Search Results for: budget

August 18, 2015

Car sharing and longer commutes are the keys to workforce mobility ⁰

by Mark Eltringham • Cities, Flexible working, News

The Government should introduce new policies to incentivise people to car share and travel further afield to find work. Those are two of the key finding of a new report, On The Move, from the think tank Policy Exchange which sets out ways to improve the mobility of the British workforce. Making it easier for people to commute twenty minutes further afield would put them in touch with at least one additional major urban area and potentially 10,000 more job opportunities, according to the report. Additionally, it suggests that drivers who offer fellow commuters a lift should be given a tax break. The authors claim that in a third of local authorities that make up the eight city regions no major employment sites (defined as having 5,000 or more jobs) are within a twenty minute commute by public transport and 80 percent of these Local Authorities have an unemployment rate above the national average.

August 11, 2015

The key to the productivity puzzle may be to give people better jobs ⁰

by Mark Eltringham • Knowledge, News, Workplace

Ever since the UK started to emerge from the economic downturn there has been a great deal of brow beating about the so-called productivity puzzle. Although the UK economy grew between 2012 and 2014, productivity fell by 1.15 percent. In addition, the UK has a productivity gap of between 23 and 32 per cent between it and comparable economies such as Germany, France and the Netherlands. When considering the reasons for this, most of the time a finger has been pointed at some old favourites such as working practices, a lack of engagement or – according to this feature published in HR Magazine this week – individual behaviour. Now a new report from the Institute for Public Policy research (IPPR) claims that the problems are far more complex than people typically assume and that one of the major factors is the jobs people are offered.

July 16, 2015

Forget flexible working, what most workers would prefer is more money

by Neil Franklin • Flexible working, News, Workplace

Flexible working, wellbeing and praise may grab all the headlines when it comes to ways of raising productivity but if you really want to get more out of staff, the number one motivator remains the one that hits them where it really matters – in their pockets. According to a study of the attitudes of 1,000 office workers from office space search engine Office Genie, around half (49 percent) chose pay rises and more than a third (36 percent) chose other financial incentives when asked to select the top three ways their employers could improve their productivity. Nine percent specifically mention company shares. The third most popular measure overall was flexible working, cited by 22 percent of workers in their top three, followed by praising good work (20 percent) and encouraging people to get a good night’s sleep, again listed by a fifth of staff.

July 10, 2015

UK Government abandons zero carbon buildings pledges

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

The UK Government has today announced that it is to abandon its plans to introduce zero carbon buildings, including homes in 2016 and zero carbon commercial buildings in 2019. As part of a range of planning measures officially announced by the Treasury, it has been confirmed that the government ‘does not intend to proceed with the zero carbon Allowable Solutions carbon offsetting scheme, or the proposed 2016 increase in on-site energy efficiency standards’. Officials from the Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG) have also separately confirmed that the zero carbon policy for non-domestic buildings will also be discarded as part of the new changes. The move has already been heavily criticised by the UK Green Building Council and senior figures in the construction sector, who are dismayed at the move by a Government that once claimed it was to be the UK’s ‘greenest ever’.

June 25, 2015

Employers lagging behind the workplace revolution say CIPD and BIFM

by Sara Bean • Facilities management, News, Workplace, Workplace design

There is strong and mounting evidence on how organisational culture and the workplace environment influence the quality of our work and working lives. This is according to a major new joint report by the CIPD and BIFM, In Search of Better Workplaces, which forms part of a wider initiative, The Workplace Conversation, an ongoing collaboration between the FM and HR bodies, which explores the evolution of the working environment and what the future of the workplace looks like. The report says that to make the purpose of workplaces clear a completely different approach is required, individual to an organisation, and which reflects what it is trying to achieve and how it wants to achieve it. It adds that good workplace design should be available for everyone and not the sole preserve of cash-rich private sector organisations. There is a range of starting points and organisations should take steps that are the right size for them.

June 17, 2015

Neocon workplace design show announces this year’s award winning products

by Mark Eltringham • Events, News, Products, Workplace design

Today is the final day of the vast Neocon workplace design
convention in Chicago. It is one of the world’s last remaining bastions of the supposedly dying art of the exhibition, in which tens of thousands of like-minded people from around the world descend on a city to live on alcohol, nibbles and hot fluorescent light in between discussing the products and ideas that hold their careers together. From the outside of any sector, this all looks like a collective madness, but from the inside things look very different. For some reason, the first day is the day on which those products which are judged to be Neocon’s best are presented their accolades. So even before our review of the show (coming soon), here are its award winning products including gongs for familiar names such as Boss, Humanscale, BuzziSpace, KI and Steelcase.

