November 25, 2021
The London Office Crane Survey Winter 2021 suggests dramatically improved confidence about London in the developments that are being undertaken in the office market. The survey, compiled by Deloitte, claims the volume of new starts has increased from 3.1 million to 3.4 million sq ft, above the long-term average of 2.4 million sq ft. More →
July 20, 2021
Many governments are increasingly approaching artificial intelligence with an almost religious zeal. By 2018 at least 22 countries around the world, and also the EU, had launched grand national strategies for making AI part of their business development, while many more had announced ethical frameworks for how it should be allowed to develop. The EU documents more than 290 AI policy initiatives in individual EU member states between 2016 and 2020. More →
July 19, 2021
The European Commission adopted a package of proposals to make the EU’s climate, energy, land use, transport and taxation policies fit for reducing net greenhouse gas emissions by at least 55 percent by 2030, compared to 1990 levels. The Commission claims that achieving these emission reductions in the next decade is crucial to Europe becoming the world’s first climate-neutral continent by 2050 and making the European Green Deal a reality. More →
June 7, 2021
The so-called ‘bullshit jobs theory’ – which argues that a large and rapidly increasing number of workers are undertaking jobs that they themselves recognise as being useless and of no social value – contains several major flaws, argue researchers from the universities of Cambridge and Birmingham. Even so, writing in Work, Employment and Society, the academics applaud its proponent, American anthropologist David Graeber, who died in September 2020, for highlighting the link between a sense of purpose in one’s job and psychological wellbeing.
May 4, 2021
Has working at home during lockdown made people more productive or not? This has been the subject of some lively debate recently. Many companies do not routinely measure productivity. A large number will have traditionally assumed that they get the highest output when staff work longer hours or under close supervision, but remote working is clearly causing some to re-evaluate this. Major firms, for instance professional services group PwC, have been sufficiently impressed to make remote working a permanent option for their staff. More →
March 18, 2021
The cost of poor company culture is a staggering £20.2 billion per year, according to research from HR software provider Breathe. The report ‘The Culture Economy 2021’, claims that almost a third (27 percent) of SME employees quit their job due to poor workplace culture, an increase of 6 percent from last year (21 percent). More →
December 18, 2020
Originally published in March, right at the start of all this. Makes me wonder how far we’ve come in nine months. In Dorian Lynskey’s The Ministry of Truth, a “biography” of Nineteen Eighty-Four, the author describes how Orwell’s book was the end point of an obsession with utopian (and ultimately dystopian) fiction that characterised the first half of the Twentieth Century, and reflected the competing political, social and economic ideologies of the era. More →
November 24, 2020
The pandemic has seriously altered how we work. According to statistics published by the International Labour Organization (ILO) in September 2020, US$35 trillion (£26 trillion) has been lost globally in labour income. There has also been an estimated loss of 17 percent of working hours worldwide since 2019, with young people and women being hit hardest. And many of those still in jobs are working under very different conditions. More →
November 24, 2020
A new white paper claims that while supplier codes of conduct are important, they are ineffective if their requirements are not met with actions to bring about transparency. To be effective, codes of conduct should support an authentic determination to embed company values and to foster strong business relationships that encourage honest communication and transparency that include monitoring the effectiveness. More →
November 20, 2020
It has now been more than eight months since the government first advised people to work from home if possible, due to COVID-19. The shift to remote working happened suddenly in March and quickly became part of everyday life; in April 2020 alone, 47 percent of people in employment did some work at home, compared to just 16 percent in the whole of 2019. IT teams were extremely successful in getting staff up-and-running with the right technology, but there was little time for organisations to fully train users before driving adoption, or personalise the approach based on individual need. This places a new onus on HR teams. More →
September 24, 2020
Derren Brown is clearly on to something. And if you’ve read his books you’ll know that what he’s on to is finding ways to tap in to our fascination with how our thoughts and actions can be manipulated using some well-defined and researched techniques and principles. Add in some showmanship and what you have is something that is indistinguishable from magic. It also gas something to say about some of the ways we think about workplace design and management.
June 22, 2021
The office sector needs to face up to its landfill issue
by Joanna Knight • Comment, Environment, JK, Workplace design