October 20, 2017
October 19, 2017
Future office and changing business of work debated at Workplace Trends
Those working within the built environment are already in the change business, was the view of Neil Usher of workessence in his presentation at the Workplace Trends Conference which was held in London this week. This was apt, as the changing business of work’ was the theme of the conference. It’s a pretty common topic these days of course but a strong line up of speakers ensured some interesting discussions; which included the rise of the gig economy, the variety of ways people from different cultures perceive workplace design and predictions on the workplaces of the future. On the current design and fit out of the office, Usher was clear; that creating a fantastic workplace is independent of culture, location, the work style you want to create and the sector in which you’re working. His other mantra was that you can still work in an awful workplace with great technology, but not the other way around, which is why there is no excuse for not getting your technology right.
October 19, 2017
How our smartphones stop us from living in the moment
As a teacher who has long witnessed and worried about the impacts of technology in the classroom, I constantly struggle to devise effective classroom policies for smartphones. I used to make students sing or dance if their phones interrupted class, and although this led to some memorable moments, it also turned inappropriate tech use into a joke. Given the myriad deleterious effects of phones – addiction, decline of face-to-face socialisation, deskilling, and endless distraction, for starters – I want students to think carefully about their phone habits, rather than to mindlessly follow (or not follow) a rule.
October 10, 2017
We (still) need to talk about mental health in the workplace
In recent years we have made huge strides in moving discussions around mental health into the public arena. Celebrities such as Cara Delevingne, Ryan Reynolds, Gwyneth Paltrow and Brad Pitt have all come forward to share personal stories of their struggle with mental health problems. The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge and Prince Harry have also championed mental health awareness through the Heads Together campaign, a charity that aims to help people feel more comfortable with their everyday mental wellbeing and offer practical tools to help support their friends and family. The campaign rose to prominence in the media as the 2017 Virgin Money London Marathon Charity of the Year.
October 9, 2017
Our Twentieth Century approach to ergonomics has to change
One of the big problems with the way some people talk about the term ‘ergonomic’ is that they tend to use it to describe the design of objects when really it’s about the relationship between a person and the things around them. It’s an abstract idea, about the relationships between design, facilities and management, so is dependent on a number of variables. When those variables change, what we understand to be good ergonomics changes too. The principle of ergonomics as we now understand it first came to prominence in the wake of the intensive growth in the use of computers. The legacy of this fixed view can be an approach based on an idea of desk-bound employees with a computer, whereas how we work now bears little resemblance to how we worked 20 years ago.
October 4, 2017
Convergence of work and life defines September London workplace design shows
It has always been a characteristic of the 100% Design exhibition that it has segmented along the demarcations of workplace, home, interiors, kitchens and bedrooms. This used to make perfect sense as the same distinctions existed in our lives, reflected in the form and function of the products we allocated to those spaces. This is no longer the case to anywhere like the same extent and consequently, the workplace section of the show is full of products that could make the crossover into a domestic, cafe or hotel setting with not an eyebrow raised. That is not to say that the mainstay products of the workplace – desks, task chairs, storage, screens – are no more. They are still specified in vast numbers. It is just that the interesting aspects of workplace design are to be found in its shared and public spaces. It is here where we witness the convergence that characterises modern working life. We might still talk about work life balance (too much) but there is a growing realisation that the distinction grows more meaningless with each passing year.
October 2, 2017
Time to start a new culture to tackle stigma on mental wellbeing issues in the workplace
As a recent Workplace Insight story reported, UK workers are still uncomfortable about having honest conversations at work, with nearly two thirds (61 percent) feel they keep an aspect of their lives hidden in the workplace. Family difficulties (46 percent) was the most likely hidden issue at work, followed by mental health (31 percent). Talking about mental wellbeing worries to employers can be very distressing for individuals and not only make a person’s condition worse, but also, leave their career in a worse place according to our latest thought leadership research report: Mind Culture. Our latest research study shows that more than half (51 percent) of survey respondents who had confided in their line manager about a mental health issue did not receive any extra support. Even worse, 8 percent respondents faced negative consequences, including being sacked or forced out, demoted or subjected to disciplinary action.
September 13, 2017
Banking sector will be ground zero for job losses from artificial intelligence and robotics
Deutsche Bank CEO John Cryan has predicted a bonfire of industry jobs as automation takes hold across the finance sector. Every signal is that he will be proved right very soon. Those roles in finance where the knowledge required is systematic will soon disappear. And it will happen irrespective of how high a level, how highly trained or how experienced the human equivalent may currently be. Regular and repetitive tasks at all levels of an organisation already do not need to be done by humans. The more a job is solely or largely composed of these routines the higher the risk of being replaced by computing power. The warning signs have been out there for a number of years as enthusiastic reports about artificial intelligence have been tempered with fears about significant job losses in most sectors of the economy. Many roles have already all but disappeared in the march towards a fully digital economy. Older readers may recall typesetters, typists, and increasingly, switchboard operators and back room postal workers, as work of the last century. And the changing nature of work is relentless.
August 23, 2017
I’ve got some real estate here in my bag
Let us be lovers,
We’ll marry our fortunes together.
I’ve got some real estate
Here in my bag.
So we bought a pack of cigarettes,
And Mrs. Wagner’s pies,
And walked off
To look for America.
“Kathy”, I said,
As we boarded a Greyhound in Pittsburgh,
Michigan seems like a dream to me now.
August 17, 2017
How workplace design shapes and reflects organisational hierarchies
The roots of the open plan office can be traced back to the 1960s when post-capitalism was beginning to emerge as a political and intellectual movement. The social and political upheaval that followed World War Two and the emphasis on the autonomous, motivated and engaged worker combined to inspire designers and architects to develop a new and more “modern” way of working. A mode of work characterised by an increased emphasis on social relations and flattened hierarchies. The open plan office was heralded as the ‘office of the future’; a progressive, transformative and near utopian design concept which would enable its occupants to thrive and succeed in a more socialist world. Yet the proponents of the open plan do not appear to have been fulfilled in large corporate businesses in the UK. I’d like to suggest that this failure is not a design fault but rather a problem caused by a clash of ideologies. Upon closer inspection, it appears that these larger corporations have not fully been able to shift into the social-democratic model of collaborative, open working styles.
August 14, 2017
Seven ways in which flexible working is making our lives more rigid
One of the main reasons why books such as Catch 22 and 1984 make such mediocre films, is because celluloid struggles to capture the books’ preoccupation with the ways in which language can be used to subvert meaning and rationality. We don’t always have to lean on the bookcase to see how this works. It’s been evident recently in the coverage of the massive growth of zero hours working worldwide, although they have now been banned in New Zealand. There are now up to 1.5 million people on zero hours contracts in the UK and the adjective most commonly associated with the practice in the media coverage has been ‘flexible’, despite the fact that from the perspective of the majority of the people working on such contracts they are anything but. It’s yet another example of the subversion in our use of the term flexible working. It’s Doublespeak; an expression which means something completely different to, or indeed the opposite of, the thing it is describing.
October 25, 2017
Frederick Taylor was a man of his time not a whipping boy for ours
by Mark Eltringham • Comment, News, Workplace, Workplace design
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