Barriers To And Challenges Of Sustainable Facilities Management Practices – Experiences From The Nordic Countries

Paper in proceeding, 2017

The development of sustainable Facilities Management (FM) practices requires active and integrated engagement of the FM organisation and their users. The aim of this paper is to list the challenges that face FM practitioners when implementing sustainable FM within the Nordic countries. We start by looking at the barriers, which we identified within this field in the literature. The systematic literature review focuses on articles referring directly to FM, sustainability of FM and stakeholder involvement. The empirical material is based on input from a one-day workshop involving more than 40 practitioners and academics interested in sustainability and FM aspects as well as in-depth interviews with stakeholders in four ongoing refurbishment projects. We look into how FM suppliers and users benefit from a sustainable approach in refurbishment projects, and we highlight the current barriers and challenges in developing sustainable FM practice. We find that the involvement of FM, end users and other stakeholders is crucial for achieving a set of sustainable goals. Informal dialogue is useful for revealing barriers, and workshop arenas offer a stage for a participatory approach to developing sustainable FM practice. However, FM companies still seem to lack concrete tools to ensure users behave according to the new requirements of the facilities.