Search Results for: culture

May 20, 2014

Design skills cited as one reason why London is the world’s best city

by Mark Eltringham • Environment, Events, News, Workplace design

For the first time, London is the world’s best city for business, culture and finance, according to the latest edition of PWC’s annual Cities of Opportunity report. And the city’s reputation as a global leader in design is cited as one of the main reasons. The index of thirty of the world’s most important cities claims that London’s sheer economic clout, technological infrastructure and its design and development skills are just a few of the factors that led to the city usurping New York for the first time. When the survey was last carried out, it was ranked third. London is ranked one of the top three best places for intellectual capital and innovation alongside Paris and San Francisco and has leapt from eighth place last year to joint first place (with Seoul) in terms of its technological readiness.

May 20, 2014

Trust in ethical behaviour is linked to the size of the business, claims report

by Mark Eltringham • Architecture, News

The larger the firm the less likely it is to trust its employees to behave ethically according to a new report from the Association of Accounting Technicians. The research also found that UK’s most ethical businesses are small architectural practices. According to the research, conducted by Opinion Matters on behalf of AAT, only 37 per cent of SMEs trust their staff to do the right thing compared to 66 per cent of microbusinesses. The report also found that firms in the architectural sector have more faith in the ethical decision making of their employees and are more concerned about the ethical behaviour of suppliers than in any other industry. Interestingly, the report highlights the fact that, as the number of employees increases, businesses are more likely to dedicate a member of staff dedicated to fostering ethical behaviour and have a formal code of conduct.

May 16, 2014

We need to add another dimension to meet the stress management challenge

by Mark Eltringham • Comment, Workplace, Workplace design

As always, any discussion of stress starts with the headline figures. Work-related stress is evidently the UK’s biggest cause of lost working days. According to the HSE’s most recent data, around 10.4 million days were lost to it in 2012, the most significant cause of absenteeism and a massive 40 per cent of all work-related illnesses. The financial cost to the UK has been estimated at £60 billion, largely due to the psychological and physical harm stress does us. The reasons for this are clear in the minds of many: the demands made on us by employers and ourselves are intolerable. Our private time is eroded, we spend too much time at work in the first place, we’re under excessive pressure to perform when we are there and as a result we’re all knackered, unfulfilled, stressed, depressed and anxious. It’s no wonder we are so keen on stress management

May 14, 2014

HR and Facilities Management bodies to collaborate on future of workplace

by Sara Bean • Facilities management, News, Workplace

One of the main themes at the ThinkFM conference yesterday was the acknowledgement that facilities management and HR need to break down the silos that often exist between the two disciplines. This was the message of Chris Kane, CEO of BBC Commercial Properties, who explained that the British Institute of Facilities Management will be collaborating with the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development on a number of projects to investigate how both communities of professionals are evolving and adapting to the changing workplace. It marked the end of a conference which began the day with a talk by Peter Cheese, the CEO of the CIPD, who remarked that both professions were in the business of getting the most of people in the working environment and why it is vital that those tasked with managing these key resources within organisations need to work together to maximise the value of its workforce. More →

May 8, 2014

Employers fail to monitor wellbeing and mental health alongside staff engagement

by Sara Bean • Flexible working, News, Workplace

Monitoring of employee engagement and wellbeing by FTSE 100 companies improved over the past year, but organisations are failing to measure or address the psychological health of employees. The latest Business in the Community (BITC) Workwell FTSE 100 benchmark showed an increase in the average company scores from 21 per cent to 25 per cent while reporting across the five identified areas of BITC’s Workwell Model; Better Work, Better Relationships, Better Specialist Support, Better Physical and Psychological Health and Working Well increased from 53 to 63. 86 per cent of companies now report on four or five of these themes. But despite this, there was almost no evidence that psychological health is being measured or addressed, and the provision of mental health support continues to be a low scoring area (11%). More →

May 1, 2014

Hierarchical organisations ‘stifle’ employee productivity, claims CIPD

by Sara Bean • Knowledge, News, Workplace

Rigid organisational hierarchies hamper the development of management, employee productivity and leadership skills within the workplace, warns the CIPD. Their report, ‘Leadership – easier said than done,’ finds a growing trend in developing the capability of individual leaders and managers, an approach known as ‘distributed leadership’. However, faced with outdated organisational structures and cultures – these managers are unable to apply what they’ve learnt in the training room. The report recommends that leadership development should give greater consideration to the organisation-wide factors that can help or hinder the practical application of great leadership skills by employees at all levels. It urges HR managers to take the next step from training individual leaders, to improving the leadership capacity of the organisation as a whole; focusing on understanding what kind of leadership it requires and what changes are needed. More →

