February 13, 2017

Neuroscience can function as a management tool for personal development ⁰

More and more employers, especially big corporates, are looking at ways to improve employee satisfaction, creativity and productivity. The business of managing change in the workplace has received much attention. It’s a clever game, and one that’s fuelling a booming growth in neuroscientific consulting. Coaching staff to embrace change and think about personal growth, alongside individualised learning programmes are hot topics in the business world. Brain science is a growth industry and it’s providing interesting answers to many important questions about why affecting change in the workplace has historically suffered low success rates, and how that can change.

February 10, 2017

Reflections on the future of work from a mirrored room ⁰

by Neil Usher • Comment, Facilities management, Technology, Workplace design

This is the first of two responses to an excellent article by Antony Slumbers, in this instance offering that his views offer too conservative a view of how technology will shape the future of work. Dr Pangloss, the teacher of metaphysics in Candide, Voltaire’s hilariously sarcastic attack on Leibnizian optimism, offered a timeless and universal explanation of the most cruel and tragic events as “the best of all possible worlds”. I would argue however that far from creating a landscape of optimism, it facilitates a dismissal of all significant change as an irrelevance given that effectively we have no option other than to happily accept it. For example, whether property transitions to a service or remains locked in its existing institutional quagmire, it doesn’t matter. Either way its fine as it’s the best we can hope for. Accept it, happily. A Panglossian future only looks appealing if you’re –well, Dr Pangloss.

January 20, 2017

The facts about sit stand work are already lost in the stream of narrative ⁰

by Mark Eltringham • Comment, Knowledge, Wellbeing, Workplace design

Toss a sliver of information into the great stream of accepted public narrative and see what happens to it. There it goes, briefly visible on the surface then consumed; part of the stream but no longer to be seen. A perfect example of this is provided by a recent piece of research carried out by the Texas A&M Health Science Center School of Public Health into the effects of standing at work on a small sample of call centre workers. While the results of the study are impressive, notably a 46 percent increase in productivity, by the time the story was reported on Inc.com, the 167 call centre workers had suddenly morphed into ‘everybody’. It should go without saying that the headline ‘Your Productivity Will Increase by 46 percent if You Stand at Your Desk’ does not reflect the conclusions of the original research. The statements by the researchers suggesting that the study is significant with regard to call centre staff but merely indicative of a wider issue go ignored.

January 17, 2017

The very idea of a universal workplace is seriously flawed ⁰

by Kyle Pinto • Comment, Flexible working, Technology, Workplace design

The debate around designing a workplace that works for millennials and now Gen Z is a public one. Every week a new article highlights what is required to create a workplace that millennials want. However for large companies with a diverse workforce, more than the desires of just one generation must be considered to make the workforce effective. Is it possible to create a universal workforce that can work across generations to serve the needs of all employees, and should that be the goal for workplace design? Right now, we know that tech firms are drawing more top talent than they did before. It can be seen in the a comparison of Harvard MBAs in 2007 and again in 2014 that went into banking (13 percent down to 5 percent) vs tech (up from 7 percent to 17 percent). Following their lead, broader design has shifted to adopt a tech feel in their own offices, with open layouts trending upwards. Office amenities from ping pong tables to slides are also rising as companies try to bring a fresh approach to the workplace.

December 23, 2016

Presenteeism doesn’t aid productivity, so employers should set workers free ⁰

by Mark Eltringham • Comment, Flexible working

At this time of year, the days are short, the morning commute can be hellish and traffic grid-locked. Wouldn’t it be ideal if more employers recognised this and offered a solution involving flexible hours, remote collaboration or even home-working? And not just at Christmas, but the whole year round? More and more companies are switching on to the benefits this can bring in terms of their employees’ well-being and productivity. Firms can allow colleagues to occasionally work from home or a third place, provide tools that enable them to work remotely and support an agile working agenda. This can be done in parallel with making provision for a hi-tech and collaborative workplace where colleagues can get together regularly to connect, get work done and be part of an effective team.

December 15, 2016

Commuting – stressful, annoying or just another opportunity? ⁰

by Mike James • Comment, Flexible working, Wellbeing

Unless you work at home you will have to commute to work in some form or another and for many people this part of the day can become such a negative factor it can impact on productivity, job satisfaction and even cause depression. However, what if we tried to look at commuting in a different light? What if we took a step back and attempted to turn all those wasted hours into something good and maybe even something productive? Depending on what source you read and when the study was done the average commute in the UK is between 50 minutes and 1 hour 38 minutes. This mean in any given working week most people are spending around 10 to 16 hours getting to and from work. If this amount of “down time” appeared during the working day business owners and managers would take it very seriously indeed. However, as the time falls outside of the employees work remit and essentially the company doesn’t need that person before and after work it is not discussed. The problem is, employees do feel like it is part of the working day and this leads to resentment, stress, fatigue and possible depression not to mention lower productivity.

