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.

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September 13, 2017

Banking sector will be ground zero for job losses from artificial intelligence and robotics

by Gordon Fletcher and David Kreps • AI, Comment, Technology

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.

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August 23, 2017

I’ve got some real estate here in my bag

by Paul Carder • Comment, Flexible working, Property, Technology

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.

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August 17, 2017

How workplace design shapes and reflects organisational hierarchies

by Angela Love • Comment, Facilities management, Workplace design

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.

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August 14, 2017

Seven ways in which flexible working is making our lives more rigid

by Mark Eltringham • Comment, Flexible working, Technology

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.

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August 11, 2017

Reducing the risk of personal gambling becoming a corporate fraud issue

by Andrew Durant • Comment, Workplace

A recently leaked confidential report for the betting industry says that, if introduced, the new rules to encourage responsible gambling in the UK would lead to closure of half of the country’s bookmakers and the loss of around 20,000 jobs. The report follows widespread concerns about the controversial use, and misuse, of Fixed Odds Betting Terminals (FOBTs) in betting shops which, have been shown to be one of the major causes for problem gambling behaviour (due to their addictive play). They allow customers to place wagers as high as £100 every twenty seconds. With gambling becoming ever more accessible through the spread of FOBTs, the growing number of online betting platforms and access to casinos on the high street, the pressure of funding a gambling habit has become one of the main reasons why people commit corporate fraud.

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August 2, 2017

Whatever you might be told, this is not the Office of the Future

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

It seems like we don’t have to wait more than a few days at a time before some or other organisation is making its own prognoses about how we will be working in the future, especially at this time of year. The thing these reports about the office of the future all share in common, other than a standardised variant of a title and a common lexicon of agility, empowerment, collaboration and connectivity, is a narrow focus based on several of their key narratives and assumptions. While these are rarely false per se, and often offer some insights of variable worth, they also usually exhibit a desire to look at only one part of the elephant. The more serious reports invariably make excellent points and identify key trends, it has to be said. However, across them there are routine flaws in their thinking that can lead them to make narrow and sometimes incorrect assumptions and so draw similarly flawed conclusions. Here are just a few.

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July 31, 2017

It is time to take action to support older people’s health at work

by Patrick Thomson • Comment, Facilities management, Flexible working, News, Wellbeing, Workplace

Poor health is one of the biggest factors causing people to leave work earlier than they would like to; yet poor health isn’t an inevitable part of ageing. We know that health conditions can become more likely as we get older. While some health conditions are not any more likely the older you get, others certainly are. Musculoskeletal conditions (affecting joints, bones and muscles) and heart and circulatory conditions increases significantly as we age. The fact that 14 percent of all 50-64 year olds have a musculoskeletal condition, and that musculoskeletal conditions alone account for 30 million days of sickness absence each year, is significant. People are by impacted by health conditions in different ways, and you can have a dramatically different outcome depending on how early you spot and take action to address a health issue at work. Sometimes slow-onset physical conditions such as musculoskeletal conditions, might start off mildly, but gradually lead to a painful exit from work. Because they change slowly they are more difficult to identify and there isn’t always a clear trigger point to do something about them.

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July 24, 2017

Employers have a growing responsibility to provide staff with cycling facilities

by Peter Ferrari • Cities, Comment, Property, Wellbeing

This month, the British Council for Offices (BCO) launched a new report looking at the importance of offering better workplace facilities for cyclists in order to support the Government’s ambitious cycling growth targets. The Department for Transport’s £1.2bn cycling and walking investment strategy, published in April, aims to make cycling “the norm” by 2040. It plans to do this by improving cycling infrastructure and expanding cycle routes between city centres, local communities and key employment and retail sites, making improvements to 200 sections of roads for cyclists and providing funding for councils to invest in cycling schemes. In addition, city councils across the UK are making improvements to their cycling infrastructure. Last year, Sadiq Khan announced plans to spend £770m on cycling initiatives in London over the course of his term, in order to make riding a bike “the safe and obvious” transport choice for all Londoners. Birmingham City Council has pledged to invest more than £11m in creating two-way cycle paths, resurfacing canal towpaths, and even offering free bikes, with the aim of doubling the number of trips in the city made by bike from 5 percent to 10 percent by 2033, in order to make the city healthier, greener, safer and less congested.

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July 13, 2017

What we may be missing about IBM’s decision on flexible working ⁰

by Gary Chandler • Comment, Flexible working, Property, Workplace design

In May, the Wall Street Journal reported that IBM had announced that it was obliging a significant number of its staff to give up on remote working and instead move back to corporate offices, many of them regional hubs. Although we had been aware of the change in policy since February, the issue only went viral as a result of the WSJ story. Comparisons were quickly made with Yahoo’s poorly received decision to summon staff back to its corporate HQ in 2013 and commentators expressed dismay that such a major corporation would be willing to return to the command and control structures of a previous era, especially given its sector and track record of encouraging flexible working. What such commentary missed was a particular nuance of the story that might suggest this is more of a continuation of existing IBM policy than they have been given credit for.

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July 11, 2017

Creativity is the new productivity in the modern era of work and workplaces ⁰

by Serena Borghero • Comment, Facilities management, Workplace design

Creativity is often thought of as a quality unique to artistic geniuses. When in reality, it is present in all of us, and something that can be enhanced and nurtured, given the right tools and environment. Creativity is the innate human ability to generate ideas, solve difficult problems and exploit new opportunities — it is the fuel for innovation. Many of today’s most pressing business problems require creative thinking to solve them, and creativity is an essential ingredient for business growth. However, 77 percent of CEOs name creativity as their company’s number one skill shortage (20th CEO survey, PWC, 2017). Being agile is critical in a world that is changing rapidly, with disruptive technology, globalisation and an increasingly complex landscape all playing a part. More than ever, supporting creativity at work is an essential part of driving value for both businesses and society. In days gone by, instead of focusing on their organisation’s creative output, most business leaders were obsessed with near-term goals such as productivity, efficiency, cost-cutting and reducing waste. But the landscape has shifted and creativity is emerging as an important dimension of productivity.

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June 30, 2017

Why using recyclable materials is no longer enough to protect the environment ⁰

by Michael Tyerman • Comment, Environment, Workplace design

A few years ago, the most commonly recognised symbol of humankind’s impact on the environment was the image of a solitary polar bear, adrift on a rapidly shrinking ice floe. Google a term like ‘melting ice caps’ even now, and you’ll still derive a host of variations of the same meme. More recently a new and even more unpleasant series of symbols has emerged for a similarly environmentally catastrophic phenomenon, carried worldwide on the tide of social media. This time, they are not about the way we pollute the atmosphere but also the land and seas, particularly with plastic. Social media feeds are packed with images of the corpses of seabirds, their flesh rotted away to expose the amount of plastic they have consumed. This is the new face of environmental disaster. This is not just an issue that affects birds, however. Barely a day passes when we cannot see a new image of turtles malformed after getting caught up in plastic netting or six pack rings, whales beached after choking on dozens of discarded plastic bags they’ve mistaken for food, clogged waterways and oceans, piles of rubbish and beaches that consist in large part of plastic eroded to the size of sand grains. Most recently Sky ran a heartbreaking documentary about a whale that had died with a stomach full of plastic rubbish.