March 10, 2014

The workplace of the future is one founded on uncertainty

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

We now know for a fact that the good people at the UK Commission for Employment and Skills take heed of what they read on Workplace Insight. After Simon Heath recently eviscerated the idea of the year 2020 as a useful marker for the ‘future’, a new report from the UKCES draws its line in the sand a bit further on in 2030. It means they can’t have a ‘2020 Vision’ and for that we should be very thankful. Yet the report still falls into the same traps that are always liable to ensnare any prognosis about the workplace of the future, notably that some of the things of which they talk have happened or are happening already. Then there’s the whole messy business of deciding what will emerge from the chaos; a bit like predicting the flavour of the soup you are making when a hundred other cooks are secretly adding their own ingredients.

February 20, 2014

Could personality profiling help create a more productive office environment?

by Suzanne McMinn • Facilities management, News, Workplace, Workplace design

Creating the most productive working space to help get the best from your people is an ongoing battle. What suits some doesn’t suit others. So if there was some way of assessing up front how people like to work and the environment that would make them their most productive, engaged and committed – before you rearrange the furniture, fittings and layout – would you leap at the chance of finding out? One approach could be personality profiling. If you could climb inside the minds of your current and future employees and assess how they best like to work, their personality and how this then drives them to be more productive in certain working environments than others – who wouldn’t want to have a delve around? Or are we in danger of pandering to personality stereotypes? More →

February 14, 2014

A Silicon Valley office that embraces classic design to create its buzz

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

It is now common for tech and media businesses to take inspiration for the design of their offices from their local Wacky Warehouse, with treehouses, slides, acid coloured cushions, chairs, play areas and other sub-juvenilia thrown into the building in the name of both ‘fun’ and an assumption that the Gen Y employees they are so patronisingly fixated on are only recently off the teat. Meanwhile some are clearly drawn back to the more sober, rational and classic styles that have long attracted corporations, especially in the US. There is something familiar about an HQ like that designed for San Francisco based software developers Giant Pixel by Studio O+A which evidently harks back to the era of modernism and post war futurism associated with architect/designers like Eero Saarinen.

January 25, 2014

Latest issue of Insight now available to view online

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

The latest issue of our weekly newsletter is now available to view online here. This week: Ilkka Kakko argues that designing for serendipity is about more than facilitating chance meetings; Mark Eltringham looks for the missing link between offices and avocados; we report on the ongoing recovery in the construction and property markets; raise questions about what happiness at work really means; and Sara Bean argues that we should never assume that working from home is the best way for an individual to work. If you don’t already subscribe, please do by adding your email in the box on the home page and we’ll make sure you see the freshest thinking on workplace design and management each week.

January 20, 2014

Blue Monday hype obscures the real debate about workplace happiness

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

So here it is. Blue Monday. Officially the most depressing day of the year. We say ‘officially’, but like the idea of ‘Body Odour’ its common usage hides the fact that it was originally created as part of a 2005 PR campaign. For Sky’s travel channel. The whole idea of Blue Monday is couched in a pseudo-mathematical equation which includes factors like the weather, levels of debt, time since Christmas, low levels of motivation and, apparently, an unspecified variable known simply as ‘D’. Now, of course, none of this is either easy to define or measure and while we mock the idea, it’s not so far removed from Prime Minister David Cameron’s attempts to measure ‘happiness’ as an alternative to GDP.

January 13, 2014

Consultation begins on international commercial property standards

by Mark Eltringham • Architecture, Facilities management, News, Property, Workplace design

Today marks the beginning of the three month public consultation by the recently formed International Property Measurement Standards Coalition as the organisation seeks to develop standardised way of measuring commercial, domestic and retail property. Formed in May of last year, the IPMSC includes many of the world’s leading property institutions including the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) from the UK. The primary aim of the new body is to remove disparities between local property measurement standards by developing globally accepted standards to allow occupiers and investors to make better decisions about property. Research from Jones Lang LaSalle claims that currently a property’s floor area can vary by up to 24 percent depending on how it is measured.

