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Life sciences organisations know that facilities directly influence performance. The challenge is ensuring investment, operating models and specialist capability keep pace with the demands of highly regulated environments.
Today’s life sciences organisations operate across complex portfolios of GMP-regulated manufacturing facilities, R&D laboratories and office environments. Each plays a different role in organisational performance, yet each requires its own balance of compliance, continuity, technical expertise and operational control.
Our Facilities Management Outlook: Life sciences report reveals a clear tension. While 88% of life sciences leaders say the workplace contributes significantly or to a great extent to overall performance, 64% identify cost optimisation and efficiency as their top strategic priority.
This creates what we describe as the performance gap: the disconnect between recognising facilities as a critical performance enabler and making the investment decisions needed to unlock their full value.
Download the full report to explore the findings.
When performance ambition meets cost pressure
In life sciences, organisations operate across three types of workplace environments: manufacturing, laboratories and offices. In manufacturing facilities, performance is measured through uptime, asset reliability and validated change. In laboratories, it is measured through continuity, scientist productivity and environment stability. In offices, it is linked to employee engagement, collaboration and talent retention.
This distinction matters because workplace value is often seen through the lens of compliance, resilience and operational control, rather than the specific outcomes each environment needs to deliver. As a result, facilities are often managed as controlled operational spaces rather than broader drivers of value.
The consequences of underperformance go beyond FM operations. They can affect production continuity, audit readiness, asset reliability and scientific productivity, meaning that facilities management is directly connected to business outcomes.
Three barriers preventing organisations from closing the gap
Our research identifies three structural barriers that continue to hold life sciences organisations back.
Cost gravity
Economic pressure is the strongest force shaping workplace decisions in life sciences. The vast majority of leaders (75%) identify economic pressure and cost cutting as the most significant disruptive force affecting their industry, which is the highest figure across the segments covered in our research.
This creates cost gravity: the tendency for financial pressure to pull decisions towards short-term optimisation, limiting investment in initiatives that could improve long-term outcomes such as talent retention, research productivity and manufacturing resilience.
For many life sciences organisations, cost optimisation is not simply about reducing spend. It is also a strategic necessity that can help safeguard competitiveness and release capital for R&D, innovation and product portfolio investment.
The execution gap
Life sciences organisations often know what needs to change but lack the specialist capability, continuity and resources to deliver it consistently. Across manufacturing and laboratory environments, execution depends on GMP-skilled technical expertise and science-aligned roles, which are scarce and critical to maintaining compliance, continuity and performance.
This capability constraint creates an execution gap, which slows progress, increases risk and limits the ability to implement improvement at scale, especially where change must be carefully controlled to protect quality and operational continuity.
The proof gap
Digitalisation and AI are major forces shaping the sector, with 44% of leaders identifying them as key disruptive forces. However, only 19% prioritise digitalisation and smart building technologies in FM.
In many organisations, digitalisation is already embedded in high-impact operational areas such as manufacturing systems and production control. The challenge is that workplace-focused digitalisation must demonstrate clear relevance to the specific environments.
To gain investment, digital initiatives need to show how they improve uptime, validation and asset performance in manufacturing facilities, support continuity and data integrity in laboratories or enhance collaboration, experience and space utilisation in offices.
Facilities management is becoming a performance assurance function
The findings suggest that life sciences organisations are reassessing how facilities services are delivered. There is growing interest in integrated service models that simplify governance, reduce fragmentation and give organisations access to specialist expertise while maintaining cost discipline.
This means facilities management must move beyond efficiency alone and support outcomes such as:
- improving production continuity and throughput
- strengthening audit readiness and compliance confidence
- increasing asset reliability
- supporting scientific productivity
- improving talent retention
- enabling data-led performance improvement
.
When facilities management is aligned to the specific demands of manufacturing, laboratory and office environments, it becomes more than an operational support function. It becomes a foundation for safer, more compliant and more resilient performance.
Closing the life sciences performance gap
Closing the performance gap requires a shift in how facilities are understood and managed. Organisations need to connect cost discipline with performance outcomes, showing how investment in FM can support reliability, compliance, scientific output and operational capacity.
The organisations making progress are reframing cost as a result of better workplace performance, strengthening access to specialist capability and using data to demonstrate the relevance of workplace-focused digitalisation.
Integrated facilities management has a critical role to play by bringing together services, technical expertise, governance and data within a controlled operating model. This helps life sciences organisations move from reactive management to targeted, data-led performance improvement.
The Facilities Management Outlook: Life sciences report draws on insights from 473 respondents across 239 healthcare or life sciences companies. It explores the performance gap in detail and shows how life sciences organisations can align facilities management to the distinct demands of manufacturing, laboratory and office environments.
Download the full report to explore the findings.