Facilities manager responsibilities: what the role covers, and how to show it is done

01

What a facilities manager is, and the duties behind the role

Facility management is the work of keeping an organisation's buildings, and the services people rely on in them, fit for the organisation's purpose. A facilities manager, sometimes called a facility manager, head of facilities or estates manager (job titles vary), leads that work. Where a building manager is usually answerable for one building, a facilities manager typically looks after a set of services across several buildings or an estate: maintenance, cleaning, security, catering, waste, reception, space and moves, and the compliance that sits under all of them.

The international standard for the discipline is ISO 41001, Facility management – Management systems, published in the UK as BS EN ISO 41001. It describes how an organisation plans, delivers and reviews facility management, rather than listing tasks. The professional body in the UK is the Institute of Workplace and Facilities Management (IWFM), which publishes professional standards and offers membership and qualifications.

Most of the legal duties a facilities manager carries out belong in law to the employer or to whoever controls the premises. The facilities manager is how the organisation meets them. In Great Britain the main ones are:

• the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974 and the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999, which require risks to be assessed and managed and set the general safety requirements for work;
• the Workplace (Health, Safety and Welfare) Regulations 1992, covering maintenance, cleanliness, lighting, temperature, washrooms and traffic routes;
• fire safety law: the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005 in England and Wales, and the Fire (Scotland) Act 2005 with its regulations in Scotland;
• the Control of Asbestos Regulations 2012, including the duty to manage asbestos in non-domestic premises;
• the control of Legionella under COSHH and the HSE's Approved Code of Practice L8;
• the Electricity at Work Regulations 1989, the Lifting Operations and Lifting Equipment Regulations 1998 (LOLER) and the Pressure Systems Safety Regulations 2000;
• the Construction (Design and Management) Regulations 2015 whenever building or maintenance work is carried out.

Northern Ireland has its own equivalents of most of these, made under the Health and Safety at Work (Northern Ireland) Order 1978, and its own fire safety law.

02

Key responsibilities of a facilities manager

Facilities manager job descriptions vary with the organisation, but the same FM responsibilities appear in nearly all of them:

• Statutory and safety compliance: knowing which inspections, tests and risk assessments each building needs, making sure they happen on time, and holding the certificates and records.
• Health and safety: safe premises and safe work in them, including contractor control, permits to work and accident reporting under RIDDOR.
• Building maintenance: planned preventive maintenance of building services such as HVAC, electrical systems, plumbing systems, lifts, fire systems and the building management system that controls heating and ventilation, and reactive repairs when something fails. This is often called hard FM.
• Soft services: cleaning, security, reception, post, catering, waste, and the care of buildings and grounds, often called soft FM.
• Contractors and suppliers: specifying services, running tenders, managing contracts and holding providers to agreed service levels.
• Budgets: setting and managing operating budgets, planning capital spend on plant and building fabric, and explaining variances.
• Space and workplace: allocating space, planning moves and changes, and making the workspace work for the people in it.
• Business continuity: what happens when power, water, heating or access fails, and who is called.
• Sustainability and energy: energy use, waste and the building data the organisation reports.
• Reporting to the business: telling senior management whether the estate is safe, compliant and on budget, and what it needs next.

Together, hard and soft FM make up most of the role. In a small organisation one person may do all of this with a handful of contractors. In a large one, the facilities manager oversees an assistant facilities manager, site managers and a helpdesk who share the day-to-day operations of each building, and spends more of the week on strategic planning, budgets and contracts.

03

In-house, outsourced, and who does what

How the responsibilities are divided depends on the delivery model, and a facilities manager needs to be clear which one they are working in.

• In-house: the organisation employs its own site staff, cleaners or engineers, and the facilities manager manages them directly.
• Single services outsourced: separate contracts for cleaning, security, mechanical and electrical maintenance, and so on, each managed by the facilities manager.
• Bundled or total FM: one provider delivers most facilities management services under a single facilities management contract, and the facilities manager becomes an intelligent client, setting the specification and checking performance.
• Managing agent: in let buildings, a managing agent may deliver facilities services for the landlord, with the tenant's facilities manager looking after its own space.

Outsourcing moves the work, not the duty. If a contractor misses a statutory inspection, the organisation is still the duty holder, and the facilities manager is the person expected to have noticed. That is why so much of the role is about specifications, service level agreements and KPIs: they are how the client side knows what is being delivered.

It helps to write down, for each building and each service, who does the work, who checks it, where the record is kept, and who is told when it goes wrong. Gaps in that table are where compliance failures come from, most often at the boundary between two contractors or between a contractor and the in-house team.

04

The working week and the compliance year

The daily and weekly work is mostly about service delivery: walking sites, dealing with faults and complaints, meeting contractors, approving quotes and invoices, and answering the business's requests. Hours vary by organisation, and many facilities managers are on call for emergencies out of hours.

Behind that sits a compliance calendar, which is the backbone of the role. A typical one includes:

• Daily and weekly: checks of fire escape routes, a weekly fire alarm test at a different call point, flushing of little-used water outlets, and routine checks of washrooms, common areas and plant rooms.
• Monthly: emergency lighting function tests, water temperature checks at sentinel outlets, and fire extinguisher visual checks.
• Periodic: servicing of fire alarm, emergency lighting and extinguishers, lift inspections under LOLER, pressure system examinations, gas safety checks and fixed wire testing, each at the interval its standard or competent person sets.
• Reviews: the fire risk assessment, the Legionella risk assessment, the asbestos management plan and the general risk assessments, reviewed on a schedule and whenever something significant changes.

