Columnists

Time to get real on what companies need from their real estate

by • Comment, Property, Wellbeing, Workplace design

As businesses return to their offices they are faced with a challenge – how do they reappraise their space requirements post-Covid? Social and technological advancements are changing real estate from being a fixed physical product, into flexible, employee-centric spaces that enable new models of hybrid working and business operations. These have a significant impact on […]

Yoga is not a wellbeing strategy

by • Comment, Wellbeing

One of the problems facing businesses right now isn’t the so-called mental health pandemic, it’s that no one seems to know what to do about it. The increased focus on employee mental health and wellbeing has seen progressive leaps in the conversation that were unimaginable 10 years ago. Even the most cynical manager has had […]

Indoor air quality needs to be talked about far more than it is

by • Comment, Environment, Wellbeing, Workplace design

One of the unintended consequences of the pandemic has been to focus attention on the issue of indoor air quality. But as Sarah Zhang points out in a recent piece in The Atlantic, this is an issue that we have long understood, and not just as a way to reduce the risks of infection. It […]

Not waving, but drowning: why we need to take languishing more seriously

by • Comment, Wellbeing

The word ‘languishing’ is being bandied around in the media as the world tries to recover from the pandemic and is experiencing many struggles resuming a semblance of ‘normal life’. Recent articles in The New York Times and The Guardian have detailed languishing as an inability to focus, being off peak performance, feeling joyless and […]

Setting out the known unknowns about work

by • Comment, Flexible working, Workplace design

With the majority of COVID-19 restrictions in England due to be lifted later this month, it is understandable that many are limbering up, ready for some grand ‘return to the office’.  Yet, unlike the pubs, hairdressers, and gyms we are not going back to what we left. This was an inevitability. The workplace was, and remains, an ever evolving […]

If you’re certain about the changing world of work, you’re certainly wrong

by • Comment, Working culture

If you click on the first link in any article on Wikipedia and keep repeating the process, eventually you will land on the Philosophy page. Or you will 97 percent of the time, according to Wikipedia itself. There’s a dry explanation for this involving the site’s classification system, as explained by the mathematician Hannah Fry […]

The new era of flexible working and knowing when to lie flat

by • Comment, Flexible working, Wellbeing

When people first started working from home in large numbers for the first time in the Spring of 2020, one of the most talked about issues was how the productivity of most stayed the same or improved. This shouldn’t have been that surprising given all that we have learned about remote and flexible working over […]

Trees can’t solve the climate change problem. That’s our job

by • Comment, Environment, Facilities management

To address the climate change challenge, the UK became the first, major, world economy to pass law committing us to reducing all greenhouse gas emissions to Net Zero by 2050. It was a strong signal to organisations and individuals across the UK that it was now time to stop talking and start acting. And start […]

The office sector needs to face up to its landfill issue

by • Comment, Environment, JK, Workplace design

Over the past ten years, reuse of furniture and furnishings has been extremely limited. Most redundant assets have been discarded to landfill. It’s a brutal fact that it is the easy and less expensive option. Many products sent for recycling often end up in landfill or incineration and so still contributing to carbon emissions. As […]

HR should play a more strategic role in business resilience

by • Comment, Flexible working, Technology, Workplace

Almost every organisation now knows it must become more resilient as the economy emerges from the pandemic. As well as coping with crises and global events, organisations must excel in the face of the many less high-profile disruptions that hit an organisation – from supply chain bottlenecks to shifts in demand and sudden skills shortages. […]

We need to rethink the role of technology in corporate wellbeing

by • Comment, Technology, Wellbeing

Employers nationwide are taking steps to improve employee wellbeing, reduce stress and improve mental health. For many, they are well-meaning, for example, banning work emails during certain hours of the day, encouraging employees to ‘switch off’.  However, the risk with blanket policies like these is that they don’t work for everyone. A recent study from […]

Never mind the agile workplace, here is something you already know

by • Comment, Workplace design

The myth has it that John Lydon’s audition for the Sex Pistols consisted largely of wearing a Pink Floyd t-shirt with the words I HATE scrawled above the prog rock group’s name. It appealed to the new band’s managers and its existing members at a time when they needed a singer with the right attitude […]

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