unsurprisingly, a Randstad Workmonitor 2025 report found that 83 percent of Australian workers perform better when they feel they belong, and 62 percent would quite simply quit if they didn’t.
It’s made some of the more senior executives who’ve operated in the industry for decades rethink the core objectives of their teams. “When I started out, FM was almost entirely about keeping the building running. Belonging wasn’t in the vocabulary. The job was maintenance schedules, cleaning contracts and making sure the lights stayed on,” says business unit director for CBRE GWS Local Victoria Antony Law.
“What’s shifted, and this accelerated sharply post-COVID, is that the physical environment is now understood as an active variable in whether people actually want to be somewhere. Not just whether they can work there [but] whether they feel they belong there.”
Law says that the case for built environments to demonstrate belonging extends beyond the people running them to the occupants as well. “The shift for me came from spending more time on the occupier side. You start to see the gap between what a building delivers on paper and what it actually feels like to be in it every day. Those two things can be miles apart. FM sits right in the middle of that gap, and increasingly, that’s where the value is.”
The need to develop a sense of belonging that extends from the team managing the building through to the occupiers is being reimagined across FM teams at all scales. Two former senior CBRE employees working on large-scale portfolios – David Tucker and Ryan Lewis – branched out earlier this year to start their own independent property and facility management advisory firm headquartered in Brisbane.
Tucker says the values traditionally prized and championed within the industry were around technical competence, compliance, risk, contractor management and operational control. While those capabilities remain essential, he adds that a present day facility manager needs to go beyond and look at it through the lens of the recipient of their services.
“If we are serious about belonging, we also need stronger capability in customer experience, communication, stakeholder engagement, inclusive service design, change management and data interpretation,” says Tucker.
“Working now in an independent advisory role, I probably see more clearly how the day-to-day experience of a building is shaped by hundreds of small decisions: how people are greeted, how issues are communicated, whether spaces feel safe and inclusive, whether the environment reflects the needs of the people using it rather than just the needs of the operating model.”
To elaborate on what belonging could mean for facility managers, Tucker defines the terms of its use. “For me, belonging in the built environment means people feel considered. They can navigate the space easily, they feel respected, their needs are anticipated and, when something goes wrong, it is handled in a way that builds confidence rather than frustration. That is where FM has enormous influence. It is not only about running buildings efficiently; it is about creating places where people feel comfortable, supported and able to do their best work.”
His partner at the advisory firm, Lewis, says that the challenge lies in making sure the model is designed around outcomes that people actually feel, not just outputs that are easy to count. “The most effective FM strategies are the ones that combine operational rigour with enough flexibility to respond to the building, the client and the community using the space. Belonging does not come from abandoning discipline; it comes from applying discipline in away that remains human.”
Implementing ‘belonging’
For facility managers to begin recalibrating their approach to their team and customers, and to centre it towards making it more inclusive, there is a need to define and, more importantly, measure the metrics that allow teams to do just that. Law argues that the nature of the job for facility managers is to instinctively define metrics for every operational outcome, but that is a temptation that should be relaxed when it comes to measuring something that is far more difficult to quantify – such as belonging.
“That said, it’s not unmeasurable. You need to triangulate across three things: perception data (targeted user surveys tied to comfort, inclusion and ease of use), behavioural signals (space utilisation patterns, dwell time, repeat use versus avoidance) and operational indicators (complaints, resolution times, helpdesk requests linked to discomfort). No single number tells the story. The discipline is in reading them together. Most FM teams aren’t doing that consistently, and that’s the gap,” says Law.
Lewis agrees that the biggest mistake FM managers can make is to reduce belonging to a single score. He says that, while the perception side of belonging can be gauged through things such as occupier feedback and pulse surveys, the question of whether your operations are genuinely fostering a sense of belonging can be gauged from indicators that reveal whether the environment is actually working for people – such as response times, repeat complaints, after-hours help requests, wayfinding issues, access problems, cleaning complaints, temperature-related requests, amenity usage and service recovery trends.
“The key is to look for patterns rather than rely on one metric. If people say they feel welcome and supported, but complaints about access, comfort or communication remain high, there is clearly a gap. Likewise, if service levels look strong on paper, but users still report friction or exclusion, then the KPIs are probably measuring the wrong things,” says Lewis.
