June 10, 2020

Firms should adopt a hybrid model as they return to work

by Neil Franklin • Flexible working, News

As mandatory working from home lifts, managers should be aware that employee expectations around how they work have evolved significantly. In a report (registration) published by Soldo in collaboration with several UK universities, management experts advise that companies need to radically redesign their business processes. Employees who worked productively at home throughout the lockdown will strongly resist managers enforcing limitations on where and when they do their work. More →

June 9, 2020

A thank you for the bitter knowledge offered by the lockdown

by Adam Burtt-Jones • Comment, Flexible working, Workplace design

With all challenges come opportunities. Covid-19 will most likely be the single largest challenge and disrupter of a generation. It has the potential to create the greatest significant shift in working behaviours and standards of the past hundred years. Workspace consultants, enlightened clients, designers, researchers and commentators have been hammering the agile / home/ remote working drum for the past twenty years or more, waiting patiently for this kind of opportunity. More →

June 9, 2020

Piecing together a new world of work after lockdown

by Grant Gibson • Features, Working culture

After months of lockdown nobody can be certain how the world will look when we eventually re-emerge from the Covid 19 crisis. Yet something seems certain – things will never be the same again. Just as the Second World War spawned the NHS, it’s clear that society is going to be re-shaped quite possibly around a bigger, more proactive government, forced to step in to help any number of industries. Unlike the banking crisis of 2008, the powers that be won’t simply be able to re-assembled the shattered economic jigsaw as it once was. More →

June 5, 2020

Latest issue of IN Magazine heralds new era for working life

by Mark Eltringham • Features, IN Magazine

The partial return to the physical world of work means that the print edition of the June 2020 issue of IN Magazine is now being mailed out. It has been available for a couple of weeks as a digital edition and it’s full of great stuff on the work topics that matter more than ever. We would say that but you can judge for yourself. More →

June 4, 2020

Right, said Fred. Here I am again

by Mark Eltringham • Comment, Technology, Wellbeing

If there has been an underlying driver of workplace thinking over the past several decades, it has been a rejection of the principles of scientific management. These begat the idea of the office as a factory, subject to the same rigid times and places of work and the same culture of process, efficiency and productivity. This made a pantomime villain of its key figure Frederick Taylor. The worst adjective you could use to describe a working culture was Taylorist. More →

June 3, 2020

Data is changing the role of the workplace and HR

by Shaun Guyver • Comment, Property, Workplace

Business leaders have been heavily dependent on HR, real estate, and technology functions working together to help their organisation adapts to this new world of work during the pandemic. Ensuring personal safety, promoting wellbeing, encouraging collaboration, and maintaining efficient service delivery will never be more important than in the coming months. The challenge facing CRE leaders is how to advise on the appropriate range of workspaces and hygiene standards to allow organisations and their people to thrive, and how to cut through the complexity of accessing and interpreting data to achieve this. More →

June 2, 2020

Working life set to become more precarious and unequal

by Neil Franklin • News, Working culture, Working lives

The future of work is likely to be even more precarious and unequal, according to a new research review from academics at Durham University Business School, Kings College Business School and University Paris-Dauphine. Dr. Jeremy Aroles, Assistant Professor in Organisation Studies at Durham University Business School, alongside colleagues, Dr. Nathalie Mitev (King’s College) and Professor François?Xavier de Vaujany (University Paris-Dauphine), reviewed a wide range of research related to working life new work practices and summarised this into a number of predictions for the future of work. This research review paper was published in the journal ‘New Technology, Work and Employment’, which is open access throughout June. More →

June 1, 2020

Zoom fatigue and the new era of online meetings

by Mark Eltringham • Comment, Technology

When it comes to that annual announcement the publishers of dictionaries like to make about their Word of the Year, 2020 will have only one candidate. But if there were a shortlist, you can bet that Zoom would be on it. The uptake of Zoom and other apps to help people connect during the lockdown has been remarkable. Numbers emerge each week of the scale of growth, but they’re instantly out of date and probably meaningless anyway. We could make up something like there having been a 2,300% increase since March 23rd, and it might as well be true. More →

June 1, 2020

The new era of work will embrace an ecosystem of spaces

by Neil Franklin • Flexible working, News, Property, Workplace design

The results of a new survey on people’s experience of working from home during lockdown will accelerate the shift from primarily office-based work to a “total workplace ecosystem”, based on offices, homes and other locations including digital space. That is the conclusion of a new report from Cushman & Wakefield which analysed responses from more than 40,000 individuals from around thirty companies across nearly twenty sectors. More →

May 29, 2020

Organisations still adjusting to reality of `gig economy`

by Neil Franklin • News

A new report from Aon claims that the so-called gig economy will continue to flourish but many employers are still adjusting to its realities. Using research from HR and gig workers across Europe, the report, Gig Economy: Financial Security or Greater Control, claims that 26 percent of European HR directors believe their workforces will have 51-75 percent of gig workers in five years’ time, while 18 percent of UK HRDs believe 75 percent or more of their workforce will be made up of contractors in 5 years’ time. Nearly all HRDs believe providing health and benefits packages would improve gig worker recruitment (94 percent), engagement (93 percent), productivity (88 percent) and retention (95 percent). More →

May 28, 2020

Working from home opens up new data security threat

by Neil Franklin • Flexible working, News, Technology

A new report from Tessian claims that nearly half of employees (48 percent) are less likely to follow safe data practices when working from home. The State of Data Loss Prevention 2020 report suggests that the global shift to remote working poses new security challenges for businesses and why traditional security solutions are failing to curb the problem of the insider threat and accidental data loss. More →

May 27, 2020

Majority of HR professionals aware of value they add to their organisation

by Jayne Smith • News, Workplace

Four in five (80 percent) of those who work in the domain of human resources in the UK and Ireland say that a role in HR and other parts of the ‘people profession’ offers them a meaningful career and almost three quarters (73 percent) believe they have the opportunity to add value to their organisation, the latest People Profession Survey from the CIPD and Workday claims. More →