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 7, 2015

‘World’s healthiest workplace’ is unveiled in Melbourne

by Mark Eltringham • Architecture, Case studies, Environment, Wellbeing, Workplace design

For some time now, the most talked about workplace issue has been wellbeing. Where once firms sought ways of using office design to solve a productivity puzzle, they are now increasingly concerned with the mental, psychological and physical health of employees. This is the case for most organisations but doubly so for those whose business is directly related to those issues, such as Melbourne based health insurance firm Medibank. The firm, Australia’s largest health insurer has moved to a new headquarters building in the Docklands district of the city and took the opportunity to create a space which it claims should be hardwired with the proactive principles of personal wellbeing and health with which its business is associated. The building has been designed by Hassell to meet these principles and includes a facility with outdoor sporting facilities, an edible garden and other green spaces.

July 6, 2015

People are outsourcing their own memories to the Internet, claims report

by Mark Eltringham • News, Technology, Wellbeing

We have outsourced our memory to the Internet and digital technology to such an extent that many of us are suffering from digital amnesia. That is the main finding of a new report from software developer Kaspersky Lab. The study of around 6,000 people claims that the seductive ease of access to a bottomless well of information is taking its toll on our natural ability to memorise and recall things for ourselves. Nearly all respondents (91 percent) across all age groups now agree that they “use the Internet as an online extension of their brain”. Around half of people now simply cannot be bothered to remember even basic facts and a quarter cheerfully even forget whatever facts they glean through search engines after they have made use of them. As with many things in the modern world, we are increasingly prone to treat even hard information as disposable.

July 6, 2015

World’s first 3D printed office building to be created in Dubai

by Mark Eltringham • News, Property, Technology, Workplace design

Could this be the shape of things to come? A Chinese 3D printing firm has announced that it has plans to print a fully functioning office in Dubai (where else?). The company, WinSun, will use a 20 foot tall printer to create the components for the 2,000 sq. ft. building which will then be assembled by hand. The local developers behind the scheme claim that the technology, once perfected, will cut project delivery times by as much as 70 percent, waste by up to 60 percent and labour by between 50 and 80 percent, compared to traditional methods of office construction. WinSun has a track record of printing affordable housing in its native country, but this is the first time that it has applied its large scale 3D printing technology to an office building. It also plans to print interior architectural elements and office furniture for the building.

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.