Designing for the person, not the process: Why user experience is the future of facilities management

By Jennifer L Bryan

At a recent Workplace Event, just after I stepped off stage following my keynote, a facilities manager made a beeline for me. Her question was direct and one I hear increasingly often: “How do I get my team to think differently and modernise how we deliver our services?”

It’s the right question. And my answer was simple: start with the user experience. Not the process, not the SLA, not the asset register. The experience. What do you want people to think and feel when they interact with your services, your operations, your spaces?

The Disconnect at the Heart of FM

This question sits at the core of my work on leading change. In over 25 years of helping organisations like Microsoft, Barclays and Mott MacDonald navigate complex transformations, one truth has remained constant: change fails when leaders treat it as a process problem. It is not a process problem. It is a people problem, and people are driven by emotion.

Facilities management is no exception. A space can be clean, compliant and on-budget and still feel hostile, confusing, or simply unconsidered to the person using it. The gap between what FM delivers and what people actually experience is where the real opportunity lies. Closing it requires a shift in thinking that goes deeper than service redesign. It requires a change in culture and mindset.

A Lesson from a Country Pub

Let me share a story. One Sunday, I was out with my family at a lovely country pub with low beams, a log fire, and a menu on a chalkboard. It was charming in every respect, until I needed to use the ladies’ toilets.

Upon walking in, it became immediately clear those toilets had been designed by a man, for men.

Three things stood out. First, there was not a single hook or shelf in either cubicle and nowhere to hang a handbag. For anyone who has navigated a cubicle while clutching a bag, you will know the particular gymnastics this requires. Second, the toilet itself sat six to eight inches above the floor on which I was standing. What followed can only be described as an Olympic-standard squat. It was barely functional and absolutely undignified. Third, the toilet roll holder was fixed to the wall the wrong way round, meaning every time I reached for paper, the entire roll launched itself off the holder with the enthusiasm of something trying to make a break for Mediterranean Sea.

None of this was catastrophic. But the experience told me something important: whoever designed that space had never once paused to ask, “Who is actually going to use this, and what will their experience be?”

The FM Parallel

Versions of that absent thinking exist across the built environment every day. We see workplaces designed without adequate storage or ease of movement to different spaces, booking systems built for the administrator rather than the user and entrance lobbies that prioritise security theatre over a welcoming first impression. The common thread is always the same: decisions made without genuinely stepping into the shoes of the person on the receiving end.

This is precisely the pattern I see in organisations struggling with change more broadly. Leaders focus on the what of change, meaning the systems, the structures, and the deliverables, and overlook how it actually feels to the people living it. The result is resistance, disengagement and change that simply does not stick. The same principle applies in FM. When your team designs services, spaces and operations without considering the emotional reality of the user, you get the pub toilets: spaces that work on paper and frustrate in practice.

How to Start Thinking Differently

Making this shift does not require a complete overhaul. It requires asking better questions, earlier. Here are three to start with.

1. Define the experience before you define the solution. Before specifying a product or writing a brief, write down what you want the user to feel. Do you want them to feel welcomed, calm, trusted or unbothered? That emotional target should sit at the top of every brief as the starting point, not an afterthought.
2. Walk the experience yourself as a user, not as the expert. Use the toilets. Book the meeting room through the system your colleagues use. Report a fault via the helpdesk and wait for the response. The distance between FM’s perception of its service and the reality of using it is often startling and always illuminating.
3. Involve the people who actually use the spaces. Go beyond the annual satisfaction survey and bring people into the design process itself. Ask what frustrates them, ask what they wish existed and ask what would make their working day a little easier. The answers are rarely expensive to act on, and the goodwill generated by simply asking is considerable.

The Bigger Picture

The facilities managers who will lead in this era are those who stop thinking of themselves purely as service providers and start thinking like experience designers. They understand that the environments we manage are not emotionally neutral. They send a message and they shape how people feel about their work, their organisation and themselves.

That is not a soft idea. It is a strategic one and it is entirely consistent with what the evidence on leading change tells us: the organisations that succeed are those whose leaders pay attention to the human and emotional reality of the people they serve.

It starts with a question. Not “how do we deliver this?” but “what should this feel like?” Ask that question early, ask it often and please do check which way the toilet roll holder is facing.

Jennifer L. Bryan is a people-first change leader, global keynote speaker, and author with over 25 years’ experience helping organisations put people at the heart of change.