At first glance, the calculation seems straightforward: an internal employee costs so much per month, while an external partner charges more. So in-house facility management is the cheaper choice, right? But that reasoning is flawed because the bigger picture involves more than just labour costs. Think of recruitment, training, equipment, insurance, and so on. In this article, we look at which additional hidden facility management costs you should take into account, and how choosing an integrated facility partner will not always be the more expensive option.
Facility management: in-house or partnering with a professional provider?
What hidden costs are associated with in-house facility management?
The labour cost of your own employee is visible on paper. But your organisation bears additional costs for every employee that are less visible. Let’s take a look at the hidden costs of in-house facility management:
Training costs
Knowledge of cleaning, safety, hygiene, and technical maintenance continues to evolve, and further training is a recurring cost. While a partner provides this as standard for its employees, with in-house management, you have to organise and fund this yourself.
Replacements during illness
A temporary worker, a colleague taking on extra tasks, a manager stepping in: in every scenario, you lose valuable administrative time. A professional partner provides a replacement from its own pool, within the scope of the fixed cost.
Recruitment
Every sector has to deal with staff turnover. And every new hire comes with an onboarding period, which again takes time. A facility partner ensures that every employee brings the right experience and can start work immediately.
Equipment
Cleaning products, machines, and PPE are purchased internally in small quantities. A facility partner, on the other hand, benefits from low purchase prices, and you reap the rewards too.
Quality control
Who monitors the level of quality? And what is that level? Daily, weekly, and monthly checks take time, as does following up on those checks and ensuring that complaints are heard. A facility partner not only ensures that cleaning quality meets official standards but also provides an objective quality control system.
Contract management and administration
Purchasing equipment, managing your suppliers’ contracts, monitoring employee contracts, and quality control: as a facility manager, you know better than anyone that the administration involved in all this takes up far more time than you would really like. A facility partner takes care of the administration. You can use that time gained for the tasks that really matter.
Compliance
Changes in safety or environmental legislation require continuous monitoring. A good facility management partner keeps a close eye on those changes and adapts where necessary.
Risk management
Anyone working with an internal facility management team also bears full liability in the event of incidents. Think of a workplace accident, a hygiene error in a food company, or a technical defect causing damage. The legal or operational costs fall internally. A specialised partner not only brings the expertise to reduce those risks but also bears part of the liability if things do go wrong.
None of these costs appears on the invoice of an external partner. At first sight they are invisible, but that does not make them any less important.
Total Cost of Ownership
What organisations are actually trying to answer when making this comparison is not “what does an external partner cost?”, but “what does facility management really cost us?”.
That is a different question, and it leads to different answers.
In the sector, this is increasingly recognised under the term Total Cost of Ownership: the full cost of a choice over time, including everything that remains dispersed and invisible as long as you only look at the invoice. This approach aligns with a broader shift in facility management towards whole-life costing, where decisions are no longer assessed on the basis of the lowest short-term price, but on what a building or installation really costs over its entire life cycle.
Anyone who calculates that honestly often discovers that the gap between in-house and external is much smaller than expected, or even the other way round.
