Success Factors and Barriers for Facility Management in Keeping Nearly-Zero-Energy Non-Residential Buildings Energy-Efficient over Time

Abstract

Energy efficiency is a cornerstone of climate change mitigation. For buildings, facility management is an essential part of achieving efficient energy use while keeping tenants satisfied. This interview study explores success factors and barriers for facility management in maintaining energy efficiency over time in four approximately 10-year-old non-residential premises built as so-called nearly zero-energy buildings (nZEB) in Sweden. The study highlights the importance of functional digital tools, benchmarks, and building professionals’ involvement in ensuring energy efficiency. It also emphasizes the need for involvement communication and strategies to engage facility management in energy efficiency efforts. The study suggests that in-house and public policies can play a crucial role in sustaining high ambitions for energy efficiency. Access to professional support that is self-evident to use is identified as a critical success factor. Additionally, the research presents an analytic model that can be used in future studies to assess facility management organizations’ potential for maintaining energy performance in buildings over time.

Workplace Energy Culture Framework: A Mixed Methods Study Examining Differences in Energy Use and Behaviours within an Industrial Workplace

“…In addition to the literature that focuses on either the employee or the organisation, there is a body of work that focuses on the barriers to energy efficiency and maintaining energy efficiency (e.g., [33,34,[46][47][48][49][50][51][52]). A lot of this work focuses on the workplace as a whole, often focusing on technical barriers, with little or no focus on the barriers associated with improving efficiency at an employee level.…”

“…Focusing on the organisation, there are a variety of barriers to pro-environmental behaviours, such as a non-green internal culture, non-authentic goals, lack of autonomy and exemplary role models, lack of support and the influence of wider colleagues and supervisors, lack of communication [33,47,51], lack of internal resource or low capacity of facilities management [47,51] and lack of policy drivers [33,47]. Several of these barriers can be associated with the influence of subjective norms.…”