Search Results for: productivity

July 6, 2015

Humans will remain at the heart of the emerging digital workplace

by Maciej Markowski • Comment, Flexible working, Technology, Workplace design

The speed of technological development over the last 30 years has been pretty mind blowing. Of course, some technologies came and went, for instance you would struggle finding fax machines in your office nowadays or people using Pagers to contact one another. It’s no wonder that in the early nineties futurologists predicted the death of the office. Technology was shaping the way we worked and was leading us away from office buildings towards a digital workplace. Yet videoconferencing hasn’t destroyed the need for business travel. Team meetings haven’t been abandoned because of messaging services like Yammer, Slack, Lync and Webex. We still do a lot of business face to face over coffee in a meeting room. Although technological advances have greatly improved the way we connect and do business, companies still appear to value human interaction.

July 3, 2015

One in five Americans would change jobs for better work-life balance

by Sara Bean • Flexible working, News, Wellbeing, Workplace

More than half of US and Canadian employees report feeling overworked and burnt out (53 percent), yet the overwhelming majority (86 percent) say they are still happy at work. According to the inaugural Staples Advantage Workplace Index employees are working longer days, with about a quarter of them regularly working after the standard workday is done. A key motivator is to advance in the organization, with nearly two-thirds of respondents seeing themselves as managers in the next five years. Though employees are largely conditioned to working longer hours, about one in five do expect to change jobs in the next twelve months. Steps employers can take to improve happiness levels include; adding more office perks, improving office technology and providing a better office design. Alongside this, with employees working longer days and on weekends, the biggest request is for employers to provide more flexibility. More →

July 1, 2015

Three ways in which the business case for green building design is moving on

by Dan Callegari • Architecture, Comment, Environment, Facilities management, Workplace design

The case for sustainable building design used to be based on two straightforward principles. The first was that buildings had to offer up some sustainable features to comply with the ethical standards of their occupiers. The second was that there was some financial benefit. Often these principles went hand in hand, especially when it came to issues such as energy efficiency. They remain the foundations of the idea of green building design and are applicable across a range of building accreditations such as BREEAM as well as standards relating to specific products and policies. Over the past couple of years, however, we have become increasingly aware of other drivers that might make us all re-evaluate how we approach sustainability. These drivers are based on a more sophisticated understanding of green building design and the benefits for all of those involved.

July 1, 2015

Takeup of flexible working remains sluggish in UK SMEs claims Microsoft study

by Mark Eltringham • Flexible working, News, Technology

It’s now one year since the UK Government extended the right to request flexible working to nearly all UK permanent employees. Two new surveys have been published to coincide with the anniversary and gauge the effects of the legislation. Both surveys, from EY and Microsoft UK, paint somewhat mixed pictures, with uptake considerably slower than might have been expected. The study by Microsoft, one of the UK’s great champions of flexible working, found that just 22 percent of workers in SMEs have requested flexible working as a direct result of the new legislation. The report also found that over half (55 percent) of British office workers are still required to work from the office during set working hours. A similar proportion (44 percent) claim it is not possible for them to work remotely under any circumstances.

June 30, 2015

Settings, silence, serendipity, wellbeing and other lessons from Neocon

by Paul Goodchild • Comment, Events, Furniture, Workplace design

The trick with visits to exhibitions like Neocon, the huge office design event which has just wrapped up in Chicago, is to stay focussed on the wood as much as the trees. So as well as identifying new products, you can also work out the themes pursued by the exhibitors and organisers which are invariably based on the ideas they are currently discussing with their clients. The show becomes a microcosm of what is happening in the outside world. At this year’s Neocon, some of the most readily identifiable themes included the dissipation of the workplace, the creation of work settings, privacy, ergonomics, wellbeing and serendipity. With the possible exception of the age old problem of ergonomics, these all relate to our changing relationship with work and workplaces, not least how we can work from anywhere and what this means both functionally and aesthetically.

June 30, 2015

Number of mobile workers in US will exceed 105 million by 2020

by Sara Bean • Flexible working, News, Technology

Mobile workers will account for nearly three quarters (72.3 percent) of the US workforce by 2020, thanks to the increasing affordability of smartphones and tablets and growing acceptance of corporate Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) schemes. According to a new forecast from International Data Corporation (IDC), the US mobile worker population will grow at a steady rate over the next five years, increasing from 96.2 million in 2015 to 105.4 million in 2020. Innovations in technology such as biometric readers, wearables, voice control, near-field communications (NFC), and augmented reality are already increasing productivity and enabling workers to work in completely new ways. In a recent IDC survey, 69.1 percent of those responsible for managing mobility within their organisation had seen a reduction in costs as a result of implementing BYOD programmes.

