Search Results for: office

May 26, 2016

Two in five managers oppose employees working from home ⁰

by Sara Bean • Facilities management, Flexible working, News, Wellbeing, Workplace

Flexible working may be growing in popularity among employees but there is evidence of a gap in expectations between employers and employees on where work should take place. A new report from Randstad found that only around a third of UK employees (35 percent) still want to work in the office every day of the week, with a majority (62 percent) wanting the option of working from home. Employers it seems feel very differently, as a report by Cornerstone OnDemand and IDC reveals that cultural attitudes are a major obstacle for the full acceptance of flexible ways of working, preventing employers from viewing it as a legitimate work practice. Two in five line managers (40 percent) admit that they do not want their employees to work from home, and crucially, even if a company facilitates remote working, bosses’ attitudes are keeping their employees in the office, with just 13 percent of employees actually choosing to work from home when given the option.

May 25, 2016

Urban Millennials are worried about the same things as everybody else ⁰

by Mark Eltringham • Cities, Comment

The acid test for any survey of the attitudes and experiences of Millennials is whether you could replace its findings with those for another generation and come up with broadly the same results. The answer is very often ‘yes’, which can generally be explained by pointing out that, contrary to what you may have heard, Millennials are people too and not the Midwich Cuckoos. So, here we have a survey from an organisation called YouthfulCities which claims that Millennials living in the world’s major cities are concerned about the high cost of housing, employment opportunities, inadequate infrastructure, crime and their personal happiness. Just like everybody else then. Except that the conclusion the survey draws is that cities need to become more ‘youthful’. Presumably in exactly the same way that office occupiers are routinely told that they need to create youthful workplaces, which is not only patronising to Millennials but also ignores the fact they’re not the only people there.

May 25, 2016

An out of hours email ban and why we all need the ‘right to disconnect’ ⁰

by Adrian Lewis • Comment, Flexible working, Legal news, Work&Place, Workplace

The recent announcement from President Francois Hollande’s Socialist Party that they plan to give French employees the “right to disconnect” by pushing through measures for an email ban out of hours has been the subject of great debate. Although many commentators have argued the need for employers to encourage people to ‘switch off’ when they aren’t in work, to date there have been no legal guidelines on this specific issue, despite several negative reports about modern technology blurring the boundaries between home and work, which some claim is creating a stress epidemic. In the UK, the Working Time Regulations specify that no worker should work more than 48 hours per week. However, there has been no case law as to whether or not checking work emails outside working hours would fall within this limit – and many UK staff check and respond to work emails outside work hours, even on holidays.

May 23, 2016

Many EU workers clinging to their fax machines and desktops, claims report ⁰

by Neil Franklin • News, Technology, Workplace design

If you think the way people work is probably not quite as glossily portrayed in the media, then you’d probably be right. A lot more European workers than is commonly supposed still believe that fax machines are essential business tools, according to a new report from unified communications business Fuze. In a study of the working habits of 5,000 EU employees, it found that the fax machine is considered ‘essential’ by 30 percent of workers in the UK, 39 percent in Germany and 42 percent in France. The report also found that many also think that desktop computers are still more important in their day-to-day working lives that laptops, tablets or smartphones. Anybody horrified by the report’s findings will be heartened by its claim that the machines will die off in time as a new generation of people who don’t know what the hell a fax machine is supplant those who still cling to their battered, old, paper-based devices.

May 21, 2016

Flexible working babble + Tall buildings + Engaging workplace design ⁰

by Sara Bean • Facilities management, Flexible working, Newsletter, Property, Technology, Work&Place, Workplace

In this week’s Newsletter; Matias Rodsevich suggests three performance management must haves; Neil Barnfather flags up a lack of disabled representation at board level; and Dr Daniel Wheatley says work-life balance and flexible working continue to be viewed as a ‘women’s issue’. From the latest issue of Work&Place, Serena Borghero looks at the role of workplace design in employee engagement; Mark Eltringham argues there’s no evolution towards a universally accepted model of workplace design and management culture; and that when it comes to skyscrapers, big and clever are two different things. There’s evidence that London’s Central office market has hit its peak; the British public remains ‘clueless or indifferent’ about the nature of smart cities; and we reveal that graduates prefer digitised workplaces. You can download our Insight Briefing, produced in partnership with Connection, on the boundless office; visit our new events page, follow us on Twitter and join our LinkedIn Group to discuss these and other stories.

May 20, 2016

Quarter of UK workers would choose home working over pay rise ⁰

by Sara Bean • Facilities management, Flexible working, News, Workplace

We reported earlier this week that flexible working has gone mainstream, with over a third of organisations now offering some kind of flexible working arrangement. The question is whether these flexible workers are more productive, as some employers persist in perceiving a flexible working request as a means of ‘shirking from home.’ Now new research to mark National work from home day, shows that 48 percent of workers are happier when they can work from home and nearly a third (32 percent) of British workers ‘feel more productive’ when they do so. The study by the Institute of Inertia, a partnership between comparethemarket.com and the University of Sheffield, found that nearly a quarter (24 percent or 7.5 million) of British workers would rather work from home one day a week than receive a pay rise, while seven million admit they suffer from ‘procrastination or inertia issues’ when working in an office.

