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:

Avanta Serviced Office Group to open Shoreditch business centre at heart of ‘Tech City’

by • News, Property

serviced officeAvanta Serviced Office Group has signed a deal to establish a new business centre in the heart of London’s Tech City at The Eagle, a 27 storey art-deco-style development on City Road, EC1, from Mount Anvil – Central London’s specialist residential-led developer. The centre is set to open on the 1st March 2015. The new centre will provide over 26,000 square feet of flexible office space over two floors, with approximately 400 desks. Set within a mixed-use development comprising retail, affordable accommodation, offices and high-end residential, it is located within TFL’s Zone 1, approximately five minutes’ walk from Old Street Rail and Underground Station, just two stops from Kings Cross.bThis is Avanta’s first site within Tech City, also known as Silicon Roundabout, which is the third largest technology start-up cluster in the world and home to over 15,000 growing businesses.

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The culture of presenteeism is not all just fun and games

by • Comment, Flexible working, Workplace, Workplace design

PresenteeismTen or so years ago an office seating manufacturer commissioned me to prepare a report on the games industry. The idea was to target a market the company had decided was primed to hear their message about ergonomics and the deleterious effects of long hours spent sitting and peering at a screen. Not only would this develop a new market for the business, it would also showcase a new product they had launched specifically to target a younger and hipper audience, even one that was overwhelmingly male. All of the elements of a successful campaign appeared to be there – the right product, a sedentary workforce that often worked around the clock to hit deadlines in an industry that epitomised youthful cool and was willing to spend money to prove it.

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Exam board introduces workplace issues to psychology A Level syllabus

by • Company news, News, Workplace, Workplace design

workplace issuesOne of the UK’s five main national examination boards is to introduce a range of workplace issues as part of its updated Psychology A Level syllabus from next year. Cambridge based OCR claims that Psychology is the UK’s fourth  most popular subject at both A and AS level and is also one of the most popular subjects at degree level too. The issues will be introduced to the syllabus as part of an Environmental Psychology theme and will consider as issues such as the effects of allowing desk clutter on individual wellbeing (although it didn’t do much for Kanji Watanabe in Akira Kurosawa’s film Ikiru, above), gender roles in workstation personalisation and so on. Students will be expected to carry out their own research into the topics as well as draw on established sources of information. OCR also suggests that the subject may help to develop the emotional intelligence of those who take the subject.

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How we travel to work has enormous impact on wellbeing, claims new research

by • Environment, News

wellbeing and cycling

Part of London’s planned cycling infrastructure around Parliament Square

New research has further highlighted the important role that the mode of transport we choose to get work has on our physical and psychological wellbeing. Walking or cycling to work is better for people’s mental health than driving to work, according to the research by health economists at the University of East Anglia and the Centre for Diet and Activity Research (CEDAR). The report ‘Does active commuting improve psychological wellbeing?’ was published today in the journal Preventive Medicine and draws on 18 years of data from 18,000 people. It follows on the heels of two other reports published last month in the British Medical Journal and Science Direct which make related claims about the careful choices we should make about how we get to work.

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Two new reports highlight major public sector procurement failings

by • Facilities management, News, Public Sector

public sector procurementA newly published  review from the UK’s National Audit Office claim that the poor management of the country’s public sector procurement function means that fraud is widespread to the tune of tens of billions of pounds. The review found that a lack of oversight and a belief that some contracts are too important to fail open the doors to fraud. A separate NAO report also claims that the function is given a low priority and too often is more interested in just getting deals signed and out of the way than thinking about how contracts function in practice. The review into the level of fraud and overcharging in Government outsourced contracts which was carried out in the wake of the high profile of the cases of ‘bad practice’ by G4S and Serco claims that the public purse may be exposed by as much as £40 billion. Five government contracts are already under investigation by police or the Serious Fraud Office, according to the report and more will follow.

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Overdevelopment leads to bad building design, claim Carbuncle Cup judges

by • Architecture, News, Property

TRINITY_SQUARE_GATESHEAD_7Building Design magazine has announced this year’s winners of its annual Carbuncle Cup competition, which aims to name and shame the UK’s ‘unforgivably bad’ buildings. As well as identifying problems with specific buildings, the judges also raised concerns about the catalysts for poor buildings, especially overdevelopment. The judges this year included Owen Luder, former president of the Royal Institute of British Architects, and Prince Charles’s architectural adviser, Hank Dittmar. While the main prize went to Tesco’s ‘inept, lumpen, arrogant and oppressive’ new supermarket in Woolwich in South East London, and the runners up prize went to the 50 storey residential Vauxhall Tower at St George’s Wharf, the most nominated building following the call for entries earlier this year was the Walkie Talkie skyscraper in London. However this office building was deemed ineligible because it is yet to complete. It now looks a shoe-in for next year’s prize however.

