October 11, 2017
UK businesses continue to stifle personal creativity at work
UK businesses are failing to support a culture of innovation despite employees believing that their companies would benefit from fresh ideas and innovative ways of working, new research claims. The study of 1,000 workplaces conducted by RADA in Business (the commercial subsidiary of the Royal Academy of Dramatic) found that 81 percent of workplaces had failed to create a culture of creativity at work that encourages new ideas and experimentation, according to their staff. Many employees feel that businesses are suffering as a result, with just under a quarter (24 percent) saying that their workplace is desperately in need of new ideas and fresh thinking to overcome current problems.
October 9, 2017
Our Twentieth Century approach to ergonomics has to change
by Mark Eltringham • Comment, Flexible working, Technology, Wellbeing, Workplace design
One of the big problems with the way some people talk about the term ‘ergonomic’ is that they tend to use it to describe the design of objects when really it’s about the relationship between a person and the things around them. It’s an abstract idea, about the relationships between design, facilities and management, so is dependent on a number of variables. When those variables change, what we understand to be good ergonomics changes too. The principle of ergonomics as we now understand it first came to prominence in the wake of the intensive growth in the use of computers. The legacy of this fixed view can be an approach based on an idea of desk-bound employees with a computer, whereas how we work now bears little resemblance to how we worked 20 years ago.
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