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In 2008 and 2009, the world was shaken by the deepest recession since the Great Depression. This event has forced changes on many industries and professions - including Facility Management. This paper provides a "snapshot view" of how Facility Managers and Facility Management departments are navigating the financial meltdown. Preliminary research focused on previous recessionary periods, and the impact that they had on the development of Facility Management. In the recessions of the eighties, nineties and two thousands, Facility Managers started professional associations and developed professional certifications for themselves. At the same time, more businesses began utilizing the Facility Management function in order to orchestrate an increasingly complicated (and potentially expensive) built environment. At the same time, the same economic pressures led both to an increase in the use of outsourcing, and a backlog of deferred maintenance. Facility Managers had to be both innovative and flexible to survive in the industry - which has seen little growth in the 2000s. The main focus of this paper was a survey answered by 119 Facility Managers. In it, they reported on both how their departments were responding to the recession, and also how they were personally managing their careers during this time. Follow-up questions were also asked of some Facility Managers, to get a more detailed understanding of their answers. The main strategy that the survey found Facility Management departments turning to during the current recession was deferred maintenance, followed by staffing cuts and contract renegotiations. Facility Managers also reported that they are continuing to shift work to outsourcers - although some FMs reported that they have either outsourced all the work they can, or that there is no way to outsource some of the tasks that they do. In those cases, they focused on doing more work in-house. Individual Facility Managers tended to have relatively long careers, with about seventy percent being in their positions for longer than three years. Also, of those FMs who reported being unemployed, the majority had only been out of work for less than six months. Many of the Facility Managers questioned in this survey stated that they believed networking was a key component of their jobs. There were some who disagreed with this, however, believing that technical knowledge has become much more important than a strong social network. About equal numbers of people who had been in their jobs for about a year reported finding those jobs through job-boards as through networking Most of the Facility Managers who responded to the survey are not aware of any initiatives devoted specifically to helping out-of-work FMs. These groups do exist, however, and some were discovered in the course of researching this paper. It's notable that many Facility Managers appeared to have much more negative view of social networking sites than they do of in-person networking. The paper concludes by speculating on what the various results mean. While Facility Management departments appear to be laying professionals off, the long tenures and short periods of unemployment may signal that Facility managers are still in demand - even in times of recession. They may actually be more in demand now than in normal times, because of the need to balance multiple needs during a time of constrained spending on both capital and operating budgets. One red flag on the horizon is the perception of new technologies by respondents to this survey. Facility Managers were originally hired to manage costly new technologies in the workplace - this is something that they must continue to do in the future, and if they are not comfortable with changes that are coming, the profession may be bypassed or become marginalized. This may be a generational issue, which will be solved as younger people enter the industry.

California community college leaders are looking for strategies to sustain facilities and maintenance operations because the governor only approved the allocation of $87.5 million in the 2014-2015 Budget Act for facilities maintenance operations. Guided by the change and strategy theories, the purpose of this multicase study was to explore the strategies that a select group of college leaders have used to sustain or improve their facilities maintenance operations. The data collection process included a review of college planning documents and semistructured interviews with 10 senior administrators from 3 large California community colleges who have used strategies to address sustaining or improving their facilities maintenance operations. Saldana coding and an inductive analysis process were used to identify themes. Triangulation was employed to increase the trustworthiness of interpretations. The analysis revealed the central role of planning as the strategy leaders should employ to improve institutional success. Funding was an additional theme leaders regarded as the issue that most often undermined planning and effective maintenance operations. All participants acknowledged the need for the integration of planning and funding to create institutional success. These findings suggest that community college leaders who use planning, funding strategies, maintenance strategies, and who empower people to sustain facility and maintenance operations can improve the teaching-learning environment. When community college leaders transform the teaching-learning environment, they enable student success. Student success increases the earning power of students that contributes to social change by expanding the tax-base and creating greater economic development.

This research presents the results of a qualitative and quantitative investigation to understand the challenges of public sector facilities management and maintenance to include the negative impact of deferred maintenance, it’s history, the current industry practices and the potential to reverse the negative impact of the current trend. History has been known to speak loudly, and with accuracy relative to the expansion of public facilities and the challenge to maintain them. The challenge to keep pace with the growing population and the ever-changing requirements for contemporary designs are felt in every sector of our public facilities. Regardless, we, the public trust that those responsible are managing these assets effectively and efficiently. Research indicates that this doesn’t appear to be the case. This study serves as a measurement against the historical performance of public facilities management practice. There have been decades of growth in public assets. During that time, innovation within operational practice and technology offer new opportunities for organizations to address issues of efficiency that translate directly in a measure of effectiveness. Given the continued outcry for additional funding, it seems that there are challenges that continue to exist despite the innovation offered. This study focuses on those challenges. Further analysis, based on successful models of public facilities management, provides insights as to what practices, if adopted, may drive the lesser achieving programs toward greater effectiveness. This paper also includes the results of a study that focuses on the current practices of public facilities management programs. The intent is to identify elements that either support or detract from efficiently operated, effective facilities departments. Given the nature of this industry, both objective and subjective elements were addressed. Objectively the organizational hierarchy and the associated communications pathways were identified. Subjectively, the lifecycle of the facilities mission was dissected and discussed throughout an interview process. Fifteen specified data points were addressed, which included questions related to accountability, effective communication, data driven program development, allocation of resources, documentation of work performed, continuous training and education and the use of technology. In order to reverse the declining momentum, we must first identify the most common areas that challenge facilities managers and understand how they currently address those challenges. This research will address the following questions: What do facilities managers perceive to be the greatest obstacles to ensuring their facilities are properly maintained? What factors do facilities mangers perceive to be the greatest challenge to ensuring sufficient resources are allocated to current maintenance? To what degree do facilities managers perceive that more effective communications would positively impact the effectiveness of facilities management and maintenance. The results of this research presents a comprehensive understanding of the challenges that face public sector facilities leadership teams, the history and creation of excessive deferred maintenance and finally, future opportunities that identifies best practices and presents an artifact that reflects a means to resolve those deficiencies identified within the current facilities management environment.

The purpose of this study was to examine how academic deans perceived the characteristics of facility built environment and its impact on learning in higher education. Q methodology was used as the means to explore the subjective opinions of academic deans within the State of Florida regarding the facility built environment’s impact on learning in higher education. For this Q study, the concourse statements were the result of communications taken from the subject literature and participant responses to this study’s online concourse questionnaire. The resulting 32 item Q sample was sorted online by 43 academic deans, associate and assistant deans. In completing the survey, the participants ranked statements representative of the characteristics of facility built environment according to their own beliefs and subjective opinions. From the resulting data and subsequent analysis, three distinct factors emerged that represented the collective opinions of this study’s participants. The emergent factors for this study were named Traditionalist – Focused on Functionality and Universal Rationality; Modernist – Technology Conscious Seeking Innovation and Flexibility; and Abstractionist – Contextual and Expressive.