Search Results for: media

June 10, 2014

Silicon Roundabout remains the UK’s foremost location for business startups

Research from accountants UHY Hacker Young has revealed the UK’s most popular postcodes for business start-ups. Silicon Roundabout is the most prolific area, generating 15,620 new businesses over the last year. London, unsurprisingly dominates the list with only three zones outside the capital making the top 20. Within London, Silicon Roundabout saw nearly five times as many businesses launched as Canary Wharf (3,180). The Borough, Bankside and Bermondsey areas, covered by the SE1 postcode, saw a rapid expansion in new business creation, with a 13 percent increase in new businesses, from 5,190 to 5,850 in the last year. Outside of London, Hove (BN3), came 10^th marked out as a hub for outsourcing, tech and finance businesses, Leeds LS14 which came 12^th and Warrington WA1 which both offer a large number of business and technology parks.

June 6, 2014

Audit commission urges UK councils to make better use of property

by Mark Eltringham • News, Property, Public Sector

UK local authorities should make better use of their £170 billion estate, including divesting or reusing around £2.5 billion worth of surplus assets, according to a new report from the Audit Commission. The report acknowledges that the estate has already shrunk by a third over the last decade but says there is still scope for councils to be more proactive in the way they manage property, not least when it comes to decisions about the use of idle or underused buildings and land. As the local government estate continues to shrink due to spending cuts and a range of Central Government initiatives such as the One Public Sector estate scheme, it was vital councils understood the properties in their portfolio and regularly reviewed them, according to the report’s authors.

June 5, 2014

The Shard evacuated after smoke spotted in basement of EU’s tallest building

by Sara Bean • Facilities management, News

Around 900 people were evacuated from the Shard this morning, following reports that smoke was coming from the basement of the 1,004ft-high building. Seven fire engines and around 50 firefighters were sent to the building, following the alert at around 10.30. The smoke had begun to dissipate by around 11.45, and this afternoon London Fire Brigade announced it was set to allow tenants to re-enter the premises. No injuries have been reported at the tallest building in Western Europe, winner of the European Award in the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitats (CTBUH) Best Tall Building Worldwide competition; however there were complaints that office workers had to walk down hundreds of steps during the evacuation. Along with retail and hospitality tenants, the Shard has a number of office occupants, including investment bank Duff & Phelps and the venture capital group Foresight. More →

June 2, 2014

Flexible working might help firms to deal with World Cup fever, claims ACAS

by Mark Eltringham • Flexible working, Legal news, News, Technology, Workplace

While FIFA works out whether it wants to dig itself in deeper or climb out of its own hole in addressing the World Cup bribery scandal, thoughts in the business world about this Summer’s quadrennial festival of football turn, yet again, to the matter of how to deal with it all. One of the first up with suggestions this time is the UK employment conciliation service agency ACAS which thinks the answer no longer lies in turning a blind eye to what people get up to, but instead working around it. They are urging firms to allow staff to work flexibly during the World Cup so they can watch games with minimal disruption to business. ACAS last month issued new guidance on flexible working in advance of a change in the rights of workers to request flexible working at the end of June, and is now suggesting that flexible working will help to reduce absenteeism and disruption during the tournament in Brazil which begins on June 12.

May 28, 2014

Money alone isn’t enough to attract and hold on to Gen Y employees

by Jessica Pryce-Jones • Comment, Flexible working, Workplace

The retention of Gen Y employees is key for all organisations. No organisation wants to invest in their next generation of management only to find that they leave, and someone new needs to be trained. But the 20-30 year old workers of Gen Y exhibit a new-found job mobility. Which makes for a ticking time-bomb of potential cost and disruption to their employers. The iOpener Institute has gathered and studied questionnaire responses from over 30,000 professionals across the world, gaining insights into how employers can retain their Gen Y talent. The research clearly shows that while pay and financial rewards are important to Gen Y (i.e. they are not prepared to be under-paid for their work), there is no significant correlation between increased levels of pay and greater talent retention.

May 28, 2014

Goodbye 9-5: flexible working practices help retain and attract staff

by Sara Bean • Flexible working, News, Technology

Tech savvy connectors @ Oliver Preston

New ways of working are being fuelled by employees desire to take greater control of their lives. Over three-quarters (77%) of respondents in a survey by YouGov for Virgin Media Business said that remote working helps them address their work-life balance and almost four in five employees (78%) believe companies today need to offer it to attract and retain staff. As part of the research, psychologist Professor Cary Cooper reveals remote workers fall into four groups which range from ‘beginners’ to tech savvy ‘connectors.’ He stresses the need for employers to not only kit out their employees with the technology they need to work remotely, but also to educate them on flexible working best practice tips and guidelines because: “Ultimately this will help them ensure there is consistency across employees’ standard of work regardless of location, and will also ensure they remain as productive as possible.” More →

