Search Results for: technology

November 11, 2014

More than three-quarters of workers are reluctant to switch employer, finds CIPD

There is little appetite among workers to switch employer, despite the growth in employment prospects in the UK. This is according to the CIPD quarterly Labour Market Outlook report which suggests that employment will again grow strongly in the final quarter of 2014 but wage growth is likely to remain subdued. The latest report shows that near-term employment expectations have risen to a seven year high, which can be partially attributed to fewer employers looking to make redundancies, as well as an expected continuation of the trend for many employers to be hiring new staff. The proportion of employers reporting hard-to-fill vacancies is broadly unchanged (44%) and two fifths of these are reported as ‘skill shortage’ vacancies. With over three-quarters (77%) of employees saying that they aren’t currently looking to change employers, there is a resultant reduction in churn amongst the existing workforce. This, combined with a growing number of EU immigrants and older people seeking work and an ongoing skills shortage, goes some way to explaining weak pay growth. More →

November 10, 2014

Stockholm is Europe’s top tech start up location, claims interactive report

by Mark Eltringham • Cities, News, Property, Technology

A new study by videoconferencing firm Atomico shows that the European centre for billion dollar technology start ups in Europe is Stockholm, followed by London and Berlin. The interactive visualisation from the survey shows that Stockholm is second only to Silicon Valley as a successful founding location for successful Internet businesses with a current market valuation of over $1 billion founded since 2003. Silicon Valley remains in a completely different league to locations on the rest of the planet with 53 startups, followed by Beijing with 17, New York with seven and Stockholm with five. London, meanwhile, has only three tech start up businesses in the £1 billion category despite its reputation as a hotbed of tech entrepreneurialism, the same number as Berlin. According to the report, Stockholm’s ability to foster successful tech startups is even more impressive based on its population of around one million, which makes it the second most prolific per capita location worldwide,with 6.3 billion-dollar companies per million people compared to Silicon Valley with 6.9.

November 3, 2014

BIM adoption set to soar in UK and US over next two years, claims report

by Mark Eltringham • Architecture, Facilities management, News, Property, Technology, Workplace design

Building owners are embracing building information modelling (BIM) as a powerful technology benefitting the design process, managing project schedules, controlling costs and minimizing project errors, according to the recent McGraw-Hill Construction SmartMarket Report “The Business Value of BIM for Owners”. The latest report focuses on the business value of BIM from the perspective of building owners in the United States and United Kingdom for whom the technology has been deployed. Initially adopted as a design tool and later evolving into an important tool for contractors, its adoption among building owners is expanding, the report claims, and that building owners are becoming more directly involved as “their power is even greater to align BIM use with their specific goals, engage more effectively with all stakeholders and extend the value of BIM beyond construction into facility management.” The study claims that 40 percent of US owners and 38 percent of UK owners expect that more than 75 percent of their projects will involve the technology in just two years.

October 28, 2014

Great Place to Work Institute reveals world’s best multinational workplaces

by Mark Eltringham • News, Workplace

Google Offices in Amsterdam

The Great Place to Work Institute has released its latest list of the 25 multinational companies that it believes are “leading the way into a more hopeful economic age”. The full list is available on the organisation’s convoluted and impenetrable website and as part of a new report, The Dawn of the Great Workplace Era, which describes a world in which “all people can expect to work for an organization where they trust their leaders, enjoy their colleagues and take pride in what they do”. This year’s list of firms has been chosen from 6,200 companies worldwide based on employee surveys and an assessment of each company’s policies. The Top Five for 2014 – Google, SAS Institute, NetApp, W L Gore and Associates and Belcorp – have been ranked as the top multinational workplaces, “for demonstrating rising levels of trust, camaraderie and pride.” These are the companies that “are taking steps to ensure that promotions go to those who best deserve them, to increase transparency, and to encourage employees to balance work and life,” according to China Gorman, CEO of Great Place to Work.

October 21, 2014

Religious leaders have their say on ongoing work-life balance debate

by Mark Eltringham • Flexible working, Technology, Workplace

The UK’s Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis has appealed to people to free themselves from digital slavery for at least one day a week. Speaking in The Times, the Chief Rabbi (pictured above) calls on all people to give up their smartphones, tablets and other devices for at least a day a week as part of a campaign to revive adherence to the Jewish custom of the Shabbat in which people do not work between sunset on Friday and Saturday. He has been joined in his call by the Archbishop of Canterbury and The Pope, both of whom have urged people earlier this year to focus less time gazing into the unblinking eye of their devices and instead focussing on the real world, its issues and the people around them as a way of achieving a better work-life balance. The Chief Rabbi claims in the interview that the ceaseless need to respond to electronic messages distracts people from family life, communal living and spiritual reflection.

October 21, 2014

Orgatec preview: the next generation workplace is all about settings

by Justin Miller • Comment, Events, Products, Workplace design

There is a well travelled international circuit for those interested in what office design tells us about the way we work that has, for a number of years, taken in London, Milan, Chicago, Stockholm and Cologne as its main stopping off points. This week sees the launch of Orgatec, the longstanding biennial workplace festival in Cologne. One of the interesting features of Orgatec is that, because it takes place every two years, it offers snapshots of key developments in the market. It throws a spotlight on whatever workplace professionals are talking about and whatever product designers are doing in response to the changing world of work. And it does it on a big scale. This year over 600 companies from 40 countries will be presenting across an exhibition area of 105,000 sq. m. This seems big, and is, but is down markedly on the size of the show from 20 years ago when Orgatec was the launch pad for seminal products such as Herman Miller’s Aeron Chair and the Ad Hoc furniture system from Vitra.

