Hybrid working may have changed how often people travel into the office, but businesses in Milton Keynes are becoming more intentional about what they want from face-to-face time. At Unity Place, the trend is being seen across coworking, informal workspaces, meeting rooms and event spaces, with people increasingly using in-person days for collaboration, team catch-ups, client meetings, networking and shared experiences rather than simply sitting at a desk. At x+why Unity Place (main image), there have been 868 meeting room bookings so far this year, with around 5,800 visitors year to date. The coworking provider has also seen regular repeat bookings from businesses that do not need a permanent office, but still want a flexible place to bring their teams together. More →

British business leaders are increasingly confident about the potential of artificial intelligence to transform the economy, but employees remain far more cautious about its impact on jobs and future career opportunities, according to new polling from Microsoft. A survey of 5,000 UK employees and 1,000 senior business decision-makers found that 84 percent of business leaders believe Britain can become a world-leading AI economy within the next five years, compared with just 41 percent of employees.

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The argument about flexible work is often staged as a fight over place: office or home, three days or five, freedom or control. That framing is convenient because location is visible. Trust is harder to measure. Yet the more revealing question is not where people work. It is whether an organisation has enough clarity, managerial capability and confidence in its own systems to tolerate different ways of working without falling back on visibility as a proxy for contribution. More →

Two employees can use AI all day and be doing very different things. One dictates an email, checks the transcription and sends the words they intended to write. Another asks a system to choose a response to a customer complaint and accepts its recommendation. An activity report might call both employees frequent users. It tells us little about who did the thinking, who made the decision or what would happen if the output were wrong. More →

Throughout the years in the workplace technology industry, I’ve heard one common question among organization leaders: How can we have fewer meetings and how can we make the ones we do have more effective? When AI came along, many thought that it would be the solvent to this long-standing challenge. But it turns out, as individuals utilize AI to help them automate routine work, the need to collaborate with team members on the outputs has become more prominent. Rather than focusing on reducing the number of meetings, organizations should ask themselves: Are we designing the workplace with intentionality for meetings that are actually worth having? More →