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 3, 2014

Plans unveiled for London’s £1.5 billion Silvertown Quays development

by Mark Eltringham • News, Property

Plans have been released for the £1.5 billion redevelopment of Silvertown Quays in the East of London. The 7 million sq. ft. mixed use scheme will cover 62 acres on the site of the Royal Docks directly opposite the Excel exhibition centre. The development will include around 2.5 million sq. ft. of commercial and retail space, and some 2,500 new homes along with education, research and exhibition facilities. As announced by London Mayor Boris Johnson in 2013, one of the key features of the project will be an avenue of ‘brand pavilions’, where companies from across the world will be invited to showcase their products. The district will be served by a new bridge connecting it to the ExCel site giving access to transport links, including the new Crossrail station with express services to the City of London, West End and beyond.

April 2, 2014

New consortium aims to standardise technology to drive Internet of Things

by Mark Eltringham • Facilities management, News, Technology

The development of the much talked-about Internet of Things has been boosted with the announcement that AT&T, Cisco, GE, IBM and Intel have come together to form a group called the Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC) which will aim to standardise the way certain technologies function and so drive the uptake of the Internet of Things. The group has the apparent backing of the White House which has also announced that it will invest $100 million in research into the way physical objects can be linked to the internet, which is the fundamental principle of the Internet of Things. The IIC will be outlining its own plans in the near future to establish a common, global framework for the development of inter-connected digital and physical worlds and so sped up the adoption of an idea that promises to transform many aspects of our lives but which has not moved quickly enough, according to many commentators.

March 31, 2014

BCO report claims to reveal link between green offices and business performance

by Mark Eltringham • Environment, Facilities management, News

A new report from the British Council for Offices claims that building owners could enjoy significant savings in their operating costs of up to £50 per square metre as well as improved staff productivity and wellbeing by investing in environmentally friendly offices and work practices. The research, Improving the Environmental Performance of Offices claims to illustrate the benefits of energy efficient offices and highlight the positive impact they can have on employee productivity. The report calls on building occupiers to focus on key areas such as benchmarking and monitoring their energy usage. The BCO believes there is already a shift in attitudes towards a greater understanding of how offices actually perform environmentally rather than simply how they are designed and that more and more businesses are waking up to specific issues such as how much energy their buildings use outside of office hours. More →

March 28, 2014

Google’s new Amsterdam office exposes Tech’s youthful obsessions

by Mark Eltringham • Comment, Technology, Workplace design

All images © Alan Jensen and D/Dock

Back in the 1990s, when Frank Duffy was one of the august handful of people popularising notions of a changing approach to office design, he categorised four models of the workplace that he foresaw would come to reflect the work done in them, namely the den, cell, hive and club. Back then, the word ‘club’ conjured up images of gentleman’s clubs and Duffy himself described it in his 1997 book The New Office as ‘essentially an ingenious early 19^th Century device to allow the kind of people who are now called networkers to share as supportive an environment as possible’, illustrating his point with an old coloured engraving of upright gents sitting around in a neo-classical, Victorian, smoke-filled room reading newspapers, sipping port and chewing the fat. Nowadays, the word club would appear to suggest something more along the lines of a youth club, as the latest pubescent design of a Google office shows us. More →

March 28, 2014

UK is world’s fourth most attractive business location, claims report

by Mark Eltringham • News, Property

Manchester, Europe’s cheapest large city for businesses

The latest edition of KPMG’s bi-annual study of the comparative attractiveness of more than 100 cities (many of them in the US) as business locations claims that the UK is one of the world’s best countries in which to do business. The Competitive Alternatives Report for 2014 assessed the competitiveness of cities in ten countries across four commercial sectors – digital services, research and development (R&D), corporate services and manufacturing – and found that the UK is the second most competitive country for corporate services; third for digital services; fourth for R&D and manufacturing and fourth overall. In Europe, the clear cost leader is Manchester with overall business costs more than 10 percent lower than those of London, the only other UK city assessed. The report claims the UK’s tax regime is a crucial factor for international enterprises as they make important funding and operational decisions.

