Sector Insights: When the FM Moves On, What Stays Behind?
At the start of this year, I moved into a new role. Like anyone who has handed over a portfolio of buildings, I spent my last weeks in the old job doing the quiet, unglamorous work of making sure my successor wouldn’t have to start from zero. It got me thinking about something every Facilities Manager eventually confronts – the properties we manage will almost certainly outlast our time managing them.
Landlords change hands. Tenants sign five, ten, fifteen-year leases. Contractors can keep service agreements for a decade and FMs move on – to new roles, new organisations, sometimes new careers. With a general election ahead of us this year, it’s a timely reminder that a change of direction can happen, it is normal, even healthy, but it also carries a risk we don’t always talk about openly – when the person leaves, does the knowledge leave with them?
Ask any FM who has stepped into a new site and the answer is usually yes. The compliance history that lives in someone’s inbox. The reason a particular contractor was chosen, and the reason another wasn’t renewed. The near-miss that never made it into a report but has shaped how a system has been run ever since. When that knowledge isn’t captured, it doesn’t just get lost – it gets rediscovered, usually the hard way, through a repeated mistake, a missed renewal, or a failure that a predecessor already solved once.
That isn’t a reflection on any individual FM’s competence. If anything, it’s proof of how much value experienced Facilities Managers hold in their heads every single day – value that is currently invisible to the asset itself. The opportunity in front of our profession isn’t to work harder to hold on longer. It’s to build the kind of knowledge continuity that means a property keeps benefiting from our work long after we’ve handed over the keys.
This is where FMANZ’s strategic pillars – Advocacy, Engagement, and Technology, Change and Innovation – offer Facilities Managers a genuinely useful frame for thinking about legacy.
Engagement is where knowledge continuity starts. The strongest handovers I’ve seen weren’t documents – they were relationships: an outgoing FM who walked their successor through the site in person, introduced them properly to key contractors, and left the door open for a genuine question in month three, not just day one. Engaging well with tenants, contractors and colleagues throughout a tenure – not just at the point of departure – is what turns isolated knowledge into shared knowledge, so it doesn’t rest on one person’s memory alone.
Technology, change and innovation give that shared knowledge somewhere durable to live. A living asset register, a well-maintained property management system, a digital twin, or even a disciplined shared drive with a clear naming convention – these are what let institutional memory survive a change of personnel. The goal isn’t more software for its own sake; it’s making sure that when someone asks, “why does this building work the way it does?”, the answer sits with the property, not just with whoever happens to be managing it that week.
Advocacy is where this becomes bigger than any one building. Every time we build systems that make our knowledge durable, we’re making the case – to landlords, to boards, to the wider property sector – that facilities management is a professional discipline, not a caretaking role that resets with every new hire. That’s a powerful argument for why FM deserves a seat at the table early in development, why it deserves proper investment, and why our profession’s contribution to a building’s performance, sustainability and safety compounds over time rather than restarting with every departure.
There’s real, practical value on the line here. Compliance histories that transfer cleanly protect landlords and tenants alike. Sustainability initiatives that survive a change of manager keep delivering on their targets instead of stalling. Health and safety knowledge that’s documented, not just remembered, protects people regardless of who’s on site. And costs stay down when the same problem doesn’t have to be solved twice.
So as we think about what good transitions look like, it’s worth asking the question of our portfolios. Not “what will I be remembered for?” but “what will keep working after I’m gone?”
It’s not one of the most professional things a Facilities Manager can aim for however it’s exactly the kind of legacy our industry, and the people who rely on the places we manage, deserve.
Stuart Bryant, FMANZ Northern Region Board Member
