Today's financial and professional services organisations face mounting pressure to reduce costs, attract and retain talent, improve customer experience and adapt to new ways of working. The workplace sits at the centre of these priorities, yet many organisations still struggle to unlock its full value.
Our Facilities Management Outlook: Financial and professional services report reveals a striking contradiction. While 85% of leaders believe the workplace has a significant impact on business performance, 57% identify cost optimisation as their highest workplace priority. This disconnect creates what we describe as the workplace performance gap.
Download the full report to explore the findings.
Leaders increasingly recognise that the workplace influences productivity, collaboration and employee experience. However, investment decisions continue to prioritise short-term efficiency over long-term performance. This does not mean organisations undervalue the workplace. Instead, economic pressure often limits investment, preventing workplace strategies from evolving beyond incremental improvements.
The result is a workplace that supports day-to-day operations but rarely delivers its full strategic potential.
Our research identifies three structural barriers that continue to hold organisations back.
Cost optimisation is the leading strategic priority, and 67% of leaders say economic pressure and cost cutting is the most significant disruptive force affecting their organisation. Cost gravity is the tendency for financial pressure to pull decisions towards short-term optimisation instead of long-term transformation.
The reason is straightforward – without reliable workplace data, organisations struggle to demonstrate how digital investments improve productivity, service quality or employee experience. Without evidence, investment is delayed, creating a cycle that reinforces the gap.
The findings suggest that organisations making the greatest progress are changing how they view facilities management. Rather than treating it as a collection of operational services, they are using IFM (integrated facilities management) to support wider business objectives.
This means:
The workplace becomes more than a cost to manage. It becomes an enabler of business performance.
Closing the workplace performance gap requires more than additional investment. It requires better alignment between workplace strategy, operational delivery and data.Organisations that achieve this move beyond cost optimisation alone. They create workplaces that improve productivity, strengthen employee experience and support long-term business performance.
IFM has a critical role to play by bringing together services, technology and governance within a single operating model, helping organisations translate workplace ambition into measurable outcomes.
The Facilities Management Outlook: Financial and professional services report draws on insights from 933 leaders across 489 organisations. It explores the workplace performance gap in detail and provides practical guidance on how organisations can overcome structural barriers and unlock greater workplace performance.