Search Results for: Gen Z

November 8, 2013

The journey to get more Women on Boards is one worth taking

by Debra Ward • Comment, Facilities management, Workplace

There has been so much written lately about women on boards and what is holding women back from becoming board members. The evidence highlights that gender diverse companies are less volatile, have a higher ROA and a lower employee turnover rate, yet this still seems not to have spurred on employers to take up the board equality issue. My question is why have so few women progressed to board level? Personally, I disagree with quotas, believing that the best candidate should be appointed. Do we really need a quota to swing the pendulum into a more balanced position? Regardless of your view, the evidence is clear; companies with gender mixed leadership outperform those who have little or no senior female representation. Why then would companies choose to not reset their gender balance in senior positions? (more…)

November 5, 2013

Interview: Greg Lindsay on engineering serendipity and harnessing chaos

by Mark Eltringham • Flexible working, Workplace, Workplace design

Render of Plaza at Zappos offices in LA

Greg Lindsay is a journalist and urbanist. He is a contributing writer for Fast Company and co-author of the international bestseller Aerotropolis: The Way We’ll Live Next as well as a visiting scholar at New York University’s Rudin Center for Transportation Policy & Management, a senior fellow of the World Policy Institute, and a research affiliate of the New England Complex Systems Institute. He is also one of the main speakers at this year’s Worktech conference in London on 19 and 20 November. In this frank and enlightening interview he offers his thoughts on how firms can engineer serendipity into their workplaces and cultures and how the way we design offices is already taking clues from the way we plan urban environments.

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November 5, 2013

Technology fix. What employers can do when social media becomes an addiction

by Pam Loch • Comment, Legal news, Technology, Workplace

Recent research shows that technology has helped us to become nearly five times more productive than we were in the 1970s. As well as enabling social interaction and personal expression, social media such as LinkedIn and Twitter can be valuable business aids for innovation and collaboration. However, with over half of people under 25 admitting they have to check Facebook at least once a day, it’s clear that for many, social media has become more than a form of virtual engagement. This can create something of an issue in the workplace, leaving employers with the dilemma of balancing the positive aspects of online communications while discouraging time wasting. (more…)

November 5, 2013

Winners of competition to uncover ‘Workplace of the Future’ announced

by Mark Eltringham • Architecture, Furniture, News, Workplace design

PopUP concept by Cincinnati School of Architecture and Interior Design

The results of a competition designed to showcase the Workplace of the Future, sponsored by Staples have been announced. The contest, run in conjunction with US based Metropolis magazine, attracted entries from some 200 architects and interior designers. The winner was Joe Filippelli, who created Vertical Flux, which is described as ‘a comfort-based approach to the 2020 workplace with fluctuating atmospheres’. The runner-up was CoLab from Rotterdam based Eckhart Interior Design with a ‘digital re-envisioning of the classic corporate office… which incorporates technology in a way that allows employees to work at any location throughout the office, collaborating with co-workers in any imaginable configuration.’

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November 4, 2013

Leading US organisations pledge to promote healthy buildings and communities

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

Adobe, one of the first companies to adopt the US Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) standard, is to conduct a study of its LEED certified workplaces to determine if they measurably contribute to more collaborative, creative, innovative and healthy employees. The move is part of a new Building Health Initiative launched last week by the California chapter of the USGBC. Google, Arup and Interface are amongst the founding partners, along with approximately 20 other organisations from a range of sectors. The movement aims to elevate green building as a benefit to public health as well as encourage the development of transparency standards in building materials. (more…)

November 1, 2013

Employers need to ‘up their game’ as 1 in 4 employees admit to looking for a new job

by Sara Bean • News, Public Sector, Workplace

Job seeking intentions are at their highest since spring 2011, as fewer organisations implement recruitment freezes. According to the CIPD/Halogen Employee Outlook survey, 24 per cent of employees in the private and voluntary sectors, and 23 per cent in the public sector, are looking for a new job. The greatest motivator to move jobs is disengagement (71% compared with 9% who are engaged), followed by job dissatisfaction (62%, compared with 10%), and those facing pressure every day (45% compared with 19% who never feel under excessive pressure). More than 3 in 5 (61%) said that an opportunity to progress within their role is important to them, but a shocking one in four employees (27%) said that they had never had a performance review at work. (more…)

