Search Results for: flexible

July 17, 2015

Do we really think the future of work involves our replacement by robots?

by Simon Heath • Comment, Flexible working, Technology, Workplace

A report published recently by my former colleagues at CBRE called “Fast Forward 2030: The Future of Work and the Workplace” claims that by 2025 so many people will be more interested in being happy and having creative roles that up to 50 percent of current occupations will be defunct. 35 years elapsed between the release of Orwell’s 1984 and the eponymous year and very little of Orwell’s dystopian vision came to pass. 2030 is a scant 16 years away so, even if one takes the exponential pace of change into account, it’s perhaps a bit of a stretch to think robots will have taken their seat at the table in quite the way we appear to think they will. Also unchanged one assumes are the attitudes of those who have a vested interest in the status quo or in dictating where the benefits of change will fall.

July 16, 2015

Women are less assertive in asking for a pay rise than men

by Sara Bean • Flexible working, Legal news, News, Workplace

There has been much focus on gender pay this week with the announcement that larger companies will be forced to disclose pay rates. Now a new poll suggests another reason why women’s pay lags over their career, a lack of assertiveness. A report commissioned by Glassdoor found that only a quarter of UK women (27 percent) feel confident they will receive a pay rise within the next 12 months, compared to 40 percent of men. Women are also less likely to leave a job because of low salary than men – 30 percent of women said that low salary had been the major factor behind them moving on from jobs in the past, compared to 39 percent of men. The Glassdoor UK Employment Confidence Survey, conducted online by Harris Interactive, monitors four key indicators of employee confidence: job security, salary expectations, job market optimism/re-hire probability and business outlook optimism.

July 15, 2015

The standard gender pay gap narrative is a myth, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t problems

by Mark Eltringham • Comment, Flexible working, Knowledge, Workplace

It is one of the great ironies of modern life that in a world drowning in data, a great deal of public discourse is driven by narratives that have little or no factual basis. If anything, the substitution of baseless and questionable stories. Sometimes these narratives are based on outdated realities. Sometimes on assumptions. Sometimes they are deliberately created and upheld by those with vested interests. Sometimes people lie, including to themselves. However they are formed, they can become pretty hard to dislodge, especially when they become so enshrined that the default response to inconvenient truths is a wall of cognitive dissonance and denial. I’m obviously building up to something here and it won’t necessarily be an easy thing to say or hear. And it’s this. The gender pay gap doesn’t exist. Or at least, it doesn’t exist in the way we normally assume so distracts from related issues that we may be able to address.

July 14, 2015

Prime Minister vows to force employers to reveal gender pay gap

by Sara Bean • Legal news, News, Workplace

A consultation begins today on plans by the government to force larger companies with more than 250 employees to reveal the difference between the average pay of their male and female employees. Writing in today’s Times Prime Minister David Cameron says he is making a personal commitment to ensure that when his daughters aged four and eleven start work they will experience complete gender equality. Although the gender pay gap has narrowed to almost zero amongst the under 40s, ONS figures show that by the age of 40, men out-earn women by an average of £1.64 per hour, while according to the recent PwC annual Women in Work Index, the UK still lags well behind many other countries in overall female economic empowerment. The new consultation will be wide ranging and will look at who will be required to report, as well as the content, frequency and manner of reporting.

July 14, 2015

Homeworkers left to fund their own technology by stingy bosses

by Sara Bean • Comment, Facilities management, Flexible working, News

Last week we learnt that for some employers, homeworking is only to be encouraged when it’s out of hours. Now new research from Regus suggests that only around a third of people encouraged by their employers to work from home (35 percent) receive any contributions from their firm to fund the fit-out. The survey of over 4,000 senior business people found that the majority (82 percent) of employers refuse to cover all the costs incurred for creating and maintaining a work space for homeworkers. This proves costly for staff, as a quarter (25 percent) of respondents said that it would take a whole monthly salary for them to fit-out their home, while the average cost of running a home office in the UK is almost £2,000 a year. Nearly half (43 percent) of workers think that most companies encouraging their employees to work from home are simply trying to transfer the workspace cost onto the employee.

July 9, 2015

Many employers discourage home working, unless it is out of hours

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

A combination of tube and rail strikes causing travel disruption in London today, means many businesses will accede to requests to work from home. Yet a large number of UK employers are still reluctant to encourage home working. According to a recent report by Redcentric, despite the fact that that just under a third of UK office workers reported an increase in productivity when working outside of the workplace, 48 percent of respondents claimed that their employers didn’t allow them to work remotely, with 23 percent saying that their business simply didn’t like them doing it, for reasons such as data privacy and loss of productivity. Yet research by PMI Health Group shows nearly a third of staff feel pressured to routinely check and send emails from home, which suggests that employers tacitly encourage home-working, as long as it is on their terms.

July 8, 2015

Productivity starts with people, advises CIPD ahead of today’s Budget

by Sara Bean • Flexible working, News, Workplace

Investing in people’s development and offering flexible working practices can help organisations boost productivity. This is according to research by the CIPD published ahead of today’s budget, which the Chancellor has said will put the emphasis on improving UK productivity. The report: Productivity: Getting the Best out of People, explores the factors that help to explain why some businesses have higher productivity than others and finds that there are clear links between productivity and how people are managed at work. The report finds that performance tends to be higher in businesses where there is a focus on higher quality products or services rather than only on low cost and where workplace culture is clearly aligned with the future direction of the business. Investment in workforce training and an intelligent approach to the implementation of ‘smart’ or agile working practices also has a positive impact.

July 2, 2015

Over half of workers feel required to work on holiday, and it’s becoming the norm

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

Mobile technology is acknowledged as a boon to flexible working, but can very easily spill into an unhealthy work/life balance. This is most in evidence around summer holiday time, as illustrated by the latest poll on the subject by the Institute of Leadership & Management (ILM). It surveyed more than 1,000 UK workers and managers to find that more than half of workers (61%) feel obligated to work while on leave. The ILM suggests this is the negative side effect of modern technology, as people are contactable anytime and anywhere. 64 percent read and send emails during their time off, 28 percent take business phone calls and 8 percent go into the office. Meanwhile, only 28 percent of those surveyed reported that they had had arguments with friends and family about their working on holiday, down from 37 percent two years ago, which seems to indicate that it is fast becoming the norm to be constantly switched on.

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 29, 2015

Beyond agile working: the six factors of knowledge worker productivity

by Andrew Mawson • Comment, Facilities management, Flexible working, Workplace, Workplace design

Whilst the world has focussed heavily on the asset productivity of offices over the last 30 years, reducing the cost of offices per head, often using agile working as a tool for achieving this, it’s becoming clear that the mobility afforded by the latest technology products can be used to aid Knowledge Worker productivity. Knowledge work plays an increasingly large part in the economic fortunes of developing countries. Indeed the vast majority of people working in AWA’s client organisations are Knowledge Workers. Over the last 30 years we’ve seen a gradual shift from manufacturing to service and now to knowledge based industries. Knowledge Workers are broadly speaking ‘people who think for a living’. Whilst the concept of ‘productivity’ in manufacturing and service industries is well understood it is barely understood at all for knowledge based sectors.

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.