August 14, 2013

Proceed with caution when using social media to recruit new talent

by Sara Bean • Comment, Knowledge, Legal news, Workplace

Time was, not so long ago that a job seeker could choose which aspects of their experience, interests and personality they wanted to reveal on a job application. For the employer this meant wheedling out the right candidates from a pile of written applications, then using the interview process to determine whether the applicant measured up to their requirements. Today, social media not only makes it easier for employers to reach a much wider universe of candidates – it also gives them the opportunity if they choose, to screen potential employees, and this is where legally, ethically and practically, new largely uncharted problems lie. More →

August 13, 2013

Worldwide space standards moving closer to UK norm, claims new report

by Mark Eltringham • Comment, Facilities management, Flexible working, Knowledge, News, Property, Workplace design

Worldwide office space standards are now moving closer to the norm seen in the UK according to a new survey from CoreNet Global. According to the CoreNet survey of real estate managers, the average amount of space per office worker globally has dropped to 150 sq. ft (14 sq.m.) , from 225 sq. ft. (21 sq.m.). This is still well outside the standards from the British Council for Offices Specification Guide which reported a fall to 11.8 sq. m. in 2009 and which will be revised downwards even further with the publication of the new guide which has been promised soon. Even this figure might be seen as high and makes assumptions about the relevance of such space standards given the way some firms now work.

August 8, 2013

The war against environmental cynicism puts an onus on suppliers to be honest

by Mark Eltringham • Comment, Environment, Furniture

Greenwash is one of those terms that has gone from needing an explanation to being in common usage in the space of a few years. The reason for that is quite simply that it is the perfect description of a particular form of marketing bullshit that we all recognise. However, while a degree of scepticism about what you hear from marketers is always healthy, but I fear the point has been reached where some people find it easy to dismiss real environmental claims as greenwash. The war against cynicism can partly be helped if more manufacturers and suppliers could get better at demonstrating the validity of their claims.

August 6, 2013

Effective recycling is about good management as much as it is materials and design

by Mark Eltringham • Comment, Environment, Furniture, Products

We all like to think we are discerning about what we will and won’t put in our trolleys at the supermarket. Not any old salty, fat-saturated gloop will make the cut these days. That’s why the producers of food like to proclaim its healthiness on packaging, regardless of the nature of the product within. ‘Lower fat’ doesn’t mean low fat. Companies in other sectors follow suit. The office products market is one in which some manufacturers don’t mind a splash of green on product labels. This doesn’t do the customer or the buyer any good and can breed cynicism in the market, undermining the efforts of those suppliers who actually take a sophisticated approach to the environmental performance of their products.

August 1, 2013

Predicting the future of the office means looking at what is happening now

by Charles Marks • Comment, Facilities management, Furniture, Workplace, Workplace design

Futurology is notoriously a mug’s game. Especially when it comes to making predictions about technology. Just ask Ken Olson, the founder of DEC who in 1977 pronounced that ‘there is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home’. Or Bill Gates himself who once claimed that Microsoft ‘will never make a 32 bit operating system’. Most recently Steve Ballmer, a billionaire executive said in 2007 ‘there’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share.’ But mone of these retrosepctively viewed dodgy predictions should make us blind to those that we know will certainly come true, especially those based on what we know is happening in the present.

July 19, 2013

Dual source lighting schemes illuminate the way ahead for office design

by Shane Cohen • Comment, Facilities management, Lighting, Workplace design

Too bright, too dull, too much glare – lighting (alongside air conditioning) is often one of the most contentious factors in a workplace. Office workers need illumination to read, write, type and interact. Yet many workplaces get it wrong and fail to consider the downsides of poor lighting, and as such staff will suffer from eye strain, headaches and postural problems, leading to sick days, not to mention lost productivity and mistakes. Eighty per cent of office workers experience at least one negative effect from poor quality lighting, according to researchers Bruskin Goldring, and 68 per cent of employees complain about the light in their offices, according to a study by the American Society of Interior Designers.

July 18, 2013

Baltimore residents offered a “guns for laptops” exchange

by Sara Bean • Comment, News, Technology

Growing concerns regarding the incursion of connectivity devices into our everyday lives ignores the fact that many people have little or no access to these tools. Access to the Internet may have been ruled as a UN human right, but that doesn’t really help those who can’t afford devices that connect them to the web in the first place. So, while for most Europeans the recent story in the Baltimore Brew that locals could turn in their guns in exchange for a refurbished Dell laptop is pretty jaw-dropping, it’s a good example of the difficulty residents in a deprived area have in, as the organisers describe it, “bridging the digital divide.”

