August 2, 2016

What Anaïs Nin can teach us about the way we design and use workplaces

by Mark Eltringham • Comment, Facilities management, Workplace design

Although the author and feminist icon Anaïs Nin was born and raised in France by Cuban parents, she is most commonly seen as an American literary figure. Like many of the mid 20th Century’s most pioneering writers and thinkers on social and gender issues, her fame appears to have slowly eroded, perhaps because much of what she wrote about at the time was for the time. She documented much of her life in diaries and letters and so we know a great deal about her as a person, including how much she loved New York while remaining open minded about its deficiencies. In a 1934 letter to her then lover Henry Miller, she laid out her thoughts on the city, and especially its physicality. One of the most eternally resonant aspects of her description is the idea that it is what a person brings to a place that makes it come alive. Culture eats design for breakfast. The stage setting is meaningless without the play and the players.

August 2, 2016

London firms paint a mixed picture in their post Brexit reaction ⁰

by Sara Bean • Cities, Facilities management, News, Workplace

Investment and hiring intentions remain relatively robust among London’s leading firms, despite the Brexit vote, claims a new analysis by the CBI and CBRE. Over two fifths (41 percent) of the 186 firms surveyed after the Referendum said that they planned to maintain their investment plans, with one in ten (9 percent) planning on actually increasing their plans. The demand for property from occupiers and investors also appears to remain strong. However, 16 percent of firms said they will freeze investment plans, whilst a fifth (21 percent) think they will reduce them. Half of businesses (50 percent) plan to continue to hire after the Referendum, with less than a third (29 percent) not planning to do so and 12 percent planning on reducing staff numbers. Many firms though are still considering their response to the Referendum and will be looking for a clear plan from the Government and City Hall to maintain the openness of London’s economy.

July 30, 2016

Office work not as bad as smoking + New age of reason + Productivity gap ⁰

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

In this week’s Newsletter; Mark Eltringham suggests reading the source material behind the latest sitting is the new smoking guff; and celebrates a new age of reason in workplace design. New evidence that giving employees more control over workplace design is the most important contributing factor to their wellbeing; businesses ready to embrace the workplace robot; and the UK economy still to address productivity and digital skills gaps. Third of parents struggle to find childcare across the summer holidays; retaining ‘passporting’ rights to the single market vital for the City during Brexit negotiations; rising over 50s population of workers suffer discrimination; and researchers confirm the imminent demise of the ‘nearly useless’ desk phone. Download our new Briefing, produced in partnership with Boss Design on the link between culture and workplace strategy and design; visit our new events page, follow us on Twitter and join our LinkedIn Group to discuss these and other stories.

July 28, 2016

Brexit ‘passporting’ rights will affect City office property market ⁰

by Sara Bean • Facilities management, News, Property

Occupier demand for commercial offices may cool as a result of the Brexit vote, with recruitment and expansion slowing, particularly in central London, according to the latest UK property snapshot from Colliers. However, despite the current economic and political climate, unique and premium properties in the City of London should remain insulated against downward rental pressures, as landlords remain bullish on rents and incentives for the best quality units; while given the low vacancy environment and anticipated constraints on new supply, new Grade A offices are still set to perform well. Average net effective rents in the West End are set to fall over the next 6-12 months, but with new supply already below trend and potential speculative schemes being delayed, downward pressure may be short-lived. For the future, retaining ‘passporting’ rights to the single market will be an important issue for the City during Brexit negotiations. To view the full report click here.

July 25, 2016

Outmoded desk phone will disappear within next couple of years ⁰

by Sara Bean • Facilities management, Flexible working, News, Technology, Workplace design

A new survey has confirmed the imminent death of the ‘nearly useless’ desk phone, which while still in evidence within many organisations, is believed by one third of workers will disappear in two to three years. With both corporate and remote workers increasingly away from their desks, 65 percent already have a ‘desk phone optional’ work environment and over half (59 percent) believe the desk phone is outdated. The 2016 Report on Business Communications in the Era of the Anywhere Worker, by Dialpad, among end users to executives, on cloud communications adoption rates and expectations, also found that businesses of all sizes are adapting to the “anywhere worker” movement and as employees increasingly rely exclusively on mobile technologies, the organisations they work for are quickly evolving to meet their mobility demands and prepare for more anywhere workers in the future. In fact, 84 percent of responding companies already have remote workers.

July 25, 2016

Office of the future? + Vaping room call + UK will avoid Brexit recession ⁰

by Sara Bean • Cities, Facilities management, Flexible working, News, Property, Technology, Workplace

In this week’s Newsletter; Mark Eltringham on the narrow focus in descriptions of the ‘office of the future’; Maciej Markowski argues the need to keep an open mind on the open plan office; and Neil Franklin finds the ethics of everyday working life are the subject of two new surveys. News of a new device that can store more data than ever; many employees believe their workplace is not making best use of latest technology; and a new research report focuses on smart cities and the future of the built environment. Public Health England advises employers to set up vaping rooms for e-cigarette users; Brexit won’t lead to crash in commercial property say experts; and young workers are ill prepared for office politics. Download our new Briefing, produced in partnership with Boss Design on the link between culture and workplace strategy and design; visit our new events page, follow us on Twitter and join our LinkedIn Group to discuss these and other stories.

