Why People Are Holding Back Your Smart Building Success (and How to Fix It)

Key Takeaways:

Training is Essential: Most smart tech failures stem from improper or insufficient staff training post-deployment—not from the technology itself.
Communication Silos Create Risk: IT, security, and facilities teams must collaborate proactively to avoid service disruptions and security lapses.
Change Resistance is Underrated: Veteran team members often resist new systems—early involvement and clear benefits help drive adoption.
A Cohesive Strategy Wins: Smart technologies must align under a unified, measurable, organization-wide strategy to realize ROI and sustainability goals.

Too often, smart building solutions promise significant environmental and cost savings along with notably happier tenants. However, once this flashy new technology is deployed, nothing could be further from the truth. In reality, the failure of smart building technology often isn’t due to the technology itself, but rather to a lack of training, information silos, and other change management misalignments between those who operate and maintain it.

This article explores three primary smart building employee obstacles—lack of training, departmental silos, and a resistance to change. It also provides a practical guide to synchronize teams, ensuring that your smart building technology fulfills its potential.

Human Factors That Derail Smart Building Strategies

The skills needed to design and implement smart building technologies often exceed those that IT teams possess in-house. For this reason, building owners and operators frequently depend on external consultants and specialized integrators to handle these tasks.

The problem is, once a smart building technology is successfully deployed, these skilled practitioners move on, and your IT team is left with the very important challenge of maintaining these systems. In many cases, insufficient training has been conducted, and the technology begins to falter due to improper maintenance, including not applying software updates, misconfigurations, and neglecting hardware upkeep.

Another common challenge deals with interdepartmental communication when managing and interacting with building IT and OT systems. When a technology moves into production use, the IT team is responsible for keeping it operational, the IT security is responsible for protecting it and the data it creates or processes, and the facilities team is often responsible for day-to-day operational use. Miscommunication among these groups can cause system malfunctions, expose data to security risks, or disrupt building and tenant experiences.

One final, yet common human factor that can prevent smart building tech success is resistance to change among staff. Too often, IT and/or facilities teams grow accustomed to traditional building management practices and may resist adapting their routines to new technologies due to unfamiliarity or discomfort. This resistance can result in the underutilization of smart systems, inconsistent implementation of maintenance or operational processes, or a failure to perform routine maintenance. This lack of interest significantly impacts the overall success of technology, which can create a ripple effect by fostering skepticism or reducing stakeholder support for future smart building projects.

Suggestions for Breaking the Cycle

Breaking the cycle of the previously mentioned human factors requires targeted strategies that both empower staff and foster inter-team collaboration. Here are four suggestions to consider:

Create and maintain a comprehensive training program. Asking staff to operate and maintain new and unfamiliar technologies is a recipe for disaster and is easily the most common reason why your smart building success is being held back. Thus, before, during, and post-deployment teams should receive sufficient training from consultants, integrators, or through highly polished virtual training content. This program should be continuously tuned and updated to keep up with the latest system updates and patches.
Dismantle communication silos. Smart building technologies can involve a wide range of teams and may even interact with occupants and tenants at times. The best way to address communication missteps is to establish a smart building task force with representatives from each group or team. This task force would hold regularly scheduled meetings to discuss day-to-day operations, upcoming maintenance, and any security needs. Additionally, a shared set of tools or dashboards should be provided across groups, giving them the visibility they need while restricting access in other areas to minimize security risks.
Cultivate confidence for technology adoption. Often, it’s your best and most reliable staff who are the most resistant to technological change. To help them overcome their resistance to process changes caused by a smart building technology addition or replacement, the best tactic is to involve them early in the technology research and decision-making process. Doing so allows them to contribute to the decision-making process, giving them a sense of ownership once it goes live. Additionally, be sure to highlight the end-state tangible results that often come in the form of the reduction of mundane and repetitive tasks that create operational efficiencies.
Build a cohesive smart technology strategy and vision. From a technological strategy perspective, smart building technologies cannot be seen as a collection of fragmented or disjointed tools that serve individual purposes. Instead, it’s important to develop a clear, organization-wide strategy that aligns all stakeholders—IT, facilities, security, and even tenants—around a shared vision. A great approach to this is to develop and promote specific, measurable goals for the technology, such as setting a target to reduce energy consumption by 20%. In this way, all parties gain a clear understanding of the challenge and work as a cohesive unit, technology included, to achieve that goal.

People Are the Key to Unlocking Smart Building Technology’s Potential

Smart building technology failures are frequently mis-attributed to the technology itself. However, no matter how exceptional the technology, you won't achieve the desired cost, energy, and time savings unless the individuals responsible for operating, maintaining, and using these systems are engaged. By tackling training deficiencies, eliminating communication barriers, promoting technology uptake, and uniting teams around a shared strategy, you can dismantle the human obstacles that impede smart building success.

Next Steps for Building Owners and Smart Technology Integrators:

Invest in ongoing training. Develop a comprehensive onboarding and continuing education program, customized for each team interacting with the building’s smart systems.
Form a smart building task force. Establish a cross-functional team—including IT, facilities, and security—with regular check-ins and shared dashboards for transparent, collaborative oversight.
Engage staff early. Include frontline operators and technicians in the research, vetting, and rollout phases to gain buy-in and reduce resistance to change.
Set measurable goals. Align all stakeholders around clear performance metrics (e.g., reduce energy use by 20%) to create unity, direction, and accountability.
Audit your smart tech stack. Conduct a gap analysis to identify which systems are underutilized due to human factors, and recalibrate your support and management strategy accordingly.