May 19, 2016

Where is the data for disability on boards – and do businesses care? ⁰

by Neil Barnfather • Comment, Legal news, Workplace

When it comes to diversity on boards, I would confidently say that disability comes in a poor fourth behind gender, age and ethnicity. It’s something I take a great interest in as a blind person, a senior executive who sits on boards and as a start-up champion. While acknowledging a limited perspective, over the years I have noted a lack of disabled representation at board level and when I joined the NonExecutiveDirectors.com recruitment platform, we had a conversation about this. The result was that the organisation and its partners decided to commission some research into the issue. The research involved the Office of National Statistics, EU Equality and Diversity Commission, Department of Business Innovation and Skills, leading academic experts in disability, in social policy and in work and employment, Trade Union Congress (TUC), business surveys, policy documents and more.

May 18, 2016

What the imminent arrival of driverless vehicles will mean for the way we work ⁰

by Mark Eltringham • Cities, Comment, Flexible working, Technology

Game changing technology doesn’t come any more disruptive than driverless vehicles. The problem is that we may find the whole idea easy to dismiss based on our past experiences of this sort of thing. Autonomous vehicles carry the whiff of Tomorrow’s World about them, yet they are about to go mainstream far sooner than we might think and their advent will have a major impact on the way we work and live. Both Ford and BMW have announced they intend to have fully autonomous vehicles on the roads within five years. That doesn’t mean the test models that are already on the roads but commercially available vehicles; Volvo will have 100 customers in Sweden and the UK using the vehicles next year. Tesla claims its cars will be driverless in two years. And it’s not just car makers who are intent on grabbing a share of this new market but computer makers like Google and Apple as well as sharing economy pioneers like Uber.

May 12, 2016

Making sense of the relentless babble about flexible working

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

Not a day goes by when some organisation or other isn’t found extolling the virtues of flexible working or urging everybody to adopt the practice. While it’s easy to be cynical about the results of surveys from technology companies which are a staple part of this media onslaught, they are actually on to something. And that is why governments, employers and their associations and employees are all attracted to the idea of flexible working as a way of achieving whatever it is they want. The result is the stew of motivations, ideas and terminology that can lead commentators to make grand and daft pronouncements about flexible working; pronouncing it dead, most famously in the case of Yahoo but more subtly in the case of the grand new Xanadus being created in Silicon Valley by the area’s Charles Foster Kanes, or as the harbinger of death for the office based on the notion that somehow we’ll all be working in exactly the same way at some point in the future.

May 7, 2016

Problem of London’s success + Design & people + Latest Work&Place ⁰

by Sara Bean • Architecture, Facilities management, Newsletter, Workplace

In this week’s Newsletter; Simon Heath suggests that FM should be satisfied with remaining essentially a service; Mark Eltringham bemoans the rise of tall buildings; examines commercial buildings that become synonymous with an organisational or sector crash; and celebrates the work of Donald Broadbent, whose research into cognitive psychology helps us address the effects of unwelcome noise in open plan offices and of German artist Fritz Kahn, in providing some understanding of how people respond to their surroundings. There’s news of a significant drop in employee satisfaction; why remote working may help to reduce the strain on overcrowded cities; and the negative effects of admin and unreliable technology on productivity. You can read the latest issue of Work&Place, download our Insight Briefing, produced in partnership with Connection, on the boundless office; visit our new events page, follow us on Twitter and join our LinkedIn Group to discuss these and other stories.

May 6, 2016

Can building design presage the decline of the world’s tech giants?

by Mark Eltringham • Architecture, Comment, Technology, Workplace design

At the movies, buildings are often used to denote hubris. The ambitions and egos of Charles Foster Kane and Scarface are embodied in the pleasure domes and gilded cages they erect to themselves and their achievements. Of course, the day they move in is the day things invariably go badly wrong. In the real world too, monstrous edifices have often presaged a crash. The UK’s most ambitious and much talked about office building at the turn of the Millennium was British Airways’ Waterside, completed in 1998, just a year after Margaret Thatcher famously objected to the firm’s new modern tailfin designs by draping them with a hankie and three years before BA had to drop its ‘World’s Favourite Airline’ strapline because by then it was Lufthansa. Nowadays BA isn’t even the UK’s favourite airline, but Waterside remains a symbol of its era, albeit one that continues to influence the way we perceive building design.

May 5, 2016

The problems that come with London’s success need better solutions ⁰

by Mark Eltringham • Architecture, Cities, Comment

We might all welcome London’s success as a thriving centre of commerce and culture, but this comes at a price and we need to look for a better balance than we currently see between London and the rest of the UK. Of course London is often the main victim of its own success. Its thriving tech and creative firms continue to spill out of the incubator districts created for them to find cheaper and more appropriate spaces in which to grow. In doing so they are pushing up rents in such unlikely nearby places as Croydon. In the traditional business districts in the City and Docklands, the capital’s tech giants are now able to compete for the first time for some of the most expensive real estate on the planet. To cope with demand, the Mayor is rubberstamping tall buildings like never before, many of them bloody awful, unloved by Londoners and heritage organisations alike, transforming the skyline and creating windswept, arid tundra at their feet.