June 26, 2015

Value older workers or sleep-walk towards a skills shortage, employers warned

by Sara Bean • Flexible working, News, Workplace

A demographic time bomb means employers must act to avoid a cliff-edge loss of skills and talents by 2035, a new study by the CIPD has revealed. There are currently 9.4 million workers in the UK today who are over the age of 50 and while the employment rate of older workers has increased significantly in recent years, there is still a 64 percent drop in the employment rate between the ages of 53 and 67. New research from the CIPD and the International Longevity Centre-UK (ILC-UK), the independent think tank on longevity, ageing, and population change, warns the UK could face serious skills shortages over the next 20 years. Unless organisations start improving how they recruit, develop and retain older workers it is estimated that the UK economy will struggle to fill one million jobs by 2035, even taking into account the mitigating effect of migrant workers.

June 25, 2015

The healthy workplace is now a matter of public policy in the UK

by Mark Eltringham • Legal news, News, Wellbeing, Workplace design

Promoting a culture that improves the health and wellbeing of employees is good management practice and leads to a healthy and productive workplace, according to the Governmental body charged with shaping policy and offering advice on health related matters in the UK. The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE), part of the Department of Health, has published a new set of guidelines on the issue and called on employers to do more to address the challenge of creating a productive and healthy workplace. According to NICE, workplace health is a significant public health issue with more than a million working people in the UK experiencing a work-related illness each year, leading to around 27 million lost working days and costing the economy an estimated £13.4 billion.

June 25, 2015

Employers lagging behind the workplace revolution say CIPD and BIFM

by Sara Bean • Facilities management, News, Workplace, Workplace design

There is strong and mounting evidence on how organisational culture and the workplace environment influence the quality of our work and working lives. This is according to a major new joint report by the CIPD and BIFM, In Search of Better Workplaces, which forms part of a wider initiative, The Workplace Conversation, an ongoing collaboration between the FM and HR bodies, which explores the evolution of the working environment and what the future of the workplace looks like. The report says that to make the purpose of workplaces clear a completely different approach is required, individual to an organisation, and which reflects what it is trying to achieve and how it wants to achieve it. It adds that good workplace design should be available for everyone and not the sole preserve of cash-rich private sector organisations. There is a range of starting points and organisations should take steps that are the right size for them.

June 25, 2015

Long distance commuting, agile working and dinosaur extinction in the UAE

by Douglas Langmead • Cities, Comment, Flexible working, Property

In Dubai, there are no suburban dinosaurs; those large-scale, single purpose office buildings that ignore the agile realities of modern working life. In the western world, these giants evolved on business parks, driven by the perceived benefits of having office workers agglomerated in order to achieve efficiency of communication and dissemination. The business practices and technologies that underpinned these buildings have evolved and improved and many are in the process of being re-purposed. Things happen on a grander scale in the Middle East where the mantra is “if the land-use doesn’t fit the land, make more land.” Here, the patterns of work and place have evolved differently from the west, and at a much faster pace with creeping tides of development spreading rapidly out from the small centres of traditional trade and commerce to vast tracts of new development.

June 18, 2015

Facilities managers must focus more on people and less on buildings

by Mark Eltringham • Facilities management, News, Workplace design

A report from facilities management company Mitie claims that the design and management of too many workplaces are hampering the productivity of employees. Based on a survey of nearly 2,500 service sector staff carried out by Quora Consulting, the report comes to the perhaps unsurprising conclusion that facilities managers should prioritise people over buildings. The study found that younger workers are especially critical of their surroundings and working cultures. Two thirds of 20-29 year olds claim that their offices are not designed to optimise productivity. Finance and legal workers also feel let down by their workplaces with almost half claiming their workplaces do not optimise their productivity. These sectors were also emotionally disengaged with fewer than 35 percent identifying themselves as ‘emotionally attached’ to their workplaces.

June 16, 2015

Back pain and mental ill health still the main reasons for workplace absence

by Sara Bean • Furniture, News, Wellbeing, Workplace

Back pain and musculoskeletal disorders (MSDs) remain the prime reason for long-term workplace absence (38%); with stress and mental-health disorders the main cause of absence for one in four companies. However, the results of the UK’s largest business survey on sickness absence published by EEF, the manufacturers’ organisation and Jelf Employee Benefits reveals that stress and mental illness is regarded as the most difficult form of absence to make workplace adjustments for, with almost a third of companies saying this is the case. Furthermore, a third of employers said that they do not have approaches for managing mental-health-related long-term absence. Just one in ten companies provides training for line managers in mental-health issues and only 2 percent of companies have an open mental-health disclosure policy, suggesting business matches society in finding it a difficult issue to address.