September 22, 2015

John Fogarty reflects on a career in office furniture spanning five decades ⁰

by John Fogarty • Comment, Furniture, Workplace design

I was lucky to enter the office furniture industry in 1971, at the beginning of a decade shaped by the explosive advent of new office technology. What had gone before would not have looked that different to anyone who’d worked a corporate office in the 1890s: serried ranks of desks occupied by clerical staff bashing away on manual typewriters and comptometers (calculating machines). Although electric typewriters had been around for most of the century, decades of global conflict had constrained their development. The first major advance came with the launch of the IBM Selectric golf-ball in 1961. Although a beautiful object – I recall this being the first item associated in my mind with the term ‘product design’ by a named designer (Eliot Noyes) – it remained expensive and rare until the price reductions driven by the multi-licensing in 1972 of the Diablo daisy-wheel print head.

(more…)

September 21, 2015

New study highlights the key roles of real estate at UK’s top law firms ⁰

by Mark Eltringham • Case studies, Facilities management, News, Property, Workplace design

The UK’s top law firms are spending more on their real estate and allocating more space to staff, following years of reductions. Those are two of the key findings of a new report from The Lawyer magazine and property consultants JLL. Around half of the UK’s Top 200 law firms shared detailed data with the study, which also incorporates publicly available information on transactions. The study also takes into account the links between real estate strategy and broader strategic, management and human resources issues. While the report says the amount of space dedicated to each lawyer has risen by 7 percent over the last two years and the costs of owning real estate have also risen markedly, it also describes how many firms are now actively using flexible working to reduce real estate costs.The report concludes with a speculative look at future trends, including the uptake of coworking space.

(more…)

September 21, 2015

Five essential office design trends to look for in the near future ⁰

by Tom Brialey • Comment, Facilities management, Flexible working, Workplace design

Since the early Twentieth Century, business leaders have been experimenting with office design in an attempt to improve productivity. From the sea of forward-facing desks imagined by Frederick Taylor, to the infamous cubicle of the late 1960s, to today’s open-plan office, each innovation has said something about our changing relationship to work. In a Gensler survey with more than 2,000 participants, 90 percent of respondents indicated that better workplace design and layout result in better overall performance. The greatest developments of recent times have emerged from the tech giants of Silicon Valley, where businesses have blended playfulness, company culture and the collaborative benefits of open layouts to craft unique and engaging spaces. So where are we headed? Here are five major trends that are likely to have a lasting impact on the way we work.

(more…)

September 17, 2015

Growth of on demand economy is transforming work and workplaces ⁰

by Mark Eltringham • Comment, Flexible working, News, Technology, Workplace design

Some of the key characteristics of the workplace of the near future are starting to crystallise pretty rapidly. In many ways, employees are aware of this to a greater extent than employers, legislators and politicians. For example, this week and over recent weeks Uber has been arguing in courts around the world that its drivers are not employees but are in fact self-employed. This is the shape of things to come. In the UK, around a fifth of the workforce is already freelance or self-employed, something which politicians like to misinterpret as small business, possibly because it makes them look better because they associate it with entrepreneurialism and the prospects of these firms employing other people. The idea this is simply not the case is supported by a new report from software provider Intuit which claims that just 13 percent of British workers think they will be in traditional employment in 2025.

(more…)

September 14, 2015

Specific types of office design could be the source of conflict at work ⁰

by Mark Eltringham • Knowledge, News, Workplace, Workplace design

A new study from Swedish researchers suggests that the layout of offices not only affects how people respond to noise at work but may also be a source of conflict between co-workers. According to the study of more than 5,000 office workers, men and women are likely to react differently to specific types of office layout. Perhaps surprisingly, the researchers found that conflict is less commonplace in open plan offices than it is in workplaces that apply contemporary models of office design that offer workers a choice of how and where to work. They conclude this may be linked to the type of work associated with these particular layouts. The study also claims that women are more bothered by noise in these types of offices than men. According to the study, there was also a more readily discernible link between office type and workplace conflict for women than for men.

(more…)

September 9, 2015

The way we talk about workplace productivity needs another dimension

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

One of the most typical claims that suppliers in this sector make about their products is that they will make people more productive at work. Many go so far as to put numbers on what this means, and usually not just 0.4 percent or whatever but something far more. We can understand why they do this because they are seeking to link workplace productivity to whatever it is they have to sell. This is often tenuous for at least two reasons. The first is that even when such a causal link is demonstrably true, it still assumes that all other things at work are equal, whereas they never are because there are so many factors involved. That is why you will find some people cheerfully working in shabby, cluttered, underlit offices while others mope around unhappily in gilded cages with expensive chairs, soaring daylit atria and olive groves. The second is that such claims simply ignore what makes people tick.