December 12, 2016

Can an organisation simply buy employee motivation? ⁰

by Matias Rodsevich • Comment, Workplace

It’s the end of the year and like in most companies it’s probably time to start calculating and reassessing your employee’s compensation. But can you actually use money to motivate and retain your employees? A study by Willis Towers Watson found that only 20 percent of employers in North America actually believe merit pay is effective in driving high performance. Traditionally money was seen as the main incentive used to motivate employees. Higher productivity results in higher salaries and bonuses. For companies, it’s been used as the main tool to attract, retain and engage their people. Today we’ve learned that the key to motivation is much more complex than that.

December 8, 2016

Book review…. HQ:Nerve Centres of the World’s Leading Brands ⁰

by Mark Eltringham • Case studies, Comment, Workplace design

Some people would have you believe that the office is dying out. But the absolute dead giveaway that it is not is the creation of tech enclaves and palaces around the world that exists solely to bring lots of people to work together in real space and real time. Some of these buildings are presented in a new book called HQ: Nerve Centres of the World’s Leading Brands from Irish publishers Roads (link is to Amazon but please try to order from a local bookshop if possible). The high tech homes of the likes of Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Vodafone are presented alongside similar examples from eight other business sectors: Finance, Retail, Motoring, Media, Drinks, Fashion, Sport and Design & Innovation.

December 7, 2016

Business as usual for recruitment and retention in post-Brexit Britain … for now ⁰

by Oliver Watson • Comment, Flexible working, Legal news, Workplace

On 24 June 2016 Britain voted for Brexit. The shock (and narrow) victory caused country-wide concern among the 48 percent of the voting public that favoured remain – apprehension seemingly justified by the immediate weakening of the pound, Cameron’s resignation and the start of ongoing political in-fighting. Speculation over job losses and potential hiring freezes added to a general sense of uncertainty, leaving some UK workers fearing their job security. Since then however, recruitment experts have somewhat softened their predictions for the UK job market as recent reports of month-on-month vacancy growth and record high employment rates have served to inspire confidence. Five months on, how has job applicant sentiment changed in the UK since the EU referendum vote? And what does this mean for businesses hiring in post-Brexit vote Britain? As part of our ongoing tracking of candidate confidence levels in the job market and their career prospects we analysed the responses of almost 28,000 job applicants across the UK and Republic of Ireland – from all ages, experiences and sector disciplines – to gauge how perspectives might have changed pre- and post-Brexit.

November 28, 2016

Britain is missing a trick by not getting workplace training right ⁰

by Steve Hill • Comment, Workplace

New research from PwC highlights Britain’s failure to provide opportunities for young people. The study brings attention to the fact that the country ranks a lowly 21st out of 35 OECD members for its ability to get 15 to 24 year olds into work, education or training. If the UK could equal Germany’s low youth unemployment rate it would stand to gain around £45 billion, a 2.3 percent increase in GDP. The PwC report compares numerous countries, however Germany, Austria and Switzerland come out on top when it comes to providing career opportunities and workplace training to young people. Perhaps a clue to their success is that these nations all have so-called ‘dual education systems’ where work-based learning sits with equal stature alongside traditional academic study.

November 25, 2016

Reducing paper-weight is the key to maintaining a healthy business in the digital age ⁰

by Chas Moloney • Comment, Technology

The idea of creating a paperless office has been circulating for at least 40 years. Business Week famously forecast its arrival in 1975, predicting that paper would be on its way out by 1980 and dead by 1990. However, it’s almost 2017 and even with new and innovative digital technologies that enable us to operate in a highly connected world, the paper-light office is still far from our reality. Yet institutions from a variety of different sectors are leading the way when it comes to driving initiatives forward to going paperless and paper-light. For example, to address the need of approximately 12 million people in the UK that annually fill in a self-assessment tax form, plans have been put in place by the government to give individual digital accounts, aiming to allow more than 50 million individuals and small businesses to manage their tax affairs online. As a result, costs will be significantly cut by erasing expensive and laborious bureaucratic processes in the long-term, whilst fundamentally streamlining and simplifying intricate business services and applications.

November 25, 2016

Workplace professionals should look to the consumer sector for boosting engagement ⁰

by Jeff Flanagan • Comment, Facilities management, Workplace, Workplace design

More and more businesses are recognising the power of the workplace experience to drive employee performance and engagement. Global brand Airbnb, for example, has now renamed its head of human resources as “chief employee experience officer.” This is good news for workplace design and management professionals. We are well placed to capitalise on this shift in business opinion, but if we want to make a tangible impact, we need to bring practical solutions to the table. First and foremost, these need to be backed up by research. There have been few studies specifically into what makes a healthy and productive work environment. However, there are a number of research projects that examine how a human being’s surroundings impact their mood and behaviour, and in particular how consumer environments shape customers’ perception of and engagement with a brand. As workplace professionals, we can learn a great deal from this consumer research and this is why workplace design and management teams should look towards consumer-facing industries for inspiration.