July 29, 2020

Remote work and office life go hand in hand in a flexible future

by Neil Franklin • Flexible working, News, Property

The COVID-19 pandemic changed numerous aspects of how we live and work and led to a massive remote work experiment. A JLL survey of more than 3,000 employees working in multi-national companies across the globe claims that 71 percent of people have worked from home during the pandemic, and that 58 percent missed the office and 44 percent missed human interaction and socialising with colleagues. The largest cohort who missed the office was the under 35s, or millennials, with 65 percent citing poor home-office environments and missing support from their managers.

July 22, 2020

Older people are happiest at work

by Neil Franklin • News, Wellbeing

The latest edition of the annual Age Research by Engaging Works claims that the happiest people in the workplace are those beyond middle age. By comparison, young employees don’t feel rewarded or recognised and feel that their views are not heard at work. They are also more likely to suffer anxiety in the workplace. However, it’s middle aged employees who are struggling the most at work, admitting that they feel the least developed. They also feel that they have a poor feeling of wellbeing at work and that they don’t have enough information to do their job. More →

July 20, 2020

People feel guilty about taking time for lunch, even when working from home

by Neil Franklin • News, Wellbeing

New research published in the journal of Psychology and Health has found that some employees feel guilty about taking breaks during the day, especially for lunch. The paper’s lead author Dr Mike Oliver explained: “The legally required minimum time for a lunch break at work is 20 minutes, however there is a growing trend nationally for large numbers of people not to take breaks at work, with surveys reporting that between 66 percent and 82 percent of workers don’t always take their breaks. More →

July 17, 2020

Self-employment is great for wellbeing, not so great for the bank balance

by Neil Franklin • News, Wellbeing

In the week the ONS announced that the number of self-employed people in the UK had dropped by 178,000 over the last quarter, a new report from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and the Institute for Fiscal Study suggests that the growing number of people who turn to self-employment do so despite a drop in their incomes. On average, they earn nearly £500 (30 percent) less a month than they did before falling out of traditional employment. More →

July 15, 2020

Some brutal realities about the future of work

by Mark Eltringham • Comment, Flexible working, Wellbeing

No author uses the built environment like J G Ballard. In his 1975 novel High-Rise, the eponymous structure is both a way of isolating the group of people who live and compete inside it and a metaphor for their personal isolation and inner struggles. Over the course of three months, the building’s services begin to fail. The 2,000 people within, detached from external realities in the 40-storey building, confronted with their true selves and those of their neighbours, descend into selfishness and – ultimately – savagery. More →

July 7, 2020

Overcoming the fear of going out

by Michelle McQuaid • Comment, Wellbeing

Over the last several months, some workers have exhibited a new ailment that has got nothing to do with the COVID-19 pandemic that sent them scurrying home to set up virtual offices in the first place. It’s called FOGO, as coined by Forbes magazine contributing writer Jodie Cook, and it refers to a new phenomenon known as the “Fear of Going Out”.

July 6, 2020

Remote working productivity will slump as firms burn up their social capital

by Neil Franklin • Flexible working, News, Wellbeing, Workplace

Employers are walking into remote working productivity slump, as people lose their visibility in an organisation, a new report claims. The survey from workplace software business Names & Faces claims that three quarters (75 percent) of people who report being more productive since working from home already know at least half of their company but that two thirds of people who don’t feel visible within their organisation have experienced a productivity drop while working from home. More →

July 1, 2020

The loneliness of the long term flexible worker

by Dr Rachel Lewis • Comment, Flexible working, Wellbeing

Flexible working arrangements are those which ‘allow employees to vary the amount, timing or location of their work’ and may include part-time working, mobile/home working, compressed hours or job-sharing – among others. Before the lockdown, according to the Chartered Institute of Personnel Development (CIPD), more than half of all employees in the UK used at least one form of flexible working, while a study by Gallup in the US suggests as many as 43 percent of employees already worked flexibly. The practice has been found to have positive effects on job satisfaction, employee commitment, reducing work-family conflict – and for many is now an essential component of modern working life. More →

June 30, 2020

Cracking the issue of work after lockdown

by Mark Eltringham • Comment, Flexible working, Workplace design

Take any issue in the modern era and you’ll find a noisy schism. The big-endians and little-endians yelling at each other about the right way to eat a boiled egg, right over the heads of the majority of people who wonder if they’d be better off just having some toast and a nice cup of tea. Not that the toast-eaters can say anything without being accused by both sides of the divide of belonging to the other. More →

June 29, 2020

Recruitment firms remain upbeat about longer term economy

by George Eltringham • News, Workplace

Research conducted by Bullhorn, suggests that recruiting professionals are optimistic about COVID-19’s future economic impact. According to Bullhorn’s Global Recruitment Insights and Data (GRID) COVID-19 Impact Survey, only two percent predict a sustained depression that extends past 2021, and more than half (56 percent) expect the economy to improve by the end of the year. More →

June 26, 2020

Acts of kindness create a virtuous circle in the workplace

by Mark Eltringham • News, Wellbeing

This is the very definition of a Friday story. The results of a research project, published in the American Psychological Association journal Emotion suggests that the small kindnesses we show to others at work tend to propagate across an organisation. For the study, a group of researchers from the University of California told workers at Coca Cola’s Madrid headquarters that they were taking part in a piece of research to measure their levels of happiness, job satisfaction, relationships with colleagues (good and bad) and their positive and negative experiences of other people’s behaviour as well as an assessment of their own behaviour over a period of four weeks.

June 24, 2020

The links between coffee, shared ideas and the office go back a long way

by Mark Barrell • Briefing, Premium Content, Wellbeing, Workplace design

The BBC recently published a piece on its website to commemorate the 40th Anniversary of Ridley Scott’s movie Alien and what it could tell us about office design and the workplace (of whatever sort). One of the interesting points raised in the piece was how the depiction of the conditions on board the spaceship Nostromo did away with the gloss and swish of previous visions of the future, replaced by grime, exposed services and strictly utilitarian interiors. The environment was one of the characters, a trick Ridley Scott later repeated in Bladerunner. More →