July 21, 2016

Offices not yet smart enough to support new ways of working ⁰

by Sara Bean • Facilities management, Flexible working, News, Technology, Workplace design

Employees believe their workplace is not making best use of latest technology, but expect this to improve as remote work begins to provide both quality of life and productivity benefits. In the latest Future Workforce Survey conducted by Dell and Intel, nearly half of global employees believe their current workplace is not smart enough, while 42 percent of millennial employees say they are willing to quit their job if technologies are not up to their standard. The research suggest that the addition of collaborative tools and innovations such as internet of things (IoT) and Virtual Reality (VR) will soon become vital to the workplace. According to the poll of nearly 4,000 full-time employees in ten countries, over half (57 percent) believe they will be working in a smart office within the next five years, while 51 percent believe that better technologies will make face-to-face meetings redundant within the next five years.

July 20, 2016

We need to keep a more open mind about open plan office design

by Maciej Markowski • Comment, Facilities management, Workplace design

Most people will be aware that there has been an historic and enduring debate about whether open plan offices are a good or a bad thing. Past articles whether in the Guardian, Dezeen or across the pond in the Washington Post would typically suggest that they diminish productivity and foster a number of other workplace ills. However introducing open plan design principles into your office is almost certainly a good idea. You really just need to make sure that you provide your employees with a choice of settings that allows them to work somewhere that suits the task in hand whether it’s space for concentration or privacy for confidential conversations in order to make it work. It’s a complex and contentious issue so it’s worth asking where open plan works and where it really doesn’t. If you ask many employees working in open plan offices what is bothering them, they’ll probably tell you two things: that they cannot focus and they have no privacy.

July 19, 2016

SMEs must offer flexible work or face recruitment and retention challenge ⁰

by Sara Bean • Facilities management, Flexible working, News, Workplace

SMEs that neglect to offer flexible work options may find their employees decide to switch to somewhere that does, according to a survey from Regus. Over 3,000 professionals across a variety of sectors were quizzed on the importance of flexibility in their working life. SME respondents left very little doubt about the value of a flexible approach, with 92 percent of workers in SMEs saying that, faced with a choice of two similar jobs, they would choose the one that offered flexible work. A third of respondents (33 percent) also stated that they would have stayed longer in their previous jobs if flexibility had been offered. According to Richard Morris, UK CEO, Regus, SMEs should think long and hard about the type of roles that they are offering to today’s professionals. He argues that the days of the fixed hours, fixed location job are becoming as outdated as the office fax machine. Flexibility is no longer seen as a perk, it is now a key differentiator for talented individuals.

July 18, 2016

Opportunities and challenges crystallise for smart cities and buildings ⁰

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

Global law firm Osborne Clarke has released its fourth research report on smart cities and the future of the built environment. The new edition addresses a number of key issues related to the built environment and poses what it suggests are the two key questions: How can the built environment become smarter? And what are the challenges and obstacles that might prevent this from happening? The report looks at case studies cross Europe and interviews experts in an attempt to discover how smart built environments ‘leverage data, new technology and innovative and collaborative thinking to deliver services that benefit citizens’. The report concludes that a fundamental shift in thinking is already well underway but it is patchy and still faces a large number of major obstacles, not least a silo mentality in decision making which restricts the ability of organisations to innovate and achieve results across a broad base of objectives.

July 13, 2016

Gensler publishes latest US and UK Workplace Surveys for 2016 ⁰

by Mark Eltringham • Architecture, Facilities management, Features, Flexible working, Workplace design

Gensler has announced the results of its Workplace Survey 2016 for both the UK and the US. Key claims of the UK report based on a study of 1,210 respondents include that the UK workforce seems to be divided into ‘haves and have-nots’, with mid and lower-tier workers confined to poor quality environments, 67 per cent of the workforce feel drained due to their office environment at the end of each day and that ‘innovators’ spend just 3.5 days of the working week in the office, highlighting the need for greater flexibility. Meanwhile, the key finding of the US study of 4,000 respondents is that a statistical link between the quality and functional make-up of the workplace and the level of innovation employees ascribe to their organisation, and found that a workplace that prioritises both individual and group work creates ‘an ecosystem of innovation’ across organisations and is a crucial predictor of how innovative an employee sees their company to be.

July 13, 2016

World FM Day and the workplace design and management elephant

by Mark Eltringham • Comment, Events, Facilities management

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.