October 20, 2014

If you want to reduce the cost of your office, move to a creative area

by Maciej Markowski • Comment, Facilities management, Property, Technology

Clerkenwell Design Week

“First we shape our buildings, thereafter our buildings shape us.” Winston Churchill, House of Commons opening speech. Buildings do indeed shape us, but what seems to affect us even more is the neighbourhood. It’s the immediate environment as opposed to buildings that is much harder to create. It needs numerous factors to influence it, among them the two most precious components– the right people and enough time. Politicians all over the world dream of creating zones that will draw the most innovative companies. But it seems that most of them grow organically – the Silicon Valley in California, the Silicon Alley in New York and the Silicon Roundabout in London. The combination of low rents, proximity to the centre of a dynamic metropolis and interesting culture made the East London neighbourhood of Shoreditch, Clerkenwell and Aldgate a perfect magnet for some of the world’s most exciting companies. So should you think about relocating there too? Here are some things to consider. More →

October 17, 2014

Firms downsizing property dramatically as agile working takes hold, claims new report

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

The sharp reduction in the amount of office space used by corporate occupiers as they adopt more agile working practices has been confirmed in a new study from facilities management services provider MITIE. The survey, as reported in the British Institute of Facilities Management (BIFM) magazine FM World, found that between the years of 2008 and 2014 firms reduced their floorspace by an average of 45 percent. The results of the report, based on interviews with property directors, mirror those of the Occupier Density Survey published last year by the British Council for Offices (BCO) which also found a marked (if smaller) reduction. The authors of the MITIE report conclude, similarly, that the economic downturn has been the main catalyst for the reduction in property used by occupiers and that the main way firms have accommodated the fall is with the uptake of flexible working practices.

October 17, 2014

Google and Deloitte set out blueprint for collaborative work in Australia

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

Deloitte Digital has launched the final version of its report into the collaborative economy carried out on behalf of Google Australia. An interim report, published in July, estimated that the benefits of collaboration to the Australian economy is already $46 billion and could rise to $56 billion. The report also claims that collaboration could help to address specific structural problems including falling productivity and a comparative lack of innovation. The study claims that the average Australian worker spends just under half of a typical working day interacting with other people but that there remains considerable room for improvement in the way those interactions take place. The final version of the report also includes a toolkit to help individuals and organisations to gauge their level and success of their collaborative work. Tellingly, the test is weighted one-third to workplace design, one-third to technology and one-third to culture and governance.

October 16, 2014

Americans would still prefer a male boss to a female boss

by Sara Bean • Comment, News, Workplace

The news that Facebook and Apple are to offer US-based female employees the option of freezing their eggs for future use, in an effort to attract more women on to their staff, has raised quite a debate on both sides of the Atlantic on whether women are being actively discouraged to put off having children. Now a new poll suggests that far from entering a brave new world, attitudes towards women in charge haven’t moved on a great deal. There is still a disappointingly high level of negativity towards female bosses, with US Americans more likely to say they would prefer a male boss (33%) to a female boss (20%) in a new job, according to a Gallup poll. And in an age when women are told to “lean in” to get positions of power at work, even women are more likely to prefer a male boss to a female boss. Although 46 per cent say it doesn’t make a difference to them, the percentage of women who would prefer a female boss has never surpassed 30 per cent since Gallup’s annual work and education poll, was launched back in 1953. More →

October 15, 2014

Awareness of benefits of BIM growing in US and UK, but implementation lags

by Mark Eltringham • Facilities management, News, Property, Technology

Building owners on both sides of the Atlantic are increasingly aware of the benefits of Building Information Modelling (BIM), even though they may not yet use it directly, according to a new report published by McGraw Hill Construction in partnership with Autodesk and Skanska. The report, The Business Value of BIM for Owners, suggests that this pent-up demand will be unleashed in the near future with 40 percent of US owners and 38 percent of UK owners predicting that more than 75 percent of their projects will involve BIM in just two years, with a particularly high level of growth in the US. Growth in the UK is being driven by the approaching implementation of a central government mandate requiring use of BIM on all national public projects by 2016, with over two thirds (67 percent) of UK owners reporting that the mandate is already having a high impact on their use of BIM. Owners in the UK are also more generally aware of the benefits of BIM and have more experience of it in practice.

October 15, 2014

Employers unready to meet demand for flexible working in UAE, claims report

by Mark Eltringham • Flexible working, News, Workplace

According to a new survey from YouGov and Citrix, office workers in the United Arab Emirates are almost universally aware of the benefits of flexible working and increasingly demand it from their employers. Yet under a quarter of organisations ‘encourage and enable’ employees to work away from their main place of work routinely. The report claims that 94 percent of the 800 UAE office workers who took part in the study say they would feel less stressed, be more productive and achieve better balance between work and family responsibilities if they were given the freedom to work flexibly outside of the office. As a result, demand for flexible working has increased by 20 per cent since an equivalent report in 2013, with many UAE workers also indicating that the ability to work from anywhere would significantly increase their job satisfaction. In contrast, only 23 percent of the businesses surveyed fully ‘encourage and enable’ employees to work from anywhere, using any device. More →