Columnists
February 14, 2023
UK businesses are out of touch with the real sources of employee stress
by Nick Gold • Comment, Wellbeing
The cost-of-living crisis is driving a wedge between employers and their staff. In a recent research report, we surveyed 500 employers to discover what they believe causes their staff the most stress. Surprisingly, an overwhelming 96 percent did not believe that employee salaries are a major stress factor for staff during the cost-of-living crisis. Instead, […]
February 10, 2023
Working parents are resilient, and a resilient team is good for business
by Erin Eatough • Comment, Wellbeing
Last week, Parent Mental Health Day renewed our focus on working parents and their resilience, the ability to adapt to change, deal with stress, and foster optimism despite difficulty. From a business perspective, resilience is the way that employees recognise and respond to challenges as opportunities to develop rather than as a threat or setback. […]
February 2, 2023
Do you walk or talk people centric change for success?
by Jennifer Bryan • Comment, JB, Workplace
In previous articles, I shared that there is a McKinsey report that states that 75 percent of the organisations that were listed at the time on the S&P would no longer exist by 2025 – they would either merge, be bought out or go bankrupt. This all means that organisations have to change and adapt […]
January 20, 2023
AI presents us with a chance to rediscover what it means to be human
by Mark Eltringham • Comment, Technology
January 17, 2023
A workplace for entrepreneurial mindsets to thrive should be your goal
by John Mullins • Business, Comment
These days it seems like everyone is looking to become more entrepreneurial. It’s a word that’s often used by big companies on the hunt for innovative thinkers and new ways of doing things. But sadly, the workplace doesn’t always work for those with entrepreneurial minds. It is too rigid, too hierarchical, too conventional. Entrepreneurs, by […]
January 4, 2023
What IS hybrid working?
by Neil Usher • Comment, Flexible working
In an uncharacteristically Waddellian moment*, the Word of the Year for 2022 according to The Economist was ‘hybrid work’. Yet despite its ubiquity, in the comparative calm of social channels over the holiday period lurked claims that no-one knows what hybrid working is. Even though millions of people are doing it. Given that such an […]
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 […]
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
March 1, 2023
The rise of the pods shows how the workplace pendulum swings
by Ben Capper • Comment, Workplace design
Long before the office died (I read its obituary in several publications) there were hotly contested debates about open plan offices. That is of course before those debates were eclipsed by more current workplace rantings (ask the editor). Skimming through the open-plan office timeline, Herman Miller launched action office, L-shaped desks with screens became shared […]