September 22, 2020

No need to sideline form in our quest for function

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

The enduring struggle to improve the working conditions and performance of people through the design and management of workplaces carries more than a whiff of the Enlightenment, a period in which pure reason was seen by its proponents as more than enough to convince the world of the ways in which we could improve the human condition. It’s a battle that was won in some ways but which endures. More →

September 14, 2020

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 →

September 11, 2020

The next chapter for office life, remote work and the stories we tell about it all

by Mark Eltringham • Comment

One of the few interesting things about the deluge of tedious work-related stories over the last few months has been watching the narratives about remote work, office life and all the rest of it develop. Of course, you’ll still get the odd piece like this, a rambling, lazy string of unexamined clichés that could have been written by a bot. And soon will be. More →

September 3, 2020

Going with the flow in the way we work

by Mark Eltringham • Features, Workplace design

Throughout history we’ve been aware of the state we now refer to as flow. It describes the sensation of existing purely in the moment of some activity, effortlessly achieving what we have set out to achieve and unaware of distractions. Mystics have described it as ecstasy, artists as rapture and athletes as in the zone. This state was first described as flow by the Hungarian psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi in 1975 and has been developed by him and a wide range of other researchers in a number of fields since that time. More →

September 2, 2020

Remote work and the coming race to the bottom

by Mark Eltringham • Comment, Wellbeing, Working lives

One of the most significant consequences of the 2008 economic crash was a remarkable shift in the nature of employment. The recession led to a surge in the number of people categorised as self-employed. The numbers have been increasing ever since, albeit at a more stable rate. By the end of 2019, the number of self-employed people in the UK exceeded five million people for the first time. That’s fifteen percent of the workforce. More →

August 20, 2020

Working from home and the future of work. How quaint

by Mark Eltringham • Comment, Flexible working, Technology

In 1962, a professor of communication studies called Everett Rogers came up with the principle we call diffusion of innovation. It’s a familiar enough notion, widely taught and works by plotting the adoption of new ideas and products over time as a bell curve, before categorising groups of people along its length as innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority, and laggards. It’s a principle bound up with human capital theory and so its influence has endured for over 50 years, albeit in a form compressed by our accelerated proliferation of ideas. It may be useful, but it lacks a third dimension in the modern era. That is, a way of describing the numbers of people who are in one category but think they are in another.

August 14, 2020

Survival, inquiry, sophistication – picking the right workplace battles

by Mark Eltringham • Comment, Workplace design

We know, and have for a long time, that the workplace is in a state of near constant flux. The meteor strike of lockdown is an accelerant, not a deviation. It has also laid bare -yet again – the faulty assumption that there is some sort of general evolution towards an idealised version of the office. That is why we see so many people routinely willing to suspend their critical facilities to make extravagant and even absurd predictions about the office of the future or even the death of the office. More →

August 12, 2020

Casting a spell on the future of work and workplaces

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

There was a time we used to talk with dismay about the Japanese phenomenon of intense social distancing known as hikikomori. We would consider with horror the isolation, lack of engagement with society, poor mental health and loneliness of the people who had almost completely withdrawn to their rooms. Those poor bastards locked up in enclosed spaces linked to the outside world only by screens. More →

August 7, 2020

A dog`s life in the future of work

by Mark Eltringham • Comment, Flexible working

Once upon a time. Not so long ago. We used to get ideas for stories on lots of different topics. These included those I often dismissed at the time as quaint, such as somebody’s thoughts on why you should bring your dog to work. Now I often hanker for such whimsy, faced with day 127 of an inbox stuffed with nothing much more than ‘how to return to the office after lockdown’. More →

August 3, 2020

Isaac Asimov’s remarkable 1964 predictions about life and work in the 21st Century

by Mark Eltringham • Comment, Technology, Wellbeing, Workplace design

Making predictions about the future can leave people hostages to fortune. Just ask the Decca record executive Dick Rowe who in 1962 rejected a contract with The Beatles confidently asserting that “guitar groups are on their way out, Mr Epstein” or even multi-billionaire Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer who declared in 2007 that “there’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share.” Some people buck the trend however. More →

July 30, 2020

The golden age of procrastination and the tyranny of time keeping ⁰

by Mark Eltringham • Comment, Features, HR, Wellbeing

Many of us start each day with a long to-do list, a new set of goals and a commitment not to repeat the same mistakes we have in the past. It’s likely that we will have promised ourselves to stop putting things off. On our hit list of the foibles we most want to dispose of, procrastination will be somewhere near the top. The problem is that because procrastination is linked to psychological factors such as an innate preference to do something we deem pleasurable to something we don’t, modern life encourages us to do it. More →

July 27, 2020

Workplace design and the corrective force of rediscovery

by Mark Eltringham • Comment, Workplace design

It has become something of a preoccupation of mine to consider why so many of the conversations we hold about workplace design are largely about the rediscovery of old ideas. It may be because there are constants about how people interact with their surroundings and each other and the truisms underlying those interactions. Although these are often reframed by the amount of data we now have to support them, some things never change. More →