Photo credit: Hendrick Inc.Facility management is stepping into its most consequential era. Not because the tools have changed; though they have, dramatically, but because the role itself has fundamentally shifted. Today’s facility leaders are no longer simply maintaining buildings. They are actively shaping the conditions for organizational success, serving as the critical connector between people, place, strategy and technology.
That shift carries both weight and possibility.
“Facility management has a profound, positive impact on organizational performance,” says Jennifer Treter, managing principal at Atlanta-based architecture and design firm Hendrick, who presented on “Collective Insights and Life Centered Design,” during NFMT East in March. “Every choice, from space strategy to experience design, utilization to sustainability, contributes to a healthier culture and a stronger company. Facility leaders are uniquely positioned to lift an organization’s potential by shaping environments where people can truly thrive.”
The question driving forward-thinking facility leaders today isn’t whether the workplace matters. It’s how to make it matter more.
For too long, facility management has been positioned at the end of the chain — called in to maintain what others designed, manage what others approved and control costs others had set. That positioning has undersold the discipline and, more importantly, undersold what great facility management teams can do for an organization.
The most effective facility leaders are reframing their role entirely. Rather than managing space, they are helping design experiences. Rather than tracking costs, they are demonstrating value. And rather than reacting to problems, they are anticipating needs.
This shift requires a new framework. One grounded in what Hendrick calls “Life-Centered Design.” This approach aligns human needs with organizational goals to create workplaces that are not only functional, but inspiring, adaptive and measurably effective.
At the heart of this life-centered, people-first approach is a simple but powerful premise: the built environment shapes behavior. Lighting affects focus. Acoustics affect stress. Layout affects collaboration. And the behavioral insights, architectural psychology, and change management principles that play into that are no longer the exclusive domain of architects and interior designers. Facility managers who understand these forces can advocate for and implement environments that actively support how people work and feel.
Activity-based planning is one practical expression of this philosophy. Rather than assigning every employee a fixed desk, activity-based workplaces provide a variety of settings calibrated to different work modes: focused individual work, collaborative brainstorming, informal connection and heads-down concentration. The result is space that adapts to people, not the other way around.
Mag Mutual, a national insurance organization, offers a compelling real-world example. When Hendrick conducted its workplace strategy survey, the data revealed that the organization’s biggest barrier wasn’t the space itself, it was the way people needed to move through their day.
“The focus was meeting and working in different ways,” says Treter. And with field teams distributed across the country, Mag Mutual needed spaces that supported everything from one-on-one digital check-ins to large group rollouts, with very little transition time between. The previous office simply couldn’t flex to meet that reality.
The solution was an activity-based layout organized around departmental neighborhoods, giving teams a sense of place and belonging while still enabling employees to move fluidly to the right space for the right task. Room schedulers, desk booking technology, and a deliberate mix of room sizes replaced the guesswork that had employees wandering halls looking for somewhere to meet. Badge data, surveys, and focus groups informed not just the layout but the specific room proportions. Revealing, for instance, that the shift to more virtual meetings had changed how people gathered internally, making smaller, technology-forward rooms far more valuable than large lounge-style collaborative spaces.
Modular, more reconfigurable layouts are the physical infrastructure that make this possible. When walls aren’t permanent and furniture systems are designed for change, facility leaders can respond to shifting team structures, headcount fluctuations, and evolving work styles. Adaptability, built in from the start, pays dividends for years.
On recent projects, Hendrick has been achieving this with layouts that orbit around a central work café. “What we’ve really been migrating towards with our clients is the idea of a multipurpose conference or training room adjacent to a larger work café or area with a flexible wall that opens,” Treter says.
That allows for flexible meeting rooms that can be divisible in multiple ways on an ordinary Tuesday, but also open up to scale for larger, all-hands events when the moment calls for it — without a single renovation.
Smart building technology has matured from a novelty to a necessity, allowing managers to refine workflow down to a razor-sharp precision as it replaces assumption with evidence, reaction with anticipation.
For Sallie Graves, chief operations officer at Mag Mutual, that clarity has been transformative. The new activity-based office gave her team the opportunity to build a data infrastructure they simply didn't have before. “We can now see conference room usage; we can see how many people are coming into the office per day,” she says.
The organization deployed a desk and room booking platform that lets employees find, reserve, and navigate the space from their phones; reducing the friction that had previously sent people wandering the floor looking for somewhere to meet. The data becomes even clearer when Graves looks ahead to their all-employee meeting, which brings in everybody from around the country.
“That’ll be a day where our office is going to be packed,” she said. "But we have data now that I think will help us plan and communicate leading into it. That was something we really didn't have a good handle on before.”
Sensor networks and occupancy analytics then take that to the next level: prioritizing wellness. When tech-enabled HVAC, lighting, and access control systems can be adjusted digitally and without major construction or vendor intervention, facility leaders gain the ability to reconfigure the building experience as needs evolve. A wing that supported a growing team last year can be quietly shifted to support a different function this year. The building bends rather than breaks.
Josh Tremblay, workplace practice leader at Progressive Companies, a Hendrick ONE Global Design partner who presented with Treter, confirms that these approaches are delivering on two fronts: cost efficiency and occupant wellness.
“We always look at a client’s why and purpose first, and leaning on this human-centered data helps us get them to it faster,” he said. “By combining sensor technology with human feedback, we get lots of ingredients to create with.”
Both firms are also piloting the use of Revit’s 3D capabilities as a building’s digital twin. This gives clients a richer understanding of long-term asset performance, from the projected lifespan of a bank of light fixtures to the wear cycle of a specific square footage of carpet. And as Graves confirmed, occupancy planning technology such as OfficeSpace can tie data from sensors directly to a reservation system.
“This also tells us how the teams end up collaborating,” Tremblay says, allowing usage trends to surface organically and inform future design decisions.
Another great example of predictive analytics at play lies in Hendrick’s Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta project. The health system operates an intelligent building network across its administrative facilities, and machine learning has become central to how those buildings are managed day to day. By tracking the peaks and valleys of employee population in real time, the system can anticipate demand on the dining facility for example adjusting staffing, food prep, and restocking rather than relying on assumption.
The same logic applies across the floor. Intelligent systems can sense when wings are at peak occupancy and adjust HVAC and lighting accordingly, much like a smart home thermostat, but at building scale and without manual intervention. The result is lower energy cost without sacrificing the comfort and conditions people need to do their best work. And the benefits extend to maintenance: data-driven facilities can move from reactive cleaning and restocking schedules to proactive ones, deploying resources based on actual usage rather than guesswork.
A people-first approach requires people-centered metrics. Yet many organizations still measure success primarily through cost per square foot, work order completion rates, and reactive maintenance ratios. These are useful, but they are incomplete.
Facility leaders who want to demonstrate strategic value connect their work to outcomes that executives and HR leaders care about: employee satisfaction, productivity indicators, retention, absenteeism and space utilization efficiency.
When a redesigned floor plan reduces noise complaints and improves focus scores in the next engagement survey, that’s facility value. When predictive maintenance eliminates a recurring HVAC failure that was disrupting an entire wing every summer, that’s facility management value.
Making the connection visible and quantifiable is how FM earns its seat at the strategy table.
Ann Marie Martin has been covering the acquisitions and divestitures (A&D) market for 20 years, producing content for major brands, firms, and magazine titles, but she’s more than just a writer. She develops programs that strengthen community, spark discussion, and foster the next generation of design’s superstars. With a child on the autism spectrum, she’s also passionate about covering how design is embracing neurodiversity. She lives in New Jersey with her two sons, new baby girl, and husband.
