What 14 Industry Polls Reveal
About Facilities Management Today
Over the 2025 Christmas period, MCP Consulting Group ran a series of fourteen short polls across the facilities management community.
The aim was simple: to explore the challenges that FM teams are currently facing in day-to-day operations and strategic delivery.
“The Fourteen Polls of Christmas – Facilities Management Report.”
While each poll focused on a specific topic, from asset information and maintenance planning to compliance and performance monitoring, the results collectively tell a broader story about the way many facilities management organisations are operating today.
The findings have now been brought together in our new report:
A Sector Working Hard — But Often Reactively
Taken together, the poll results paint a consistent picture.
Across many organisations, facilities management teams are working hard to deliver safe, compliant and reliable operations. However, the underlying operating model is frequently more reactive than strategic.
As the report summary explains, many organisations have the tools, data and processes in place, but these elements are not always functioning as an integrated system.
This leads to several familiar challenges:
Asset data that is incomplete or poorly structured
Maintenance plans driven by legacy tasks rather than strategy
Reactive work dominating maintenance schedules
Performance data that exists but is not consistently used
Improvement activity that fails to embed long-term learning
In many cases, individuals compensate for these structural gaps through experience and effort — but this approach is difficult to sustain.
Key Findings from the Polls
Some of the poll results were particularly striking.
Asset Information
The most common challenge reported was incomplete or outdated asset data, cited by 43% of respondents.
Maintenance Scheduling
Perhaps the most revealing result came from the maintenance scheduling poll, where 100% of respondents stated that reactive work dominates their schedules.
Work Management
Two-thirds of respondents highlighted weak work close-out discipline as their biggest challenge, limiting learning and confidence in performance reporting.
Data and Insight
While systems and data often exist, 75% reported that information is rarely used to inform decisions.
Continuous Improvement
Every respondent indicated that lessons are not consistently embedded, meaning similar issues often recur.
These results suggest that many FM organisations are not lacking activity, they are lacking alignment across the system.
Connecting the Results to the MCP FM Operating Framework
When viewed individually, each of the poll results may appear to represent a specific operational issue.
However, when mapped against MCP’s Facilities Management Operating Framework, a wider pattern emerges.
The framework brings together the key elements required for effective facilities management, including:
· Asset Inventory
· Maintenance Planning
· Maintenance Scheduling
· Work Management
· Compliance and Risk Management
· Data and Performance Monitoring
· Financial Management
· Continuous Improvement
These elements are supported by the three core pillars of:
People – Process – Performance
When these elements are aligned, facilities management can move from reactive problem solving towards structured, proactive asset management.
The poll results suggest that in many organisations this balance has become disrupted, with gaps in data, planning, governance and ownership increasing reliance on individual effort.
Why This Matter for FM Leaders
Facilities management environments are becoming more complex.
Compliance expectations are rising, assets are ageing, and operational resilience is under increasing scrutiny. In this context, the ability to connect strategy, data and operational delivery becomes critical.
Improvement rarely comes from fixing one isolated issue. More often, it comes from strengthening alignment across the entire FM operating model.
That is precisely the purpose of MCP’s FM Operating Framework.
The Fourteen Polls of Christmas report explores the results in more detail and provides commentary on how these insights relate to the FM Operating Framework.
Explore the FM Operating Framework
If you would like to understand how these findings relate to a structured facilities management operating model, you can explore our framework here:
If you would like to explore how your facilities management operating model compares or how greater alignment across people, process and performance can be achieved, our team would be pleased to discuss how independent insight can support sustainable improvement.
