Search Results for: one public sector

July 27, 2015

Coworking juggernaut WeWork announces plans to dominate London

by Mark Eltringham • Flexible working, News, Property, Workplace design

Earlier this month, US based coworking juggernaut WeWork announced that it had opened the UK’s largest space of its kind in Moorgate in East London. Now, according to a report in the journal CoStar, the firm is looking to become a major tenant in the commercial property market in London in the same way that it has come to dominate Manhattan. According to the report, WeWork is looking to acquire over 1 million sq. ft. of space in the capital over the next 18 months as it seeks to provide coworking space for its growing customer base of young creative and technology businesses and other start ups. If it succeeds in finding the space it wants, the firm will have quadrupled the commercial property it occupies in London to 1.5 million sq. ft. WeWork is already Manhattan’s largest tenant and is now valued at $10 billion, having started in 2010.

July 9, 2015

London transport shuts down ….. agile workers unaffected …..

by Paul Carder • Cities, Comment, Flexible working, Wellbeing

London’s Financial Times reported this morning, “The worst London Underground strike in more than a decade saw millions of Londoners struggle to get to work”. It is chaos, here in the UK capital – the top global city in PwC’s Cities of Opportunity ranking. It is a sorry state of affairs, as in a scene reminiscent of 1970s union-crippled Britain, the “workers” representatives couldn’t agree with “the management”. “Workers” and “management”…we thought we had overcome that particular divide in business and society, didn’t we? But, some people have a vested interest in keeping it very much alive. In the large, industrialized, unionized industries such as transport, it lives on. Only last year, UNITE union leader Len McCluskey addressed his supporters in Liverpool as “sisters and brothers” like some mid-20th century socialist (which, of course, he is).

June 30, 2015

Is the environment now a non-issue for building occupiers and managers?

by Mark Eltringham • Comment, Environment, Facilities management, Workplace design

This week, I took part in a series of debates in London and Manchester. The discussions, led by Rob Kirkbride of the US workplace design trade journal Monday Morning Quarterback, focused on workplace trends in North America and Europe, based on the issues that dominated the recent Neocon show in Chicago. This in turn is based on the premise that what suppliers talk about when they present their products in public reflects what their clients are saying to them. However, one subject we didn’t cover in any detail was the environment, because nobody was talking about it very much at Neocon. Indeed nobody seems to talk about it very much at exhibitions anywhere these days. While few would deny that sustainability is an important subject, could it be that it is now something of a non-issue for building occupiers and their suppliers?

June 26, 2015

Value older workers or sleep-walk towards a skills shortage, employers warned

by Sara Bean • Flexible working, News, Workplace

A demographic time bomb means employers must act to avoid a cliff-edge loss of skills and talents by 2035, a new study by the CIPD has revealed. There are currently 9.4 million workers in the UK today who are over the age of 50 and while the employment rate of older workers has increased significantly in recent years, there is still a 64 percent drop in the employment rate between the ages of 53 and 67. New research from the CIPD and the International Longevity Centre-UK (ILC-UK), the independent think tank on longevity, ageing, and population change, warns the UK could face serious skills shortages over the next 20 years. Unless organisations start improving how they recruit, develop and retain older workers it is estimated that the UK economy will struggle to fill one million jobs by 2035, even taking into account the mitigating effect of migrant workers.

June 25, 2015

Long distance commuting, agile working and dinosaur extinction in the UAE

by Douglas Langmead • Cities, Comment, Flexible working, Property

In Dubai, there are no suburban dinosaurs; those large-scale, single purpose office buildings that ignore the agile realities of modern working life. In the western world, these giants evolved on business parks, driven by the perceived benefits of having office workers agglomerated in order to achieve efficiency of communication and dissemination. The business practices and technologies that underpinned these buildings have evolved and improved and many are in the process of being re-purposed. Things happen on a grander scale in the Middle East where the mantra is “if the land-use doesn’t fit the land, make more land.” Here, the patterns of work and place have evolved differently from the west, and at a much faster pace with creeping tides of development spreading rapidly out from the small centres of traditional trade and commerce to vast tracts of new development.

June 24, 2015

Second largest deal after BBC’s MediaCity confirmed for Salford Quays

by Sara Bean • Facilities management, News, Property

The second largest deal since the BBC announced its relocation to MediaCity in 2007 has been confirmed at Salford Quays. A total of 160,000 sq ft of space at the Soapworks scheme is being let to TalkTalk and the Home Office. TalkTalk has agreed to take 106,000 sq ft on a 15-year lease, following the decision by the broadband provider, which originally took 20,000 sq ft at the Soapworks on a ten-year lease in October 2014 for its meeting and training facility, to consolidate its entire North West presence into Salford Quays. The former Colgate factory has also been chosen by the Home Office, which is taking 54,000 sq ft on a ten-year lease. The government department will relocate its operations from premises across Greater Manchester including Manchester Airport to sit under one roof, with the move due to take place in June 2016.

