Search Results for: population

China dominates a record breaking year for the world’s tall buildings

by • Architecture, Cities, News

one-world-trade-center tall buildingsThe world’s taste for skyscrapers continues unabated according to a new report from the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat. While the numbers of new tall buildings in Europe, the US and Australia remains relatively subdued, those in the Middle East and Asia continue to grow, making up the overwhelming majority of the 97 new skyscrapers completed in 2014, a new record. The report also highlights large differences in the scale of buildings across the world. While Europe’s largest completed tall building the Leadenhall Building (or Cheesegrater) at 224m was only marginally above the cut-off height of 200m, China completed no fewer than 58, the tallest of which was the mixed-use Wharf Times building in Wuxi at 339m.

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Market for smart cities set to triple worldwide over next five years

by • Cities, News, Technology

According to a new report, the global market for smart cities will grow by nearly a factor of three from $411.31 billion in 2014 to $1,135 billion by 2019. The not so snappily titled report, “Smart Cities Market by Smart Home, Intelligent Building Automation, Energy Management, Smart Healthcare, Smart Education, Smart Water, Smart Transportation, Smart Security, & by Services – Worldwide Market Forecasts and Analysis (2014 – 2019)”, has been published by MarketsandMarkets, and claims to define and segment smart cities into various sub-segments of technologies, solutions, services and regions with in-depth analysis and forecasting of revenues. The authors also claim that the report identifies drivers and restraints of this market with insights on trends, opportunities, and challenges.

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Quarter of UK workers stressed by way bosses handle change management

by • News, Wellbeing, Workplace

Quarter of UK workers mistrust management regarding workplace changeOne in four UK employees feel disengaged, with an “excessive amount of change” cited as one of the top causes of work-related stress. According to the 2014 Towers Watson Global Workforce Study under half of employees (48%) feel that leaders are inspiring them to give their best at work and as a consequence, they are not as productive as possible. The research suggests that senior managers are not successfully managing and communicating change, with less than a third (30%) of employees saying that changes are well-implemented at their organisation. Effective leadership is also vital to a company’s ability to retain its top talent as a lack of trust in leadership was named by workers as one of the top reason to consider leaving a job. And worryingly, only half (49%) of employees actually believe the information they receive from the senior leadership team.

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Flexible working could boost economy by £90 billion, claims report

by • Flexible working, Knowledge, News

Laptop on Kitchen Table with Cup of CoffeeThe widespread adoption of flexible working in the UK could boost the economy by as much as £90 billion each year according to a new report from mobile tech firm Citrix and the Centre for Economics and Business Research (Cebr). The study of 1,272 British knowledge workers claims that their ‘best case scenario’  calculation is based on saving UK workers £7.1 billion in commuting costs and over half a billion hours spent travelling. This would add around £11.5 biliion annually to the economy. The report also suggests that an even greater boost to GDP could come from the introduction of a large number of currently unemployed and underemployed individuals such as the retired, disabled and  stay-at-home parents. By tapping this pool of talent the report claims that the economy would benefit by up to £78.5 billion annually, equivalent to nearly 5 percent of GDP.

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HR managers appreciate importance of IT, but don’t work with IT people

by • Flexible working, News, Technology, Workplace

HR managersResearch sponsored by Sungard Availability Services claims that while almost two thirds (63 percent) of the UK’s senior HR managers believe a closer alignment with their organisation’s Chief Information Officer will be vital in realising their department’s ideas, only 12 per cent currently work very closely with the IT crowd. The findings of the report show that 97 percent of HR professionals believe the CIO is very capable in supporting business growth through technology including enabling mobile and flexible working (58 percent), creating new ways to communicate with employees (64 percent) and driving efficiencies (66 percent) Nevertheless, the HR department profess to be big supporters of technology within the enterprise – with over two thirds (68 percent) stating that if the CIO was not sitting on the board within their organisation, then they should be.

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Next ten years will see a surge of activity in new smart cities era

by • Cities, Environment, Technology

fs_gfx_smart-cities-concepts-v1Researchers Frost & Sullivan are promoting a study of the world’s smart cities which predicts that the global market will be valued at US$1.565 trillion by 2020. The report also claims that there will be a minimum of 26 smart cities worldwide  by 2025 with more than half in Europe and North America. By 2025, nearly three fifths of the world’s population, or 4.6 billion people, will live in an urban setting and in developed regions, this figure could run to over 80 percent. This new era of urbanisation will force planners to radically rethink how they create cities, develop digital infrastructure and provide services to residents  in a sustainable manner across a range of key parameters. The report defines smart cities as those built around ‘smart’ and ‘intelligent’ solutions and technology that lead to the adoption of at least 5 of 8 key parameters—energy, building, mobility, healthcare, infrastructure, technology, governance and education, and citizen.

