Search Results for: pay ratio

Office location key factor for staff engagement, with home working preferred 0

by • Facilities management, Flexible working, News

Office location most important productivity factor, with home working preferred

It might be disheartening to learn that despite an employers best efforts to design an engaging and inspiring workplace, for many employees it’s where the offices are located that matters most. In a recent UK poll by ClickSoftware over half (57%), said office location was the most important reason why they’d stay in their job ahead of both pay (52%) and job security (33%). However, the most preferred place to work is at home, with 60 percent of people identifying this location to be ‘very comfortable’. The survey also looked at the factors that affected job performance, and found one in five people (20%) believe their productivity at work has been negatively affected by the location of their job. This increases further in the capital with over a quarter of Londoners (26%) feeling that their productivity would suffer by working in a ‘horrible location’. (more…)

It’s worth exploring alternative forms of finance for office fit out

by • Comment, Facilities management, Workplace design

Fit-out-1You can’t help but notice that there has been a shift in recent years for us to become the consumers of things we were once obliged or wanted to own. We watch films on Netflix, listen to music on Spotify and share cars with strangers through BlaBlaCar. As both individuals and businesses we rent software rather than own it and in the growth of serviced offices and co-working spaces we see the same forces at work. The attractions of this approach are obvious, not least in keeping down the costs of things we may not want to keep in the long term and leaving ourselves free to make different choices in the light of rapidly changing circumstances. So it’s no surprise that economic uncertainty is just one factor that has driven an increase in asset financing at the same time that we have seen a permanent change in spending patterns.

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How a big, stupid idea can be more attractive than a small, effective one

by • Architecture, Comment, Property

We’re going to be hearing a lot of big ideas over the next few weeks. Politicians will be sharing their ‘visions’ with us and letting us know exactly how ‘passionate’ they are about them and anything else Twitter tells them we care about. It’s going to be boring and infuriating, but we only have ourselves to blame. We fret when politicians don’t give us a handy label on which we can rest our hopes or lay the blame, depending on whether we agree with whatever the big idea is or not. Of course, David Cameron’s vision of choice when he became Prime Minister in 2010 was The Big Society. I won’t get into the rights and wrongs of that but I think we can all agree that The Big Society has been kicked unceremoniously into The Long Grass and we won’t be hearing much about it in the build up to this year’s General Election. Nor will we be hearing much about another of David Cameron’s pet projects even though that has actually gone on to be something of a success.

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Third of Millennials more engaged by contributing to company vision than a high salary

by • News, Wellbeing, Workplace

Third of Millennials more engaged by contributing to company vision than a high salaryThe younger generation of workers say high visibility and the chance to help influence the workplace culture is of much more importance than the size of their pay packet. When asked by US-based firm Futurestep what matters most to them as employees, the greatest number of Millennial respondents – those born after 1980 – (23%) said it was “the ability to make an impact on the business,” followed by “a clear path for advancement” (20%) and “development and ongoing feedback” (16%). Income came in at fourth place at 13 percent. When questioning what makes Millennials choose one job over another, more than a third (38%) said “visibility and buy-in to the vision of the organization” while 28 percent said “a clear path for advancement.” “Job title and pay” came in third place at 18 percent.

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Majority of UK workers concerned about their ability to retire

by • Legal news, News, Workplace

Man-with-empty-pockets-006A new report from the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development claims that the majority of UK workers are concerned that their current pension arrangements won’t allow them to retire. It found that the average employee pension contribution to a workplace-defined contribution pension scheme is currently 5 percent, but most employees think they should be saving almost double that (9 percent). Four in ten (43 percent) think they should be contributing more than 10 percent of their salary to their retirement savings and almost a quarter (22 percent) admitted they didn’t know how much they should be contributing. The shortfall between what employees are paying in and what they think they should be paying is highlighted by the fact that over half of UK workers have considered how they might work past state pension age and one in ten people (13 percent) are worried that they will never be able to afford to leave paid employment.

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Digital revolution continues to transform the way we work

by • Facilities management, Flexible working, Technology, Workplace

Old-Street-TechhubThe full extent of the way digital technology is transforming British working life is apparent in new research published by Brunel University. The study – essentially a snapshot of the digital revolution in 2015 – found that 98 percent of the 830 businesses surveyed have a website, 8 in 10 manage finances online, 53 percent provide flexible working and 63 percent see innovation as a way to improve customer satisfaction. However, the study also reveals a major gulf between big business and SMEs, with larger firms significantly more digitised than their smaller contemporaries. This raises concerns over the preparedness  of the SME sector at a time when the Government’s growth agenda has prioritised nurturing and supporting new and evolving enterprises – and for whom the digital battleground has broken down traditional barriers to entry.

