July 23, 2018

New report on the future of work argues we are at an inflection point on the journey

by Mark Eltringham • Comment, Technology, Workplace design

Whatever you make of the Brexit vote, the idea put forward by Jacob Rees-Mogg in a Channel 4 interview that it will take 50 years before we can judge its benefits is extraordinary. No doubt, people will be making those judgements in half a century, but long term predictions of this kind are invariably foolish. Especially when you consider that nobody seems to know what is happening with Brexit at all on a day by day basis. Predictions about the long term future of work can be equally foolhardy. This is a reason why it’s best to make them about the short term, while you still have a reasonable chance of looking prescient. A lesson for the authors of this piece of nonsense published in Fast Company last week.

July 20, 2018

White Paper: the magic of disruption and what it means for the workplace

by Anthony Brown • Briefing, Premium Content, Technology, Workplace design

In a 1973 essay called Hazards of Prophecy: The Failure of Imagination, the science fiction writer Arthur C Clarke sets out Three Laws regarding our relationship with technology. Only the third of these is well remembered these days:. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. He was one of the first writers to coin the sort of law that have now become commonplace on the subject of the way our world, including the workplace, can be disrupted by technological developments. They include a corollary to Clarke’s: Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced (Gehm’s Law)

July 20, 2018

A round-up of seven of the best workplace stories from around the web

by Mark Eltringham • Features, Technology, Workplace design

A sizeable majority of us are in jobs that don’t fit our occupational interests

Does workplace design really matter?

The most productive meetings have fewer than eight people

Stories from experts about the impact of digital life

Workplace interventions for reducing sitting at work

The AI revolution will be led by toasters, not droids

If you’re going open-plan for costs, you’re doing it wrong

July 19, 2018

When it comes to change management, culture sometimes eats strategy for breakfast

by Gary Chandler • Features, Flexible working, Workplace design

21st Century organisations are under constant pressure to evolve. They are beset by a number of forces that demand they change constantly. These include the need to restructure the organisation, adapt to new technologies, respond to competitors and changes in the economy and legislative environment. Inevitably, this constant need to change affects both people and the built environment in very profound ways. However, according to a study of Culture and Change Management published by the Katzenbach Center, only around half of all transformation initiatives meet their objects over time. Among the biggest obstacles to successful change management cited by the study is change fatigue, which is characterised by a lack of empathy and a widespread failure to engage with the change process.

July 17, 2018

Video: Arthur C Clarke predicts remote and flexible working in 1964

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

Some people foresaw the virtualisation of work, flexible working and the erosion of the workplace over 50 years ago. Scientist and author Arthur C Clarke appeared on the BBC’s Horizon programme in 1964 to apply his foresight and clipped vowels to the question of what future technological advances would mean for the way we work and the makeup of the world’s cities in the 21st Century. He is absolutely correct in his vision in some ways and way off in others, even allowing for his talk of ‘transistors’ rather than microchips.

July 16, 2018

Seven stories you may have missed that will get your week off to a flyer

by Freddie Steele • Features, Property, Technology, Workplace, Workplace design

A bunch of coworking startups saying the same things about how different they are

The agile workspace is pants

Mass incompetency in business: the way we promote people is dead wrong

Want to discover (or re-discover) your sense of purpose at work?

Is stress at work always a bad thing?

Augmented space planning: Using procedural generation to automate desk layouts

A Stanford researcher says we shouldn’t start working full time until age 40

July 11, 2018

Katrina Kostic Samen confirmed as President of the British Council for Offices

by Neil Franklin • News, Property, Workplace design

The British Council for Offices (BCO) today welcomes Katrina Kostic Samen as its new President. Katrina Kostic Samen, Founder and Managing Partner at KKS Strategy, formally takes over the position from Ken Shuttleworth, Founding Partner of Make Architects, at the BCO’s Annual General Meeting in London today, Wednesday 11th July. As Chair of the BCO Annual Conference held earlier this year in Berlin, Katrina set out the vision for her Presidential year, challenging delegates to look at the workplace from multiple occupier perspectives, and to ensure that they are designing and delivering offices which are inclusive and provide for a diverse workforce.

July 11, 2018

A beauty industry veteran makes the case for corporate wellness

by Leena Jain • Comment, Wellbeing, Workplace design

Wellness is a term that today transcends the consumer and business worlds, but it is so much more than a buzzword. Today, the wellbeing of employees is essential for organisations to flourish, so much so that the term has in many ways replaced ‘productivity’ as the way to measure the success of an organisation. Both the beauty and workplace design sectors are very personal areas of high emotional involvement. There is a very real and physical contact with these products — in beauty, women are particularly (and increasingly men too) engaged in developing a customised routine because it gives them a sense of happiness, wellbeing and identity.

July 6, 2018

A storm brewing around the workplace and facilities management

by Cathy Hayward • Comment, Facilities management, News, Workplace design

In Shakespeare’s plays, the sky often goes dark and a storm starts to brew as a prelude to tragedy or violence creating a sense of foreboding. And so it was at today’s BIFM AGM in the lead-up to the special resolution to change the name of the institute from the British Institute of Facilities Management to the Institute of Workplace and Facilities Management. After a fire alarm test appositely kicked off the event, sun poured through the windows and ceiling panes of the Friends Meeting House in Manchester as BIFM chairman Steve Roots gave an update on the institute’s performance in 2017 and plans for 2018. As he introduced the format for the three ordinary resolutions, the sun dipped behind a cloud and the room was plunged into gloom causing murmurs of nervous laughter among the 80-strong audience. More →

July 5, 2018

Open plan offices may discourage communication, claims new study

by Freddie Steele • News, Workplace design

The usual rationale for open plan offices is that they help people to collaborate more effectively. But this premise is challenged by a new study from researchers at Harvard Business School which suggests that employees at two large Fortune 500 companies actually engaged in less face-to-face contact after switching to entirely open workspaces. As published in the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, Ethan Bernstein and Stephen Turban sought to conduct a real-world comparison of people’s behaviour in different types of offices to test a hypothesis that open plan layouts reduce communication.

July 5, 2018

The top five songs about office life and office furniture

by Mark Eltringham • Comment, Furniture, Workplace design

Too few musicians draw inspiration from the office or office furniture, and for very good reasons. The main one being that one of the main reason to get into rock and roll is to avoid a desk in the first place. Nevertheless, it’s worth saying that the office is routinely used as both a setting and a symbol in movies even if workplaces are generally seen as mundane or dehumanising in stark contrast to whatever troubled romance / disaster is befalling the protagonist. Offices are usually depicted as dystopian (Brazil), soul-destroying (Office Space, American Beauty) or a backdrop for whatever else is going on (name your own romcom). More →

July 5, 2018

Why a Google office simply does not work for everybody ⁰

by Dr Caroline M. Burns • Comment, Facilities management, Technology, Workplace design

The open plan office versus closed debate rages on, and rather than running out of steam in the face of all of the evidence and reasoned argument put forward one one side or the other by many industry thought-leaders, it seems to have nine lives. Those grand and ground-breaking new offices occupied by the world’s tech giants seem to be particularly popular examples of why highly open and transparent workplaces do, or don’t work, especially those headline-grabbing offices created around the world by Google. This public debate has led to some very interesting and insightful discussions in various forums (to which I have contributed), inspiring me to synthesise the key themes into four reasons why a Google office is not necessarily the right type of office for your organisation. Many thanks in particular are due to David Rostie and Kay Sargent for their valuable online contributions to the debates which inspired this article.