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:

July 1, 2015

Takeup of flexible working remains sluggish in UK SMEs claims Microsoft study

by Mark Eltringham • Flexible working, News, Technology

It’s now one year since the UK Government extended the right to request flexible working to nearly all UK permanent employees. Two new surveys have been published to coincide with the anniversary and gauge the effects of the legislation. Both surveys, from EY and Microsoft UK, paint somewhat mixed pictures, with uptake considerably slower than might have been expected. The study by Microsoft, one of the UK’s great champions of flexible working, found that just 22 percent of workers in SMEs have requested flexible working as a direct result of the new legislation. The report also found that over half (55 percent) of British office workers are still required to work from the office during set working hours. A similar proportion (44 percent) claim it is not possible for them to work remotely under any circumstances.

June 30, 2015

Is the environment now a non-issue for building occupiers and managers?

by Mark Eltringham • Comment, Environment, Facilities management, Workplace design

This week, I took part in a series of debates in London and Manchester. The discussions, led by Rob Kirkbride of the US workplace design trade journal Monday Morning Quarterback, focused on workplace trends in North America and Europe, based on the issues that dominated the recent Neocon show in Chicago. This in turn is based on the premise that what suppliers talk about when they present their products in public reflects what their clients are saying to them. However, one subject we didn’t cover in any detail was the environment, because nobody was talking about it very much at Neocon. Indeed nobody seems to talk about it very much at exhibitions anywhere these days. While few would deny that sustainability is an important subject, could it be that it is now something of a non-issue for building occupiers and their suppliers?

June 25, 2015

The healthy workplace is now a matter of public policy in the UK

by Mark Eltringham • Legal news, News, Wellbeing, Workplace design

Promoting a culture that improves the health and wellbeing of employees is good management practice and leads to a healthy and productive workplace, according to the Governmental body charged with shaping policy and offering advice on health related matters in the UK. The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE), part of the Department of Health, has published a new set of guidelines on the issue and called on employers to do more to address the challenge of creating a productive and healthy workplace. According to NICE, workplace health is a significant public health issue with more than a million working people in the UK experiencing a work-related illness each year, leading to around 27 million lost working days and costing the economy an estimated £13.4 billion.

June 24, 2015

CTBUH announces winners of best tall buildings awards for 2015

by Mark Eltringham • Architecture, Case studies, Cities, News, Property

The Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat has announced the winners of the Best Tall Building Awards for 2015. The winners were selected from a pool of 123 entries based on an evaluation by a panel of industry experts. The organisers claim that not only do the winners exemplify best practice they also advocate ‘improvements in every aspect of performance, including those that have the greatest positive effect on the people who use these buildings and the cities they inhabit’. Many of this year’s winners demonstrate a commitment to sustainability, especially those that make use of greenery to enhance the looks and environmental credentials of the building. The organisers also note that buildings are better integrated into their surroundings which ‘has been a long-needed requirement’. The Best Tall Buildings have been named from 33 countries in four competing regions.

June 24, 2015

Construction work completes on UK’s greenest commercial building

by Mark Eltringham • Architecture, Environment, News, Property

Morgan Sindall has completed construction of what is claimed to be the UK’s greenest commercial building, the Enterprise Centre at the University of East Anglia. The building boasts record-breaking sustainability credentials including both BREEAM Outstanding and Passivhaus accreditations. It has been designed to maximise the use of low embodied carbon materials over a projected 100-year life span. The building incorporates an innovation lab, a 300-seat lecture theatre, flexible workspaces, teaching and learning facilities, as well as business ‘hatcheries’ and incubator units for small businesses and start-ups in the low carbon sector. The developers believe that by placing like-minded academic and private sector occupiers side by side, the centre will foster innovation, stimulate smarter ways of working, promote industry standards and create new sustainable supply chains.

June 23, 2015

A gallery of the workplace winners of this year’s RIBA Awards

by Mark Eltringham • Architecture, News, Workplace design

The full list of regional winners of the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) Awards for 2015 has been finalised. The list of 37 winners will now go on to compete for the Stirling Prize in October. This year’s list is dominated by London projects, as is often the case, but also by homes whereas last year they were dominated by large scale projects, especially The Shard. We’ve rounded up a gallery of the major workplace projects in the list for England and Wales with some notes extracted from RIBA’s own commentaries (so don’t blame us). Each entry is hyperlinked for you to discover more about the project. Unfortunately, the regional winners for Scotland and Northern Ireland are not well served by their respective websites, which is a particular shame given the success Scotland in particular has in terms of the number and apparent quality of its winning projects.

