April 9, 2021
Lockdown mental fatigue is rapidly reversed by social contact, study claims
Many of us are looking forward to a summer of relative freedom, with road-mapped milestones that will grant us more opportunities to see our friends and family. But we’ll be carrying the effects of months of isolation into those meetings, including a sense that our social skills will need dusting off, and our wits will need sharpening. The mental effects of lockdown have been profound. Social isolation has been shown to cause people’s mental health to deteriorate even if they have no history of previous psychological problems. Alongside this drop in mood, loneliness has been linked with a host of cognitive problems, including fatigue, stress and problems with concentration. More →
If a robot worker makes a mistake on the job, or annoys customers, businesses may not give it a pink slip and a cardboard box for its office belongings, but companies may be forced to shut down these expensive machines, according to a team of researchers. Knowing how to better design and manage these robots may help service industry firms both avoid losing their investments in the robots, as well as secure an increasingly necessary source of extra help, the team added. 
British Land has announced that JLL has chosen 1 Broadgate for its new UK flagship office. JLL, the global real estate services firm, has signed an agreement for lease for 134,000 sq ft on a 15 year term, representing a pre-let of nearly a third of the office space. 
Lockdown has meant the majority of UK office-based employees have taken up working from home arrangements over the last year, and it seems that many employers lack trust in their employees when they can’t physically see them. Last year 
The UK civil service is set to pioneer a widespread hybrid working strategy with the announcement of a new deal with serviced office provider IWG. The details of the deal, 
New rules allowing commercial premises to be converted into homes come into force as part of a package of measures the UK government claims will help to revitalise England’s high streets and town centres. It believes the new rules will help “support the creation of much-needed homes while also giving high streets a new lease of life – removing eyesores, transforming unused buildings and making the most of brownfield land.” 
It is now a truism that society expects more of business than merely maximising shareholder value. 
A new survey of many of the world’s leading real estate investors finds that 92 percent of respondents expect demand for healthy buildings to grow in the next three years. The report claims that this is a compelling signal of the direction the real estate sector is heading. This finding, among others, is captured in a report titled 
New research by 
The productivity benefits of homeworking appear to have increased during the pandemic, with employers now more likely to say that the shift to homeworking has boosted productivity (33 percent) than they were in June 2020 (28 percent). This is according to new research by the 
April 7, 2021
The binary choices and multiple outcomes of flexible working
by Mark Eltringham • Comment, Flexible working