July 28, 2016
Working in an office is NOT as bad as smoking, whatever you might read 0
There is a lurid headline in today’s Telegraph proclaiming that ‘Working in an office is as bad as smoking’. It’s been picked up by a number of other news outlets, has been splashed all over search engines and will no doubt join the stream of misleading narrative that distorts the subject and encourages designers to come up with nonsense like this. So, in an almost certainly vain attempt to close the sluice gates, we would encourage people to read the source material. In this case that is a piece of research in The Lancet medical journal published yesterday. What the report actually concludes is that ‘in addition to morbidity and premature mortality, physical inactivity is responsible for a substantial economic burden. This paper provides further justification to prioritise promotion of regular physical activity worldwide as part of a comprehensive strategy to reduce non-communicable diseases’. In other words, it supports an existing, well understood conclusion.
How many people in the workplace genuinely trust their managers and employers? It’s a question that we should ask because the answer unfortunately is not as many as you might think. It’s almost certainly well below what an organisation supposes or expects. For example, a recent 
In America at least, the great symbol of corporate conformity is the office cubicle. Satirised in the Dilbert cartoons and a staple in any movie about the degrading aspects of modern working life, the cubicle provides a perfect shorthand way of portraying an individual crushed by the corporate jackboot. Yet what these things miss is the propensity of people to personalise their surroundings and claim a space as their own, even if only for the short time they may be there. This seems to be particularly the case when it comes to office design and so we were much taken with 
UK growth had already eased from around 3 percent in 2014 to around 2 percent before the EU referendum due primarily to slower global growth, but the Brexit vote to leave the EU is likely to lead to a significant further slowdown. UK GDP growth is forecast to decelerate to around 1.6 percent in 2016 and 0.6 percent in 2017 according to 
There is an ancient Asian parable which has found its way into a number of cultures including Hindu and Buddhist lore. In one version, the Buddha tells of a king who has nine blind men summoned to his palace. An elephant is brought in and they are asked to describe it. Each man feels a different part of the elephant and describes it to the king. In turn they tell him it is a pot (the man who feels the head), a winnowing basket (ear), a ploughshare (tusk), a plough (trunk), a granary (body), a pillar (foot), a mortar (back), a pestle (tail) or a brush (tip of the tail). They disagree violently with each other to the amusement of the king, and the Buddha surmises that ‘in their ignorance they are by nature quarrelsome, wrangling, and disputatious, each maintaining reality is thus and thus.’ Around 2,500 years later, groups of people continue to describe big things solely based on the bits with which they come into contact and bicker with others who are close to other bits.
There is no doubt that the UK’s office based knowledge industry is facing a crisis in the form of a ‘wellbeing deficit’. Both the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) and Health and Safety Executive (HSE) have reported record levels of absenteeism, with the latter attributing 23.3 million lost working days to work-related ill-health, such as depression, stress, anxiety and musculoskeletal disorders. A great deal is already known about the causes of the key issues of employee stress and demotivation, but more work needs to be done to establish how organisations can meet their corporate goals with regard to these issues, whilst still engaging, motivating and nurturing their workforce. A significant body of published research has identified that a sense of ‘personal control’ can have a hugely positive impact on employee wellbeing, but how can we engender that control when it comes to creating a productive working environment?
Tim Peake’s recent return home from space at the end of a six month stay in the International Space Station highlighted just how essential it is for people to stay in contact with their friends, family and the rest of the world, literally from wherever they may be. Of course, back on Earth we now take it for granted that we are in a state of constant connectedness to the rest of the world. So the idea of someone being out of contact, even for brief periods of time, strikes us as odd. Perhaps that partly explains our fascination with the experiences of astronauts and other people who cannot take connectivity for granted. But it’s not just astronauts who have to consider how to enjoy the connectedness that we normally assume to be ours by right. People who work at sea face the same challenge and you could argue that it is more important for such truly remote workers to be in contact with other people and the Internet. So who fares better when it comes to achieving connectivity?
August 2, 2016
Seven workplace stories we like and think you should read this week 0
by Mark Eltringham • Architecture, Comment, News, Property, Workplace, Workplace design