Facility manager duties: what the role covers in New Zealand, and how to show it is done

01

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

The Facilities Management Association of New Zealand (FMANZ) puts it simply in A career in facilities management: "facilities managers look after buildings once they're built", overseeing "the strategic and operational management of facilities to ensure our public spaces and workplaces are safe, healthy, sustainable, productive and fit-for-purpose." The government's careers service, Tahatū, describes the Facilities manager, Kaiwhakahaere whakaurunga role in one line: facilities managers "manage buildings and facilities to ensure they are safe and fit for purpose."

Where a building manager usually answers for one building, often for a landlord or a body corporate, a facilities manager more often works for the organisation that occupies the buildings, such as a council, a school, a hospital or a company with offices across the country, and looks after a set of services across several sites. FMANZ notes that many do the work under other titles, from operations manager and facilities officer to head of facilities and contract manager, and job advertisements use facility manager and facilities manager for the same role.

No Act describes the job. A facilities manager carries out duties the law gives to their organisation or to the building owner. The main ones are:

• The Health and Safety at Work Act 2015 (HSWA). Section 36 gives every person conducting a business or undertaking (PCBU) the primary duty of care: to ensure, so far as is reasonably practicable, the health and safety of its workers and that other people are not put at risk by its work. Section 37 adds a duty on a PCBU that manages or controls a workplace, covering the workplace itself and the means of entering and leaving it. Section 30 says how risks are managed: eliminated so far as is reasonably practicable, and if they cannot be, minimised. Section 34 requires PCBUs with overlapping duties to consult, cooperate and coordinate.
• The Building Act 2004: for any building with specified systems, such as sprinklers, fire alarms, emergency lighting, lifts and backflow preventers, the council-issued compliance schedule, the procedures it lists, and the owner's BWoF every 12 months.
• The Fire and Emergency New Zealand (Fire Safety, Evacuation Procedures, and Evacuation Schemes) Regulations 2018 and the Fire and Emergency New Zealand Act 2017: an evacuation procedure for most buildings used by the public and, under section 75 of the Act, an approved evacuation scheme for a relevant building, such as one where 10 or more people work or 100 or more can gather.
• The Health and Safety at Work (Asbestos) Regulations 2016: WorkSafe's guidance on managing asbestos in your building or workplace says PCBUs "must identify asbestos material in their building or workplace and develop an asbestos management plan", and that buildings built before 1 January 2000 are likely to contain it.

WorkSafe's What is the primary duty of care page includes safe plant and structures (buildings are its first example of a structure) and "adequate facilities (that are clean, safe, accessible, in good working order and maintained to stay that way) for the welfare of workers". Much of that is the facilities manager's daily work: a safe and healthy working environment for everyone who uses the building.

02

The key duties of a facilities manager

Facilities manager job descriptions in New Zealand vary with the organisation, but the same responsibilities come up again and again. Tahatū's tasks include managing buildings so they are safe, overseeing maintenance and compliance, managing health and safety risks, planning for future needs and growth, monitoring heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems, monitoring building functions using technology, and preparing and managing operational budgets. With FMANZ's description of the role, the duties are:

• Health and safety: identifying and managing the risks in the buildings and the work done in them, contractor control, the emergency plan, and making sure a notifiable event is notified to WorkSafe.
• Building compliance: knowing which specified systems each building has, engaging independent qualified persons (IQPs), making sure the owner's own checks on the compliance schedule are done, and that the BWoF is issued, sent to the council and displayed on time.
• Fire safety and emergencies: the evacuation scheme and its trial evacuations, fire wardens, and the response to earthquakes, floods, power and water outages and lift entrapments.
• Maintenance: building maintenance, from planned preventative maintenance of plant, services and building fabric to reactive repairs when something fails.
• Services: FMANZ includes overseeing cleaning and maintenance contracts, and security, catering and vehicle fleets.
• Contractors and procurement: specifying services, running tenders, managing contracts and checking that what was paid for was delivered.
• Budgets: operating budgets, the running cost of each building, long-term capital plans for plant, buildings and other assets, and explaining where the money went.
• Space, sustainability and continuity: planning how office and other workspace is used, energy efficiency, water and waste, and planning, in FMANZ's words, "for business continuity during emergencies and natural disasters".
• Reporting: telling senior management whether the estate is safe, compliant and on budget, and giving them what they need to make decisions about what it needs next.