July 17, 2013

What Graeme Obree, the Flying Scotsman, can teach us about workplace innovation

by Andrew Brown • Comment, Technology

Innovation is one of the over-used words in the UK built environment. In fact, it is used so much that its true meaning is being left behind by marketing teams and spin doctors. The real definition is about a new method, idea, product, i.e. some form of technological innovation. Think about the last time you read of a claim for an innovative product, method or management concept. How new was it really? Often ‘innovation’ is more to do with the Emperor’s clothes than an effective new method or a radical product that changes a manufacturing process or reduces carbon, or just makes life and work more efficient. More →

July 12, 2013

The challenge in Silicon Alley is providing the right quantity and quality of office space

by Charles Marks • Comment, Facilities management, Property, Workplace design

News emerges from BNP Paribas that the most dynamic occupiers in Western European property markets belong to the technology, media and telecoms (TMT) sector and that the most important market in the region is London. This comes as no surprise given the plans of Google to move to its new home in King’s Cross and the focus on developments in Tech City. But the same hothousing of TMT businesses is also evident in the area Prime Minister David Cameron has referred to as Silicon Alley, a cluster of businesses running alongside the M4 originally clustered between Reading and Swindon but now extending as far as Bristol. Companies that have found a home in the area include the likes of Cisco, Microsoft, Oracle, Ericsson, Vodafone, O2, Citrix, Dell, Huawei, Lexmark, LG, Novell, Nvidia, Panasonic, SAP and Symantec not to mention the countless other smaller businesses, consultants and freelancers that share this hothouse.

July 10, 2013

Design Museum sale paves way for resurrection of Commonwealth Institute

by Mark Eltringham • Architecture, Comment, News, Property, Workplace design

Deskheads of a certain vintage may have viewed the news that Zaha Hadid had bought the Design Museum’s London home for £10 million in a somewhat different light to much of the media that reported the sale. While journalists succumbed to the apparently irresistible pull of architectural headline magnet Zaha, to some of us the interesting part of the story was that the sale finally freed the Design Museum to move to the long empty Commonwealth Institute building in Kensington. The building is one of the most architecturally important modern buildings in London and has a long association not only with The Commonwealth Institute educational charity but as a venue for cultural events and exhibitions of design, not least the now defunct Prima and Spectrum exhibitions which did so much to promote commercial interior design in the UK.

July 9, 2013

BIFM partnership with DWP may prove an ill-advised and short-lived union

by Simon Heath • Comment, Facilities management

Rather like someone who collects friends on Facebook and followers on Twitter with the obsessiveness of the avid lepidopterist completist, news reaches us from the British Institute of Facilities Management concerning yet another partnership. Not content with the recently announced merger with Asset Skills, the Facilities Management Association and the Cleaning and Support Services Association, this time it’s the Department for Work & Pensions (DWP) that is the object of BIFM’s affections. Not that BIFM are considering moving in to Caxton House and a run for Parliament in 2015 (at least not that we are aware of). But while BIFM are, understandably, trumpeting the signing of this joint agreement, the DWP are not. In fact, if one searches on www.gov.uk using the search terms “BIFM” or “British Institute of Facilities Management” no results are returned.

July 5, 2013

Douglas Engelbart helped to define our relationship with technology and each other

by Mark Eltringham • Comment, Flexible working, Technology

The obituaries of Douglas Engelbart, who died on Tuesday, invariably characterised him as ‘the inventor of the mouse’ which is downplaying the contribution he made to our ability to interact with computers. He had the foresight to see that our relationship with technology would become one of the defining characteristics of modern life and he had it at a time when computers were the size of rooms and programmed using punched cards. He took part in the world’s first videoconference and developed ideas for early incarnations of word processors, the internet and email. He made no money from the mouse, the rights for which were sold to Apple for $40,000 in 1983 and the patent for which ran out in 1987. He was honoured in his lifetime however, winning the Lemelson-MIT prize in 1997 and a National Medal of Technology for ‘creating the foundations of personal computing’ in 2000.

While the mouse appears to be about our physical interaction with the computer, and indeed is one of the most pressing concerns for ergonomists, Engelbart was actually more concerned with developing ways for groups of people to use computers to share information and ideas. His thoughts on how intellectualised workers would apply technology while sitting at what he called ‘working stations’ are strikingly contemporary but at the time he expressed them went against the grain in a world in which computers were mere number crunching machines. Indeed, for a time Engelbart became a marginal figure as interest waned in his ideas, only for him to achieve the recognition his work and ideas deserved over the last twenty five years as the internet transformed our working lives.