Search Results for: management

November 5, 2013

Interview: Greg Lindsay on engineering serendipity and harnessing chaos

by Mark Eltringham • Flexible working, Workplace, Workplace design

Render of Plaza at Zappos offices in LA

Greg Lindsay is a journalist and urbanist. He is a contributing writer for Fast Company and co-author of the international bestseller Aerotropolis: The Way We’ll Live Next as well as a visiting scholar at New York University’s Rudin Center for Transportation Policy & Management, a senior fellow of the World Policy Institute, and a research affiliate of the New England Complex Systems Institute. He is also one of the main speakers at this year’s Worktech conference in London on 19 and 20 November. In this frank and enlightening interview he offers his thoughts on how firms can engineer serendipity into their workplaces and cultures and how the way we design offices is already taking clues from the way we plan urban environments.

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November 5, 2013

RICS’ new FM Guidance Note aims to improve business performance

by Sara Bean • Facilities management, News, Property

The Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors has launched a global guidance note which can help facilities and estates managers increase efficiency and drive up profits across business. The Global Strategic Facilities Management (FM) Guidance Note is aimed at facilities managers and corporate real estate professionals overseeing the running of commercial property worldwide, providing recommendations on developing, implementing and evaluating a strategic plan for the running and servicing of individual buildings and property portfolios. The note is also accessible for clients and consultants by providing them with a clear picture of the best practice methods that should be implemented in the running of buildings in order to boost organisational performance. More →

November 1, 2013

Employers need to ‘up their game’ as 1 in 4 employees admit to looking for a new job

by Sara Bean • News, Public Sector, Workplace

Job seeking intentions are at their highest since spring 2011, as fewer organisations implement recruitment freezes. According to the CIPD/Halogen Employee Outlook survey, 24 per cent of employees in the private and voluntary sectors, and 23 per cent in the public sector, are looking for a new job. The greatest motivator to move jobs is disengagement (71% compared with 9% who are engaged), followed by job dissatisfaction (62%, compared with 10%), and those facing pressure every day (45% compared with 19% who never feel under excessive pressure). More than 3 in 5 (61%) said that an opportunity to progress within their role is important to them, but a shocking one in four employees (27%) said that they had never had a performance review at work. More →

November 1, 2013

There is very little about flexible working that is actually flexible

by Mark Eltringham • Comment, Events, Flexible working

It’s pretty clear why some of the world’s greatest writers have been drawn to the human propensity for moral and linguistic inversions and subversions. Books like 1984, Catch 22 and A Clockwork Orange are predicated on the idea. And it’s not one limited to literature. If we look, we can see it going on all around us. In the field of workplace design and management we can see it in the use of the word ‘flexible’ as used in the phrase flexible working. This is a word that in this particular context is coming to mean something like its opposite. According to a survey from YouGov, the 9 to 5 is a thing of the past, supplanted by a style of work labelled flexible but which involves a third of us working for over ten hours a day, many at home right up until the point we go to bed with a smartphone that sits by our side, to wake us with a beep and a wodge of new notifications the next morning.

October 30, 2013

Workplace Trends conference justifies the workplace in a virtual world

by Sara Bean • News, Property, Workplace design

In his lightning summary of five decades of the office at Workplace Trends 2013: Making it Work, which took place last week, architect Frank Duffy remarked on the challenge of justifying place in an increasingly virtual world. It’s never been easy to gauge the productivity of offices and knowledge workers – a conundrum the conference returned to throughout the day. Tim Oldman from the Leeman Index, which has gone some way to measure workplace effectiveness, revealed that only 53 per cent of 42,677 workers questioned had agreed their workplace enables them to work productively. Yet despite this, as most of the sessions of the day confirmed, the office is far from obsolete, and as a place for workers to congregate and collaborate, it remains king. More →

October 30, 2013

IT managers yet to accept the whole challenge presented to them by BYOD

by Brandon Allen • Comment, Technology

How exactly does an employee’s convenience trump an organisation’s need for control? That’s the debate corporations are facing when it comes to managing the ‘Bring Your Own Device’ trend. BYOD allows employees to use their personal mobile products for business. In 2012, IBM decided a majority of their workforce could use their own phones and tablets for work purposes, but the company had high concerns about security, according to a report in the MIT Technology Review. They needed to quickly find solutions to the problem instead of fighting the inevitable. So given the inevitability of BYOD and the lack of control that accompanies it, what is the upside for businesses and how does an IT department ready itself for the BYOD challenge?

