May 31, 2018
Majority of global workforce now work somewhere other than the office every week
Technological change, globalisation and changes in employee expectations mean that over two-thirds of global employees now work remotely every week, and over half do so for at least half of the week. Though it must be said this is according to a new study from IWG, which is the parent group of workspace companies including Regus and Spaces, the study found that every week 70 percent of employees are working at least one day a week somewhere other than the office. More than half (53 percent) work remotely for half of the week or more, whilst more than one in 10 (11 percent) people work outside of their company’s main office location five times a week. The survey adds also that flexible working and the use of shared workspaces are no longer the preserve of start-ups. The world’s most successful businesses – including varied companies such as Etihad Airways, Diesel, GSK, Mastercard, Microsoft, Oracle and Uber – are already adopting a flexible workspace approach.
May 2, 2018
The quest for wellbeing has taken over from our search for productivity
by Mark Eltringham • Comment, Wellbeing, Workplace design
For decades, humankind has sought to establish the link between office design and productivity. And by humankind I mean a parochial band of researchers, suppliers, workplace specialists, futurologists and designers with a special interest in the whole thing. Most other people only expressed a passing interest in the subject. It did not seem to matter to this band that the whole thing had been proved many times over many years, invariably falling on cloth, if not exactly deaf, ears. We’ve known for some time what makes people happy and productive at work and much of the new research has merely served to proved something we already know. Undaunted, researchers maintained their quest for the evidence that would get the message across to an apparently indifferent world. This quest has mutated over the past few years into something that is at first glance only slightly different but which has some rather interesting implications. The go-to workplace topic of the early 21st Century is no longer productivity per se, but wellbeing, and that is making all the difference.
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