May 23, 2014

Workplace design and management of TMT sector aped by other firms

by Mark Eltringham • Facilities management, Flexible working, Property, Technology, Workplace design

The publication of a report last week by the British Council for Offices highlights the wider impact of workplace design trends and commercial property arrangements in the increasingly important Technology, Media and Telecoms (TMT) sector. Not least it suggests that they are having a transformational influence on the way firms in other sectors approach leases, workplace design and the changing nature of work. It is no coincidence that the TMT sector is the one most commonly associated with the employment of the much-talked-about Gen Y demographic, nor that the business practices most commonly associated with this overly-stereotyped group are those that are having the greatest influence in the way we design and manage offices.

May 21, 2014

Homeworking has environmental benefits, says Carbon Trust

by Sara Bean • Environment, Facilities management, Flexible working, News

There have been some doubts cast recently on the environmental benefits of flexible working. At the recent ThinkFM conference, Lord Rupert Redesdale, the CEO Energy Managers Association said that keeping buildings open for longer to accommodate flexible workers could become unfeasible for many businesses. But what if you simply increase the numbers of home workers instead? Homeworking reduces employee commuting, resulting in carbon, money and time savings. If office space is properly rationalised to reflect this, homeworking can also significantly reduce office energy consumption and rental costs. This is according to new research from the Carbon Trust, which found that if adopted and encouraged by employers across the country, homeworking could result in annual savings of over 3 million tonnes of carbon and cut costs by £3 billion.

May 21, 2014

Information overload is a big problem for ‘infobese’ UK workers

by Mark Eltringham • Flexible working, Technology, Workplace

We all know –or should – that we have a real problem with information. We are not only deluged with the stuff, we appear increasingly willing to wallow in it voluntarily, even when we know it’s bad for us. The full extent of the challenge we face managing information is laid bare in a new report from Microsoft called ‘Defying Digital Distraction’. The study is based on a survey carried out by YouGov which found that 55 per cent of 2,000 British office staff experience some form of information overload at work. A similar proportion feel they are distracted by information, just under half (43 per cent) experience stress as a result, a third (34 per cent) feel overwhelmed by it and 28 per cent believe it affects their personal wellbeing. The report is fronted by Dave Coplin, the Chief Envisioning Officer of Microsoft UK who we interviewed last year and coincides with the publication of Dave’s new book called The Rise of the Humans: how to outsmart the digital deluge.

May 14, 2014

Spending on office furniture becomes a US political football

by Mark Eltringham • Comment, Furniture, Public Sector, Workplace design

We’ve mentioned this before but when it comes to riling those who see public sector spending as inherently wasteful, nothing gets their backs up quite so much as the buying of lightbulbs and office furniture. You can come up with your own theories on why that might be (and I hope you do), but it’s been proved yet again as Fox News and other right wing commentators and media in the US have risen up in moral indignation at the news that the Internal Revenue Service has spent $96.5 million on office furniture and refurbishment during the last five years of the Obama administration. Now of course, this is just the touchstone for griping about government spending in general and Barack Obama in particular, but the US is clearly not alone in having an issue with office furniture purchases and you have to wonder exactly why this is.

May 14, 2014

Using a mobile phone while driving is now commonplace for UK managers, claims survey

by Mark Eltringham • Flexible working, Legal news, News

As if it weren’t perilous enough to be sitting on your backside for hours every day while trying to subsist on a diet of coffee and Ginsters’ pasties, new research from Regus UK has highlighted just how many British road warriors routinely work behind the wheel. The poll of 1,800 managers and business owners revealed that around three quarters of them routinely use their mobile phone while driving, both breaking the law and imperilling themselves and other road users in the process. Around two-fifths of respondents admit they have dialled into conference calls while driving and a fifth said they have held important business discussions, when either they or the person with whom they were talking was in apparent control of a ton of speeding hot metal.

May 13, 2014

Workplace design, Facebook likes and the need of companies to be your friend

by Mark Eltringham • Comment, Environment, Facilities management, Workplace design

Companies put an awful lot of time and money into getting people to like them on social media these days. While it would be easy to see the like button on Facebook as the primary conduit for this corporate neediness, but it cuts across many aspects of the ways in which companies work, including their relationships with employees and the ways in which they develop new forms of workplace design and management. This is most evident in the tech palaces which are aimed at the same digital natives that firms habitually target with their online marketing, but the need to make customers and employees friends of the business cuts across a wide range of sectors. The workplace is yet another channel of communicating chumminess, and it offers many of the same challenges as social media.