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Stress and staff disengagement go hand in hand, claims new report

by • News, Workplace

disengagementEmployees suffering from high stress levels have lower engagement, are less productive and have higher absentee levels than those not operating under excessive pressure, according to research from HR consultancy provider Towers Watson. According to the firm’s Global Benefits Attitudes survey of 22,000 employees worldwide, there appears to be a causal or coincidental link between stress levels and disengagement. The survey found that levels of workplace disengagement significantly increase when employees experience high levels of stress. The research shows that of those employees who claim to experience high stress levels, over half (57 percent) also reported that they were disengaged. In contrast, only one in ten (10 percent) employees claiming low stress levels said they were disengaged and half of this group claimed to be highly engaged. The reasons for high stress levels were also explored in the research. Inadequate staffing was the biggest cause cited by employees with over half (53 percent) naming it as a top cause of workplace stress.

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Germany set to introduce evening email ban, but is it really needed?

by • Comment, Flexible working, Legal news, Technology, Workplace

email banIt seems likely that the much discussed German ban on out-of-hours emails is to be implemented. According to reports over the weekend,  the German Labour Minister Andrea Nahles has agreed to the implementation of new legislation that aims to end the culture of people dealing with messages outside of their normal working hours and could lead to a total free time email ban. The opportunity to herald the new legislation came with the publication of a new report she had commissioned into mental health and work, which led her to claim that ‘there is an undeniable link between being constantly available for work and mental illness’. However the new legislation has met with a degree of scepticism, especially in an article written over the weekend by Karl-Heinz Büschemann for Germany’s largest circulation national newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung.

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New issue of Work&Place is now available to download and read online

by • Facilities management, Premium Content, Work&Place, Workplace, Workplace design

Work&PlaceThe September issue of Work&Place has today been published and is available to download or view online. Amongst this month’s highlights are: Ian Ellison’s review of June’s Workplace Strategy Summit; Jim Ware offers up a case study of workplace transformation at NEF from the perspective of the  firm’s CEO; Agustin Chavez and Laurie Aznavoorian consider how the workplace can help firms to manage knowledge; David Karpook meanwhile characterises the role of the facilities manager as akin to that of a stage manager; Wim Pullen explores the multi-generational workplace using empirical evidence; Erik Jaspers looks at how workers are colonising the world’s cities; Pawel Lenart and Dominika Kowalska report on how one specific country – Poland – has seen a transformation in the way it creates and uses workplaces over the past twenty years; and, on related themes Nancy Sanquist explains how IFMA is driving the agenda on urban FM and Charles Marks looks at how the UK’s regions are looking to capitalise on the Smart Cities movement

Business leaders seem powerless to stem tide of always on working, claims report

by • News, Technology, Workplace

Always on workingAmongst the reported findings in the latest edition of the annual Deloitte Global Human Capital Trends survey is a growing belief amongst business leaders that information overload and the always on working culture are significantly undermining personal wellbeing, engagement and productivity. This challenge has been identified before in the same report, but the latest edition perhaps signals that despite the high level of awareness of the issue at both a personal and general level, little is being achieved in terms of stemming the inexorable erosion of personal time. The report is based on a survey of more than 2,500 business leaders. It found that over a third think that constant access to work is undermining employee productivity and engagement and fewer than one in ten feel they are dealing with the problem adequately. (more…)

Mode of transport when commuting determines health and happiness

by • News, Public Sector, Workplace

CommutingNew research published in the British Medical Journal last week has confirmed the perhaps obvious fact that people who drive to work are generally less healthy and more overweight than those who get to work in other ways. More surprisingly, the report also found that using public transport to commute may be just as beneficial to healthy as cycling. The report suggests that with nearly 24 million people regularly commuting to work each day in England and Wales, its results based long term research with a sample of 16,000 people should have significant implications for Government infrastructure policy, urban design and individual workplace policies. “Policies designed to effect a population-level modal shift to more active modes of work commuting therefore present major opportunities for public health improvement”, it concludes.

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Hotels allocating more public space to meet the needs of business travellers

by • Flexible working, News, Workplace design

Business TravellersPresenteeism isn’t restricted to the workplace. Growing demand from business travellers means hotels are increasing the amount of working and meeting space they provide in their facilities in cities across Europe and the rest of the world. Three quarters of British employees work while staying in a hotel according to the survey carried out by the Fraunhofer Institute on behalf of hotel business solutions firm HRS. Only Italians spend more time working in hotels (76 percent), followed the UK (75 percent), Poland and Switzerland (50 percent respectively), Germany (46 percent), China (45 percent), Russia (43 percent), Austria (42 percent) and France (25 percent). The firm has also identified a number of hotels around the world which it believes offers exemplars of the new working spaces available.

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