June 23, 2015

Fit note scheme is not reducing long term sickness absence, claims new study

by Mark Eltringham • Legal news, News, Wellbeing

The UK government’s fit note scheme, introduced five years ago to help people back to work from long term sickness absence, has failed to deliver its intended reductions, according to research from manufacturing and engineering trade association EEF and Jelf Employee Benefits. The study of 345 companies claims more than two-fifths (43 per cent) of employers believe the policy had not helped employees return to work, up from 35 per cent in 2010. Employers also told the survey that the quality of GP advice on fitness for work has deteriorated, which the report’s authors claim is largely down to the fact that only around one in eight GPs in the UK have been trained in specific health and work and the Government has shown no willingness to invest in more training to bring the numbers of those qualified up to the necessary levels necessary to meet its own goals.

June 18, 2015

Facilities managers must focus more on people and less on buildings

by Mark Eltringham • Facilities management, News, Workplace design

A report from facilities management company Mitie claims that the design and management of too many workplaces are hampering the productivity of employees. Based on a survey of nearly 2,500 service sector staff carried out by Quora Consulting, the report comes to the perhaps unsurprising conclusion that facilities managers should prioritise people over buildings. The study found that younger workers are especially critical of their surroundings and working cultures. Two thirds of 20-29 year olds claim that their offices are not designed to optimise productivity. Finance and legal workers also feel let down by their workplaces with almost half claiming their workplaces do not optimise their productivity. These sectors were also emotionally disengaged with fewer than 35 percent identifying themselves as ‘emotionally attached’ to their workplaces.

June 17, 2015

Neocon workplace design show announces this year’s award winning products

by Mark Eltringham • Events, News, Products, Workplace design

Today is the final day of the vast Neocon workplace design
convention in Chicago. It is one of the world’s last remaining bastions of the supposedly dying art of the exhibition, in which tens of thousands of like-minded people from around the world descend on a city to live on alcohol, nibbles and hot fluorescent light in between discussing the products and ideas that hold their careers together. From the outside of any sector, this all looks like a collective madness, but from the inside things look very different. For some reason, the first day is the day on which those products which are judged to be Neocon’s best are presented their accolades. So even before our review of the show (coming soon), here are its award winning products including gongs for familiar names such as Boss, Humanscale, BuzziSpace, KI and Steelcase.

June 16, 2015

London cements its status as Europe’s most important tech hub

by Mark Eltringham • News, Property, Technology

A new report launched to coincide with London Technology Week claims that London has cemented its position as the most important tech hub in Europe and will boost the UK economy by £18bn in 2015. According to the event’s organisers, London’s technology sector is growing faster than both the overall economies of London and the whole UK and will continue to do so for the next decade. The figures show that the number of companies in London’s digital technology sector has grown by 46 percent since the launch of the Tech City programme. The sector now employs almost 200,000 people, 17 percent more than in 2010. Other research from EY claims to show London’s dominance of the European tech sector. According to EY more than 1,000 international tech investment projects located in London between 2005–2014, significantly more than the next most attractive city, Paris (381).

June 16, 2015

Staff want flexible working but worry about growing fat, stale and lonely

by Mark Eltringham • Flexible working, News, Workplace

A new report from Regus, based on a study of 44,000 workers worldwide claims that while many people see flexible working as an important factor in their career choices, they also remain worried about what working from home will mean for their happiness, health, family lives and job prospects. The report claims that many workers are afraid that working from home will mean they grow lonely, overweight and stale. According to the report, home workers still long for a chance to mix with other professionals and so opt to pop out of the house regularly for a change of scenery and to reconnect with the real world. More →

June 15, 2015

Generation Y isn’t as tech savvy as it and everybody else likes to think

by Mark Eltringham • Technology, Workplace

The shaky idea that the members of Generation Y are somehow different to the rest of the human race tends to rest on their characterisation as ‘digital natives’. However, according to a new report from US campaign organisation Change the Equation, just because Millennials have grown up with digital technology and are very attached to it doesn’t mean they are particularly tech savvy, especially when it comes to using technology to solve challenges in the workplace. The report, based on na analysis of the OECD’s Programme for International Assessment of Adult Competencies, found that although Millennials spend an average of 35 hours a week using digital devices, more than half of them (58 percent) are still unable to use their tech to help increase their productivity. They are still better in this regard than previous generations where 70 percent of people have low skills, but not significantly better.