January 28, 2020
Getting on well with colleagues gives workers greater job satisfaction than having a good salary, new research has claimed. “New Decade, New Direction” by the Institute of Leadership & Management asked more than 2,100 workers to identify the factors that affect their job satisfaction and explored their career plans for the new decade. (more…)
January 22, 2020
A quarter of employees think challenging issues like workplace bullying and harassment are swept under the carpet in their organisation, a new report from the CIPD, the professional body for HR and people development, claims. (more…)
January 21, 2020
Four in ten professionals admit they’re on the brink of burnout, with more than two thirds stating that stress at work is the main contributor, research carried out from online jobs site CV-Library has claimed. Out of more than 2,000 UK professionals surveyed, 45 percent said they have trouble sleeping, 40 percent suffer from negative thoughts and 39 percent feel exhausted.
January 16, 2020
New research from Aon claims that employers have increased their strategic focus on both emotional and financial wellbeing programmes, while physical wellbeing programmes have remained largely static. Aon’s UK Benefits & Trends 2020 Survey (registration) shows that 51 percent of employers now have financial wellbeing strategies in place, up from 21 percent three years ago, while 68 percent have emotional wellbeing strategies, up from 41 percent. These were the least developed pillars of employee wellbeing when Aon asked organisations in its 2017 UK Health Survey. (more…)
January 14, 2020
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, toxic social media use, competing facts and readily believed fictions. (more…)
January 12, 2020
Working parents’ ability to switch off from their work is being undermined by the rise of modern communications and the uptake of flexible working practices, with almost half agreeing the boundaries between home and the workplace have blurred, according to the most authoritative annual survey of working families in the UK. (more…)
January 7, 2020
Toyota has revealed plans to build a prototype city of the future on a 175-acre site at the base of Mount Fuji in Japan. Announced at CES 2020, the global consumer technology show in Las Vegas, the Woven City will be a fully connected ecosystem, powered by hydrogen fuel cells. Envisioned as a “living laboratory,” the city will be home to full-time residents and researchers who will be able to test and develop technologies such as autonomy, robotics, personal mobility, smart homes and artificial intelligence in a real-world environment. (more…)
January 3, 2020
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 challenges including the risk of burnout for an increasingly diverse workforce. (more…)
December 30, 2019
New projections from Rest Less, a jobs, volunteering and advice site for the over 50s, claims that workers aged 65 and over are likely to be responsible for at least 50 per cent of all UK employment growth in the next 10 years. The analysis, based on population projections from the Office of National Statistics, makes an assumption that the current employment rate of each age group will remain static, and suggests that with population changes alone, the over 65s are likely to be responsible for 52 per cent of all the UK’s employment growth in the next 10 years, 57 per cent in the next 20 years and as much as 62 per cent by 2060. (more…)
December 17, 2019
More than one in ten (12 percent) so-called gig workers in the UK are working multiple roles and consider temporary work as their main role, taking advantage of improved work-life balance, greater variety of work and the ability to see more of their families, according to a new report. The research, carried out by Reed Specialist Recruitment, for its Temporary isn’t Temporary campaign, surveyed 5,000 workers and looked at their experience of, and attitude to, temporary and multiple career roles.
December 11, 2019
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 things that were previously deemed too complex or even too “human”. We’ll see these changes and tech trends at work – traditional professions like accountancy, lawyers and others will over time, see significant portions of what they do be taken over by virtual robots. Vocations such as lorry drivers, taxi drivers and even chefs may disappear as machines are introduced to perform the same function but with more consistent results and less risk. (more…)
January 21, 2020
The vaguery of workplace serendipity
by Neil Usher • Comment, Facilities management, Technology, Workplace design