October 5, 2018

Developing a resilient mindset to cope with stress

Earlier this year, The New York times reported on a company in New Zealand that reduced its employee’s work time to four days a week whilst paying them for five. The idea came to the CEO after he read research that showed that employees generally only spend three hours a day on actual productive work. The change was highly successful, employees were as productive over the four days as they were over the five but the wellbeing of employees improved dramatically.

September 28, 2018

The horrors and harmonies of workplace hierarchy

by Monica Parker • Comment, Technology, Workplace design

I am a child of the seventies, and one of my favourite shows when I was just a tyke was The Jeffersons. For those not familiar with The Jeffersons, it was about a black family in New York City who had, through ambition and entrepreneurship, ‘made it to the top’. George Jefferson, the patriarch, was a bolshie character. Hijinks usually ensued. But what stuck with me about that show was the catchy theme song, Movin’ On Up. The lyrics were ‘I’m movin’ on up, to the upper east side, to a deluxe apartment in the sky… I finally got a piece of the pie.’ Growing up in suburbia, this was probably the first time that I learned the idea of a penthouse, and the notion that the higher up the building, the more important you were. It wasn’t until I was about age eight that I realised the word wasn’t ‘high-archy’, but ‘hierarchy.’

September 27, 2018

We need to take a scientific approach to the potential impact of AI

by Eleni Vasilaki • Comment, Technology

Should we be afraid of artificial intelligence? For me, this is a simple question with an even simpler, two letter answer: no. But not everyone agrees – many people, including the late physicist Stephen Hawking, have raised concerns that the rise of powerful AI systems could spell the end for humanity. Clearly, your view on whether AI will take over the world will depend on whether you think it can develop intelligent behaviour surpassing that of humans – something referred to as “super intelligence”.

September 24, 2018

It is not particularly easy to change human behaviour by design

by Mark Eltringham • Comment, Facilities management, Workplace, Workplace design

Many of the techniques employed by modern illusionists rely on a thorough grounding in the research of psychologists. They’re not alone in standing on the shoulders of academics to bend people to their will. Many of our beliefs about the workings of our society and workplaces and their design are based on this sort of manipulation. It’s telling that the growth of consumerism in the 20th Century, especially after the War when we first began to move from a needs based economy to one fuelled by desire, was driven by the ideas of Sigmund Freud’s nephew. Edward Bernays became the ‘father of PR’ by popularising his uncle’s theories in the US then applying them to mould the subconscious desires of the American masses. He did this not just in the name of commerce but also in that of politics because he believed that society was becoming increasingly irrational, immoral and dangerous.

September 18, 2018

Building a culture of creativity that unites the physical and digital workplace

by Serena Borghero • Comment, Technology, Workplace design

Agreeing on the definition of creativity is no easy task, as it can mean a whole range of different things to different people. To some, creativity means painting a beautiful picture or creating a unique sculpture, while for others it might mean writing a catchy tagline, developing a new business model, or building an innovative online tool. The fact is, creativity can be found in all walks of life, not just those we traditionally see as creative, such as art, design or music. And furthermore, it’s playing an increasingly pivotal role in the growth, development and success of all types of organisations, and the employees working for them.

September 14, 2018

All those workplace trends lists that you see? We’ve been there before ⁰

by Mark Eltringham • Comment, Facilities management, Furniture, Workplace design

Conference and show season looms and with it arrives the annual swarm of workplace trend forecasts. These are often presented as groundbreaking but many of them are indistinguishable from each other and based on some very familiar tropes and assumptions. These days such things tend to be shaped into lists, because that’s how the Internet likes it. That is all perfectly natural and we are free to make our own mind up which of these features are meaningful and which are hack jobs. No football pundit was ever fired for stringing together clichés rather than thinking and talking, and no marketing person has ever lost their job for publishing a list of Ten Trends.

September 13, 2018

You should not expect the coworking bubble to burst anytime soon

by Kathryn O'Callaghan-Mills • Comment, Coworking, Property, Workplace design

Coworking is not the norm yet, but it is headed that direction. In fact, a sign of its success is the fact that it has moved from being labelled a fad to asking if it is a bubble about to burst. Here’s a short answer: it is not going to go pop, fizzle out or run out of steam anytime soon. Why would it? Coworking is not something driven by real estate and developers. It reflects how our society is changing.

September 12, 2018

Reinventing jobs for an automated future workplace

by Ravin Jesuthasan • AI, Comment, Technology

Earlier this year, the European Commission announced it will invest €20 billion in Artificial Intelligence (AI) research and development by 2020 to boost the adoption of AI and robotics across multiple industries, which will have a significant impact on the way work across sectors gets done. Facing demographic deficits, Europe and Japan – and to an extent the US and China – are highly motivated to continue investment into AI, which is growing at an annual rate of 15 percent, and set to reach $1 trillion globally by 2050, according to Morgan Stanley.

September 10, 2018

The evolution of the workplace conversation in ten graphs

by Mark Eltringham • Comment, Facilities management, Technology, Workplace design

Based on Google Trends data since 2004 and without comment.

Main image: Herman Miller Living Office

September 7, 2018

How Thomas Jefferson came to invent the swivel chair and laptop ⁰

by Mark Eltringham • Comment, Furniture, Technology, Workplace design

In 1775, Thomas Jefferson was a busy man. As part of the Committee of Five men and at the tender age of 33, he had been charged with drafting the Declaration of Independence that was to be presented to Congress the following Summer. By all accounts, Jefferson was a self-contained and self-sufficient man and, like many great people, a mass of contradictions.

September 6, 2018

Creating a productive workplace for people is all about context

by Mark Eltringham • Comment, Facilities management, Workplace, Workplace design

The quest for a proper understanding of the links between the places we work, the things with which we fill them and our wellbeing and productivity has been ongoing for a very long time. It predates our current thinking on productive workplace design and the facilities management discipline as we now know it by decades and has its roots in the design of early landmark offices such as Frank Lloyd Wright’s Larkin building and research such as that carried out at the Hawthorne Works in Chicago in the late 1920s. Yet the constantly evolving nature of work means that we are forever tantalised by an idea that we can never fully grasp and makes established ideas seem like revelations.

September 4, 2018

Don’t stand so close to me: why personal space matters in the workplace ⁰

by Paul Goodchild • Comment, Wellbeing, Workplace design

As successive BCO Specification Guides and the research of organisations like CoreNet Global have proved, the spatial dynamics of offices have changed dramatically in recent years. Put simply, the modern office serves significantly more people per square foot than ever before. Originally this tightening was largely down to the growing ubiquity of flat screen and the mobile devices, but more recently the major driver of change appears to be the gradual disappearance of personal workstations in favour of more shared space.