April 28, 2014

New collaborative office design for Petronas HQ in Italy

by Mark Eltringham • Architecture, Company news, Workplace design

Building work has begun on the new 17,000 sq. m. European Research & Development Headquarters for Petronas Lubricants, the global lubricants manufacturing and marketing arm of Petronas, the Malaysian oil and gas company. The building has been designed by architecture, urbanism and design practice Broadway Malyan. The office – located in Santena, just outside Turin, Italy – is part of a major investment into Petronas’ overall research capability and will be home to a community of several hundred scientists, researchers and new product developers. It is expected to play an important role in supporting Petronas’ development and refinement of fuels and lubricants with a particular emphasis on an office design that encourages collaborative work.

April 9, 2014

The Wall Street Journal (and others) are wrong about human resources

by Mark Eltringham • Comment, Workplace

Everybody ready? Great. Then it’s time for another round of HR bashing and a tipping point for more existential navel-gazing for everyone’s favourite corporate pantomime villain – the human resources department. Or is it? You can choose your own particular moment at which the crowd boos and hisses at the bad guys in HR, but hot on the heels of the Lucy Adams debacle at the Beeb and a report that finds human resources to be the profession with the most “can’t do” attitude comes an article from, of all places, the Wall Street Journal that looks at what it means to do away with your HR function altogether. The restrictions of the word count being what they are, coupled with the way sweeping generalisations provide the quickest way to guarantee a bump in readership, the WSJ takes the broadest of brushes to add another coat to the painting of HR as an ancillary function that, far from oiling the wheels of commerce, is often a distraction at best and, at worst, an active obstruction.

April 9, 2014

WorldBlu announces latest additions to its list of democratic workplaces

by Mark Eltringham • Events, Workplace

WorldBlu, a US based business that promotes democratic workplace design has announced that it has added 41 organisations around the world to its certified list of Most Democratic Workplaces. According to WorldBlu, the organisations range in size from five to 65,000 employees and represent over $13 billion in combined annual revenue and come from the US, Canada, Mexico, UK, Netherlands, Denmark, Malaysia, Haiti, New Zealand, Belgium and Romania from a range of sectors including technology, manufacturing, healthcare, retail, agriculture and services. Organisations become eligible after employees complete the proprietary WorldBlu Design Assessment, a survey evaluating their practice according to the firm’s own ten ‘Principles of Organizational Democracy’, with an overall combined score of 3.5/5 or higher. The awards were announced yesterday, Democracy in the Workplace Day (who knew?).

April 9, 2014

Local Government is lagging behind in its use of digital technology

by Mark Eltringham • News, Public Sector, Technology

A new report claims that the UK’s local authorities are not only lagging behind the rest of the world in their use of digital technology but in some areas their development has stalled completely, despite significant investment. The report, Smart People, Smart Places from the New Local Government Network claims that ‘whilst there is much good practice emerging, councils sometimes struggle to fully unlock the benefits of technologies that they do invest in [because] they are often uncomfortable, and risk averse.’ While it acknowledges that the problem does not apply to every council, with some showing exemplary thinking in certain areas, it also paints a general picture of organisations unable and unwilling to make the most of the technology in which they invest, lacking vision and leadership and intimidated by change.

April 4, 2014

RICS issues case studies to celebrate strategic role of facilities management

by Sara Bean • Facilities management, Knowledge, News, Property

RICS has published six case studies examining the impact strategic facilities management (FM) can have on business performance. The case studies were devised following the publication of a 2012 research report, Raising the Bar: Enhancing the Strategic Role of FM, which found that over 75 per cent of survey respondents believe that facilities management is a strategic role. This was followed earlier this year by Raising the Bar: City Roundtables Report which made specific recommendations for action, including better promotion of the strategic role played by facilities management within organisations. The case studies were launched at the BBC’s Salford Quays building, featured in one of the studies, which describes the role the BBC’s FM team took in relocating critical services from London to Salford Quays and how the FM strategy was responsible for fostering creativity in the organisation. More →