Sustainable facilities management (sfm): a review of practices and barriers

Abstract

Practicing sustainability helps Facilities Management (FM) professionals to re-position themselves from traditional FM to strategic support function. However embracing sustainability is a challenging task as FM scopes are firm specific and integrating sustainable practices are puzzling. Yet, incorporating sustainability into FM practice has a great potential and FM professionals are identified at the forefront in delivering sustainability. However, only few FM professionals are able to embrace the sustainability concept into their operations due to various reasons such as; lack of capability, knowledge and skills, financial support and support from government being the major barriers as per theory. Hence, this paper focusses on identifying current FM scope with possible sustainable practices and explores the existing barriers to practice sustainable facilities management (SFM). A critical literature review was carried out into materials published in referred journals, conference papers and books etc. The findings revealed that, FM scope could be expanded among 15 support services among which building services and management, and real estate management were most commonly cited. In addition, SFM practices were identified in terms of achieving economic, environment and social sustainability. Accordingly, economic sustainability contains 2 strategies and 8 practices whileenvironment sustainability and social sustainability consist of 3 strategies and 11 practices, and 4 strategies and 15 practices respectively. The review further indicated that 32 barriers existing to practice SFM. This showcase that FM professionals need to focus on identifying firm specific FM scope and its sustainable practices by improving their capabilities.