Facility management burnout isn’t always visible on a spreadsheet, but it’s felt every day in the lives of those carrying aftermath. As one Reddit post put it:
“My brother came to this country to work. He’s too honest, too hardworking. And I want to save him from a burnout.”
— Reddit, r/FacilityManagement (2025)
The story was simple and devastating. One facility manager, 340 employees, and no support when colleagues left. The work didn’t stop; it just shifted onto his shoulders.
Benchmarks suggest the sustainable ratio is closer to one facility manager for every 80–100 employees, according to a 2025 IFMA and BOMA study. Yet many operate at three times that load. Moves only magnify the strain. A 2025 BOMA survey found 64% of employees call moving the most stressful workplace experience. If the staff feel it, the facility manager is the one carrying it.
This is what burnout looks like: not a single missed line in a budget, but an endless string of aftermaths — storage bills, stranded assets, and hours spent improvising fixes that should have been planned.
At the 2025 IFMA World Workplace Conference, Shannon Miles and Jennifer Robbins asked a question that stopped people in their tracks:
“Have you ever regretted buying furniture — not because it broke, but because the plan around it did?”
Hands went up.
Everyone had a version of the same regret: stairwells stacked with desks, cages crammed with chairs, invoices for storage no one accounted for. What started as a purchase decision became a warehouse problem.
Regret isn’t just financial. It’s the creeping sense that the system is designed to fail the very people asked to manage it.
The toll doesn’t stop with managers. According to Gallup’s 2024 State of the Global Workplace report, 20% of employees report loneliness at work, with hybrid workers reporting even higher levels. When offices are cluttered, outdated, or clearly neglected, that sense of disconnection deepens.
Furniture waste itself carries a signal. IFMA’s 2025 workplace waste analysis found that when employees see usable furniture dumped, they report frustration, guilt, and disengagement. But when assets are reused or donated, employees report pride and cultural alignment.
Every stranded asset, every storage cage, is more than a budget issue. It’s a cultural one.
Not every story ends in regret. In the same IFMA session, Shannon and Jennifer told of a consumer brand that insisted on asking a different first question: “What happens after?”
Before the first chair arrived, they required a decommission plan. Every item was tagged and tracked, mapped to a next-life outcome: redeployed, resold, donated, or recycled.
The difference was immediate. No stranded assets. No emergency storage. No late-stage scramble. For the FM, the plan held. For employees, the signal was clear: this company values its people and its resources.
Relief, in this case, wasn’t luck. It was designed.
That design is what CORT has scaled. According to the CORT Office Circularity Whitepaper (2024), furniture in its system is rented three to six times across its lifecycle, refurbished between uses, and ultimately resold or donated. The result: 95% of products kept out of landfill, and 66% fewer greenhouse gas emissions compared with purchase.
For facilities teams, the change is visceral: predictable OpEx instead of surprise costs, accountability for the return path, and fewer nights spent worrying about what will happen when the plan shifts. For employees, it’s a space that feels intentional, not neglected.
Most facility leaders don’t start fresh. They inherit spaces mid-stream: legacy assets, half-written specs, timelines that don’t match budgets. The choice is whether what they inherit breeds regret — or whether it’s a system built to deliver relief.
If you’re ready to see what relief could feel like in your workplace, explore CORT’s Furniture-as-a-Service™ Calculator or visit the Office Furniture Rental page. Both will let you model scenarios side by side and see how a managed lifecycle changes the total cost — and the emotional cost — of office furniture.
