May 25, 2021
Search Results for: big data
May 12, 2021
The UKs great digital divide narrowed by pandemic
by Jayne Smith • News, Technology
New research by Rouge Media, highlights where in the UK has the most lapsed or internet non-users, following Ofcom’s announcement that the digital divide has been narrowed by pandemic, but around 1.5m homes remain without internet access. More →
April 30, 2021
Apple commits to new campus as part of huge investment plan
by Neil Franklin • News, Property, Technology
Apple has announced an acceleration of its US investments, with plans to make new contributions of more than $430 billion and add 20,000 new jobs across the country over the next five years. The plans include the creation of a new campus in the Research Triangle in Raleigh, North Carolina. Apple will spend over $1 billion on the campus, where it will employ around 3,000 people working on technology including software engineering and machine learning. Employees are expected to start work at the campus next year. More →
April 21, 2021
Email fatigue is causing rising dissatisfaction with remote work
by Jayne Smith • Flexible working, News, Working lives
Superhuman, have released the results of a new survey that examines how the pandemic and shift to remote work are impacting employee satisfaction with their jobs. More →
April 14, 2021
The digital world is not necessarily greener than the physical world
by Neil Franklin • Comment, Environment, Technology
No sooner had the world learned about the existence of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) than we also learned how much of a problem they could be for the environment. An NFT is digital token in a similar way to Bitcoin, except there’s only one of each NFT. It is associated with a piece of content, guaranteed unique and so is worth whatever somebody will pay for it. In the case of a digital artist called Beeple, who had only ever previously sold a piece for $100, this was $69 million for an NFT for a digital collage of images called Everydays: The First 5000 Days sold at Christie’s in March. Bought by a collector in Singapore, this made him one of the world’s “top three most valuable living artists,” according to the auction house. More →
April 13, 2021
After a year of lockdowns, people are burnt-out but happier
by Steven Buck • Comment, Wellbeing
Glint’s latest insights report shows that there is a worrying increase in employees experiencing challenges with their mental health, with burnout risk trending upwards year-over-year. That spiked in late March 2020 and climbed by nearly 4 percent between August and December 2020. That’s not a big surprise, given the first challenging months of the global pandemic. Paradoxically, employees say that despite feeling burnt-out, they also feel happier at work at the end of a year of lockdown than they did at the start. Is this some sort of contradiction—or evidence of something very encouraging about the state of HR? More →
March 25, 2021
Wellbeing strategies could add £61bn to English economy
by Jayne Smith • News, Wellbeing, Working culture
Corporate wellbeing could add £61bn to the English economy by 2025 through added productivity, if UK companies can create new wellbeing strategies and improve underperforming ones, according to a new study by Westfield Health. More →
March 23, 2021
Two-thirds of UK CEOs experience ‘decision paralysis’
by Jayne Smith • Business, News
A report released by Peak, an Artificial Intelligence (AI) company, claims that two-thirds (67 percent) of CEOs and other C-suite executives in the UK have experienced ‘decision paralysis’, defined as an inability to make or decide on a solution or course of action usually caused by over-analysing or overthinking a situation. More →
March 22, 2021
The era of work personalisation is upon us
by Gary Chandler • Comment, Workplace design
You may have heard it said that any idea repeated often enough develops some form of legitimacy. We’ve had plenty of reason to reflect on whether this notion is true or nor over the past year, especially as all-encompassing pronouncements about the future of work have proliferated and intensified. The problem is exacerbated by the fact that around 80 percent of people only read headlines. This can be a particular issue when you see a headline like The Death of the Office Desk is Upon Us above an article that suggests the death of the personal desk is upon us, when the reality is rather more about the personalisation of work. More →
March 18, 2021
From the archive: Escaping the gravity of the fixed times and places of work
by Mark Eltringham • Features, Technology, Wellbeing, Working culture
In November 2019, just before that thing happened, there was this… The worst workplace related news story of 2019 is also one of the most widely reported. I’m not linking to it because I don’t want to give it any credibility, but it has been discharged into the ether by Fellowes along with a ‘behavioural futurist’ called William Higham. I will say only two things about it. Firstly, we flatly refused to publish a story about the damn thing and it’s a shame that the mainstream media couldn’t spot it for the utter drivel it is. The fact that they have picked up on it says something about the way such issues are covered in the press. That’s why you’re more likely to see a stress-related story about rats driving cars on the BBC than you are something meaningful. More →
March 17, 2021
Mental health and wellbeing are top of the priority list
by Jayne Smith • News, Wellbeing, Working culture
A new in-depth report by HR and payroll software providers, Natural HR highlights the trends, challenges and priorities facing the HR profession, and the impact of the pandemic. In 2019, the top priority of HR leaders was cited as recruitment and retention, however by the end of 2020 this had shifted to employee health and wellbeing. More →
May 14, 2021
We need to acknowledge our bias if we want to see the world for what it is
by Mark Eltringham • Comment, Wellbeing, Working lives
We’re all biased. We all recognise the sharp bump of our critical thinking skills kicking into life when confronted with ideas and information that go against our beliefs. We know how they doze in the comforting embrace of affirming data. So, it’s been entertaining this week to observe the reaction to the large-scale academic study of 10,000 IT workers which found that they had worked 30 percent longer hours while working from home, a fifth of it outside their normal times of work, without actually doing any more work. In essence their productivity had fallen by 20 percent in spite of their increased hours. More →