March 27, 2014

Holding

by Mark Eltringham • News

No text

March 26, 2014

UK workers are amongst least engaged in the world, claims new report

by Mark Eltringham • News, Workplace

The latest survey highlighting how disconnected the world’s workers feel from what they do comes courtesy of researchers ORC International. In its Global perspectives survey of over 7,000 employees in 20 countries, the researchers found that UK employees are amongst the most disengaged in the world. Engagement has declined sharply over the last year for UK based workers with under half (48 percent) claiming to be engaged with their jobs, down from 56 percent last year. This puts the country in 18^th position, with only Japan and Hong Kong coming out worse. Only 40 percent think their managers motivate and inspire them and only 37 percent feel encouraged by their employers to innovate. In fact the UK’s score fell according to every measure used in the report including the wellbeing index with a rating of 57 percent, down from 61 percent last year.

March 26, 2014

The enduring need to put a bit more of the M into facilities management

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

Shutterstock’s new offices, Empire State Building

It may well be a statement of the obvious, but it’s worth reminding ourselves sometimes that the term facilities management consists of two words. There is often a bit too much emphasis on the facilities and a bit too little on the management and sometimes we look for design and product solutions to problems that would be better managed in some way. You can put this down to a number of things but to some extent at least it’s down the idea that when you are determined to use a hammer, every job looks like a nail. Obviously the media takes some of the blame for this mindset because it often earns income from businesses who want to sell their stuff to solve particular problems rather than focus on the idea that many of them can be addressed either as a management issue or in combination with products and design.

March 25, 2014

Robotic managers likely to lack empathy and forget ethics, claims CMI report

by Mark Eltringham • Workplace

A new report into the judgements of managers has concluded that they are significantly more prone to responding in a ‘robotic’ way to moral questions than the general population, relying on handed-down rules rather than their own ethical standards. The report, Managers and their Moral DNA, was commissioned by the Chartered Management Institute (CMI) in conjunction with personality testing website Moral DNA. It found that nearly three quarters of managers (74 percent) lack empathy and do not fully consider the moral consequences when they take decisions, which is 28 percent higher than the general population. The report also claims that managers are 4 percent more compliant with rules and 5 percent less caring in their ethical decision-making at work than in their personal lives, a figure that tallies with other results from the Moral DNA database according to the report’s authors.

March 24, 2014

Public sector purchasing doesn’t need this kind of lightbulb moment

by Mark Eltringham • Furniture, Products, Public Sector, Workplace design

The latest of the weekly kickings reserved for the UK’s public sector purchasing community comes in the shape of a BBC Panorama documentary alleging that a range of frauds and cock-ups cost the National Health Service around £7 billion a year. The NHS denies these figures but there are clearly obvious and serious deficiencies in the way goods and services are procured across the public sector, as we have reported. Yet there is a flipside to such reports which tap in to (and sometimes pander to) a widespread scepticism of the way the public sector goes about its business. So we must first ask whether an equivalent private sector organisation with a budget of £109 billion a year would not also be open to a wide range of eye-wateringly expensive failures, inefficiencies and frauds. And secondly we must question whether the great British public, along with some businesses, are generally able to grasp the issues involved.

March 20, 2014

European executives overconfident about their ability to manage change

by Mark Eltringham • Comment, Facilities management, News, Technology

There are a number of casual truisms about the modern workplace that everybody accepts to the point they become clichéd. But knowing something and knowing what to do about it can be two completely different things. While we might all agree that ‘change is a constant’ and the ‘main driver of change is technology’, both ideas are subject to the interconnected and immutable law that whatever we do is likely to be wrong to a greater or lesser degree. According to new research from the Economist Intelligence Unit, one of the main reasons for this is that organisations and business leaders are not very good at judging how responsive they are to change, make the converse misjudgements about the readiness of their competitors. In the words of the survey, they tend to see themselves as speedboats while viewing their competitors as supertankers when the reality is often the other way around.

March 18, 2014

Morgan Lovell to research impact of the workplace on wellbeing

by Mark Eltringham • Facilities management, Workplace, Workplace design

One of the latest pieces of research to explore the possible links between the workplace and individual wellbeing is to be carried out by office fit-out firm Morgan Lovell in conjunction with the British Council for Offices (BCO) and workplace analytics tool HATCH. The firm hopes to create an original piece of research that will help to quantify the impact the workplace has on wellbeing and identify the causal links. The firms says it hopes to use this to create a business case for occupiers who would like to invest in designing offices in a way that fosters wellness and productivity and is inviting interested people and firms to take part. The firm says the survey takes less than 10 minutes and can be found here. To say thank you to respondents to the survey for their time, Morgan Lovell will donate £1 to Comic Relief for every person that completes the questionnaire. The findings will be published in April.