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Stockholm is Europe’s top tech start up location, claims interactive report

by • Cities, News, Property, Technology

Tech start upA new study by videoconferencing firm Atomico shows that the European centre for billion dollar technology start ups in Europe is Stockholm, followed by London and Berlin. The interactive visualisation from the survey shows that Stockholm is second only to Silicon Valley as a successful founding location for successful Internet businesses with a current market valuation of over $1 billion founded since 2003. Silicon Valley remains in a completely different league to locations on the rest of the planet with 53 startups, followed by Beijing with 17, New York with seven and Stockholm with five. London, meanwhile, has only three tech start up businesses in the £1 billion category despite its reputation as a hotbed of tech entrepreneurialism, the same number as Berlin. According to the report, Stockholm’s ability to foster successful tech startups is even more impressive based on its population of around one million, which makes it the second most prolific per capita location worldwide,with 6.3 billion-dollar companies per million people compared to Silicon Valley with 6.9.

Worldwide fall in levels of trust by employees in their workplace leaders

by • News, Workplace

Deterioration in levels of trust by staff towards workplace leadersThey say a fish rots from the head, and with overwhelming evidence this week that workplaces are torn by backbiting, lying and bitching, a global analysis on workplace trust reveals a deterioration in the levels of trust employees have for their bosses. Interaction Associates annual workplace trust research, Building Workplace Trust 2014/15, found that more than half of the people surveyed gave their organisation low marks for trust and effective leadership. More than half of the 500 people surveyed at companies worldwide, give their organisation low-to-poor marks for trust and effective leadership. When asked to rate the statement “Employees have a high level of trust in management and the organisation”, just four out of ten agreed. The majority (58%) found their organisation lacking, and in fact, trust may be going from bad to worse at many organisations, as  a quarter (26%) of those surveyed say they trust their boss less this year than in 2013.

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Over 50s have highest rate of long term unemployment

by • Flexible working, News, Workplace

Over 50s have highest rate of long term unemploymentMore than a million people over 50 have been pushed out of the workplace a new report from The Prince’s Initiative for Mature Enterprise (PRIME) has revealed. Up to 1.5 million people aged 50-69 “involuntarily” left employment over the last eight years due to a combination of redundancy, ill health or “forced” early retirement. Of these, 1.1 million people would be willing to work. Yet if the employment rate of this 50–64 age group matched that of the 35–49 age group, it would boost UK GDP by £88 billion (5.6%). The report: ‘The missing million: illuminating the employment challenges of the over 50s’ was produced by PRIME, now part of Business in the Community, in collaboration with The International Longevity Centre (ILC), the leading think tank on longevity and demographic change. The report explores the employment challenges facing older workers and calls for urgent action from policy makers and employers to ensure that people over 50 remain in the labour market, for example through flexible working and retraining. (more…)

Huge increase in Glasgow and Edinburgh office leasing activity, as demand grows

by • Facilities management, News, Property

GlasgowGlasgow and Edinburgh have both seen more than 80 per cent growth in office leasing activity in the past year. A comparison of Scotland’s two major cities to other major cities on the continent at a recent JLL Research Seminar revealed that leasing activity in Glasgow increased by more than 120 per cent between July 2013 and June 2014, in comparison to the same period from 2012-2013. The increase in leasing activity placed Glasgow at the top of the list of forty comparable European cities. Edinburgh is fourth in the list with an increase in activity of around 80 per cent. The office markets of Edinburgh and Glasgow are expected to see continued high levels of occupier demand, an increase in investment activity and a strong performance from business parks. However, Edinburgh’s weakness is a lack of scale, and Glasgow’s is flat population growth; and though leasing markets in both cities are showing very strong recovery, vacancy rates are falling and Grade A space remains scarce. (more…)

Workplace design is increasingly interwoven with the dynamics of the city

by • Comment, Facilities management, Workplace design

workplace designThe Workplace Strategy Summit, held near my adopted home town of Reading in June attracted some of the world’s most renowned experts on workplace design and management. As is the case these days, much of the talk focussed on urbanisation, both in its own right and in terms of its influence on the design of work and workplaces. One speaker, Andrew Laing of Aecom argued convincingly that the city is just as much a part of the modern workplace as the traditional office. ‘As we explore the future of work and place, we are beginning to see a shift towards an urban scale in how we frame the workplace problem,’ he said. ‘Our starting point is perhaps no longer the office but the city at large. And what we mean by the city may not be the bricks and mortar urbanism of the twentieth century, but a bricks and mortar urbanism imbued with digital information and connectivity: a powerful combination of the physical and digital.’

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Mode of transport when commuting determines health and happiness

by • News, Public Sector, Workplace

CommutingNew research published in the British Medical Journal last week has confirmed the perhaps obvious fact that people who drive to work are generally less healthy and more overweight than those who get to work in other ways. More surprisingly, the report also found that using public transport to commute may be just as beneficial to healthy as cycling. The report suggests that with nearly 24 million people regularly commuting to work each day in England and Wales, its results based long term research with a sample of 16,000 people should have significant implications for Government infrastructure policy, urban design and individual workplace policies. “Policies designed to effect a population-level modal shift to more active modes of work commuting therefore present major opportunities for public health improvement”, it concludes.

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