Columnists
December 18, 2020
The shape of things to come for the world and the workplace
by Mark Eltringham • Comment, Flexible working, Technology, Wellbeing, Workplace design
Originally published in March, right at the start of all this. Makes me wonder how far we’ve come in nine months. In Dorian Lynskey’s The Ministry of Truth, a “biography” of Nineteen Eighty-Four, the author describes how Orwell’s book was the end point of an obsession with utopian (and ultimately dystopian) fiction that characterised the […]
December 18, 2020
Events of 2020 have proved the value of personal resilience
by Silja Litvin • Comment, Wellbeing
No-one could have predicted what 2020 would deliver. A pandemic, lockdown, moving the workplace into the home. We are in uncharted waters. The Oxford English Dictionary defines resilience as being able to withstand or recover quickly from difficult conditions. Resilience is an almost stoic quality, and a pandemic a time of crisis. It almost feels […]
December 16, 2020
The weakness of purpose and the shift to problem-solving
by Steven van Belleghem • Business, Comment
BlackRock is one of the largest asset management companies on the planet. Each year, at the start of January, the CEO Larry Fink writes a letter addressed to the other CEOs of the world. In his New Year’s letter for 2020, Fink appealed in particular to his fellow CEOs’ sense of social responsibility. In particular, […]
December 15, 2020
Preparing for a mental health epidemic is a shared responsibility
by Sheena Pirbhai • Comment, Wellbeing
With the continuous impact of the pandemic on people’s mental health due to isolation, work uncertainty, and anxiety over health, the topic has been dominating the news, begging the question of how we can achieve accessible and cost-effective treatment for all and prevent the expected acceleration of mental health issues in the coming months. As […]
December 12, 2020
Listening in on an enormous conversation about the workplace
December 11, 2020
Firms should be aware of the legal implications of employee monitoring
by James Castro-Edwards • Comment, Flexible working, Technology, Workplace
Employee monitoring is an emotive topic. Businesses may wish to monitor their staff for a variety of reasons. For instance, they may wish to prevent the unauthorised disclosure of confidential or sensitive information, or detect attempts to steal valuable intellectual property. In the current conditions, dominated by the coronavirus pandemic, many businesses have opted to […]
December 10, 2020
Corporate inclusivity efforts must include disability
by Silke Muenster • Comment, Wellbeing
When we think about inclusivity and diversity in the corporate world, we often think of racial and cultural diversity, gender, or LGBTQ+ inclusion—but one aspect that has been too long forgotten or ignored is the topic of disability inclusion. Caroline Casey, disability activist, CEO and founder of the Valuable 500 initiative, notes that though 90 […]
December 10, 2020
Employers should explain their monitoring policies to workers
by Chioma Iwunze • Comment, Workplace
The number of companies monitoring their employees is growing. According to a Gartner survey, more than 22 percent of employees use employee movement data, while 17 percent of them are monitoring computer usage. With companies choosing to monitor employees, privacy laws are also catching up, and thus there is a need for explaining employee monitoring […]
December 4, 2020
The lost art of office furniture peacocking and the growing mental health crisis at work
by Mark Eltringham • Comment, Technology, Wellbeing, Workplace design
When Donald Trump was pictured recently sitting uncomfortably at a table that looked like it had been retrieved from a skip, it provoked the sort of sneering commentary about furniture choices last seen when Dominic Cummings popped in to the Downing Street garden to deliver some self-serving blather from behind a rickety trestle table.
December 3, 2020
Hybrid working presents us with a once in a generation opportunity
by Michael Cockburn • Comment, Coworking, Flexible working, Technology
In the face of the revolutionary and long-lasting changes to workplaces across the world resulting from the pandemic, some commentators have suggested that the wide-spread necessity of adopting remote working practices may have made the office obsolete. However, such a dramatic upheaval to the very foundation of the workplace and working dynamic won’t come without […]
January 5, 2021
We shouldn’t become village idiots in our new ways of life
by Mark Eltringham • Cities, Comment, Flexible working, Technology
The idea of a Global Village comes loaded with a number of idyllic connotations. Most of them derive from the use of the word village itself, which triggers the idea of a community in our minds. Yet even the man who coined and popularised the term in the 1950s and 60s to describe a world […]