January 12, 2014

Latest issue of the Insight newsletter available to view online

by Mark Eltringham • Architecture, Facilities management, Newsletter, Workplace, Workplace design

The latest issue of our weekly newsletter is now available to view online. If you don’t already subscribe, please do so. Just submit your email address in the Subscription section on the right of this page and we’ll keep you up to date each week with a digest of the best news and views on the design and management of workplaces, the people who work in them and the technology they use. This week, we offer a timely warning of the perils of predictions while hypocritically predicting what we’ll spend most of 2014 talking about, ponder why wellness programmes are so popular given that they don’t appear to do all they claim, ask why so many UK employees are so keen on moving jobs, question the thinking behind the idea of creating a cycle lane in the sky in London and highlight the ongoing resurgence in the takeup of commercial property in the UK.

January 8, 2014

CBI to embrace open plan working at new London HQ

by Sara Bean • Architecture, Facilities management, News, Workplace design

The CBI is to move its headquarters to new offices in Cannon Street, London, after more than 30 years at its present Centre Point home, which is to be converted into apartments. Staff at the UK’s leading business organisation will make the switch from the multi floor office layouts of the 1960s built tower to an open plan 25,000 sq ft space when they move into the fourth floor of the eight-floored Cannon Place development in the spring. The CBI director-general, John Cridland, said he was looking forward to the move to the new offices, on which the organisation has signed a 15-year lease and invited its members to make use of a dedicated member’s lounge at the new London HQ to meet their clients and CBI staff. More →

January 2, 2014

Why we should be wary of expert predictions for 2014

by Mark Eltringham • Comment, Facilities management, Workplace design

As ever the first day back at work coincides with a flood of forecasts about what will happen in the world in the year ahead. But predictions are often more interesting in retrospect than they are in their own time. For example, each year The Economist produces its one-off ‘The World in…’ publication which asks well-informed academics and writers to tackle an issue that relates to their own specialism. This year these relate to issues such as Scottish independence (it’s a ‘no’, by the way), the rise of African economies and a potential customer backlash against technology businesses and the rich geeks who own them. Interesting though it is to read all of this, The Economist is at least honest in publishing a list of its hits and misses, whereas most people appear to just pretend the misses never happened.

December 29, 2013

The most read stories on Insight in 2013

by Mark Eltringham • Comment, Facilities management, Workplace design

It’s been one year since Insight first hit the digital streets and it’s been fascinating to see what people have been most interested in. One of the great things about online publishing is you cannot escape from what people think. Printed trade magazines can tell you they send out 12,000 copies or whatever, but they can’t tell you whether the recipients are interested enough to read them or share their contents. Online, that is all made transparent. So it’s been great to start a publication that after just a few months was demonstrably the UK’s most widely read title covering workplace design and management issues. We even know what people like the most. So here, in no particular order, are our most widely read stories from 2013, ranging from the technical to the esoteric, news stories, case studies, the bursting of bubbles and the challenges to received wisdom.

December 16, 2013

Book Review: The Emergent Workplace

by Mark Eltringham • Comment, Facilities management, Workplace design

Looking for patterns in the mash. © Columbia Pictures

It’s rather refreshing to see a book or report in which the word ‘Workplace’ in the title is prefaced by ‘Emergent’ rather than something misleading like ‘Tomorrow’s’ or ‘Future’. And so the authors Clark Sept and Paul Heath define their vision of the workplace presented in this slim but engaging book as a thing which is ‘in the process of becoming prominent’ to use the dictionary definition of the word emergent. By using this particular epithet, they are describing the consequences of the various forces that drive today’s workplace rather than lapsing into the fallacies most commonly associated with works of this kind; principally those of either assuming there is an evolution of all offices towards an ultimate model, or that already commonplace factors such as technology which frees us to work anywhere and at any time can in any way be associated with ‘the future’.

December 13, 2013

One of the most important things we need at work is shelter from the storm

by Nigel Sikora • Comment, Workplace design

The challenge of providing the optimum level of acoustic performance in an office is one of those issues that everybody accepts is very important, has at least some understanding of and has a degree of awareness of the solutions. Yet it has proved to be one of those intractable issues that suffers both from some important misperceptions and which also has to be balanced against other challenges when it comes to designing offices, not least the most significant trend of the past twenty or thirty years, namely the shift to open plan working. At the same time we have seen a shrinking of workstation footprints and the greater use of mobile phones and other technology. All of these changes have focussed attention on workplace acoustics – currently one of the most talked about issues in the workplace, and visual privacy – one of the least talked about.