Facilities and workplace

Facilities is invisible when it works and is the loudest topic in the company when it does not. It is also, after payroll, frequently the largest fixed commitment a business makes.

Occupational health and safety, accessibility, and building compliance are legally regulated and vary by jurisdiction — and in the United States by state as well as federally. This structures the decision and names what to ask; it is not a substitute for qualified advice or a licensed inspection.

Space follows how people actually work

Plan from observed attendance, not from headcount or from policy. A hybrid organization with a three-day expectation does not need desks for everyone, and does need more of the rooms people compete for — small meeting spaces and focus rooms, which are chronically undersupplied because they are easy to convert into desks.

Measure before committing: actual peak occupancy by day, room utilization, and what people leave the building to do. Most offices are simultaneously too large in aggregate and too small on Wednesday.

Leases are the commitment nobody models

A lease is a multi-year fixed obligation signed on a headcount forecast that will be wrong. Treat it as the capital decision it is — finance:capital-allocation for the appraisal, legal-risk:contract-review for the terms.

The terms that matter later: break clauses and what they cost, expansion and contraction rights, what "restore to original condition" obliges you to spend at exit, and who pays for what when the building fails. Dilapidations at lease end routinely surprise organizations that never read the clause.

Health, safety, and the duty of care

The obligation follows the worker, not the building. Home workers, field staff and contractors are in scope in most jurisdictions, which organizations discover late.

Keep the fundamentals current and evidenced: risk assessments, fire and evacuation, first aid, accident recording, and the statutory inspections the building requires. Evidence produced as a by-product of doing the work survives scrutiny; evidence assembled after an incident does not.

Physical access control sits with security:access-and-identity for policy; site incidents that disrupt operations escalate to operations:business-continuity-and-resilience.

Office services, and what is worth funding

Services are judged on whether they remove friction, not on generosity. Reliable connectivity, rooms that work on the first attempt, and somewhere to take a call beat perks that photograph well.

Absorbs the administrative-services function — mail, reception, supplies, workplace vendors — which sits here rather than as a separate department, alongside operations:vendor-management for the suppliers delivering it.

Sources

references/sources.md in this skill lists the outside authorities that settle the questions here — what each one is authoritative for, and what you may do with it. Check them before answering on anything they cover, and cite what you used. Most are free to read and not free to reproduce; the use note on each is binding.

Never

• Size space from headcount rather than observed occupancy.
• Sign a lease without modeling the exit and the dilapidations.
• Treat health and safety as applying only to the office.
• Fund visible perks while rooms and connectivity fail daily.