Search Results for: people management

December 17, 2014

Only a third of staff trust their senior management, finds CIPD

There is little evidence of improvement in the quality of management in the UK over the last decade – and it is one of the reasons behind the UK’s long-standing productivity weakness compared to the likes of the US and Germany. According to the CIPD report ‘Are UK organisations getting better at managing their people?’ while 65 percent of employees are generally satisfied with their line manager and largely trust them and value their honesty, only 33 percent say they trust their senior management. It found that management processes are not always applied consistently or fairly and this is one reason why there is a lack of trust in senior leadership. These are deep-rooted problems and the solutions are largely down to organisations, says the CIPD, which is urging the Government to consider ways in which it can raise awareness of the challenges and potential approaches to tackling them, not least in its capacity as an employer.

December 8, 2014

ILM issues management guide to office Christmas party etiquette

by Sara Bean • Legal news, News, Workplace

We’re well into the office Christmas party season and with it comes the usual management warnings; however, this one comes from the Institute of Leadership & Management (ILM) so it’s worth taking notice. A survey by ILM reveals some pretty predictable misdemeanours; including almost 9 out of 10 workers (87%) seeing colleagues drink too much and 48 per cent having gone to work with a hangover after their office party, but over a quarter (28%) also admit to having heard staff revealing their colleagues’ secrets. There are consequences of such indiscretion, with more than half the managers surveyed (51%) saying they would reprimand workers for being rude to each other, while 28 per cent would tell workers off for revealing their colleagues’ secrets. And keen to dodge the line of fire themselves; 41 per cent of managers would reprimand staff for shouting at the boss. More →

December 3, 2014

HR managers appreciate importance of IT, but don’t work with IT people

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

Research sponsored by Sungard Availability Services claims that while almost two thirds (63 percent) of the UK’s senior HR managers believe a closer alignment with their organisation’s Chief Information Officer will be vital in realising their department’s ideas, only 12 per cent currently work very closely with the IT crowd. The findings of the report show that 97 percent of HR professionals believe the CIO is very capable in supporting business growth through technology including enabling mobile and flexible working (58 percent), creating new ways to communicate with employees (64 percent) and driving efficiencies (66 percent) Nevertheless, the HR department profess to be big supporters of technology within the enterprise – with over two thirds (68 percent) stating that if the CIO was not sitting on the board within their organisation, then they should be.

November 21, 2014

Worktech weaves together the strands of people, place and technology

by Mark Eltringham • Cities, Events, Flexible working, Technology, Workplace

Day two of Worktech London and affirmation that far from dying, as so many headline writers would have us believe, the office is merely entering a new phase. The underlying theme of Worktech continues to be how we find new ways of weaving together the strands of presence and connectedness formed by cities, buildings and technology. Worktech is a constant reminder that while our world may be shaped by algorithms, we still need each other and need to be with other people at least some of the time. The event is admirably hosted by long time collaborator and MC Jeremy Myerson whose knowledge and donnish charm holds things together while the real Don, founder Philip Ross, beams from the sidelines. It is now de rigeur for such events to have a poet in residence and this year’s was Matt Harvey who summed things up at the end of the day with reference to Worktech’s longstanding idea of jellybean working but who popped up in between sessions with lyrical summations including one that showed some real spunk (you had to be there).

October 14, 2014

Two more major US firms scale back flexible working because people work better together

by Mark Eltringham • Facilities management, Flexible working, News

Perhaps the most talked about workplace issue of 2013 was the decision by Marissa Mayer, CEO of Yahoo to oblige the company’s homeworkers to return to the embrace of the corporate bosom. It was controversial but a lot of businesses clearly prefer people to work together in one place for significant periods of time. Yahoo’s methods only differed from those of companies like Google in using a stick to drive them there rather than the carrot of a gilded and playful tech palace to entice them. The controversy in the Yahoo case seemed to derive from a challenge to the received wisdom about flexible working and the same voice have risen in indignation over the past couple of weeks as two more American companies have made it known it’s best for everybody if they spend more time working together under one roof. Reddit and Bank of America have joined Yahoo and HP in deciding people collaborate better when they are in physical proximity.

October 10, 2014

Is workplace management now a core capability for knowledge businesses?

by Andrew Mawson • Events, Facilities management, News, Workplace design

That’s the key question for delegates coming to this year’s Workplace Week Convention at PWC’s More London office on the 6th November. Entitled ‘The Work/place revolution….taking human performance to new levels’ the convention aims to explore what organisations need to do to get ‘personal best’ performance from every worker on the payroll.For years, the management of Facilities has been viewed by many leaders as ‘non core’, but recent research by AWA (Advanced Workplace Associates),the organisers of Workplace Week, suggests that this may no longer be true for knowledge based businesses. ‘It’s becoming clear that the way the workplace is designed and managed can have a really dramatic impact on the performance of knowledge workers in ways that have not previously considered. Knowledge workers think for a living it’s critical that everything is created to give them the best chance of delivering a great performance.

June 24, 2014

The ties that bind facilities management with workplace design

by Mark Eltringham • Comment, Facilities management, Workplace design

There is an ongoing feeling within the facilities management discipline that when it comes to the design of workplaces, the majority of facilities managers are not consulted early enough or well enough or consistently enough to ensure that the end result of the design process is a workplace that is as functional and as effective as it could be. The reason this feeling persists is that in many cases it is true. Or at least is true to a greater or lesser extent depending on how you view these things. And if that sounds woolly, then you have to remember we are talking about facilities management here, finding a definition for which has been like nailing jelly to a wall for many years. In many cases the demarcation between workplace design and workplace management is based on the mistaken idea that the two have little correlation when in fact the relationship between them should be more akin to that between sex and parenthood. One is an act of creation and the other of care, with the latter a direct consequence of the former.

May 29, 2014

What is expense management costing you and your business?

by Richard Gyles • Comment, Workplace

Time is money. That’s why organisations are placing an ever-growing emphasis on improving productivity and streamlining administrative processes to encourage employees to focus on value-added activities. So I’m staggered by how many otherwise forward-thinking companies are still reliant on old-fashioned, paper-based expense management processes. Expenses are an obvious time-sink for claimants themselves and is often portrayed as a dull task; but badly managed expense processing costs employees and businesses money. A survey conducted by Access aCloud has discovered that employees are losing £45 a year owing to interest charges due to the waiting period of reimbursement – with a collective £2.1 billion lost by 46 million workers each year. In the UK, the average waiting time for expenses to be paid is 3.3 weeks. However, the survey revealed that over 20 per cent of people spend 6.3 weeks chasing their employer for their claims to be paid. 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 16, 2014

Four million people in UK now work from home, claims TUC

by Mark Eltringham • Flexible working, News, Technology

Figures released today by the TUC to mark National Work from Home Day show that more than 4 million people now regularly work from home; a rise of more than 62,000 over the course of the last year. The number of people who say they usually work from home increased by 62,000 over the course of last year to reach more than four million for the first time. The findings are from a new TUC analysis published to mark national work from home day, organised by Work Wise UK. The TUC analysis of figures from the Office for National Statistics shows that the number of regular home-workers has risen by over a half a million since 2007 – an increase of more than 10 per cent. Millions of workers across the UK occasionally work from home too, says the TUC. More →

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 →