Columnists

The vaguery of workplace serendipity

by • Comment, Facilities management, Technology, Workplace design

It has become vogue to refer to the workplace as being ‘all about people’. It points in all directions at once. Organisations need fit, healthy, happy, skilled, motivated, engaged and purposeful people being (and feeling) productive and doing their best work every day. They want their people working closely together – they’ve spent a lot […]

Digital culture is key to attracting contingent workforce

by • Comment, Workplace

Over the past decade, we’ve witnessed a radical change in the makeup of workforces in the UK and globally. The rise of flexible workforces continues unabated, to the point where contingent workers are a significant and vital part of the employment fabric. Demonstrating this point, recent research by the City & Guilds Group found that […]

What Baloo can teach us about our suspicion of tall buildings

by • Architecture, Cities, Comment

“What Baloo had said about the monkeys was perfectly true. They belonged to the tree-tops, and as beasts very seldom look up, there was no occasion for the monkeys and the Jungle-People to cross each other’s path.” Of course, Rudyard Kipling meant this figuratively but there is a clear link between ‘up’ in the figurative […]

The Fourth Industrial Revolution is upon us and we`re not ready for it

by • Comment, Technology

Cast your mind back a decade or so and consider how the future looked then. A public horizon of Obama-imbued “yes we can” and a high tide of hope and tolerance expressed in the London Olympics provides one narrative theme; underlying austerity-induced pressure another. Neither speaks directly to our current world of divisive partisan politics, […]

Putting the responsibility into personal and corporate social responsibility 0

by • Comment, Environment, Wellbeing

You’re probably aware of the experiment performed by Stanley Milgram in which volunteers were asked by men in white coats to administer what they believed to be electric shocks to another person, who they could not see, but could hear, from behind a screen. Around two-thirds of the volunteers agreed to deliver what they were […]

The culling of freelancers with IR35 is a really, really bad idea

by • Comment, Flexible working

Imagine a world with no freelancers, holiday cover workers, or people to help fill the hiring gaps on projects. With IR35 extending into the private sector, this could be a reality; and we should be worried that a skilled and flexible workforce of freelancers could soon be extinct. Instead of dealing with the headache of […]

Burnout remains a risk for workers of all generations

by • Comment, Wellbeing

Flexible working has become an important part of the modern UK economy, with over half of employees taking up a flexible working arrangement. However, Nuffield Health’s latest whitepaper The effects of remote working on stress, wellbeing and productivity has found while remote working is associated with higher workplace wellbeing, it can also present many business […]

Personality is not only about who you are but also where you are

by • Comment

In the field of psychology, the image is canon: a child sitting in front of a marshmallow, resisting the temptation to eat it. If she musters up the willpower to resist long enough, she’ll be rewarded when the experimenter returns with a second marshmallow. Using this ‘marshmallow test’, the Austrian-born psychologist Walter Mischel demonstrated that […]

Anthropology might hold answers to the most difficult workplace challenges

by • Comment, Workplace design

Many recent discussions have centered on the drawbacks of the open-plan office, a major format in the UK, and possible pathways to the communal workplace of the future. As part of this, it has been acknowledged that the factors responsible for determining the open-plan office’s performance are complex, and a number of the present-day workplace’s […]

Is flexible working the answer to improved employee mental health and productivity?

by • Comment, Flexible working

One of Labour’s flagship policies for its 2019 general election campaign was to introduce a four-day week. More accurately, its policy is to introduce a 32-hour week. This brought flexible working again into the media spotlight. Research suggests that flexible working and reduced hours can have multiple benefits, including improved mental health and greater productivity.

Avoiding the minefield of WhatsApp communications

by • Comment, Legal news, Workplace

Whether to keep colleagues updated or to share a new idea, WhatsApp groups are increasingly becoming a go-to communication tool in the workplace.  There are benefits to having such informal communication channels – they can be less hierarchical and improve cohesion within the team, as well as being a fast and easy way to communicate […]

Tech trends to watch that will disrupt 2020 and beyond

by • AI, Comment, Public Sector

The next decade promises to offer both incredible opportunity and challenge for all of us. Technologies like artificial intelligence will no longer be considered new but will instead be at the heart of some huge disruptive changes that will run right through our society. In particular, AI will start to enable the automation of many […]

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