In a small organisation one person does all of this with a few contractors; in a large one, the facilities manager leads coordinators, site staff and a helpdesk across multiple sites, often a portfolio of buildings in different regions. Either way, the aim is buildings that run smoothly, so the organisation's employees can get on with their own work.

03

Whose duty it is: the PCBU, the officers, the owner and the contractors

A facilities manager needs to know, for each duty, who holds it in law. That is rarely the facilities manager in their own name.

• The PCBU is the business or organisation. It holds the primary duty of care and, where it manages or controls the workplace, the workplace duty. The facilities manager is one of its workers, with a worker's own duty of reasonable care.
• Officers, such as directors and the chief executive, must exercise due diligence under section 44 of HSWA to make sure the PCBU meets its duties. WorkSafe's Introduction to the Health and Safety at Work Act 2015 special guide says that health and safety managers, team leaders, line managers and supervisors are not officers unless they also hold a specified position or exercise significant influence over the management of the business. Most facilities managers advise the officers; the reports they write are part of how officers meet their duty.
• The building owner holds the Building Act duties: the compliance schedule, the IQPs, the Form 12A certificates and the BWoF. In a leased building the facilities manager works with the landlord's property manager on these.
• Contractors are PCBUs with their own duties. WorkSafe's Property management FAQs say that where more than one business is involved, "you all must work together, so far as is reasonably practicable, by consulting, cooperating, and coordinating your activities".

Outsourcing moves the work, not the duty. The special guide is plain that "PCBUs cannot contract out of their duties, but can enter reasonable agreements with other PCBUs to meet their duties", and "the PCBUs should also monitor each other to ensure everyone is doing what they agreed." WorkSafe's Overlapping duties quick guide lists where the gaps come from, including when "a business assumes another business is taking care of a particular health and safety issue" and when businesses "do not know what other work is happening and when". See the guide to overlapping duties for how to agree them.

Write down, for each site and service, who does the work, who checks it, where the record is kept and who is told when it goes wrong. The gaps are where compliance failures start.

04

The working week and the compliance year

Day to day, the work is service delivery: walking sites, dealing with faults, meeting contractors, approving quotes and answering the organisation's requests. Behind that sits a calendar of fixed obligations:

• The compliance schedule: MBIE's page on inspection and maintenance of specified systems says "A building owner may be responsible for undertaking some less complex and more frequent inspection tasks", while most specified systems need at least an annual IQP inspection, some six-monthly or quarterly. MBIE's Managing your BWoF page says inspection frequency "might be weekly, monthly, 6 monthly or annually".
• The BWoF: renewed every 12 months, with each IQP's Form 12A attached, supplied to the council and displayed where all building users can see it.
• Trial evacuations: at the frequency set in the approved evacuation scheme. Fire and Emergency's page Maintain your scheme (trial evacuations and training programmes) says the period "must not be greater than six months", and that a report goes to Fire and Emergency within 10 working days, including after an unplanned evacuation such as a false alarm.
• The emergency plan: WorkSafe's guidance on workplace emergency plans says plans "should be tested at least yearly".

If a procedure on the compliance schedule is missed, there is no catching up later. MBIE says "The Building Act does not provide any flexibility or exemptions": an IQP cannot issue a Form 12A unless every procedure for that system was done, and the owner should instead issue a BWoF Report and Declaration (B-RaD), with an IQP's Specified System Report and Declaration (S-RaD) for each system affected, giving the reason it was missed and what will stop it happening again.

Health and safety law is changing too. WorkSafe's page Understanding the changes to health and safety law says that from 1 April 2027 businesses with fewer than 20 workers must manage critical risks ahead of other risks, and larger ones must give critical risks the highest priority.

05

Skills, qualifications and what good evidence looks like

There is no single route in. Tahatū says you usually learn on the job, and that experience in similar work, a Diploma or Graduate Diploma in Facilities Management or a relevant tertiary qualification, such as one in business and management or building and construction, may be useful, and that the job needs people who are organised, solve problems and communicate well; FMANZ notes that others come up from administration or the trades. FMANZ's Professional Competency Framework sets out 13 core competencies in three groups, technical, management and elective, from operations and maintenance, health and safety, and compliance and regulatory, to commercial acumen, teamwork, and procurement and contract management. FMANZ uses it to "benchmark core FM skills in order to set minimum standards and exemplars within the industry", and to assess its Certified members (CFMANZ).