(more…)

September 9, 2015

Wellness policies often ignore the role of the workplace environment ⁰

by Mark Eltringham • News, Wellbeing, Workplace design

A new meta analysis compiled by researchers from Harvard Business School and Stanford University raises questions about the way Government and organisational policies designed to tackle the problems of work related health costs in the United States have largely ignored the health effects of ‘psychosocial workplace stressors’ such as high job demands, economic insecurity, and long work hours. The analysis of 228 existing studies assessed the effects of ten workplace stressors on four specific health outcomes. The researchers claims that job insecurity increases the odds of reporting poor health by about 50 percent, high job demands raise the odds of having a diagnosed illness by 35 percent, and long work hours increase mortality by almost 20 percent. They argue that any policies designed to address these issues should account for the health effects of the workplace environment.

(more…)

September 2, 2015

We need to do more than pay lip service to workplace wellbeing ⁰

by Ann Clarke • Case studies, Comment, Wellbeing, Workplace design

Too many companies continue to talk about employees as their ‘greatest asset’ yet their fine words are not always not borne out in their behaviour, be that through working culture, remuneration or environment. With more and more investors using employee wellness and engagement as a barometer for the health, stability and culture of the business – the concept of workplace wellbeing is finally garnering the attention it deserves. Our workplace behaviours, cultures and environments are not keeping us fit, well, productive, happy or profitable. Finally businesses are accepting their moral responsibility to take better care of their people. So what affects employee productivity, creativity and happiness and how can changes to the workplace promote the best financial and moral outcomes for businesses and employees alike?

(more…)

August 28, 2015

The reason offices will always be needed is tied up with human nature

by Nigel Sikora • Comment, Flexible working, Technology, Workplace design

People have a tendency to confuse what is possible with what will happen. This appears to be a particular issue when we consider the effects of new technology. Hence the enduring talk of the death of the office, which technology makes possible but which people make impossible. One of the key areas of research that describes this tension is the work of Tom Allen at MIT. Allen made his name in 1984 with the publication of a book called Managing the Flow of Technology which first popularised the Allen Curve, a graph of his research findings which shows a powerful negative correlation between physical distance and the frequency of communication between colleagues. So precisely can this be defined, that Allen found that 50 metres marks a cut-off point for the regular exchange of certain types of technical information.

(more…)

August 17, 2015

What Edward T Hall (and Jerry Seinfeld) can teach us about stress and design

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

Work-related stress is the biggest cause of working days lost in the UK. According to the HSE’s most recent statistics, around 11.3 million days were lost to it in 2013/14, the most significant cause of absenteeism. The reasons for this are clear in the minds of many: the demands made on us by employers are increasingly intolerable, our own time is being eroded by work, we spend too much time at work, we’re under excessive pressure to perform and as a result we’re all either knackered, unfulfilled, stressed, depressed or anxious. Or guzzling a noxious cocktail of all of them. But there is another factor that has come into play over the last few years. As workstation sizes have contracted in response to new technologies and new space planning models, people have been forced closer to their colleagues, meaning that not only has their time been eroded, so has their space.

(more…)

August 13, 2015

Left-handed employees face practical problems at work suggests research ⁰

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

The days of forcing left handed children to write with their right hand may be long over but according to new research launched today to mark the UK’s ‘National Left-Handers Day’, a large proportion of UK employees experience problems at work because they are left-handed. According to a survey by CV-Library 12 percent of the working population is left-handed, which equates to over 4.5 million staff. Of those, 1 in 5 (over 852,000 people) face practical problems at work including conducting simple tasks, such as having to use right-handed scissors that don’t cut, to persevering with entire workstations being laid out incorrectly, making them difficult and uncomfortable to use. Yet the majority of UK employers (96.7 percent) don’t ask new employees if they are left-handed and only a quarter of businesses (25.4 percent) provide left-handed staff with specialist office equipment and stationery.

(more…)

August 13, 2015

Take-up of sit-stand desks still lagging in UK, but change is coming fast ⁰

by Mark Eltringham • Furniture, News, Wellbeing, Workplace design

The number of UK employers offering staff sit-stand workstations remains sluggish, despite rapidly growing awareness of their benefits, according to a new study from office furniture firm Kinnarps. Compared to the near universal provision of sit-stand desks in Scandinavia, and in spite of the fact that UK buyers now universally acknowledge what they can do to improve employee wellbeing, the UK market has yet to fully adopt workstations that encourage more active working. Based on a study of 132 senior decision makers, facilities managers, designers and HR managers, 98 percent of respondents say they can see the attraction of introducing sit-stand working, citing improved health (73 percent), increased productivity (11 percent) and attracting and retaining talent (5 percent), among the principal benefits. Yet only 8 percent say that such workstations are ‘widely available’ in their workplaces.