“The most meaningful approach is to combine experience measures with service performance measures and then review them together at a building and portfolio level. That gives FM teams a much more realistic view of whether they are creating environments where people genuinely feel they belong.”
When considering ways to enhance belonging in the built environment, it is important to equally consider the factors that inhibit it. Law says that cost reduction and standardisation push toward uniformity – same specifications, same service levels, same cleaning schedules across every environments that feel generic and interchangeable, which is the opposite of belonging.
Duncan Waddell, the managing director of FM Intelligence, says that there is an inherent tension between achieving efficiency and cultivating belonging, but it is often misunderstood as a trade-off of these two things against each other, when it should instead be treated as an optimisation issue.
“Operational efficiency tends to favour standardisation, cost minimisation and predictability. Belonging, on the other hand, requires flexibility, local responsiveness and personalisation,” explains Waddell.
“Mature facility asset management (FAM) organisations recognise that belonging can enhance efficiency outcomes (e.g. higher utilisation, reduced churn, fewer complaints) and the objective is not uniformity, but consistent quality with appropriate adaptation.”
Waddell notes that the practical resolution lies in establishing non-negotiable core service standards, allowing local tailoring to reflect stakeholder demographics and purpose, and using data to identify where customisation delivers measurable value.
Taking the first step
Well-meaning facility managers who have realised the need to cultivate belonging in the built environments that they look after, now face an uphill task of identifying a checklist of concrete steps that they can take to achieve that – and FM professionals agree it stems from upskilling and reskilling.
Waddell observes that traditional FAM skill sets such as those around technical, operational and compliance expertise remain essential, but delivering belonging requires adjacent capabilities that have not historically been core to FAM, such as human-centred design thinking, data analytics and interpretation, behavioural insights, stakeholder engagement at a deeper level, understanding of diversity, equity and inclusion principles and digital literacy across smart buildings and experience platforms.
“The implication is that FAM must evolve from a ‘service delivery function’ to an ‘experience coordination function’. This requires rethinking training pathways (integrating workplace strategy and stakeholder experience), broadening recruitment beyond traditional FAM backgrounds and developing hybrid roles (FAM plus workplace experience plus data),” says Waddell.
Tucker, meanwhile, says that the best FM professionals in the future will be those who can combine operational discipline with people awareness. They will understand asset performance and compliance requirements, but will also know how to interpret occupier needs, manage service interactions and shape environments that work for a diverse group of users. He offers a five-point plan for building belonging into FM operations.
The first step he says is to listen intently – not through an annual survey alone, but through regular, structured feedback and visible follow-ups. The second is to focus on the everyday moments that shape user experience. These could range from clear communication to respectful service interactions, which matter more than many people realise.
The third is to make inclusion a practical and achievable goal, adding that it would mean looking carefully at accessibility, signage, amenities, hours of operation, cultural considerations and how different user groups actually experience the space. “A building can be technically compliant and still not feel welcoming,” says Tucker.
The fourth step he urges is to empower frontline teams who will inevitably have the greatest influence on whether an environment feels helpful, respectful and responsive. Finally, he says that it is necessary to also hardwire belonging into governance. It must be discussed in company board reviews, reflected in reporting and linked to performance expectations.
Law says that most gains in cultivating belonging will come from small, consistent operational improvements rather than capital projects. He offers his own three-point plan to foster belonging in built environments. First, he says, it is essential to make buildings feel responsive. “People feel they belong when they feel heard. That means closing the loop on issues quickly and visibly, not just fixing the problem, but communicating that it’s been fixed,” says Law.
The second is to involve building users in decisions, even minor ones. Soliciting their participation, he says, builds ownership, and ownership builds belonging. The third suggestion he offers is similar to Tucker’s recommendation, which is to empower frontline teams. Those on-site staff shape day-to-day experience more than any design intent or service specification and if they’re empowered to respond to users as people rather than tickets, it shows.
As Law concludes, “Belonging is delivered operationally, not declared strategically. That’s the bottom line.”
This article first appeared in the May 2026 edition of FM magazine. To download the entire edition for free, click here.
Image: Emily Kim, Pexels
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