Columnists
December 20, 2022
Never mind the workplace predictions, here’s some bollocks
by Mark Eltringham • Comment, Flexible working, Technology, Workplace design
Time of the year for looking backwards and forwards. For workplace predictions and retrospectives. The Economist announces that the word / term of the year is hybrid work. This is interesting because, although The Economist is using it as an interchangeable term for flexible working as many do, a great deal of energy is still […]
December 13, 2022
Getting past the uncertainty of GDP to find something better
by George Muir • Business, Comment, Everything Omni, Wellbeing
The other night, my fourteen-year-old daughter was revising for her Economics exam, and we discussed the Swedish Economic Model and its relevance in our own age of uncertainty. According to the International Monetary Fund, Sweden’s national debt to GDP ratio has fallen chiefly since 1995. We proceeded to discuss the term Gross National Product (GDP). […]
December 9, 2022
The Great Relearning about the Great Office Problem
by Mark Eltringham • Comment, Flexible working, Technology, Workplace design
One of the latest people to invent activity-based working is sociologist Ana Andjelic, who combines it with the similarly familiar hub and spoke office model on her substack as a solution to the Great Office Problem. She’s not the first and is a less surprising pioneer of a decades old model than some other people […]
December 6, 2022
Flexible working should be the norm for as many people as possibe
November 23, 2022
The unspoken privilege of wellbeing
by Stephanie Fitzgerald • Comment, SF, Wellbeing
I sat in the main hall at a recent conference, listening to the keynote presentation. A Head of HR at a large manufacturing company described the implementation of their wellbeing strategy over the last year. So far, so important. There is no doubt that the conversation around wellbeing has been rightly amplified, as employees are […]
November 20, 2022
Is carbon counting really the answer for the office furniture industry?
by Joanna Knight • Comment, Environment, JK
There is an increasing awareness that carbon is contained within all the products we buy. As an example, a leading sports trainer manufacturer is now displaying carbon content labelling, rather like food retailers quote calories. Within the workplace sector, the environmental impact of the built environment and products such as office furniture and flooring are […]
November 17, 2022
The workplace circus continues to entertain, but back in the real world…
by Mark Eltringham • Comment, Flexible working, Technology, Wellbeing
The Great Workplace Circus headlines its 322nd show of the year with everybody’s favourite distraction, Elon Musk, being driven into the ring by his own shoddily built clown car, declaring he needs everybody at Twitter to be ‘extremely hardcore’ before sacking a few people from his space programme, then setting fire to the tent himself. […]
November 10, 2022
Summing up where the office now stands in the scheme of things
November 4, 2022
The human mind and body are not really machines for living in
by Mark Eltringham • Comment, Workplace
It is ironic that while we live in a world in which we are witnessing the automation of more and more human skills and capabilities, we are often best able to understand the way people function with symbols of mechanisation. That is the underlying conceit of what turned out to be one of the animated film […]
November 3, 2022
Are digital skills the key to a happier, more productive workforce?
by Katy Liddell • Comment, Technology, Workplace
The rising cost-of-living is impacting life and work in all four corners of the UK. Research from BCC has found that businesses feel compelled to increase their own prices. With costs rising, businesses are facing growing pressures. Not least the need to attract and retain the talent they can depend on to deliver. Research has […]
December 22, 2022
How businesses can support employee wellbeing over a difficult festive period
by Louise Aston • Comment, Wellbeing
When we think about the festive period, the financial pressures that Christmas brings, amid rising energy bills and not having enough to eat shouldn’t be first and foremost on our minds. With thirty million people employed by businesses in the UK, that is a huge number of employees who could benefit if employers acted now […]