March 28, 2022

Working from home means getting your priorities right

by Mark Eltringham • Comment, Flexible working, Wellbeing, Workplace design

It should come as no great surprise to learn that data from Leesman, the world’s leading workplace analyst, found that the chair was seen by remote working employees as the second most important feature in creating a productive working from home environment. Cited by 90 percent of people, it was narrowly beaten into second place only by a desk or table (91 percent). A ‘mere’ 89 percent of people cited WiFi, which is what you may have assumed was the most important need of remote workers, especially given that Hierarchy of Needs meme we’ve all seen. That needs to be reworked because clearly broadband matters slightly less than comfort and safety. More →

March 21, 2022

The lumpy, bumpy uncertainty of the future of work

by Mark Eltringham • Comment, Flexible working, Wellbeing

It’s now two years since we experienced the first true, sharp jolt of the pandemic. And even if we had now fully escaped its grip, the intervening 24 months would have proved transformational. The clichés, groupthink and glib takes may still shape much of the discourse about the ‘future of work’ but many of the instant experts of the Spring and Summer of 2020 now appear to have moved their insight on to other matters. And that leaves the rest of us with the task of working out what is actually going on. More →

March 18, 2022

Flexible working and wellbeing? We already know how that all works

by Mark Eltringham • Features, Podcasts, Premium Content, Wellbeing, Wellbeing Matters

If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans. Woody Allen’s wise observation could have been made for this year. But it’s not just true for plans that go awry, but also those that go right in unexpected ways. For example, what better time to publish a book about the links between flexible working and wellbeing than in April 2020 as large swathes of the population were adjusting to completely remote work, many of them for the first time? More →

March 1, 2022

Office furniture giant Flokk acquires Connection, doubling footprint in UK

by Mark Eltringham • Company news, Workplace design

Flokk, one of the leading European manufacturers of office seating and office furniture products, has acquired UK-based office furniture manufacturer Connection, expanding its footprint in the strategically important UK market and underpinning its international growth strategy. “Having Connection join the Flokk group moves us into the major league of Europe’s second-largest office seating market. We roughly double our size to about EUR 30 million in the key UK market. The transaction is another example of Flokk continuing to consolidate the fragmented European office seating market through targeted and value-creating acquisitions of attractive companies and brands,” says Lars I. Røiri, CEO of Flokk. More →

February 21, 2022

Who watches the workplace watchmen?

by Mark Eltringham • Comment, Technology

One of the world’s best known and most enduring foundational psychological experiments does not appear to be as clear cut as we commonly think. It was back in 1961 that a team led by the American psychologist Stanley Milgram asked a number of ordinary people to administer what they believed to be increasingly high levels of electric shocks to a person in another room while listening to their responses. More →

February 14, 2022

The Great Resignation will cast a long spell

by Mark Eltringham • Comment, Flexible working, Wellbeing, Workplace design

The writer Alan Moore believes in magic. Not hocus-pocus magic, double double toil and trouble, but in the power of words and art to change reality and bring things into existence. It’s a compelling idea, one that Moore shares with Picasso amongst others, and the evidence for it in its metaphorical sense is all around. More →

February 8, 2022

The office sector needs to develop better arguments for its products

by Mark Eltringham • Comment, Flexible working, Property, Workplace design

The distillation of every received and laundered idea of the past two years leads us here. A claim from Gallup that in future just over a third of the desks in offices will be empty. Whatever Gallup thinks, this is great news for the office sector. One of the truths the office sector hasn’t always liked to talk about too much over the last few decades is that in a typical office over that period, around half of the desks have already been empty. More →

February 7, 2022

New issue of IN Magazine is now online

by Mark Eltringham • Features, Premium Content

The January 2022 issue of IN Magazine is now online. In this issue we: visit what is claimed to be the best office in the world; consider whether the experience of our daily lives is shaped more by maintenance than design; challenge the idea of people as blank slates; look at a new generation of datacentre design; explore the regional flex office market; ask how rising energy costs will impact remote workers; talk to manufacturers using waste and unwanted materials to create new products; hear from Robert Bolton of KPMG on a new era for HR; and learn about how intentional design applies to the workplace. All back issues of IN Magazine are available here.

January 31, 2022

The great workplace conversation (still) needs to be held with a great deal more humility

by Mark Eltringham • Comment, Flexible working, Technology, Workplace design

“Nobody knows anything”. William Goldman’s infamous summing up of the essential unknowability of the movie business also has a less quoted second part. “Not one person in the entire motion picture field knows for a certainty what’s going to work. Every time out it’s a guess and, if you’re lucky, an educated one.” It is a call for humility. That no matter how much we know about what we do and how good we are at it, we can’t always predict its outcomes. And that is clearly the case with the ongoing Great Workplace Conversation. More →

January 25, 2022

Hybrid working? Let’s put on a show

by Mark Eltringham • Comment, Flexible working

I’m currently rereading Art Kleiner’s masterful book The Age of Heretics which describes the history of ground-breaking thought in management in the 20th Century and the lessons we forget. It remains a relevant book for the new era of ‘hybrid working’ because the book draws a distinction between two fundamental schools of thought in management theory. One of these sees management as a numbers game in which people are inherently problematic and so must be directed what to do based on data and routines of desirable activity and behaviour. And the other sees people as well meaning, capable and adaptable with managers there to facilitate and channel their abilities and help them develop. More →

January 4, 2022

So where are we?

by Mark Eltringham • Comment, Property

That’s right. A New Year and still nobody knows anything. More →

December 23, 2021

You gotta get IN to get out

by Mark Eltringham • IN Magazine, News, Premium Content

It was only towards the end of the development of IN Magazine that we became aware of something called COVID 19. By the time of the official launch in March of 2020, it had become clear that the world was facing a challenge that would lead to a reassessment of many aspects of our lives. We’re not out of the woods yet and there remain more questions than answers about what lies ahead. Yet organisations are looking forwards and I’ve been privileged in recent weeks to listen in on several conversations from occupiers about both their plans for the future and the necessity of flexibility in applying them, as they tread uncertainly in a new era and learn more about it as they go. More →