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How Facilities Leaders Address Reliability and Training Gaps as Strategic Expectations Expand
As buildings take on greater strategic weight, Bernard Clement of Johnson Controls explains why facilities leaders are now responsible for risk, cost, and execution alignment.
Key Points
Facilities leaders face widening execution gaps as strategy, cost pressure, and risk expectations outpace training, data reliability, and on-the-ground capacity.
Bernard Clement, a Product Management executive at Johnson Controls, explains how facilities leadership has evolved into a risk role shaped by energy costs, shifting priorities, and operational reality.
He outlines a practical path forward built on retrofitting existing buildings, improving control strategies, aligning healthy building KPIs with energy goals, and tying facility decisions to core business risk.
It's usually pushed down from the leadership onto the organization. And sometimes those are topics that they've never heard about, and workers on the ground are left to educate themselves.
Facilities leadership has moved from the boiler room to the boardroom, but the operating model hasn’t caught up. Strategy now moves faster than facilities teams can realistically absorb it, compressing time for training, alignment, and real execution. Expectations keep stacking up, from healthy buildings to energy efficiency and decarbonization, while the people responsible for delivering it are asked to adapt in real time.
Bernard Clement brings a global operator’s perspective to the changing role of facilities leadership. A Product Management executive focused on Healthy Buildings at Johnson Controls, he has led major product initiatives and business across three continents. That experience puts him on the front lines of a shift where facilities teams are being asked to translate high-level strategy into real-world performance, often with little room for error.
"It's usually pushed down from the leadership onto the organization. And sometimes those are topics that they've never heard about, and workers on the ground are left to educate themselves," says Clement. As facilities take on a more strategic role, the burden of execution hasn’t shifted evenly. New priorities arrive with urgency, but education and operational readiness lag behind.
Sensing trouble: That pressure exposes a familiar fault line between promise and performance. Technology looks simple on a spec sheet, but reliability, data quality, and long-term support are harder problems once systems meet real operating conditions. "It’s really easy to put a sensor somewhere, but having a sensor that works 99% of the time, delivers consistent data, and is supported over the long term is a very different challenge," Clement says, pointing to similar issues with heat pumps, where success depends not just on the equipment but on trained installers and service teams that can respond when systems fail under extreme conditions.
From niche to need: The pandemic pulled healthy buildings out of obscurity and into the center of decision-making, forcing leaders to confront how directly buildings affect people. But that urgency didn’t last in isolation. As new risks surfaced, healthy buildings became one priority among many, competing with security, cost, and operational realities. "Before the pandemic, healthy building was on nobody’s radar. The pandemic put it front and center and made people realize that buildings impact people," Clement says, adding that priorities continue to shift as leaders are forced to weigh health initiatives against more immediate threats, such as physical security, where those trade-offs become unavoidable.
Power play: Cost ultimately anchors the conversation. As power demand accelerates, driven in part by the rapid expansion of energy-intensive data centers, facilities decisions are increasingly judged on ROI and utility spend rather than long-term ambition alone. "Decarbonization was front and center five years ago, and it’s still there, but energy efficiency is now the big topic because saving cost is what drives the conversation," Clement explains.
To manage these competing priorities, Clement lays out a practical framework built on intertwining goals. His approach uses healthy building KPIs to define what "good" looks like alongside energy targets and takes a long-term view focused on retrofitting, improving building intelligence with an eye toward tools like agentic AI, and using local mandates—like those imposing steep fines for non-efficiency—to justify investment.
In the shadows: But, the framework is only half the battle. The harder challenge is how leaders think about risk, especially the risks that don’t show up cleanly in data. "It’s super easy to measure energy consumption, but it’s much harder to connect healthy buildings to employee performance, and sometimes there are risks I don’t see because I can’t measure them," Clement says, urging facilities leaders to look beyond the last crisis and consider what future, less visible threats may be forming around their buildings.
For Clement, the real leverage comes when facilities leaders stop treating strategy as abstract guidance and start turning it into concrete building decisions that protect the business. That means anchoring facilities choices to what leadership actually cares about, from brand and risk to cost and performance. "What are the three things your company is talking about, and how can you help as a facility leader execute on those priorities?" Clement asks, pointing to questions like space utilization and occupancy as prime examples of where facilities can drive measurable value by aligning buildings to business reality rather than habit.
