April 20, 2021
April 19, 2021
Pressure and weak leadership form the recipe for workplace bullying
by Neil Franklin • News, Wellbeing
Employees experience more bullying on days with higher work pressure and passive avoidant leadership, finds new research from BI Norwegian Business School and the University of Bergen and published in The European Management Journal. Professor Olav Kjellevold Olsen and colleagues studied how work pressure is related to daily experiences of workplace bullying related acts, as well as the relationship with transformational or laissez-faire leadership. Transformational leadership involves paying more attention to employees’ needs for achievement and providing social support. Laissez-faire leadership involves a more passive and destructive approach leaving followers on their own in situations in need of leadership. More →
April 19, 2021
Over a third of employees worry about job security if they report an accident at work
by Jayne Smith • News, Wellbeing, Working culture
Employees would worry about the security of their job if they were to report suffering an injury in the workplace, claims new research carried out by JMW Solicitors. More than 1,200 people were surveyed and results claim that 39 percent either ‘strongly agreed’ or ‘agreed’ that they were worried their job would be at risk if they reported their employer for negligence. More →
April 16, 2021
Mental health concerns at SMEs have surged during the pandemic
by Jayne Smith • News, Wellbeing
Breathe has released the findings from a recent survey aiming to understand business attitudes and approaches to mental health in the workplace. According to the firm, the pandemic has fuelled a health crisis which continues to impact the mental and physical wellbeing of staff in a number of ways. As a result, employers are under pressure to introduce adequate safeguarding measures, according to the report. More →
April 9, 2021
Lockdown mental fatigue is rapidly reversed by social contact, study claims
by Dr Christopher Hand, Greg Maciejewski and Joanne Ingram • Features, Flexible working, Wellbeing
Many of us are looking forward to a summer of relative freedom, with road-mapped milestones that will grant us more opportunities to see our friends and family. But we’ll be carrying the effects of months of isolation into those meetings, including a sense that our social skills will need dusting off, and our wits will need sharpening. The mental effects of lockdown have been profound. Social isolation has been shown to cause people’s mental health to deteriorate even if they have no history of previous psychological problems. Alongside this drop in mood, loneliness has been linked with a host of cognitive problems, including fatigue, stress and problems with concentration. More →
April 8, 2021
Working from home surveillance drives rise of digital presenteeism
by Neil Franklin • News, Technology, Wellbeing
Lockdown has meant the majority of UK office-based employees have taken up working from home arrangements over the last year, and it seems that many employers lack trust in their employees when they can’t physically see them. Last year saw a rise in the implementation of surveillance software, to ensure that workers are acting in best corporate interests. However, this is having a negative impact on some employees – who are feeling forced to work longer hours due to a new perceived need to remain visible to their manager or team leader, revealed in a survey by cybersecurity firm Kaspersky. With remote working set to stay post-COVID, these findings indicate a worrying growing trend around broken working from home employee trust. More →
April 6, 2021
Workplace interruptions may help people feel a sense of belonging
by Neil Franklin • News, Wellbeing
In those heady pre-lockdown days, the most common complaint about office life, and especially open plan office life, was the inability to get work done without distraction. Now a new paper from researchers at the University of Illinois suggests that the interruptions may have served some purpose in the way they helped people feel a sense of belonging in the workplace. More →
April 1, 2021
Finding a new sense of purpose in the way we all do business
by David Lineen • Comment, Environment, Property, Wellbeing
It is now a truism that society expects more of business than merely maximising shareholder value. Milton Friedman’s conviction that unswerving commitment to this single goal would ensure that business and society would prosper has come to be seen as blinkered, unfit for the twenty-first century and enabling of corporate greed. Instead of shareholder value maximisation, an idea that The Economist called ‘the biggest idea in business’ in 2016, businesses are now encouraged to recognise their responsibilities to an array of ‘stakeholders’, from employees, suppliers and customers, to the planet itself and other communities (real or imagined). So, it has never been more important for businesses to do good, have a clear sense of purpose and be seen as doing so. More →
April 1, 2021
‘Healthy buildings’ enjoy a surge in demand worldwide
by Neil Franklin • Environment, News, Property, Wellbeing
A new survey of many of the world’s leading real estate investors finds that 92 percent of respondents expect demand for healthy buildings to grow in the next three years. The report claims that this is a compelling signal of the direction the real estate sector is heading. This finding, among others, is captured in a report titled A New Investor Consensus: The Rising Demand for Healthy Buildings (registration) which claims to be a comprehensive health and wellness study of global real estate investment managers and stakeholders representing aggregate AUM of $5.75 trillion and portfolio investments in real estate totalling approximately US$1.03 trillion. More →
March 30, 2021
Working mothers healthcare hit hard by the pandemic
by Jayne Smith • News, Wellbeing, Working lives
The UK government has had to make many changes to its healthcare system in the last year to stop the spread of coronavirus, including asking people to stay home when possible, prioritising higher-risk patients and putting many routine appointments on pause throughout the pandemic. More →
March 29, 2021
Mental health transparency at the top is the key to workplace wellbeing
by Elaine Carnegie • Comment, Wellbeing
As the world emerges from the grip of the pandemic, the mental health crisis continues to worsen. One thing is for certain as we look to rebuild – the business community must put the mental health of all employees as top priority. But is there something that’s missing in the current conversation around workplace mental health and wellbeing? One thought is around leaders themselves, and that intrinsic connection to their own mental health and wellbeing. What many leaders have been carrying throughout the pandemic is exceptional, including the added weight of responsibility for the wellbeing and mental health of employees and to create mentally healthy workplaces, yet we rarely hear how leaders themselves are coping. More →
April 13, 2021
After a year of lockdowns, people are burnt-out but happier
by Steven Buck • Comment, Wellbeing