In many organizations, Facilities Management (FM) is still seen as a cost center, focused on keeping lights on and buildings compliant. Yet the way facilities and assets are managed increasingly determines whether the business can resist shocks, protect people and data, and keep serving customers when things go wrong.
Recent industry research underlines this shift. JLL’s Global State of Facilities Management Report 2025 describes a “boiler room to boardroom” moment: FM is emerging as a strategic function that directly shapes operational resilience, occupant experience and long‑term enterprise value. Resilience is no longer abstract. It shows up in uptime, recovery times, and the ability to adapt buildings and infrastructure to climate, energy and market volatility.
This article outlines four practical ways facilities and asset management teams can become resilience engines for the business, and closes with a simple self‑assessment checklist.
Business continuity plans often live in documents owned by risk or IT teams. But in day‑to‑day operations, continuity is decided by whether critical assets and sites can keep running safely under stress. That includes power systems, HVAC, fire safety, elevators, production equipment,data rooms and service spaces.
At EU level, buildings account for around 43% of final energy consumption, which means they are a major source of both operational risk and decarbonisation opportunity. Energy performance, asset reliability and space usage are all intertwined. If energy infrastructure fails, if a critical chiller stops during a heatwave, or if maintenance backlogs accumulate in key sites, resilience is compromised long before any crisis plan is activated.
The first step in moving from “fixing things” to resilience is to understand which assets matter most for the continuity of the business.This goes beyond generic labels like “priority 1” and requires structured criticality criteria: impact on safety, impact on operations, impact on customers, impact on environment and compliance. Standards such as ISO 55001 explicitly encourage risk‑based asset management, where resources are prioritized according to the consequences of failure.
With a clear criticality map, FM teams can:
In practice, this might mean classifying a hospital’s main electrical panels and emergency generators as top‑critical, while decorative lighting remains low‑critical. In logistics, dock doors and sorting equipment would rank higher than non‑essential office HVAC. The point is to tie technical priorities to business impact, not to subjective urgency.
Decades of reliability and asset management practice show that relying mainly on corrective maintenance leads to higher lifecycle costs, more unplanned downtime and bigger safety risks. Preventive maintenance reduces the likelihood of failure, while predictive techniques - using sensors and data analytics - detect issues before they disrupt operations.
Industry bodies and government studies consistently highlight that planned, risk‑based maintenance is one of the most cost‑effective ways to improve reliability. When FM teams combine criticality mapping with preventive and predictive strategies, they can:
For example, rather than treating all rooftop units the same, a team can use historical fault data, runtime and energy consumption to identify which units are most likely to fail under heat stress, and tune maintenance plans accordingly.
Resilience is not just about avoiding outages; it is also about coping with energy and climate turbulence. In Europe, buildings remain among the largest energy consumers, and new directives aim to transform the building stock towards nearly zero‑energy and zero‑emission performance by 2030 and beyond. For facilities leaders, this creates a dual challenge: ensure uninterrupted operation while also cutting consumption and emissions.
A resilience‑oriented energy strategy typically includes:
Policy briefings on EU energy efficiency stress that renovation and better building operations can unlock significant energy savings in public and commercial buildings, with direct benefits for energy security and cost. Facilities teams are on the front line of that change.
Read our CSRD + ISO 55001 guide
Regulation is another dimension of resilience. Environmental, safety and asset‑management standards increasingly require organizations to document how they manage risks, maintain assets and report on energy and emissions. Under CSRD, for example, companies must disclose Scope 1, 2 and 3 greenhouse gas emissions and demonstrate credible plans to reduce them.
Facilities and asset teams hold critical data needed for these disclosures: energy use, equipment performance, refrigerant losses, maintenance history and more. When this information is fragmented in spreadsheets and local systems, responding to audits or investor questions becomes slow and error‑prone. When it is consolidated in a single asset and facilities management platform, organizations can:
Compliance then becomes more than a “tick‑box exercise”: it underpins a credible resilience narrative.
Facilities and asset management teams can use questions like these to assess where they stand:
If the answer to several of these questions is “not yet,” the upside is clear: there is significant room to strengthen resilience through better asset and facilities management.
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