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Flexible working improves the quality and quantity of sleep

Flexible working improves the quality and quantity of sleep

by • Flexible working, Knowledge, News, Wellbeing

Flexible working

Morning Sun by Edward Hopper

Giving employees more control over their work schedules may help curb sleep deficiency, according to health researchers in the US. A team led by Orfeu M. Buxton, associate professor of bio-behavioural health at Penn State University set out to explore the question of whether family-friendly work practices and other forms of flexible working had any impact on the quantity and quality of sleep. They results are published this month in the journal Sleep Health. Of the nearly 500 employees from an IT company surveyed over a period of a year, the researchers found that employees who were able to enjoy more control over their working day also enjoyed an average of eight minutes more sleep per night than those with rigid working hours. The research also found that participants’ perceptions of their sleep quality also improved.

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MPs call on BBC to cut ‘staggering’ running costs of its estate

by • Facilities management, News, Public Sector

BBC television centre redesign plans confirmedThe body which oversees UK public spending has criticised the way the BBC is running its estate following the publication of a National Audit Office (NAO) report. While the report praises certain aspects of the way the estate is managed, especially its strategy of rationalising space, the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) is heavily critical of the BBC’s failure to meet its target of costs capped at 6 percent of licence fee income and the way the costs of some buildings are unacceptably high, including at the revamped Broadcasting House in London (above). According to the PAC, the running cost of the building is significantly more than others in the same area and around three times higher than a UK average. The BBC defended itself, highlighting progress in many parts of its estate and claiming that such comparisons did not stand up to scrutiny.

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NHS estate checks in for major surgery of leases and facilities management

by • Facilities management, News, Public Sector

facilities managementThe troubled organisation which looks after a £3 billion chunk of the NHS estate is set to launch an extensive review of its enormous portfolio of offices, hospitals, health centres and GP practices. According to a report on commercial property website CoStar, the move comes as NHS Property Services gets to grips with structural problems in the way the estate is managed, not least the fact that over two thirds of its properties do not have documented leases in place, many facilities management services are provided without a contract in place and nobody seems aware of the true cost of running its estate of the thousands of individual sites involved. The health estate has come under mounting scrutiny over the past two years following the setting up of NHS Property Services in April 2013 as part of the Government’s plans to modernise and rationalise the public sector property portfolio.

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New report offers occasionally surprising vision of the future of work

by • Flexible working, News, Technology, Workplace design

Future of WorkA new report into the future of work from Cisco claims –unsurprisingly – that employers are shifting their workplace policies to accommodate new demands from employees for more flexible working styles, regardless of their demographic cluster. The 2014 Cisco Connected World Technology Report also also claims that the majority of both Generation X and Y professionals already believe that smartphones and wearable devices will be the workforce’s most important communication devices by 2020 – while the laptop will maintain its place as the workplace device of choice. These devices and their attendant software and apps will drive the uptake of flexible working although sixty percent of respondents to the survey still prefer to take notes using a pen and paper. Two of the most intriguing findings of the report are that while just over half of Gen Y professionals think they are more efficient than older workers (roughly in line with the perceptions of older workers themselves) this is way out of step with the impression HR professionals, and the majority of people still believe that the future of work still lies in the office, at least some of the time.

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EU institutions are not implementing their own green building policies

by • Environment, Facilities management, News, Public Sector

Green building at the EUAccording to a report on EU news site euractiv.com, the various institutions of the European Union have been ‘unambitious’ in terms of delivering energy efficiency as part of their own buildings strategies. That is the key finding of a new study from the European Court of Auditors. which claims that green building standards and initiatives developed and promoted by the EU are not consistently employed for new buildings or as part of major renovation projects carried out by bodies such as the European Commission, European Parliament, EU Council and other institutions. The special report reveals shortcomings in the approach of these bodies, calls on the EU Commission to propose a common policy for reducing the carbon footprint of EU institutions and bodies and proposes the setting of an overall reduction target for greenhouse gas emissions by the year 2030. The report claims that it is through the design processes of a new building, or for a major renovation, that the greatest impact can be made on its energy performance and this should be the focus of its proposed new approach.

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Workplace Week focuses on the office and individual productivity in all its forms

by • Events, Facilities management, Flexible working, Workplace, Workplace design

1KP_4971The holy grail of improving people’s productivity was the focus of this year’s Workplace Week, which took place last week from 3-7th November and raised more than £12,500 for Children in Need. The annual event organised by AWA and designed as a celebration of workplace innovation, included visits to 11 workplaces showcasing the latest techniques to get people performing at their very best, a day-long convention and a series of Fringe events. Andrew Mawson, who heads up AWA, opened the convention by setting the discussion in context. “We have maximised asset productivity by getting more people into buildings, and therefore working a building harder. But we need to focus on human productivity. If each organisation could make each person just 5 per cent more productive, that would have a major impact both on that organisation and the wider economy. In the knowledge economy we need to get the very best performance out of each and every brain on the payroll and to create the conditions that consciously support that.

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