January 9, 2019

Podcast: embracing the punk spirit and the elemental workplace

by Mike Petrusky • Facilities management, Features, Workplace design

Neil Usher is an experienced senior property, workplace, facilities and change management leader who is currently an executive consultant for Unispace and workessence. He is also the author of “The Elemental Workplace” in which he describes “the 12 elements for creating a fantastic workplace for everyone”. In this new podcast, I ask Neil about the latest trends in the workplace and finds out his opinions on the open office debate, the impact of technology, and the importance of workplace experience. Neil argues that workplace is now being taken seriously as a contributor to performance and is a significant part of our organization’s culture, so we must establish “laws of workplace” that we can use as a foundation to build on in our practice. We discuss the origins of the punk rock music scene and agree that we must bring “the spirit of punk” to our work by being fearless about trying new things in our roles as workplace leaders.

December 21, 2018

The ten most read stories on Workplace Insight for 2018

by Mark Eltringham • Facilities management, Features, Property, Technology, Workplace, Workplace design

We can’t help but feel that the world caught up with us a bit during 2018. We’ve been talking about the intersection of people, place and tech since we started up five years ago. Of course, we weren’t even the first to do this. As we’ve always acknowledged, we’re standing on the shoulders of the giants who first recognised what was happening a quarter of a century ago. Many of the ‘trends’ with which we are presented are nothing more than the crystallisation of ideas first expressed by people in the 20th Century. They seldom get their due.

December 21, 2018

Are open plan workspaces truly evil or is this just fake news?

by Dr Caroline M. Burns • Features, Workplace design

A recently published paper describing the results of an academic study by Ethan S. Bernstein and Stephen Turban[1], both of Harvard, has become another unwarranted casualty of the debate within our industry and in the mainstream media on ‘open plan’ offices versus anything else. The researchers conducted two controlled studies in different organisations before and after a workplace refurbishment from dedicated cubicles to dedicated open plan (benching) neighbourhoods, and concluded that face to face interaction reduced significantly, while email and other digital communications increased in the new environment.

December 17, 2018

Meatspace, cyberspace, the uncertainty of expertise and some other stuff

by Mark Eltringham • Features, Technology, Workplace, Workplace design

The sign that somebody knows their stuff about a subject is often that whatever they say about it is full of questions, equivocations and caveats. They’ll often start out by saying things are complicated in mitigation of their opinion on a particular topic. They’ll say there are no silver bullets. It’s almost always neophytes, chancers and the conflicted that offer certainty. To prove my point here is David D’Souza of the CIPD making a point about the tendency to look for pat, narrow solutions to complex, broad challenges. Not only does he have something interesting to say, you know that he has the depth and breadth of knowledge to expand on each of the points he makes with yet more sophistication. It’s fractal thinking.

December 14, 2018

Getting a better handle on the psychology of office design

by Paul Goodchild • Architecture, Comment, Workplace design

It was the Finnish architect Juhani Pallasmaa who described the door handle as ‘the handshake of the building’ in his book The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses. Buildings greet us in other ways too and we respond to those greetings in very human ways. So much so, in fact, that when we make decisions about the ways in which offices introduce themselves, we should take account of the psychological factors that can mean the difference between a successful or failed office design. More →

December 14, 2018

Bruntwood launches design now, pay later service for occupiers

by Neil Franklin • Company news, Property, Workplace design

Property and flexible office firm Bruntwood has launched ‘Made & Managed’ which it claims is a service enabling occupiers to benefit from a ‘design now, pay later’ approach to designing and creating bespoke offices. The service is based around the idea that tenants absorb design and fit-out costs into a monthly bill, meaning no upfront costs.

December 14, 2018

New Deloitte London office: a world-leading building for sustainability and wellbeing

by Neil Franklin • Company news, Environment, Workplace design

Deloitte’s new UK and North West Europe headquarters at 1 New Street Square, EC4, is claimed to be the largest office in the world to achieve leading certifications for being both an exemplar green building and one designed to enhance the wellbeing of its people. The new 270,000 sq ft HQ, which Deloitte occupied in July, is the culmination of a four year programme redefining the workplace of the future for the firm’s people and clients. The space was designed by ID:SR with furniture supplied by Sketch Studios.

December 12, 2018

People are great: a conversation with James Woudhuysen on the future of work ⁰

by Mark Eltringham • Features, Podcasts, Technology, Workplace design

At a conference at the WWF’s Living Planet Centre in Woking staged by the office furniture firm Kinnarps, I had an off the cuff chat with James Woudhuysen who had just delivered one of his typically entertaining, erudite and challenging talks on the future of work alongside equally renowned speakers such as Philip Tidd and Namrata Krishna from architecture firm Gensler. James is an academic, writer, commentator and (dread word) futurologist. More →

December 11, 2018

Promotion: Humanscale opens new Manchester showroom

by Freddie Steele • Company news, Furniture, Workplace design

Humanscale has opened the doors to its latest showroom in the City of Manchester, reinforcing its presence in the North of England. Located in the Old Town, formerly home to the famous Factory Records label, this is Humanscale’s second showroom in the UK this year, after moving to a new space in the heart of London’s design quarter. When Humanscale originally put down roots in Clerkenwell in 2001 it was the first outpost beyond North America.

December 10, 2018

The best office designs of 2018, the future of work in 2019, and some other clickbait

by Mark Eltringham • Features, Flexible working, Technology, Wellbeing, Workplace design

This week’s beachcomb of the best workplace stories is brought to you in the wake of the first flood of retrospectives and predictions that wash up in the media at this time of year. The first piece of flotsam [sound of a metaphor snapping] is Dezeen’s listing of the world’s best office designs of 2018, which appears to be based on the answers to three questions. Is it a coworking space? Does it look like an office? Is there anybody actually working there? Answer yes, no, no to those three simple questions and you’re in the frame.

December 7, 2018

Seven reasons why this will not be the office of the future

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

At this time of year, it seems like we don’t have to wait more than a few hours before some or other organisation is sharing its prognosis about how we will be working in the future. The thing these reports usually share in common, other than a standardised variant of a title and a common lexicon of agility, engagement and connectivity, is a narrow focus based on their key assumptions about what the office of the future will be like. While these are rarely false per se, and often offer valuable insights, they also frequently exhibit a desire to look at only one part of the great workplace elephant. While the more informed reports make excellent points and identify trends, across most there are routine flaws in thinking that can lead them to make narrow and sometimes incorrect assumptions and so draw similarly flawed conclusions. Talk of the office of the future tells us rather a lot about how we view offices right now.

December 7, 2018

Accelerating rate of digital tech and smart buildings to transform the built environment

by Sara Bean • AI, Cities, Facilities management, News, Technology, Workplace design

Technology is in the process of transforming almost every aspect of society, with change happening at an “accelerating rate,” and this is being made possible due of simultaneous rapid advances in several key areas of technology. This is according to a new White Paper on ‘Megatrends: Smart Building Technology’ from BSRIA (registration required) that predicts this will have a huge impact on construction and building services; from the way buildings are constructed to how they are managed and interact with occupants. More →