June 18, 2015

Facilities managers must focus more on people and less on buildings

by Mark Eltringham • Facilities management, News, Workplace design

A report from facilities management company Mitie claims that the design and management of too many workplaces are hampering the productivity of employees. Based on a survey of nearly 2,500 service sector staff carried out by Quora Consulting, the report comes to the perhaps unsurprising conclusion that facilities managers should prioritise people over buildings. The study found that younger workers are especially critical of their surroundings and working cultures. Two thirds of 20-29 year olds claim that their offices are not designed to optimise productivity. Finance and legal workers also feel let down by their workplaces with almost half claiming their workplaces do not optimise their productivity. These sectors were also emotionally disengaged with fewer than 35 percent identifying themselves as ‘emotionally attached’ to their workplaces.

June 11, 2015

US Govt passes legislation to reduce the amount of office space it occupies

by Mark Eltringham • Facilities management, News, Property, Public Sector

Over the past few years, the UK Cabinet Office has looked to the way it procures and occupies real estate as an important way of reducing the country’s budget deficit. One other country that is following suit is the US. The congressional Transportation and Infrastructure Committee of the US House of Representatives has unanimously approved legislation to reform the way federal office space is managed, procured and occupied. The Public Buildings Reform and Savings Act of 2015 sets out ways to reduce and consolidate space, divest unnecessary buildings, improve oversight of facilities management, negotiate better and shorter lease terms with the aim of saving billions of dollars each year. In the UK, the Government claims to have reduced the public sector estate by 2 million sq ft in just three years with a range of similar approaches, saving around £1.2 billion.

June 10, 2015

Time to get back a sense of proportion about sitting down

by Mark Eltringham • Comment, Wellbeing, Workplace design

The well of public discourse about office design is regularly fouled by the effluent of people who really should know better. Normally this is characterised by hyperbolic assertions about how flexible working will lead to The Death of the Office (it won’t) or how the decision by Yahoo and others to go into partial reverse on remote work would spell The Death of Flexible Working (it didn’t). All of this drivel can be forgiven when it comes from civilians, but the fact that it remains commonplace in the workplace media and emanates from the mouths of people who work in the sector is enough to make you despair. The latest example of this attention seeking behaviour, excretion of simplistic bullshit, market making or whatever you see it as, is the drive to demonise sitting, now normally expressed alongside some variant of the slogan ‘Sitting is the New Smoking’.

June 8, 2015

Three reasons why National Work From Home Day has it all wrong

by Mark Eltringham • Comment, Flexible working, Public Sector, Technology

Last Friday was National Work From Home Day in the UK. Each year, the TUC and organisers Work Wise seem to take this as an opportunity to analyse data about the uptake of flexible working and arrive at the wrong conclusions. This year, its analysis of the ONS Labour Force Survey found that the number of people regularly working from home had increased by more than 800,000 since 2005, taking the total to over 4.2 million. These are solid enough data, but what are we to make of TUC General Secretary Frances O’Grady’s conclusion that: “these figures show millions of British workers have adopted homeworking and are enjoying a better work-life balance, while saving time and money on costly commuting that benefits no-one”? There are several reasons to suggest that he’s got that wrong to a large extent.

June 4, 2015

Third of working women feel disadvantaged in the workplace

by Sara Bean • News, Workplace

One in three (31%) successful working women in the UK say that men are offered greater opportunities at work, according to new research by Badenoch & Clark. The research claims that the glass ceiling is still a barrier to women in the workplace and this is especially true in typically male-dominated professions such as law and the IT industry. 58 percent of women in the private sector say that their organisation had leadership and development programmes compared to only 48 percent of women in the public sector. When asked why men are offered more opportunities, over half of the women surveyed (57%) said it was because of an unconscious gender bias with male-dominated senior teams preferring to recruit, mentor and measure performance in their own image. This suggests that the challenging issue of gender bias cannot be resolved through development programmes alone.

June 2, 2015

The bonds that link work with place are loosening day by day

by Paull Robathan • Comment, Flexible working, Technology, Work&Place

Over the decades designing productive spaces for work has focused on redefining the corporate office and its surroundings. While there are examples of quality design in buildings around the world, there is a growing movement that challenges the presumption that work should always be done “at work”. If we aim to allow people to be at their best, develop and nurture creativity and maximise quality output then we must ensure the place where the work is done is outstanding. Sarah Kathleen Peck of ‘It starts with’ summed it up when she wrote “There are people, places and things that make me feel like I’m building my energy stores, that rejuvenate me, and help me to do my best work. Likewise, there are also people and places that zap my energy; that leave me exhausted; that make me feel as though I’ve waste my time and my energy – and my day – without getting anything useful done.”