June 5, 2020
The partial return to the physical world of work means that the print edition of the June 2020 issue of IN Magazine is now being mailed out. It has been available for a couple of weeks as a digital edition and it’s full of great stuff on the work topics that matter more than ever. We would say that but you can judge for yourself. More →
June 5, 2020
Art supposedly holds up a mirror to life. Except when it comes to our working lives, it doesn’t. Or at least it doesn’t always show a true or full reflection, both in terms of the amount of time we dedicate to work and how important it is to us. More →
June 4, 2020
If there has been an underlying driver of workplace thinking over the past several decades, it has been a rejection of the principles of scientific management. These begat the idea of the office as a factory, subject to the same rigid times and places of work and the same culture of process, efficiency and productivity. This made a pantomime villain of its key figure Frederick Taylor. The worst adjective you could use to describe a working culture was Taylorist. More →
June 1, 2020
When it comes to that annual announcement the publishers of dictionaries like to make about their Word of the Year, 2020 will have only one candidate. But if there were a shortlist, you can bet that Zoom would be on it. The uptake of Zoom and other apps to help people connect during the lockdown has been remarkable. Numbers emerge each week of the scale of growth, but they’re instantly out of date and probably meaningless anyway. We could make up something like there having been a 2,300% increase since March 23rd, and it might as well be true. More →
May 15, 2020
From the archive. Originally published in 2013. People have been talking about the death of the office for at least a quarter of a century. Leaving aside the often misleading conflation of flexible working with homeworking that is often involved, the underlying premise of such talk has been the same for all of that time. The main argument is, and always was, that there is an alternative to the tedium, aggravation and expense of travelling to an office solely to work inside its hermetically sealed and fluorescent-lit, blue-carpeted interior alongside people who can drive you spare, before you schlep home again. More →
May 13, 2020
The expression “if these walls could talk” is taking on an entirely new meaning with the emerging opportunity to create digital twins for buildings, claims Peter Löffler, the head of innovation at Siemens Smart Infrastructure in a new episode of the Workplace Insight podcast. Across the entire lifecycle of structures such as office buildings, hospitals, airports and hotels, creating a digital twin can significantly reduce costs, improve efficiencies, speed construction delivery, as well as enhance performance and the user experience. More →
May 11, 2020
The ethical, practical and philosophical implications of how we live alongside new forms of technology is something we will have to address very soon. It is a point well made in this conversation between Kate Darling of MIT and the neuroscientist Sam Harris. But we’ve had parts of this conversation before. For example, while most people will not have read the book from which it came, those with an interest in work, workplaces and their links with our happiness (or perceived lack of it) will know that the British philosopher Bertrand Russell once famously said that “one of the symptoms of approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one’s work is terribly important”.
April 14, 2020
The Universe is a noisy place. Countless bodies chatter to each other against the backdrop of distant echoes from the Big Bang. Because we are curious, we have developed the technology to listen in and record the din and convert it from the electromagnetic vibration it really is into something we can sense with our ears. NASA has even produced a playlist of the noises from our own solar system and some of the objects we have propelled into it, which you can listen to here. More →
April 2, 2020
Tomorrow morning I’ll be taking part in a live webinar considering some of the most important workplace issues that have been raised by the global corona-virus pandemic. As always, we’ll try to take on the least helpful ideas about the “future of work”, the impact on people’s lives, their reactions to the crisis as well as those of their employers. Crucially, we will also talk about what happens after this ends and what longer term effect it will have on work and workplaces. More →
March 19, 2020
Betteridge’s law of headlines declares that “Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no”. And so I simultaneously ask and answer the question of whether the coronavirus pandemic will really lead to the death of the office. So it goes. Of course, I’m not the first person to raise the question over the last few weeks as the world adapts to the threat of the pandemic. But it’s worth reminding ourselves that the demise of the office has been predicted for at least a quarter of a century, although never in such circumstances. More →
March 13, 2020
In the third in our series of wellbeing podcasts published in partnership with Wellworking, I am in conversation with Derek Clements-Croome, one of the world’s leading experts on wellbeing and sustainability in the workplace. We look at the increasingly powerful links between personal wellbeing and green sustainable building design and consider some of the most important yet last talked about wellbeing and productivity issues such as temperature and air quality. More →
June 18, 2020
Charles Handy was a true visionary about the modern workplace
by Mark Eltringham • Comment, Technology, Workplace