Two numbers landed in my feed this month and I haven’t been able to put them down.
The first: 51% of facilities organizations report staff shortages. The second: 42% say they have a genuine skills gap — and the single most common gap named was compliance and safety expertise. That’s from SFG20’s State of Facilities Management 2026 report, and it lines up with what IFMA and the Simplar Foundation found in their own inaugural FM Index: a workload index reading of +43 on a scale that tops out at 100, meaning the clear majority of us expect the pile to get heavier, not lighter. The average facilities position now takes close to four months to fill.
Read those together and the picture is blunt. More work, fewer hands, longer waits to backfill, and the scarcest skill of all is the one that keeps people safe and keeps you out of a courtroom.
If you manage a building right now, none of that is news. You’re living it. So let me skip the hand-wringing and say the thing I actually believe: you will not hire your way out of this, and waiting to be rescued by a bigger headcount is the most expensive plan on the table.
The trap has a name
The SFG20 report names the failure mode precisely, and it’s worth quoting the idea because it’s the whole ballgame: understaffed teams drift into “fix-on-fail.” You stop maintaining and start reacting. The preventive work — the inspection, the filter, the belt, the panel check — keeps getting bumped because something is always on fire, sometimes literally.
Here’s why that’s a trap and not just a bad week. Reactive facilities work is the most expensive kind there is. The deferred repair you skipped in July because you were short two people becomes the emergency you’re paying triple for in December — overtime, emergency vendor rates, collateral damage, and the operational disruption of a system going down at the worst possible time. Every hour you lose to fix-on-fail makes you more understaffed for the preventive work that would have stopped the next failure. The backlog compounds like debt. And debt doesn’t care that you were busy.
So the real question isn’t “how do I get more people?” It’s “how do I keep a thin team from sliding into the reactive spiral while I work the longer game on hiring?” That’s a stewardship question, and I built a facilities department from zero, so I’ve had to answer it with the hours I actually had, not the ones I wished for.
Protect the hours you already have
You can’t manufacture staff. You can refuse to let your limited hours leak away. Four moves, straight from the Steward Blueprint pillars, in the order I’d run them:
1. Triage by consequence, not by noise (Proactive Planning + Life Safety Traceability). When you’re short-handed, the loudest request wins by default — and the loudest request is almost never the most important one. Fix that. Rank your assets by what happens if they fail. Life-safety systems and mission-critical equipment get maintained on schedule no matter what the week looks like. Everything else gets queued honestly. A short-staffed team that still hits every fire, electrical, and life-safety interval is doing the job. A fully-staffed team that lets those slip while chasing cosmetic tickets is not.
2. Make your documentation so tight nothing gets done twice or forgotten once (Documentation Integrity). This is the cheapest capacity you will ever find. On a thin team, the most wasteful thing that happens isn’t the work — it’s the re-work: the task nobody logged so it got done again, the inspection somebody “was pretty sure” happened, the vendor visit no one can prove. Every action stamped, attributed, and filed the day it happens. That single habit recovers hours you didn’t know you were losing and — not incidentally — it’s exactly the compliance-and-safety discipline the whole industry just admitted it’s short on.
3. Let preventive maintenance do the labor of the people you don’t have (Proactive Planning). A preventive schedule is a force multiplier. One planned filter change prevents a failed unit, an emergency call, and a day of firefighting. When you’re understaffed, PM isn’t the thing you cut to free up time — it’s the thing that frees up time by keeping small problems from becoming budget lines. Cutting PM to survive the week is eating your seed corn.
4. Turn the gap into a budget conversation leadership can actually hear (Fiscal Accountability). Here’s the encouraging half of the data: 43% of organizations named staff training and development as their top area for increased budget. Leadership is more willing to invest here than you might assume — but only if you speak their language. Don’t walk in asking for “another tech.” Walk in with the risk, the cost, and the ROI: here is the compliance exposure we carry with our current coverage, here is what a failure in this system costs, here is what a modest investment in training or a targeted hire buys down. You don’t need a national platform to build that case. You need clean records — which loops right back to the pillar above.
The part that’s easy to miss
Stewardship gets quoted as “doing more with less,” and I’ve come to dislike that phrase. It makes a virtue out of being under-resourced, and it lets the people who set the budget off the hook.
Here’s what I mean instead. Stewardship is designing your operation so that the most important things never fall through — even on your worst-staffed week. It’s the difference between a team that reacts to whatever’s loudest and a team that has already decided, on a calm day, what will never be allowed to slip. The understaffing is real and I’m not going to pretend a system fixes it. But a well-built system decides where the shortage shows up. Poorly run, the gap shows up in a missed fire inspection or a failed panel. Run well, it shows up in a repainted hallway that waited a month. One of those is a liability. The other is Tuesday.
Half of us are understaffed. That’s the environment now, and probably for a while. So build for it. Protect the hours you have, document like it matters, let preventive work carry the load, and make the case for investment in the only language that moves a budget.
The headcount may or may not come. The standards don’t wait for it either way.
If you had to fully protect one system this quarter — the one that never slips no matter how thin the week gets — which would it be? I’d genuinely like to know what tops your list.
— Donnie Moore — FMP — MaintenanceOps App
Strategy | Stewardship | Facilities Leadership
Stay excellent. Stay humble. Keep building.