October 29, 2013

‘Beleaguered’ UK workforce is poorly motivated and unproductive

by Sara Bean • Flexible working, News, Workplace

UK workers are lacking motivation and job satisfaction, with over half either feeling neutral or unhappy about going to work most days, only one in four very satisfied with their jobs and 20 per cent who dread going to work. According to a new report, ‘The Forgotten Workforce’ a series of blows to UK workers, including cuts to their working hours, increasingly inconsistent working patterns, pay freezes, and introduction of zero hours – coupled with little or no investment in technology to support employees – has led to a UK workforce lacking morale and disengaged from the business. An efficient business needs an efficient workforce. If this cycle continues, businesses will face increasingly poor productivity and the UK economic recovery will suffer warns the report. More →

October 29, 2013

Many UK facilities managers still failing to see the magic of BIM, claims report

by Mark Eltringham • Facilities management, News, Technology

According to a new survey from the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors, the UK’s facilities managers are simply not ‘getting’ what Building Information Modelling is all about and how it can be applied. The latest research into the acronym replete debate about the role of BIM found that more than a third of facilities management professionals are unfamiliar with building information modelling and its uses. RICS is calling on facilities managers to increase their general awareness of the potential of the technology. The survey was carried out on behalf of RICS by the crudely monikered and government funded BIM4FM initiative and found that of the nearly two thirds (65 percent) of respondents who were aware of BIM, nearly all (62 percent) believed it would help them in their roles.

October 29, 2013

Looking forward to Workplace Week; productivity and the connected organisation

by Mark Eltringham • Events, News

‘High Street’ at Network Rail’s Milton Keynes base

There’s not much time to go before Workplace Week, which takes place from the 4th to 8th November. The annual workplace conference and fundraiser for Children in Need will include more than a dozen visits to offices in London and around the UK, a one-day convention and events staged by Kinnarps, ASOS, KPMG, Herman Miller and Colebrook Bosson Saunders. Site visits include to the public sector’s new generation of landmark buildings, Network Rail, RBS and Innocent Drinks. The theme of this year’s convention on the 5th November is Driving Productivity Through The Connected Organisation which will take place at PricewaterhouseCoopers’ offices. Speakers includes Keith Saxton, director of financial services at IBM Research; Johnny Dunford, global director of commercial property at RICS; and Liz Nottingham, Regional HR Director for Western Europe at Starcom MediaVest group.

October 28, 2013

‘Them and us’ mentality rife, as third of staff report low levels of trust in senior managers

by Sara Bean • News, Workplace

A counterproductive “them and us” mentality is being bred in too many of the UK’s workplaces, as more than one in three employees report that their level of trust in senior managers is weak (34%), According to the latest research by the CIPD, while an overwhelming majority report that they trust in their colleagues and line managers to some or a great extent (92% and 80% respectively), trust ratings increase with an employee’s seniority, with senior managers much more likely to report strong trust between employees and senior management than non-managerial workers. Creating a better level of trust isn’t difficult however, with the majority of employees pointing to simple and effective practices such as ‘approachable’, ‘competent’ and ‘consistent leaders’ who ‘act with honesty and integrity’ and ‘lead by example’. More →

October 25, 2013

Only culture change will prevent the sexual harassment of people at work

by Pam Loch • Comment, Legal news, Workplace

Are we dangerously unaware of or perhaps even becoming dismissive about the nature and extent of sexual harassment in the workplace today? A recent survey, commissioned by a firm of solicitors, has thrown up some statistics which point to significant levels of harassment being experienced by both men and women at work. In the poll of 1,579 working people 60 per cent of women and 40 per cent of men reported that they had experienced “inappropriate” behaviour with much of it classed as persistent, degrading and embarrassing. The behaviour that most people complained about involved some degree of unwanted physical contact but also included colleagues watching pornography in the workplace.

October 25, 2013

Economic recovery, the changing psychological contract and the future of the office

by Mark Eltringham • Comment, Facilities management, Flexible working, Workplace design

There has always been a link of one sort or another between the labour market and office design. So, as the UK’s unemployment statistics continue to fall, they remain moderately high and there continue to be structural changes in the nature of work, typified by this year’s debate about the growing use of zero hours contracts. You have to wonder what impact structural changes, levels of unemployment and redundancy (around 4 million in the UK since 2008) have had on the way we manage and design our workplaces. There is no doubt that the downturn combined with the structural changes in the way we work have had an effect on demand for commercial property, but what will it all mean in the longer term?