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:

February 13, 2023

Childhood’s end for work and the need for a grown-up conversation about it

by Mark Eltringham • Features, Flexible working, Technology, Wellbeing

Arthur C Clarke’s finest novel Childhood’s End is the story of an Earth that is invaded by a force of alien Overlords. This is not a destructive colonial invasion, which is why there’s no Hollywood blockbuster in the tale, but a seemingly benevolent intervention which ushers in a golden age for humanity. Although humankind initially does not get to meet the Overlords in person (for reasons I won’t give away here), the aliens unite the world’s governments, eradicate crime, conflict and the nation state and do away with the need for creativity and hard work. It is the literal end of history.

February 8, 2023

Some questions about AI, a world drowning in content and the human centipede of creativity

by Mark Eltringham • Automation, Comment, Technology

One unintended but welcome result of the new fixation with AI is that many of the people who became experts on the workplace in 2020 are now experts on AI. You’ll find them on social media and they’ll have written a book about it by May to sit on the shelf alongside the one about hybrid working and The Great Resignation. So, if you want some certainty about where generative AI taking us, go talk to one of them because people who know about the subject seem to have little or no idea. More →

January 27, 2023

Issue 13 of IN Magazine celebrates ten years of workplace insight

by Mark Eltringham • Environment, Facilities management, HR, News, Premium Content, Technology, Workplace design

The new issue of In Magazine has now been published. It marks ten years of Workplace Insight with a few things we think we know about work, working culture and work places. Elsewhere in this issue: Stephanie Fitzgerald talks about the unspoken privilege of wellbeing; we consider the sprawl of the world’s megacities; Jo Knight argues that the office sector needs to really up its game on the environment; Rene Stevens makes the case for a strategic approach to learning environments; we weigh up the pros and cons of retrofit and new builds; Neil Usher sets out to develop a universally acceptable definition of hybrid working; Andy Brown on what we really need data for; why dead tech hangs around; and we do the maths on what it means when people say the office should be worth the commute it takes to get to it. More →

January 20, 2023

AI presents us with a chance to rediscover what it means to be human

by Mark Eltringham • Comment, Technology

Like a lot of people right now, I am struggling to get my head around where we are going with AI. Look around and you’ll see the breathless excitement at the sheer amazingness of it all. And examples of its limitations, how it screws up, how military grade AI can be fooled by somebody hiding in a box, and its sense of humour failure. All of this is demonstrably, paradoxically true. More →

January 16, 2023

Forget all the talk of Blue Monday; work is still (largely) good for us

by Mark Eltringham • Comment, Facilities management, HR, Wellbeing

So here it is. Blue Monday. Today. Officially the most depressing day of the year. We say ‘officially’, but like the idea of ‘Body Odour’ its common usage hides the fact that it was originally created as part of a PR campaign, in this case one for Sky’s travel channel in 2005. The whole idea of Blue Monday is couched in a pseudo-mathematical equation which includes factors like the weather, levels of debt, time since Christmas, low levels of motivation and, apparently, an unspecified variable known simply as ‘D’. More →

January 13, 2023

How the 21st Century office was born in post war Europe

by Mark Eltringham • Features, Workplace design

There was a curious addition to a 2016 report on the Top 10 Technologies Driving the Digital Workplace from tech researchers Gartner. It wasn’t a technology at all but rather a slightly obscure office design concept that originated in Hamburg in the late 1950s, but which tells us a lot about how we work in the 21st Century office, according to Gartner. Its history lies with the German consulting firm Quickborner. Led by the brothers Eberhard and Wolfgang Schnelle, the firm applied the egalitarian principles of the post war world and rejection of the scientific management theories that had created the familiar factory-like rows of desks that had come to dominate open plan offices to create something more in tune with the new age.

December 20, 2022

Never mind the workplace predictions, here’s some bollocks

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

Time of the year for looking backwards and forwards. For workplace predictions and retrospectives. The Economist announces that the word / term of the year is hybrid work. This is interesting because, although The Economist is using it as an interchangeable term for flexible working as many do, a great deal of energy is still expounded on defining exactly what it means. We may work out when the obsession with three days in the office, two at home thing started. But for now, determining where people are at any given time doesn’t seem very flexible to me. More →

December 12, 2022

The ethics of AI, liveable cities, unf*cking work and how the office needs to be more like your home…

by Mark Eltringham • IN Magazine, News, Premium Content

IN13 is in production but you can see the digital edition of issue 12 of IN Magazine here. It continues to explore the most up to date topics for workplace managers and executives. Including: a look at the reality of liveable cities; why offices now need to offer people more privacy, peace and quiet; how firms need to address the challenges of the circular economy; a case study from the dynamic city of Ljubljana; David Sharp on the ethics of AI; Chelsea Perino on hybrid working; a critical review of Neil Usher’s new book; Marie Puybaraud of JLL in conversation; and much more. All back issues of IN can be found here. And why not check out Works Magazine and Work&Place Journal too. More →

December 9, 2022

The Great Relearning about the Great Office Problem

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

One of the latest people to invent activity-based working is sociologist Ana Andjelic, who combines it with the similarly familiar hub and spoke office model on her substack as a solution to the Great Office Problem. She’s not the first and is a less surprising pioneer of a decades old model than some other people who should really know better. That includes an architectural practice who came up with the idea earlier this year and whose name escapes me. More →

November 30, 2022

Always connected in the age of disconnection

by Mark Eltringham • Features, Flexible working, Wellbeing

All of humanity’s problems,” the French scientist and philosopher Blaise Pascal wrote in 1654, “stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” He may have been right, but then again, sitting in a room alone isn’t necessarily a great state of permanent being either. 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 →

November 17, 2022

The workplace circus continues to entertain, but back in the real world…

by Mark Eltringham • Comment, Flexible working, Technology, Wellbeing

The Great Workplace Circus headlines its 322nd show of the year with everybody’s favourite distraction, Elon Musk, being driven into the ring by his own shoddily built clown car, declaring he needs everybody at Twitter to be ‘extremely hardcore’ before sacking a few people from his space programme, then setting fire to the tent himself. The swarm of stories spawned by this extraordinary behaviour include this tired and predictable rant in the Telegraph about ‘lazy Brits’. Ironically, there’s nothing lazier than a columnist on this rag with some space to fill. More →

November 15, 2022

Hybrid working is now an essential part of many job offers

by Mark Eltringham • HR, News

A new US study conducted by IWG claims that employers view the hybrid working model as an essential part of their toolbox when it comes to recruitment, hiring and retention, with nearly 95 percent of HR leaders saying it is an effective recruitment tool. Released today, the ‘HR Leaders & Hybrid Working Report’ examines findings from a poll of more than 1,000 HR professionals at managerial and board level. More →