March 27, 2014
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About Mark Eltringham
Posts by Mark Eltringham:
March 26, 2014
UK workers are amongst least engaged in the world, claims new report
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 18th 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 25, 2014
Robotic managers likely to lack empathy and forget ethics, claims CMI report
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
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
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
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.
March 18, 2014
What the UK regional divide can teach us about the way we design offices
In the BBC documentary Mind the Gap, Evan Davis asks why London has an economy that is larger than and different to those of other UK cities, but also getting bigger and more differentiated. One of the main reasons he finds for this is something called agglomeration; the more skilled people you can put within physical reach of each other in an environment, the more productive and economically successful that environment will become.The problem for the UK is that not only is London of a different magnitude to its other cities, it does not comply with something called Zipf’s Law which states that in a typical country the largest city will be around twice the size of the second largest, around three times the size of the next largest and four times the size of the fourth largest and so on. It shouldn’t be taken too literally but it does illustrate the important economic principle of agglomeration and explains why there is such a widening divide in the UK economy.
March 17, 2014
The engaged employee remains as elusive as ever, claims global Deloitte report
© Mahendra Singh, from The Hunting of the Snark
To describe the truly engaged employee as elusive would be something of an understatement. It seems as if the more firms strive to engage with the people who work for them, the less engaged they become, like somebody responding to the gifts and attention of a needy and increasingly creepy lover. A new study from Deloitte frames the paradox. The Global Human Capital Trends survey of 2,500 organisations from around the world found that as they pursue policies to engage employees, they also exhibit a startling inability to do so. Regardless of what they try, they struggle to attract and retain the right people and are all too dispiritingly aware of their ability to create a compelling and engaging brand. The findings back up those of a worldwide Gallup report published last October which found just one in eight employees feel committed to their jobs and able to make a positive contribution.
March 14, 2014
Might a lack of joined-up thinking undermine UK high-tech ambitions?
Old Street: the UK’s tech epicentre
Over the past week both Prime Minister David Cameron and London Mayor Boris Johnson have offered up visions of economic success founded on new technology. Yet, as the CBI points out in a new report pinpointing the dearth of talent needed to make such dreams a reality, politicians often appear to ignore the realities of a situation. In its new report, Engineering our Future, the CBI calls for significant action to make a career in the key disciplines of science, technology, engineering and maths more attractive and easier to pursue. The report points out that these are the skills needed to underpin the Government’s stated focus on the tech, environmental, engineering and manufacturing industries that will shape the country’s future and is calling for a cut in tuition fees, new courses and inter-disciplinary qualifications to allow those skills to flourish.
March 13, 2014
Gallery: Google’s Kuala Lumpur office offers an alternative vision of a tech palace
Mention the offices of Google (or Facebook or Apple) and you’re perhaps most likely to think of the latest generation of gleaming Xanadu-like corporate tech palaces now being planned or built in London or California. But the new offices of Google in Kuala Lumpur offer a distinctly different vision. Designed by M Moser Associates, this is a compact community space centred on a cafe, meeting rooms and retro gaming zone. The pre-school acid colours and shapes, regionalised biomimicry, exposed building services, toys and knowing use of vintage decor are all familiar elements of a design aimed at young(ish) techies and creatives, but the main drivers for the revamp are the equally familiar commercial needs to consolidate a previously dispersed workforce into a single space and give them a choice of zones in which to interact. More →
March 13, 2014
Insight confirms partnership with Clerkenwell Design Week
Workplace Insight has confirmed a partnership agreement with Europe’s largest commercial interior design event, Clerkenwell Design Week. The event takes place each year, uniquely using the showrooms and other spaces that make the Clerkenwell area of London home to more creative businesses, designers and architects per square mile than anywhere else on the planet. It is also part of the East London Tech City hub. Now in its fifth year, the 2013 event attracted 50,000 registered attendees and thousands of others visitors. Insight will be covering the event, which will take place from 20 – 22 May, focussing especially on the intellectual content that forms a central element of the week’s content. We will be inviting the many eminent speakers and commentators to share thoughts and ideas in the build up and aftermath.
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.
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