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:

January 11, 2017

New gadget aims to deal with office acoustics at source ⁰

by Mark Eltringham • News, Products, Technology, Workplace design

Last year we ran a piece which looked at some of the outlandish ways designers have offered people the chance to get some peace and quiet at work. The extremes people will consider as they deal with the challenge of office acoustics is enlightening. All of those examples relied on the principle of keeping at least some of the racket produced by colleagues from entering the ear. But a new prototype product launched at this week’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas frames the issue differently by going back to source. The Hushme is a voice masking device for mobile phones. It has integrated earbuds and comes with a range of masking sounds such as wind, rain, monkey, Darth Vader and squirrel. You have to wonder who it’s aimed at but the makers suggest it is all about privacy. Then again, it may make an ideal gift for some and could be popular for this year’s Secret Santas.

[embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2Cf3rHifv0[/embedyt]

January 11, 2017

Strategic application of Big Data reaches tipping point, claims study ⁰

by Mark Eltringham • News, Technology

A new study claims that the application of Big Data in the workplace has now reached a tipping point as two thirds of organisations now consider its application of ‘strategic’ consequence, with just a fifth (19 percent) still at an experimental stage. According to the 2016 Big Data Maturity Survey from AtScale, nearly all of the 2,550 businesses who took part (97 percent) claim they will do as much or more to apply Big Data to decision making over the next three months. The main application is expected to be business intelligence according to 75 percent of respondents to the study. The AtScale study also found most companies now deploy Big Data in the cloud rather than keeping it on premises. “There’s been a clear surge in use of Big Data in the Cloud over the last year and what’s perhaps as interesting is the fact that respondents are far more likely to achieve tangible value when their data is in the cloud,” said AtScale CTO and co-founder Matt Baird.

January 6, 2017

Work-life balance trumps pay in workplace new year’s resolutions ⁰

by Mark Eltringham • Flexible working, News

New research from Office Genie claims that when it comes to career-focussed resolutions, financial desires lose out to a more holistic approach to wellbeing: A better work-life balance is the top new year’s resolution for UK employees (17 percent), closely followed by the wish to learn new skills in the workplace (14 percent). Pay rises (13 percent) are important however, coming in third. Having healthier lunches (9 percent), being more organised (7 percent), and getting a promotion (6 percent) also proved popular. It would appear employees are less concerned with getting more done: productivity (5 percent), working harder (3 percent), and making more friends in the workplace (1 percent) are the three least popular resolutions.

January 6, 2017

Learning to love staff means letting them disconnect from work, and other stories ⁰

by Mark Eltringham • Flexible working, News, Technology

Topical workplace issues featured prominently at this week’s British Psychological Society’s Division of Occupational Psychology annual conference held in Liverpool. Four of the key takeaways from the event deal with issues such as the right to disconnect when working from home – a right recently enshrined in law in France, the way different personality types deal with emails, the toxic relationship between employers and employees and even how managers can learn to show their staff more love. The focus at teh event underlines a growing awareness of the complexities of our new relationship with work and workplaces.

January 5, 2017

Smart buildings and driverless vehicles to spearhead huge growth in Internet of Things spending ⁰

by Mark Eltringham • News, Technology

Worldwide spending on the Internet of Things (IoT) is forecast to reach $737 billion for the past year (2016) as organisations invest in the hardware, software, services, and connectivity that enable the IoT. According to a new update to the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Semiannual Internet of Things Spending Guide, global IoT spending will experience a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 15.6 percent over the 2015-2020 forecast period, reaching $1.29 trillion in 2020. The industries forecast to make the largest IoT investments in 2016 are Manufacturing ($178 billion), Transportation ($78 billion), and Utilities ($69 billion). Consumer IoT purchases, the fourth largest market segment in 2016, will become the third largest segment by 2020. Meanwhile, cross-industry IoT, such as that for connected vehicles and smart buildings, will rank among the top segments throughout the five-year forecast.

January 2, 2017

Britain must future proof itself ahead of a decade of disruption, claims report ⁰

by Mark Eltringham • News, Technology

Brexit negotiations will ‘fire the starting gun’ on a decade of change for the UK, claims a new report from think tank the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR). The study, Future Proof: Britain in the 2020s, sets out the key challenges it claims will shape the UK in the period up to 2030 and the ‘choices that must be made now if these changes are to lead to a fairer and more equal society’. Among the issues covered in the report are the challenges directly related to Brexit, alongside factors such as an ageing population, other demographic changes, the risk to jobs posed by automation, the shift of the globalised economy towards Asia and the enduring problems associated with wage inequalities and the environment.

