Columnists
October 14, 2015
Sitting down is no worse than standing for long periods, claims new study 0
by Mark Eltringham • Comment, News, Wellbeing, Workplace design
As we’ve always argued, the now commonly parroted idea that ‘sitting is the new smoking’ is extremely dubious and has led to a degree of hysteria about the effects of sedentary work and the substitution of one harmful extreme for another. Now a new peer reviewed study from researchers in the UK and Australia confirms […]
October 12, 2015
How workplace design is more closely reflecting how we actually work 0
by Adrian Campbell • Comment, Flexible working, Workplace design
In years gone by, a ‘one size fits all’ approach to office design might have been the norm, but as the decades have progressed, so too have the options available to businesses designing ‘homes from home’ for their office-based workforces. As new interpretations of the office environment proliferated, so the open plan model came to into […]
October 11, 2015
How biodynamic lighting stimulates sense and performance at work 0
by Peter Young • Comment, Products, Wellbeing, Workplace design
Biodynamic lighting is an artificial light source that replicates the dynamic variations of daylight and sunlight through a light management system. Up until recent times, it was commonly believed that light was only needed for seeing. However, in 2001, an American scientist, G. C. Brainard discovered a circadian photoreceptor in the retina, which receives a […]
October 7, 2015
Why Jeremy Hunt is wrong about the need to work long hours 0
by Mark Eltringham • Comment, Flexible working, Wellbeing, Workplace
This week the UK’s Health Secretary found himself at the centre of a storm because of some comments he’d made suggesting that eroding one of the UK’s welfare platforms would encourage people to work as hard as the ‘Chinese and Americans’. Most of the backlash against these comments was political, so make your own mind […]
October 2, 2015
For once and for all, please stop with this ‘death of the office’ stuff 0
by Mark Eltringham • Comment, Furniture, Property, Technology, Workplace design
I was involved in a meeting with an office fit-out company this week which involved a discussion of how their clients can develop misconceptions about the extent to which their contemporaries are introducing new office design and management models based on agile working, shared space, mobile technology and all that other good stuff. This presents a […]
September 28, 2015
A review of the CIFF office design show 2015 in Shanghai 0
by John Sacks • Comment, Events, Furniture, Workplace design
Shanghai’s population is reported to be in the region of twenty six million, more than double that of London, and the city continues to creep outwards inexorably, attracting even greater numbers. For the casual visitor however, its vast size does somehow seem to be manageable, just. The traffic is very heavy of course, but it […]
September 24, 2015
Weighing up the pros and cons of the BREEAM environmental standard 0
by Charles Marks • Comment, Environment, Facilities management, Workplace design
For some years there has been a growing awareness of the need to improve the environmental performance of buildings. This is closely linked to both the Government’s own international commitments to reduce carbon emissions by 80 percent over the next 35 years and the need of organisations to act ethically and cut costs while they’re […]
September 22, 2015
John Fogarty reflects on a career in office furniture spanning five decades 0
by John Fogarty • Comment, Furniture, Workplace design
I was lucky to enter the office furniture industry in 1971, at the beginning of a decade shaped by the explosive advent of new office technology. What had gone before would not have looked that different to anyone who’d worked a corporate office in the 1890s: serried ranks of desks occupied by clerical staff bashing away on manual typewriters […]
September 21, 2015
Five essential office design trends to look for in the near future 0
by Tom Brialey • Comment, Facilities management, Flexible working, Workplace design
Since the early Twentieth Century, business leaders have been experimenting with office design in an attempt to improve productivity. From the sea of forward-facing desks imagined by Frederick Taylor, to the infamous cubicle of the late 1960s, to today’s open-plan office, each innovation has said something about our changing relationship to work. In a Gensler survey […]
September 18, 2015
Majority of workers go into the workplace when they should be off sick 0
by Sara Bean • Comment, News, Wellbeing, Workplace
Debates around presenteeism tend to revolve around staff checking their emails while on holiday, but another potentially more destructive behaviour is that of the worker who reckons they’re so indispensable they insist on coming into the workplace when they’re ill. In a recent survey, 89 percent of workers said they had gone into work when they were not well, […]
September 18, 2015
What Robert Frost can teach us about the changing workplace
by Mark Eltringham • Comment, Facilities management, Flexible working, Technology
The great Twentieth Century American poet Robert Frost is arguably best known these days for two quotations that have – usually in bastardised versions – entered into common usage. The first is the final verse of his poem The Road Not Taken, and especially the final three lines: “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I […]
October 21, 2015
Far fewer working women than men receive an annual bonus 0
by Sara Bean • Comment, News, Workplace
Nearly three quarters of the UK’s working women don’t receive any form of annual bonus. Glassdoor’s latest UK Employment Confidence Survey found that only 29 percent of women at work receive a bonus, compared to 44 percent of men, which presumably is one reason why 44 percent of men remain positive about the outlook for their employer […]