Many teams keep this calendar in facilities management software such as a CAFM system; smaller ones use a spreadsheet. Either way, the facilities manager rarely does these checks personally. The job is to make sure each one has an owner, happens on time, and leaves a record that someone other than the person who did it can find and trust.

05

Qualifications, skills, and what good evidence looks like

There is no single route to become a facilities manager, and no specific degree is required. People arrive from building services engineering, the trades, the armed forces, hospitality or property, and an office manager who looks after office buildings often grows into the role. Some take a degree or foundation degree in facilities management or the built environment; others gain hands-on experience and work up from a supervisor or assistant facilities manager post. In England the National Careers Service lists a Facilities Management Supervisor Level 3 advanced apprenticeship, a Facilities Manager Level 4 higher apprenticeship and a Senior and Head of Facilities Management Level 6 degree apprenticeship. Some facilities managers specialise in hard FM or in workplace services; senior roles lead the estate strategy for a whole organisation. Professional qualifications from IWFM, and health and safety qualifications such as IOSH Managing Safely or a NEBOSH certificate, are common in facilities manager job adverts. Salary varies with sector, region and the size of the estate: the National Careers Service gives an average of £26,000 a year for a starter and £50,000 for an experienced facilities manager, and current adverts are the best guide to a particular job.

Employers usually ask for relevant work experience in facilities or a related field. The skills that matter most in the manager role are organisation, contract and budget management, a working knowledge of building services, and the ability to explain risk to people who are not specialists. A facilities manager who can say plainly what is compliant, what is not, and what it will cost to fix is more useful to a management team than one who reports everything as green.

Good evidence of the role being done well is not a thick folder. It is being able to answer, quickly and with a record behind each answer:

1. Which statutory inspections are due in the next three months, and which are overdue?
2. Were last week's routine checks done, in every building, and by whom?
3. Which faults are open, how old are they, and who owns each one?
4. Are the contractors delivering what the contract says, measured the same way each month?
5. Where is the money going, against budget, and what is coming?

06

Where the record fails, and what SiteClara does about it

A facilities manager usually has good records of the things contractors certify and weak records of the things that happen every day. The weekly fire alarm test is written in a log book on site, the cleaning contractor keeps its sheets in its cupboard, the security officer's patrol is in a notebook, and a fault mentioned at reception may never reach anyone. When the business asks whether the routine checks were done across every site last month, the honest answer is often an assurance rather than a record.

SiteClara records that routine work at the place it happens. A printed QR poster at each location, such as a washroom, plant room, fire exit or bin store, with an optional NFC tag behind it, lets cleaning, security or site staff scan the code or tap the tag on their own phone, with no app to install. They see the scheduled checks due there and mark each one done or explain what stopped them, with a photo when it helps. An issue reported there goes onto the team's list of jobs until someone closes it, and the supervisor's queue groups open jobs by building and floor. A supervisor can escalate a job to the building manager, who can answer it.

Each day the supervisor reviews the day's totals and photos, adds a note and approves a report, which goes to the facilities manager and other nominated contacts at 8am the next morning. It shows what was reported, what was completed, what is still open and how scheduled checks went, for example 12 of 12 completed. Where a cleaning provider and a security provider work on the same site, each can run its own staff, forms and approval. It is priced per building, with no per-person fees.

07

Questions people ask

What are the 11 core competencies of a facility manager?

The 11 core competencies of facility management are the International Facility Management Association's: IFMA says facility managers should know them, and its core competency courses cover them: communications; finance and business; facility information and technology management; leadership and strategy; occupancy and human factors; operations and maintenance; performance and quality; project management; real estate; risk management; and sustainability. IFMA says it established these areas of facility management through its Global Job Task Analysis, a survey of thousands of facility managers around the world.

What makes a good facility manager?

The National Careers Service lists the skills a facilities manager needs as business management, leadership, customer service and administration skills, being thorough with attention to detail, working well with others, maths, using your initiative, and confidence with a computer and the main software packages.

08

Further reading, and a list to take away

The Institute of Workplace and Facilities Management (IWFM) publishes professional standards, guidance and qualifications for facilities managers. The Health and Safety Executive publishes guidance on managing premises, asbestos, Legionella (L8 and HSG274), workplace welfare (L24), electrical safety, lifting equipment and CDM 2015. The Home Office and the Scottish Government publish fire safety guidance for non-domestic premises. The National Careers Service describes the role and the routes into it, and ISO 41001 is available from BSI.

If you are writing a facilities manager job description, or starting in the role, check that you know:

• every building and service you are responsible for, and those you are not;
• who the legal duty holders are, and which of their duties you carry out;
• the compliance calendar for each building, and who owns each line of it;
• which services are in-house and which are contracted, and how each contract measures performance;
• where each routine check is recorded, and how you would see that it was missed;
• how faults are reported, and how you know each one is closed;
• the budget, the capital plan, and what senior management expect to see from you and how often.