Structuring a facilities team across multiple sites

A single-site facilities team usually organises itself around whoever's available — a small team covering whatever comes up, with informal knowledge of the building filling in the gaps a formal structure would otherwise need to cover. That approach genuinely works at small scale and genuinely stops working somewhere between site three and site ten, without there being an obvious single moment where the old way broke.

The core structural question: centralised or distributed

Most multi-site structures land somewhere between two poles — a fully centralised team dispatched to whichever site needs them, or fully distributed teams with their own dedicated staff per site or small cluster of sites. Centralised offers efficiency and consistency; distributed offers local knowledge and faster response for routine issues. Very few estates sit cleanly at either extreme, and the honest answer for most is a hybrid: local coverage for routine and urgent work, centralised specialists for planned maintenance and statutory categories that don't need daily presence.

What has to be centralised regardless of structure

Whatever the staffing model, certain things need to be consistent across every site regardless of who's physically doing the work: the asset register and PPM structure, the triage and intake process for reported issues, and the reporting format that rolls up to whoever's accountable for the whole estate. Letting these vary site by site is how a facilities function stops being one function and becomes several loosely related ones.

• –Centralise asset records, PPM structure and reporting format — these need to be identical across every site
• –Distribute day-to-day reactive coverage where local presence genuinely improves response time
• –Keep specialist statutory categories with a central or specialist resource rather than duplicating expertise thinly per site
• –Give site-level staff enough local flexibility to handle genuinely site-specific quirks without breaking estate-wide consistency

The handover problem that only shows up at scale

A single-site team rarely has a serious handover problem, because there's usually only one or two people who need to be kept in the loop. A multi-site team has a constant stream of handovers — between shifts, between sites, between a departing staff member and whoever replaces them — and each one is an opportunity for institutional knowledge to quietly evaporate if it was never written down anywhere durable.

This ties directly into estate-wide reporting too — a structure that can't produce a consistent picture across sites will struggle to support genuinely useful compliance reporting at the level leadership actually wants to see it.

The knowledge that only exists on site

Whichever structure an estate chooses, the same fragility appears: a quantity of essential knowledge that exists nowhere except in one site-based person's head. Which isolator actually controls that plant, who to call about the lift, why the third-floor thermostat is deliberately capped, where the stopcock is. None of it is written down because none of it ever needed to be — until that person leaves.

Centralised structures hide this problem rather than solving it, because the knowledge is still local; it is simply now further from the people making decisions. The mitigation is the same either way and is dull to sustain: write the site-specific knowledge down as it is used, not as a project when someone resigns.

Common mistakes

• –Choosing a structure without deciding what must be centralised regardless
• –Leaving site-specific knowledge undocumented because it is obvious to whoever holds it
• –Centralising decisions while leaving the information they depend on local
• –No handover discipline until someone actually leaves
• –Duplicating asset data per site rather than holding one register
• –Assuming a site is covered because someone is nominally responsible for it