July 21, 2020
The enduring but changing struggle to improve the working conditions and performance of people through workplace design and management has more than a whiff of the Enlightenment of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries about it. The Enlightenment marked a new era in which the old superstitions and dogmas were to be overthrown by pure reason.
July 17, 2020
It’s been talked about for a number of years now but we can expect to be hearing a lot more about the four day week or six hour day soon. The modern conversation has its roots partly in a Swedish experiment designed to limit the hours people work in an attempt to improve their work-life balance and possibly even increase their productivity. Now a growing number of firms are looking to introduce a nominal four day working week or restrict the use of technology – meaning email – outside of certain hours. More →
July 16, 2020
This sounds really obvious but when organisations talk about diversity and inclusion they often forget to include disability. They talk about the importance of women in leadership and the gender pay gap, the need to include people from an ethnic minority background especially following the Black Lives Matter movement. And June just gone was dedicated to LGBT+ Pride month. More →
July 15, 2020
No author uses the built environment like J G Ballard. In his 1975 novel High-Rise, the eponymous structure is both a way of isolating the group of people who live and compete inside it and a metaphor for their personal isolation and inner struggles. Over the course of three months, the building’s services begin to fail. The 2,000 people within, detached from external realities in the 40-storey building, confronted with their true selves and those of their neighbours, descend into selfishness and – ultimately – savagery. More →
July 9, 2020
In March, coronavirus presented a stark challenge to businesses attempting to cope with workplace absence. FirstCare statistics show that during Q1 2020, more than 98 percent of Covid-19-related absences were due to unconfirmed cases, self-quarantining as a precaution, or caring for dependents. This has resulted in huge financial pressure on businesses. Now though, as restrictions are gradually eased, human resources must respond to the mental health challenges the pandemic has manifested in workers, including grief, trauma, PTSD and more general anxiety. More →
July 7, 2020
Over the last several months, some workers have exhibited a new ailment that has got nothing to do with the COVID-19 pandemic that sent them scurrying home to set up virtual offices in the first place. It’s called FOGO, as coined by Forbes magazine contributing writer Jodie Cook, and it refers to a new phenomenon known as the “Fear of Going Out”.
July 6, 2020
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 3, 2020
Slowly, it seems we are seeing a gradual return to some sort of normality. Shops are opening up as well as restaurants and pubs and many of us are now also heading back into the office. But these aren’t the offices as we once knew them. Workspace layouts and seating plans are being completely overhauled to bring in new social distancing and safety measures. Beyond just the physical changes this incurs, this could also have a wider impact on how we work – and businesses need to be prepared and ready for that too. More →
July 2, 2020
Everything has taken a hit in 2020. Nothing has gone unscathed or unchanged – and the same goes for leadership. From boardrooms to living rooms, meeting rooms to spare rooms, leadership has moved away from face-to-face interactions to digital communications. Meanwhile, forward-thinking initiatives, spurred on by continuing diversity imbalances and widening gender pay gaps, have been put on hold. Following government guidance, only half of businesses published their 2018-19 gender pay gap report – which could reportedly push gender equality back a whole generation. We are risking losing sight of what’s important to us – and unless we’re intentional about how we make systemic, much-needed organisational changes, they’re not going to happen if we only focus on more ‘critical’ things, or keeping the lights on. More →
July 1, 2020
Flexible working arrangements are those which ‘allow employees to vary the amount, timing or location of their work’ and may include part-time working, mobile/home working, compressed hours or job-sharing – among others. Before the lockdown, according to the Chartered Institute of Personnel Development (CIPD), more than half of all employees in the UK used at least one form of flexible working, while a study by Gallup in the US suggests as many as 43 percent of employees already worked flexibly. The practice has been found to have positive effects on job satisfaction, employee commitment, reducing work-family conflict – and for many is now an essential component of modern working life. More →
June 30, 2020
Take any issue in the modern era and you’ll find a noisy schism. The big-endians and little-endians yelling at each other about the right way to eat a boiled egg, right over the heads of the majority of people who wonder if they’d be better off just having some toast and a nice cup of tea. Not that the toast-eaters can say anything without being accused by both sides of the divide of belonging to the other. More →
July 22, 2020
Don’t be a commute Canute, Boris
by Andrew Mawson • Comment, Flexible working