About Mark Eltringham

Mark is the publisher of Workplace Insight, IN magazine, Works magazine and is the European Director of Work&Place journal. He has worked in the office design and management sector for over thirty years as a journalist, marketing professional, editor and consultant.

Posts by Mark Eltringham:

April 16, 2025

Come fly with me. The new digital issue of IN magazine is here for you

by Mark Eltringham • IN Magazine, News, Premium Content

The digital edition of IN magazine 23 is now out and available for you here. In this issue: why we act up at airports and what designers can do about it; the datacentre market is struggling to keep up with AI’s rapacious demand for resources; a review of the Workspace Design Show which keeps getting better; what a new generation of buildings can tell us about how to balance ethical goals with organisational strategy; the headquarters of Italy’s largest co-op; the difficulties of keeping up with developments in AI and why we need to keep trying; and a book that sets out the research based business case for the office. Plus loads of great commentary and our regular round up of product and business news and events. More →

April 1, 2025

British workers now entirely unproductive, claims report

by Mark Eltringham • News, Wellbeing, Workplace

The overwhelming majority of UK workers don’t do anything productive at all, according to a new report published today. The study of available research into the illnesses, injuries, distractions, wastes of time, procrastinations, productivity drains and paralyses that afflict British workers found that the annual cost to the British economy is around £1.8 trillion, equivalent to 98.9 percent of GDP.

March 28, 2025

The full stop emerges as a major point of contention in the workplace

by Mark Eltringham • News, Workplace

A new poll from The Adaptavist Group claims that there is a growing generational divide in workplace communication, with emojis, punctuation, and AI use emerging as key areas of contention. The study, which surveyed 1,000 UK knowledge workers, reveals how different age groups interpret digital communication tools in the workplace, affecting collaboration and productivity. The Workplace Communication Atlas suggests that nearly half of workers (46 percent) struggle with misinterpreting tone or phrasing, making it the most significant communication challenge. Differences in response time expectations (also 46 percent) and lack of context (31 percent) were also cited as common issues. The findings build on previous research from The Adaptavist Group, which showed that 56 percent of workers find generational collaboration difficult. More →

March 20, 2025

Our happiness depends on kindness and connections with other people

by Mark Eltringham • News, Wellbeing

The World Happiness Report 2025, released today to coincide with the UN’s International Day of Happiness, reveals that people are generally kinder than commonly perceived, and that social connections play a pivotal role in determining how happy we are. The report highlights a significant disparity between perceived and actual acts of kindness within communities. Global studies on the return of lost wallets indicate that actual return rates are approximately double what people anticipate. This suggests that communities are more benevolent than individuals often believe, and recognising this kindness is strongly associated with higher happiness levels. More →

March 12, 2025

Brain rot is the word of the year and we only have ourselves to blame

by Mark Eltringham • AI, Comment

In December, ‘brain rot’ was announced as the word or phrase of the year 2024 according to the Oxford University Press. And right on time, we had the viral story of the hawk tuah girl meme coin rug pull to prove it. If you don’t know what any of that means, then do yourself a favour by not finding out. I do know and feel as if something meaningful and important has been cauterized from my brain for ever to make way for it. More →

January 28, 2025

A break in the workspace-time continuum

by Mark Eltringham • Comment, Wellbeing

The fracturing of time and place underlies every one of the great workplace issues of our time. Everything that springs from this – the where, when, how, what and why of work – is defined by the shattering of any fixed idea we may once have had of a time and a place to work. Because the challenge to these traditional ideas is now so inextricably linked in our minds with new technology, we might often forget that people have been asking questions about how we can get the most out of each day for thousands of years. Tempus fugit after all, and as a consequence we’ve always known that how we spend our days is how we spend our lives. More →

January 28, 2025

Most people are happy for AI to inform decisions about work, CIPD claims

by Mark Eltringham • AI, News, Workplace

To coincide with National Productivity Week, a CIPD poll suggests that almost two thirds of people (63 percent) would trust artificial intelligence (AI) to inform – but not make – important decisions at work. According to the poll of over 2,000 people, over a third (35 percent) wouldn’t trust AI to make important decisions at work, preferring to use human intelligence. Just 1 percent of respondents would trust AI to make important work decisions. More →

January 22, 2025

The constant craving to put numbers on working relationships

by Mark Eltringham • Features, Workplace design

The answer to the great question of life, the universe and everything is not 42, as you may have been led to believe. It’s 1/137 (or near enough). This is the greatest of the two dozen or so universal constants. According to current thinking, without the physical and quantum relationships it describes, the universe as we know it could not exist. More →

January 20, 2025

Forget all the talk of Blue Monday; work is still (largely) good for us

by Mark Eltringham • Comment, Facilities management, Wellbeing, Workplace

So here it is. Blue Monday. Today. Officially the most depressing day of the year. We say ‘officially’, but like the idea of ‘Body Odour’ its common usage hides the fact that it was originally created as part of a PR campaign, in this case one for Sky’s travel channel in 2005. The whole idea of Blue Monday is couched in a pseudo-mathematical equation which includes factors like the weather, levels of debt, time since Christmas, low levels of motivation and, apparently, an unspecified variable known simply as ‘D’. More →

January 17, 2025

We still display status in office design, but in new and subtle ways

by Mark Eltringham • Comment, Workplace design

There was a time, not so long ago, that one of the most important factors to consider when designing an office was the corporate hierarchy. The office was once the embodiment of the corporate structure. In Joanna Eley and Alexi Marmot’s 1995 book Understanding Offices, quite a lot of space is dedicated to the idea of the ‘space pyramid’, which means simply that the higher up the organisation you were, the more space you were allocated and the better your furniture and surroundings. Even then, the idea of office design as a signifier of dominance was starting to wear thin, as the authors acknowledge. Ostentatious displays of status were already seen as somewhat gauche, but they were to be fatally undermined by the technological advances to come.

December 19, 2024

The Internet and a pile of turtles that goes all the way down

by Mark Eltringham • Comment, Technology

In his 1998 book A Brief History of Time, Stephen Hawking relates the following anecdote: “A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the centre of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: “What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.” The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, “What is the tortoise standing on?” “You’re very clever, young man, very clever,” said the old lady. “But it’s turtles all the way down!”

December 18, 2024

A divine spark of inspiration for office occupiers and designers

by Mark Eltringham • Briefing, Premium Content, Workplace design

Organisations are having to rethink the form and function of their offices in ways unprecedented in their relatively short history. And perhaps the biggest challenge is to create places to work that reflect the organisation’s culture and the needs of the people who work there (some of the time). One possible framework for aligning an office design model with the culture of the organisation is presented in a supplement published for IN Magazine called Gods of Work. Published in partnership with Modus, it draws on management and organisational theory and established models of office design to suggest solutions to some of the challenges facing organisations as they rethink the way they work. The office of the future for most organisations will be smaller, but much better and we hope this becomes an invaluable guide for those setting out on that path.