November 1, 2013

There is very little about flexible working that is actually flexible

by Mark Eltringham • Comment, Events, Flexible working

It’s pretty clear why some of the world’s greatest writers have been drawn to the human propensity for moral and linguistic inversions and subversions. Books like 1984, Catch 22 and A Clockwork Orange are predicated on the idea. And it’s not one limited to literature. If we look, we can see it going on all around us. In the field of workplace design and management we can see it in the use of the word ‘flexible’ as used in the phrase flexible working. This is a word that in this particular context is coming to mean something like its opposite. According to a survey from YouGov, the 9 to 5 is a thing of the past, supplanted by a style of work labelled flexible but which involves a third of us working for over ten hours a day, many at home right up until the point we go to bed with a smartphone that sits by our side, to wake us with a beep and a wodge of new notifications the next morning.

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October 31, 2013

9 to 5 consigned to history as flexible working patterns take over

by Sara Bean • Flexible working, Legal news, News

Flexible working practices don’t necessarily equate to working fewer hours. In fact, people are working increasingly longer hours as flexible working patterns consign the traditional 9-5 to history. A third of Britons are now working more than 10 hours a day, with a short or no break and are bringing work life into the home by responding to work emails, texts and calls in the evening. Research conducted by YouGov for business communications systems firm, RingCentral found that more than half (55%) surveyed now work more than 40 hours a week. As working patterns change, companies are seeing the importance of managing a geographically dispersed workforce (68%), and also believe that providing employees with the ability to work flexibly (78%) or from home (60%) are important for employee productivity levels. (more…)

October 31, 2013

New report identifies the ten key trends set to transform US commercial property

by Mark Eltringham • News, Property

According to a new report from Deloitte, the recent upturn in the US commercial real estate sector is set to continue unabated into next year. Which is great news but according to the property consultancy, the market that emerges from the ashes of the downturn will be very different to the one from which they were formed. Deloitte’s 15^th annual Commercial Real Estate Outlook report has identified what it considers the top ten trends that will reshape the emerging market based on a mixture of original research, subjective insights and the firm’s experience with clients. These trends are dominated by structural and financial issues and the only nods towards external socio-economic factors are mentions for the aging workforce within the market (so much for the transformational potential of GenY) and increases in single family households (can’t see the link with commercial property).

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October 30, 2013

Workplace Trends conference justifies the workplace in a virtual world

by Sara Bean • News, Property, Workplace design

In his lightning summary of five decades of the office at Workplace Trends 2013: Making it Work, which took place last week, architect Frank Duffy remarked on the challenge of justifying place in an increasingly virtual world. It’s never been easy to gauge the productivity of offices and knowledge workers – a conundrum the conference returned to throughout the day. Tim Oldman from the Leeman Index, which has gone some way to measure workplace effectiveness, revealed that only 53 per cent of 42,677 workers questioned had agreed their workplace enables them to work productively. Yet despite this, as most of the sessions of the day confirmed, the office is far from obsolete, and as a place for workers to congregate and collaborate, it remains king. (more…)

October 30, 2013

More law firms introducing flexible working, but progress remains slow

by Mark Eltringham • Flexible working, Legal news, Workplace

When it comes to the adoption of flexible working, law firms have proved to be one of the more intransigent sectors in the UK. But there are signs of change with news that more firms in Scotland are embracing new working practices. A survey of 3,400 solicitors carried out by the Law Society of Scotland found an increasing number were making use of flexible working. The research shows that while the majority of respondents (77 percent) continue to work full time, two thirds are now allowed to work away from their main place of work although take-up remains sluggish with only a quarter doing so at least once a week. In marked contrast to other professions, around two thirds of respondents did not access emails and work files while away from the office.

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October 29, 2013

What the endless debate about HS2 can teach us about how we work

by Mark Eltringham • Comment, Flexible working, Technology

A man working on a train

One of the most fascinating aspects of the debate about whether the UK should spend £50 billion (or whatever you think it might be) on the new HS2 rail network, is the way in which it has formed a touchstone for a discussion about how we work. But people on both sides of this debate can have things either spectacularly or misguidedly wrong. On one side, the people behind the scheme, including the Government, used the jaw-dropping assumption that nobody worked on trains as the foundation of a business case. That was the familiar sight of large organisations working their relentless way towards a number they wanted, regardless of inconvenient facts. This idea has now been so widely discredited and mocked that it has been dropped completely from the latest business case, tellingly the sixth in just three years. And yet on the other side, we have people arguing that we should travel less and use videoconferencing as an alternative to face to face meetings, which can be almost as problematic.

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