Columnists
July 14, 2015
Homeworkers left to fund their own technology by stingy bosses
by Sara Bean • Comment, Facilities management, Flexible working, News
Last week we learnt that for some employers, homeworking is only to be encouraged when it’s out of hours. Now new research from Regus suggests that only around a third of people encouraged by their employers to work from home (35 percent) receive any contributions from their firm to fund the fit-out. The survey of over […]
July 9, 2015
London transport shuts down ….. agile workers unaffected …..
by Paul Carder • Cities, Comment, Flexible working, Wellbeing
London’s Financial Times reported this morning, “The worst London Underground strike in more than a decade saw millions of Londoners struggle to get to work”. It is chaos, here in the UK capital – the top global city in PwC’s Cities of Opportunity ranking. It is a sorry state of affairs, as in a scene […]
July 9, 2015
Many employers discourage home working, unless it is out of hours
by Sara Bean • Comment, Flexible working, News, Wellbeing, Workplace
A combination of tube and rail strikes causing travel disruption in London today, means many businesses will accede to requests to work from home. Yet a large number of UK employers are still reluctant to encourage home working. According to a recent report by Redcentric, despite the fact that that just under a third of UK office […]
July 9, 2015
Wind tunnels and Beyoncé’s backside added to tall buildings charge sheet
by Mark Eltringham • Architecture, Cities, Comment, Property
As if there aren’t enough reasons to dislike tall buildings already, two news stories drop into our inbox this week which add to the growing charge sheet against these phallic assaults on our senses and sensibilities. According to the first story, it appears that the recent proliferation of towers in London not only means that […]
July 6, 2015
Humans will remain at the heart of the emerging digital workplace
by Maciej Markowski • Comment, Flexible working, Technology, Workplace design
The speed of technological development over the last 30 years has been pretty mind blowing. Of course, some technologies came and went, for instance you would struggle finding fax machines in your office nowadays or people using Pagers to contact one another. It’s no wonder that in the early nineties futurologists predicted the death of […]
July 1, 2015
Three ways in which the business case for green building design is moving on
by Dan Callegari • Architecture, Comment, Environment, Facilities management, Workplace design
The case for sustainable building design used to be based on two straightforward principles. The first was that buildings had to offer up some sustainable features to comply with the ethical standards of their occupiers. The second was that there was some financial benefit. Often these principles went hand in hand, especially when it came to […]
June 30, 2015
Settings, silence, serendipity, wellbeing and other lessons from Neocon
by Paul Goodchild • Comment, Events, Furniture, Workplace design
The trick with visits to exhibitions like Neocon, the huge office design event which has just wrapped up in Chicago, is to stay focussed on the wood as much as the trees. So as well as identifying new products, you can also work out the themes pursued by the exhibitors and organisers which are invariably […]
June 30, 2015
Is the environment now a non-issue for building occupiers and managers?
by Mark Eltringham • Comment, Environment, Facilities management, Workplace design
This week, I took part in a series of debates in London and Manchester. The discussions, led by Rob Kirkbride of the US workplace design trade journal Monday Morning Quarterback, focused on workplace trends in North America and Europe, based on the issues that dominated the recent Neocon show in Chicago. This in turn is […]
June 29, 2015
Beyond agile working: the six factors of knowledge worker productivity
by Andrew Mawson • Comment, Facilities management, Flexible working, Workplace, Workplace design
Whilst the world has focussed heavily on the asset productivity of offices over the last 30 years, reducing the cost of offices per head, often using agile working as a tool for achieving this, it’s becoming clear that the mobility afforded by the latest technology products can be used to aid Knowledge Worker productivity. Knowledge work […]
June 25, 2015
Long distance commuting, agile working and dinosaur extinction in the UAE
by Douglas Langmead • Cities, Comment, Flexible working, Property
In Dubai, there are no suburban dinosaurs; those large-scale, single purpose office buildings that ignore the agile realities of modern working life. In the western world, these giants evolved on business parks, driven by the perceived benefits of having office workers agglomerated in order to achieve efficiency of communication and dissemination. The business practices and technologies […]
June 23, 2015
Design must support knowledge circulation in the next generation workplace
by Lee Parsons • Comment, Knowledge, Workplace design
Businesses thrive because of their workforces, and the ideas, work and creations they bring to an organisation. But despite the fact that sharing knowledge and thoughts is vitally important, most designers focus on providing individual space for workers, while little thought is given to creating spaces that support knowledge circulation. Separate offices for one or two people, cubicles […]
July 15, 2015
The standard gender pay gap narrative is a myth, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t problems
by Mark Eltringham • Comment, Flexible working, Knowledge, Workplace
It is one of the great ironies of modern life that in a world drowning in data, a great deal of public discourse is driven by narratives that have little or no factual basis. If anything, the substitution of baseless and questionable stories. Sometimes these narratives are based on outdated realities. Sometimes on assumptions. Sometimes […]