Columnists
September 14, 2018
All those workplace trends lists that you see? We’ve been there before 0
by Mark Eltringham • Comment, Facilities management, Furniture, Workplace design
Conference and show season looms and with it arrives the annual swarm of workplace trend forecasts. These are often presented as groundbreaking but many of them are indistinguishable from each other and based on some very familiar tropes and assumptions. These days such things tend to be shaped into lists, because that’s how the Internet likes […]
September 12, 2018
Reinventing jobs for an automated future workplace
by Ravin Jesuthasan • AI, Comment, Technology
Earlier this year, the European Commission announced it will invest €20 billion in Artificial Intelligence (AI) research and development by 2020 to boost the adoption of AI and robotics across multiple industries, which will have a significant impact on the way work across sectors gets done. Facing demographic deficits, Europe and Japan – and to […]
September 10, 2018
The evolution of the workplace conversation in ten graphs
by Mark Eltringham • Comment, Facilities management, Technology, Workplace design
September 7, 2018
How Thomas Jefferson came to invent the swivel chair and laptop 0
by Mark Eltringham • Comment, Furniture, Technology, Workplace design
In 1775, Thomas Jefferson was a busy man. As part of the Committee of Five men and at the tender age of 33, he had been charged with drafting the Declaration of Independence that was to be presented to Congress the following Summer. By all accounts, Jefferson was a self-contained and self-sufficient man and, like […]
September 6, 2018
Creating a productive workplace for people is all about context
by Mark Eltringham • Comment, Facilities management, Workplace, Workplace design
The quest for a proper understanding of the links between the places we work, the things with which we fill them and our wellbeing and productivity has been ongoing for a very long time. It predates our current thinking on productive workplace design and the facilities management discipline as we now know it by decades […]
September 4, 2018
Don’t stand so close to me: why personal space matters in the workplace 0
by Paul Goodchild • Comment, Wellbeing, Workplace design
As successive BCO Specification Guides and the research of organisations like CoreNet Global have proved, the spatial dynamics of offices have changed dramatically in recent years. Put simply, the modern office serves significantly more people per square foot than ever before. Originally this tightening was largely down to the growing ubiquity of flat screen and […]
August 22, 2018
Why early intervention matters for workplace mental health
by Liz Walker • Comment, Wellbeing, Workplace
Last year alone, poor mental health was the primary cause of long-term absence for 22 percent of organisations, with employees feeling too stressed or anxious to face going in to work. This was up from 13 percent in 2016. However, 45 percent of those who take time off for mental health reasons give their employers […]
August 21, 2018
How do you make your company culture work for everyone?
by Jonathan Richards • Comment, Workplace
Company culture is the bedrock of any business. And it has been thrown into sharp focus in recent months with many high-profile scandals hitting the headlines such as the discrimination case at Uber. In light of this, many businesses are now investing in – even living and breathing – their company culture. This is of course, […]
August 16, 2018
The office will always live on because nothing propinks like propinquity
by Mark Eltringham • Comment, Property, Workplace design
Perhaps the most pervasive and enduring myth about the office is that it is somehow dying off. It’s a blast of guff originally farted out at the dawn of the technological revolution in the early 1990s, which has somehow lingered and been stinking the place out ever since. The essential premise behind the idea of […]
August 15, 2018
The global problem of overwork and the right to disconnect
by Aki Stamatis • Comment, Flexible working, Technology, Wellbeing
Anybody who doubts the importance of work and working culture to people’s lives should look at the resistance to President Macron’s mooted changes to labour laws. His attempts to modernise and liberalise French workplace legislation marked the first cracks in his reputation and brought millions of French workers to the streets as part of a […]
September 18, 2018
Building a culture of creativity that unites the physical and digital workplace
by Serena Borghero • Comment, Technology, Workplace design
Agreeing on the definition of creativity is no easy task, as it can mean a whole range of different things to different people. To some, creativity means painting a beautiful picture or creating a unique sculpture, while for others it might mean writing a catchy tagline, developing a new business model, or building an innovative […]