Workplace Management

Workplace management studies the occupied environment as an operational whole: workplace allocation, the configuration of settings, day-to-day workplace provisions, and how these provisions match work patterns. The field sits between strategy (which concept) and delivery (whether the concept works day to day).

Workplace management partly overlaps with FM and partly sits within it, depending on organisational structure: in some organisations it is a separate function between HR, IT and FM; in others it is fully housed within FM. Knowing the discipline in its own right stops FM from treating workplace questions purely as an extension of space management, when there is also a behavioural and policy component.

• Who owns workplace policy, and where does that end and pure space management begin?
• Does the workplace provision match the actual work pattern, or the assumed one?

• CoreNet Global and IFMA research on workplace practice.
• Workplace management scholarship from the Nordic and Anglo-Saxon traditions.

• Workplace policy should have an owner spanning HR, IT and FM, otherwise every friction point lands on FM without the corresponding mandate.

• Space and workplace management
• Workplace experience & hospitality

• Translating work patterns into workplace provision

• Demand organisation

  Workplace policy fits naturally with the demand organisation's client role, not with delivery-side oversight.

[Content pending]

The standards section arrives in Part 7.

• Workplace management conflated with office fit-out, when the discipline also covers policy, behaviour and governance.

Hybrid work has blurred the line between workplace policy and HR policy (where someone may work, when presence is required), without a shared framework for who sets that policy.

• CoreNet Global, workplace strategy and workplace research.