April 19, 2021
Pressure and weak leadership form the recipe for workplace bullying
Employees experience more bullying on days with higher work pressure and passive avoidant leadership, finds new research from BI Norwegian Business School and the University of Bergen and published in The European Management Journal. Professor Olav Kjellevold Olsen and colleagues studied how work pressure is related to daily experiences of workplace bullying related acts, as well as the relationship with transformational or laissez-faire leadership. Transformational leadership involves paying more attention to employees’ needs for achievement and providing social support. Laissez-faire leadership involves a more passive and destructive approach leaving followers on their own in situations in need of leadership. (more…)
A new global survey by CFO Research and 
If a robot worker makes a mistake on the job, or annoys customers, businesses may not give it a pink slip and a cardboard box for its office belongings, but companies may be forced to shut down these expensive machines, according to a team of researchers. Knowing how to better design and manage these robots may help service industry firms both avoid losing their investments in the robots, as well as secure an increasingly necessary source of extra help, the team added. 
Lockdown has meant the majority of UK office-based employees have taken up working from home arrangements over the last year, and it seems that many employers lack trust in their employees when they can’t physically see them. Last year 
The UK civil service is set to pioneer a widespread hybrid working strategy with the announcement of a new deal with serviced office provider IWG. The details of the deal, 
In those heady pre-lockdown days, the most common complaint about office life, and especially open plan office life, was the inability to get work done without distraction. Now a new paper from researchers at the University of Illinois suggests that the interruptions may have served some purpose in the way they helped people feel a sense of belonging in the workplace. 
New rules allowing commercial premises to be converted into homes come into force as part of a package of measures the UK government claims will help to revitalise England’s high streets and town centres. It believes the new rules will help “support the creation of much-needed homes while also giving high streets a new lease of life – removing eyesores, transforming unused buildings and making the most of brownfield land.” 
A new survey of many of the world’s leading real estate investors finds that 92 percent of respondents expect demand for healthy buildings to grow in the next three years. The report claims that this is a compelling signal of the direction the real estate sector is heading. This finding, among others, is captured in a report titled 
Workers across the UK could return to offices faster than anticipated, according to a new RICS survey of facilities managers. According to the poll, a growing number of respondents say that up to 80 percent of employees will head back once the pandemic is resolved. This is up from less than 60 percent expected in the same poll from the previous quarter ending November 2020. As evidence suggests the UK vaccination programme is taking hold across the country, results to the 
A new report from KPMG suggests that half of major corporations do not expect to see a return to any sort of ‘normality’ until 2022 when half of the general population has been vaccinated. The report also claims that there has been a steep decline in the appetite of the global executives who took part in the survey for office downsizing as the firms reconsider the need for in-person business to resume when countries emerge from the pandemic. 
A new report from think tank Demos and Legal & General calls on the UK Government to back policy change that supports growth of hybrid working and local offices to drive forward its plans for regeneration and economic growth. The report, 
April 14, 2021
The digital world is not necessarily greener than the physical world
by Neil Franklin • Comment, Environment, Technology