Feature
The office is no longer a place, but a service that must compete with employees' home offices in experience, convenience and value. The shift has turned facilities management from a background function into a strategic imperative.
Office occupancy swings from 30% on shoulder days to 90% at peak times. Energy systems waste resources on empty floors or buckle under unexpected crowds. Conference rooms overflow on Thursdays but sit dark on Mondays. The technology built for predictable rhythm can't adapt. This isn't temporary. It's permanent.
The All-In-One Workplace Management Trap
The common Integrated Workplace Management System (IWMS) vendor pitch sounds compelling: one platform to unite IT, HR, facilities and security. Data silos dissolve. Integration headaches vanish.
Then implementation begins.
Envoy product manager Shirley Gao has watched this pattern repeat countless times. "All-in-one platforms try to cover too much, leading to feature overload and misaligned expectations across departments,” she said. “This results in systems that are 'ok, but not good' for any single team."
The economics make it worse. Most businesses already run on established systems, such as SAP for enterprise resources, ServiceNow for IT management, Okta for identity and BACnet and Honeywell for building controls. Migration means ripping out infrastructure that powers critical operations.
Even companies that complete migrations discover that data problems persist, Gao added. Modules acquired through acquisitions maintain their own data models. The interface looks unified, but is still fragmented underneath.
ISS Facility Services for North America CIO Alice Fournier sees this regularly. When the workforce came in on a regular schedule, workplace processes had a predictable cadence. That rhythm has disappeared. Legacy tools dominate, and the biggest challenge to IWMS adoption is integration across technology stacks unique to every workplace.
Most organizations underestimate the fragmentation of their building, HR and IT data, said Michael Pytel, who advises enterprises at VASS. Without a clean data foundation and governance, IWMS projects risk becoming another silo. Without experienced guidance, he warns, these projects often never leave the lab.
The technical obstacles are real. But the human ones are worse.
The Human Problem With IWMS
Today's teams have already chosen their tools and optimized their workflows. Designers standardize on Figma. Sales lives in HubSpot. Operations manages through Asana. Engineering builds in Linear. Forcing consolidation feels like control, not an improvement.
Engineering, facilities, HR and IT operate on different cycles, KPIs and budgets. Even using the same platform, they lack shared cadence to sustain consistent adoption. Migrating tools means relearning workflows, rewriting procedures and retraining vendors. "The psychological and political resistance is often stronger than the technical one," Gao said.
Power dynamics surface immediately. Who owns the data? Who manages permissions? Who controls the budget? Without executive sponsorship and aligned incentives, teams revert to familiar tools the moment pressure eases.
Simple integration tools can't bridge these gaps. Zapier automates trigger-action events, not stateful workflows. IWMS can't ensure consistency or security for functions such as visitor approval, badge printing and door unlock, it. For regulated environments requiring FedRAMP or SOC 2 compliance, multi-tenant SaaS tools fail basic data residency requirements.
The solution isn't fighting these realities. It's designing systems that accommodate them.
Building for Reality, not Aspiration
Gao advocates a different approach: "The future points toward Composable IWMS: ecosystems connected via APIs, webhooks, GraphQL or event buses."
Organizations that succeed with multi-tool environments define system boundaries. They establish "sources of truth" for different data types: Salesforce for accounts, for instance. They use middleware or event buses to sync critical states, not entire datasets. They establish data contracts so each team knows its accountability.
The practical implementations work today. Unified identity and access management supports one-click access across systems. Centralized notification hubs aggregate actions without merging backend data; Slack, Teams and Jira already support this. Data lakes with semantic layers unify analytics without touching transactional systems. API-first, event-driven architectures let systems interoperate through standardized interfaces.
Technology companies struggling with their own real estate challenges will focus on building IWMS tools with easy integrations, more use of AI and consumer-like interfacesThe winners won't be platforms that try to do everything, but systems that connect everything easily.
But to understand why this matters, you need to understand what employees expect from the office in the first place.
Competing Against the Commute
White-collar workers spent the pandemic upgrading their home setups with ergonomic chairs, multiple monitors, noise-canceling headphones and perfect lighting. They discovered productivity without commutes. Now companies compete against that comfort, and operational efficiency alone won't win.
"Workplaces looking to attract top talent need to provide elevated experiences that bring workers back in,” Fournier said. She's identified three areas that make offices more appealing:
- Physical experience. Badge in without friction. Visitors breeze through security. Digital wayfinding eliminates confusion. Book desks and rooms from your phone.
- Comfortable spaces. Natural light, outdoor access, managed temperature and noise levels. Cleanliness meets hospitality standards, not just industrial maintenance.
- Hotel-like services. Fresh food, quality coffee, dry cleaning pickup, package handling.
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Technologies connecting into the IWMS increasingly form the backbone of these experiences. "Workplace priorities are shifting from physical space management to experience management," Pytel said.
Olena Kuvarova, COO at Overcode, experienced this transformation when her team went hybrid. She installed monitoring systems to track office usage patterns. The data was stark: entire sections unused, day after day. Within months, she cut office space by 20% without affecting team comfort.
The office monitoring system now predicts peak days, sends notifications about available desks and tracks which amenities get used. "This turned IWMS into a tool that ensures financial accountability and transforms the office into a truly 'smart' asset,” she said.
The technology to deliver this vision already exists. Integration makes it possible.
Using Intelligence in Facilities Management
Fournier expects AI in maintenance, predictive capabilities and employee experience technology to reshape IWMS. Pytel sees AI, IoT sensors and predictive analytics as technologies that allow IWMS platforms to anticipate usage, automate maintenance and guide strategic planning.
Sensors predict when to turn off lights or schedule repairs before failures occur. Occupancy tracking adjusts climate control and analyzes meeting patterns to recommend space reconfigurations.
With workforce pattern data, IWMS delivers predictive energy management. Platforms now quantify energy consumption, space utilization and carbon footprint in real time, turning sustainability from an annual report metric into a daily operational decision.
Cloud architectures and open APIs make connecting IWMS with ERP systems easier than ever.
From Facilities Management to Workplace Intelligence
By 2034, IWMS will evolve from facility management tools to strategic workplace intelligence platforms, Pytel predicted. “They'll use real-time data to orchestrate resources, predict workforce needs and even model the impact of policy changes,” he said.
The systems won't just respond to requests, but will anticipate needs. Predictive models will suggest space reconfigurations before teams outgrow their areas.
AI will schedule maintenance based on usage patterns, weather and equipment age. Digital twins will simulate policy changes before implementation.
Fournier sees the market as ripe for disruption, particularly from technology companies solving their own real estate challenges. They'll bring consumer-grade expectations, AI-first architectures and integration-by-design philosophies.
The office isn't returning to what it was. Companies can fight that reality with all-in-one platforms that promise simplicity but deliver complexity and resistance. Or they can build for the workplace that actually exists, where work happens across multiple systems, distributed teams and competing priorities.
Editor's Note: Catch up on more considerations the return to office entails:
- How Your Workplace Can Keep – and Keep Up With – Tomorrow's Employees — Employees want not just pay, but clarity and work-life balance. If you want to keep your employees, you have to meet them where they are.
- Return to Office Myths, Realities and the Future of Work — It's time we have an honest and open conversation about the way we work, and it starts by unpacking some of the biggest RTO myths.
- How Companies Are Redesigning Their Offices for Better Collaboration — Old office designs don't always fit new ways of work. Here's how two companies rethought their spaces to accommodate employee needs and business demands.