The latest IWFM Market Outlook highlights a growing challenge for facilities management organisations. Rising costs, constrained budgets and ongoing skills shortages are making it harder to deliver more with existing resources. As recruitment pressures continue, the question is no longer how to get people to work harder. It’s how to help skilled workers achieve more by removing operational inefficiencies around them.
The Growing Pressure on Facilities Management Teams
The 2026 IWFM Market Outlook paints a difficult picture for facilities management: constrained budgets, rising costs and continued difficulty accessing skilled workers.
But when recruiting more people isn’t the answer, FM leaders need to ask another question: how much of the skilled capacity they already have is being lost to the way work is planned and delivered?
Budgets have failed to keep pace with inflation for the third consecutive year. Just 38% of respondents reported an increase in budgets, while 72% experienced increased employment costs and 83% saw the cost of supplies rise. At the same time, 64% identified the availability of skilled workers as having had a negative impact on the FM market.
It is a sobering picture.
But perhaps the most important question isn’t simply how FM absorbs those pressures.
It’s how the sector adapts to them.
Why “Doing More With Less” Has Reached Its Limit
One comment in the IWFM discussion gets right to the heart of the problem: facilities managers have long been expected to “do more with less”, but there is only so much “less” an organisation can practically deal with.
That matters when the availability of skilled people is already constraining the sector.
And yet, just as that pressure intensifies, IWFM’s research identifies a fall in the proportion of organisations increasing investment across technology, skills and training, workspace and carbon reduction solutions.
That creates a danger. If organisations respond to uncertainty by simply reducing investment, they risk placing even greater pressure on an already stretched workforce. The alternative is to think differently about productivity.
Not: how do we get people to work harder?
But: how do we remove the inefficiency surrounding them so the people we already have can achieve more? That distinction should become central to the FM industry’s response to today’s labour challenge.
When Resources Are Limited, Workforce Optimisation Matters
For Totalmobile, workforce productivity isn’t about squeezing more from frontline teams. It’s about making better use of the capacity already there. That means understanding demand, skills, location and availability, and matching the right work with the right person at the right time. It means reducing avoidable downtime and unnecessary travel. And it means giving frontline employees the information they need to execute work effectively while providing managers with real-time operational visibility.
Those principles are already at the heart of Totalmobile’s FM proposition. Dynamic scheduling uses skills, location and priority to assign work and respond to changing demand, while mobile execution and real-time data provide greater visibility of field performance. It’s a particularly important distinction when headcount cannot simply keep growing.
Totalmobile’s proposition is explicitly designed around increasing workforce efficiency by maximising operative output and enabling organisations to achieve more with their existing workforce without increasing headcount. That makes digital transformation less about replacing people with technology and more about making scarce skills go further.
The Technology Investment Contradiction
Perhaps the most revealing finding in the IWFM Industry Report concerns technology.
Despite investment momentum slowing, 68% of respondents identified technology as having a positive impact. The panel highlighted this as an unusually high figure and an important contradiction: organisations are investing less at a time when many acknowledge technology is delivering a positive impact.
That should give FM leaders pause for thought. In an uncertain economic environment, delaying transformation can feel like the prudent decision. But postponing investment doesn’t remove operational inefficiency. It can mean continuing to absorb the cost of inefficient schedules, unnecessary travel, fragmented systems, manual processes and limited visibility.
So perhaps technology needs to stop being viewed solely as another line on the cost base. The investment case should start with the operational capacity it can release. The IWFM touched on precisely this point, arguing that better measurement and quantification of business value are needed to support investment cases.
Totalmobile’s FM proposition reflects the same principle. Its focus is on optimising workforce use by assigning the right tasks to the right people at the right time, while using real-time scheduling to accommodate change, reduce downtime and improve output.
Digital Transformation Must Go Beyond Digitisation
There is another challenge beneath the investment numbers. IWFM’s research continues to find evidence of “lag odds” around technology, while the discussion highlighted uncertainty about the potential impact of AI, digitalisation and wider technological change.
Buying technology is not, by itself, transformation. The real opportunity lies in connecting work across the operation.
Demand enters the business. Work is prioritised. Resources are intelligently matched. Frontline teams receive what they need to deliver it. Data comes back from the field. Managers gain insight into performance and use it to continuously improve what happens next.
Plan. Do. Review. And then improve.
That connected approach is reflected in Totalmobile’s Field First platform, which brings capabilities, insights and analytics together and connects stages of service delivery through an integrated experience.
The distinction is important. Digital transformation shouldn’t simply make an existing process digital. It should make the operation better.
Turning Operational Data Into Better Decisions
IWFM’s call for greater organisational insight and agility also closely aligns with this.
The webinar discussion argued that FM providers have an opportunity to use their operational data to demonstrate value, providing empirical evidence and analysis that help customers make decisions.
The panel went further, discussing the amount of data available across facilities operations and the opportunity to turn that data into usable intelligence and identify trends.
For FM providers, that’s potentially a significant shift. Real-time operational insight can help organisations understand workforce utilisation, resource requirements and service delivery rather than relying solely on what has already happened. Totalmobile’s proposition similarly connects real-time data with decisions concerning asset maintenance, workforce productivity and strategic planning.
The aspiration shouldn’t simply be more data. It should be better decisions, made sooner.
The Cost of Standing Still
The IWFM report is appropriately titled around “headwinds and hard choices”. The pressures it’s describing are very real. But one of those hard choices is what happens to technology investment when budgets tighten.
There is a natural temptation to wait for greater certainty. For facilities organisations dealing with higher costs, constrained budgets and limited skilled-worker availability, however, waiting carries its own cost.
Technology cannot create skilled people where they don’t exist. What it can do is help organisations make substantially better use of the people, time and operational information they already have.
That is why we believe the next phase of digital transformation in FM needs to focus relentlessly on outcomes: greater resource utilisation, more productive field teams, less wasted travel and downtime, stronger operational visibility and better-informed decisions.
For an industry being asked once again to do more with less, perhaps the answer isn’t simply to do more. It’s to work differently.