January 2, 2017

Women report more workplace stress than male colleagues, claims study ⁰

by Mark Eltringham • News, Wellbeing

Women in the UK report more work-related stress than men because of workplace biases, the types of work carried out, the burden of taking on extra responsibilities at home and the perception of unequal pay, according to the latest figures from the Health and Safety Executive (HSE). The HSE data suggests that women aged 25-54 in Britain are more stressed than their male contemporaries, with this pressure peaking for those aged 35-44, at a time when many are juggling family responsibilities such as caring for children and other family members. According to the HSE data for the period from 2013 to 2016, the prevalence of work-related stress as defined in the report among female workers was 2,250per 100,000, equivalent to around 270,000 workers. Among men the figures were 1,270 per 100,000, or around 200,000 workers. The HSE reported that 11 million working days were lost due to stress between 2015-2016, equating to 37 per cent of employment-related ill health and 45 per cent of days lost.

January 1, 2017

A workplace tale told in numbers: WeWork in 2016 ⁰

by Mark Eltringham • Company news, Property

WeWork is the weather vane for a new era in which property is increasingly consumed as a service. The company has issued a statement looking back over its achievements during the past year. It’s a tale told in numbers so makes interesting reading. The firm claims it has added 58 new spaces and now offers over 110 locations open around the world for its 80,000 members. It has opened spaces in 18 new cities including Berlin (Berlin), Beer Sheva, Seoul, Mexico City, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Montreal, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Denver and Sydney. Perhaps most tellingly, it has extended its client reach to include firms such as Microsoft, HSBC, Bacardi and Samsung. There’ll be lots of people offering up lists at this time of year detailing key workplace trends. Few will be as instructive as the numbers coming out of WeWork and the wider coworking movement.

December 26, 2016

The Winter 2016 issue of Work&Place is available now ⁰

by Mark Eltringham • Architecture, Case studies, Facilities management, Flexible working, Premium Content, Technology, Work&Place, Workplace, Workplace design

The Winter 2016 issue of Work&Place is now available to view online. In this edition… Neil Usher, Workplace Director at Sky offers a first hand account of the story behind the firm’s remarkable new offices at the Osterley campus in London; Kate Langan explores some of the implications of the growing digitisation of the workplace; Jim Ware looks at how the challenge of creating effective meeting spaces is now a strategic concern; John Blackwell tries to make sense of falling productivity levels when we have all the tools and know how to increase it; David Woolf makes the case for designing better collaborative spaces; Mark Eltringham looks forward to an almost entirely unpredictable future for workplaces in the 21st Century; and Karen Plum and Andrew Mawson set out the factors that drive knowledge worker productivity. The PDF edition is available to view and download here. Or view online here.

December 23, 2016

Presenteeism doesn’t aid productivity, so employers should set workers free ⁰

by Mark Eltringham • Comment, Flexible working

At this time of year, the days are short, the morning commute can be hellish and traffic grid-locked. Wouldn’t it be ideal if more employers recognised this and offered a solution involving flexible hours, remote collaboration or even home-working? And not just at Christmas, but the whole year round? More and more companies are switching on to the benefits this can bring in terms of their employees’ well-being and productivity. Firms can allow colleagues to occasionally work from home or a third place, provide tools that enable them to work remotely and support an agile working agenda. This can be done in parallel with making provision for a hi-tech and collaborative workplace where colleagues can get together regularly to connect, get work done and be part of an effective team.

December 22, 2016

Getting ahead at work: social class divide, power and office politics ⁰

by Mark Eltringham • News, Workplace

A new study from the University of Virginia Darden School of Business has found that class-based inequality in the workplace persists not only because of external factors like bias and glass ceilings, but also because of structural factors that discourage people from lower social classes from seeking positions of power in the first place. The paper, co-authored by Peter Belmi of the Darden School of Business and Kristin Laurin of the Stanford Graduate School of Business, claims that most people believe that getting ahead requires a mixture of pro-social behavior – such as being competent, hard-working, and a team player; and political behaviour – such as being outspoken, flattering, and treating others as “resources”. According to the research published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, inequality begins to thrive in the disparity between which groups are actually willing to put both behaviours into practice. Even though everyone derides political angling, it turns out that relatively high-class individuals are still willing to play the game to get ahead. Not so with lower-class individuals.

December 22, 2016

Green buildings help you to think and sleep better ⁰

by Mark Eltringham • Environment, News

A new study from researchers at Harvard claims to establish a link between those standards for green buildings with an indoor environmental quality (IEQ) component and the wellbeing and productivity of employees. The study, The impact of working in a green certified building on cognitive function and health, has been published in the journal Building and Environment. Based on a study of 109 subjects in ten ‘high performing’ buildings compared to staff from the same firm in uncertified buildings, it found that respondents enjoyed a 26.4 percent uplift in cognitive performance, a 6.4 percent increase in sleep quality and 30 percent fewer symptoms. The accreditations used in the study were LEED New Construction 2009, Green Star Office v3, BREEAM New Construction 2012, BCA Green mark for new non-residential buildings v4.1 2013, and DGNB New Office v2012