June 11, 2015

US Govt passes legislation to reduce the amount of office space it occupies

by Mark Eltringham • Facilities management, News, Property, Public Sector

Over the past few years, the UK Cabinet Office has looked to the way it procures and occupies real estate as an important way of reducing the country’s budget deficit. One other country that is following suit is the US. The congressional Transportation and Infrastructure Committee of the US House of Representatives has unanimously approved legislation to reform the way federal office space is managed, procured and occupied. The Public Buildings Reform and Savings Act of 2015 sets out ways to reduce and consolidate space, divest unnecessary buildings, improve oversight of facilities management, negotiate better and shorter lease terms with the aim of saving billions of dollars each year. In the UK, the Government claims to have reduced the public sector estate by 2 million sq ft in just three years with a range of similar approaches, saving around £1.2 billion.

June 11, 2015

Government urged by top organisations to combat climate change

by Sara Bean • Environment, Facilities management, News, Property

In an open letter to the Financial Times, 80 UK businesses, including Willmott Dixon, Cisco, E.on, Kinnarps, UK-GBC and BT have joined with the Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF) to call on the government to take action to combat climate change. It calls on the administration to; seek a strong global deal in Paris in December which limits temperature rises to below 2°C; set an ambitious 5th carbon budget to drive forward UK emissions reductions (covering period 2028-32) and establish a long-term framework for investment in the low-carbon economy. WWF-UK Chief Executive David Nussbaum said: “British business is ready to step up. From construction and energy to retail, the best British enterprises know that green growth is the future. They take on board that it’s no longer credible to base a sustainable economy on fossil fuels, so the Government should put us on track for a low-carbon world.”

May 27, 2015

Smart buildings, smart cities and the promise of infinite data

by Paul Doherty • Cities, Comment, Facilities management, Technology

The rapid urbanization of our world and the weaving of existing and new buildings into the urban fabric of Smart City initiatives are some of the great challenges facing our global industry today. Along with the vast amount of definitions and marketing campaigns surrounding the phrase “Smart Cities” comes the challenge of understanding why the movement is important to the Architecture, Engineering, Construction and Facility Management (AEC/FM) industry and how industry stakeholders can profit from, or at the very least, not get run over by the tsunami called Smart Cities. The emergence of Smart Cities as the conduit for ideas, thoughts, policies and strategies for the world’s urban environments is an important milestone for our industry, and it comes at a time of rapid innovation, convergence and redefinitions.

May 11, 2015

Does declining productivity spell the end for IT and property directors?

by John Blackwell • Comment, Facilities management, Property, Technology, Work&Place

When it comes to increasing organisational output, which in turn directly relates to real wage growth and higher living standards, the only determinant is productivity, measured in terms of output per hour worked. This is at the heart of all businesses and is essential for growth. The basic facts on productivity are clear. For over a decade, productivity has been painfully weak across all the major economies. The UK has performed particularly badly, with productivity having declined by 3.7 percent since 2008. A recent OECD report went as far as saying: “weak labour productivity since 2004 has been holding back real wages and well-being. The sustainability of economic expansion and further progress in living standards rest on boosting productivity growth, which is a key challenge for the coming years”.

May 5, 2015

Election uncertainly blamed for slowdown across the UK construction sector

by Sara Bean • Facilities management, News, Property

The UK construction market experienced a slowdown in April, with output and new orders expanding at the slowest rates since June 2013, according to the latest Markit/CIPS UK Construction survey. Although the growth of commercial work was the least marked since August 2013, many survey respondents suggested that underlying conditions remained favourable, but some clients had delayed decisions ahead of the general election. Looking ahead, confidence regarding the 12-month outlook dipped from the nine-year high seen in March, but remained stronger than its long run average. A number of firms cited optimism that underlying demand would continue to improve, while others suggested that the removal of election related uncertainty would help support new business gains.

April 29, 2015

‘Time to bin SLAs’ as IT buyers focus on costs over benefits ⁰

by Mark Eltringham • News, Products, Technology

More than half of the UK’s technology buyers claim that their main focus when procuring IT services is on keeping down costs rather than achieving specific benefits for their business, according to a report from technology company MooD International. The report, based on a study of just 160 IT directors and managers, also claims that revenue generation and growth are named as the most important initiatives by the remaining 48 percent. Over three quarters (76 percent) of respondents said that their firm’s expectations are not aligned with what suppliers believe they are contracted to deliver. The report claims this mismatch can be traced back to service level agreements (SLAs). While 77 per cent of suppliers focus on business benefits to a great or reasonable extent, 64 per cent of contracts are either entirely or mainly measured on transaction based SLAs.