Good evidence is not a thick folder. MBIE says the owner must keep "all records of inspection, maintenance and repairs undertaken for at least two years", with dates, work done, faults found, remedies and who did the work, stored with the compliance schedule, which may also require log books of inspections by the owner, tenants and maintenance staff. WorkSafe's special guide says records of notifiable events are kept for at least five years from the date the regulator was notified.

Beyond those, a facilities manager doing the job well can answer these quickly, with a record behind each answer, whatever tools or software hold it:

1. Which IQP inspections and owner's checks are due in the next three months at each site, and which were missed?
2. When is each BWoF due, and is the current one on display?
3. When was the last trial evacuation at each relevant building, and was it reported to Fire and Emergency?
4. Were last week's routine checks done in every building, and by whom?
5. Which faults are open, how old are they, and who owns each one?

06

Where the record fails, and what SiteClara does about it

A facilities manager usually has good records of what the IQPs certify and weak records of what happens every day. The owner's weekly checks are ticked on a sheet in the plant room, sometimes for the week ahead. The cleaners' sign-off sheets stay in their cupboard. A broken stairwell light is mentioned to whoever was passing and never reaches the contractor. Asked whether the routine checks were done at every site last month, the honest answer is often an assurance rather than a record.

SiteClara records routine work at the place it happens. A printed QR poster at each location, such as a washroom, plant room, stairwell 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 checks due there and mark each one done or say what stopped them, with a photo when one is asked for; the named person and the time are recorded as it happens. An issue reported at the location goes onto the team's list of open jobs until someone closes it, and a supervisor can escalate a job to the building manager.

Each day the supervisor sees what was due, done and missed, records why a check was missed, and approves a report that goes to the facilities manager and other nominated contacts the next morning: what was reported, what was completed, what is still open and how the scheduled checks went. Where a cleaning company and a security company work on the same site, each runs its own staff, forms and approval, and the facilities manager reads both.

07

Questions people ask

How much does a facilities manager earn in New Zealand?

Tahatū's Facilities manager job profile gives the most common pay as $60K to $103K a year before tax, with a lower range of $50K and an upper range of $133K. FMANZ's A career in facilities management says that, excluding bonuses, junior facilities managers with one to two years' experience can expect $55,000 to $75,000, mid-level ones with three to four years $70,000 to $100,000, and senior ones on average $100,000 to $150,000.

Is a facilities manager an officer under HSWA?

Usually not. WorkSafe's HSWA special guide says people who advise or make recommendations to senior leadership are not officers on that basis alone, and names health and safety managers, line managers and supervisors as examples, unless they also occupy a position that allows them to exercise significant influence over the management of the business. A facilities manager is a worker with their own duty of reasonable care, and the business remains the PCBU.

What are the core competencies of a facility manager?

In New Zealand, FMANZ's Professional Competency Framework sets out 13 core competencies in three groups. The technical ones are operations and maintenance, facilities management planning, health and safety, technology and innovation, and compliance and regulatory; the management ones are commercial acumen, strategy and leadership, and teamwork and communication; the elective ones are project management, property management, asset management, procurement and contract management, and environmental stewardship and sustainability.

08

Further reading, and a list to take away

For health and safety, start with the Health and Safety at Work Act 2015 and WorkSafe's Introduction to the Health and Safety at Work Act 2015 special guide. For buildings, MBIE's Managing your BWoF and Specified systems and compliance schedules pages. For fire, Fire and Emergency New Zealand's guidance on evacuation schemes. For the profession, FMANZ and Tahatū's facilities manager profile.

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

• every site and service you are responsible for, and those you are not;
• who the PCBUs are at each site, owner, tenants and contractors, and which of their duties you carry out;
• which buildings have a compliance schedule, which specified systems it lists, who the IQPs are and which checks your own team does;
• when each BWoF is due, and that the current one is displayed;
• which buildings need an evacuation scheme, and when the next trial evacuation is due;
• where each routine check is recorded, and how you would see that it was missed;
• what the officers expect to see from you, and how often.