Search Results for: workplace

March 25, 2015

HSBC to relocate its UK headquarters building to Birmingham

by Mark Eltringham • Cities, News, Property

Banking giant HSBC has announced the relocation of its core banking business for personal and business customers to the Arena Central development in Birmingham. The move will see the bank take a long term lease on a 210,000 sq. ft. office and relocate around a thousand employees to the new headquarters building from London over the next four years. The choice of location follows a review into the bank’s operations and its ability to service the needs of some 16 million customers in the UK. The West Midlands is the UK’s second largest financial centre after London, with some 220,000 employees across the region. Two years ago, Deutsche Bank completed a deal for 200,000 sq. ft. of new space at Brindleyplace and earlier this year, the local council announced plans for the Snow Hill area in an attempt to create an alternative to London’s Docklands.

March 24, 2015

Film: The Japanese workers who withdraw to live in Internet cafes

by Mark Eltringham • Comment, Flexible working, Technology

Japanese workers appear to manifest some of the most extreme reactions to the challenges of modern life. Often these are related to the uncertainties of work and the fracturing of time and space associated with contemporary working life. Two of the most common characteristics of the Japanese response appears to be isolation and exclusion. Recently, the Japanese Government investigated the phenomenon of banishment rooms which some firms are alleged to have used to exclude unwanted employees. There has also been a great deal of talk about hikikomori, those people who lock themselves away from the rest of the world, estimated to be up to 1 percent of the population. Now, a new film from Shiho Fukada tells the story of two Japanese men who have taken to living in Internet cafes as they seek to find their way in life.

March 24, 2015

Government publishes its State of the Estate Report for 2014

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

Yesterday, the Government published its State of the Estate report for 2014 detailing the size and cost, efficiency of use and sustainability of central government buildings. The report covers all central government property with the exception of the military estate, prisons, NHS, Defra rural estate, Foreign & Commonwealth Office and Home Office and overseas estate. The current Government has laid great store on its ability to rationalise and improve the estate and the report focuses on its achievements in this regard. The report claims that since 2010, the changes have resulted in the estate divesting some 2,000 properties (28 percent of the total), reduced the footprint of the estate by 2 million sq. m. (a 20 percent reduction). It claims that this has been achieved by “identifying underused properties and modernising buildings to make better use of a smaller number of properties and the space within them.”

March 24, 2015

Guidance published for SMEs on management and wellbeing of older workers

by Sara Bean • Legal news, News, Wellbeing, Workplace

Since the the Default Retirement Age (DRA) was abolished in 2011, there’s been a growing awareness that the UK population is ageing at a rapid rate. One in six people in Britain are now over 65, with eight million workers aged 50 and over. But what is often overlooked is that the majority of older workers work for small and medium sized businesses. Of the 8 million workers who are 50 and over, 5.2 million work for businesses with less than 250 employees. Now in the first of its kind to specifically target smaller employers, new guidance published by Healthy Working Lives, part of NHS Health Scotland, aims to provide advice on hiring and managing older employees. Managing Healthy Ageing Workforces has been written by Dr Matt Flynn, Director of Newcastle University’s Centre for Research into the Older Workforce, and Kathleen Houston, Development Manager for Healthy Working Lives.

March 23, 2015

How artificial light affects our health in more ways than we think

by Mark Eltringham • Knowledge, Technology, Wellbeing, Workplace design

Life on Earth has developed over the course of billions of years to attune its cycles and rhythms to the fixed routines of light and dark. Yet the modern world counters this hardwired biology in humans and radically increases our likelihood of developing a range of physiological and mental illnesses and conditions. That is the main conclusion of a new paper from Richard G. Stevens and Yong Zhu published by the Royal Society last week. The article outlines how inadequate light during the day, especially inside buildings, coupled with overexposure to artificial light in the evening not only disrupts our sleep patterns but alters our physiognomy at a metabolic, hormonal and even genetic level. The report also highlights how this can account for ‘a portion of the modern pandemics of breast and prostate cancers, obesity, diabetes and depression’.

March 23, 2015

Property investors favour sustainable buildings, claims report

by Mark Eltringham • Environment, Facilities management, News, Property

Property owners could make a greater return on their investments if they improved the sustainable credentials of their buildings, according to a new report published by CBRE. According to the study of 280 investors published in the Investor Intentions Survey 2015, a growing number are taking into account environmental considerations which they consider have a direct influence on the returns and value of their assets. Nearly three-quarters (70 percent) believe sustainability is either a critical or desirable criterion when making investment decisions with only 15 percent claiming that “sustainability is not a significant consideration in selecting assets to buy”. The report’s authors claim that while the property industry has been seeking evidence of the financial benefits of sustainable buildings for some time, this has been difficult to define given the complex factors that influence transaction prices.

March 22, 2015

March 20th issue of Insight is now available to view online

by Mark Eltringham • Facilities management, Newsletter, Workplace, Workplace design

In this week’s issue; we highlight six key workplace related issues from this week’s Budget announcement; Alan Williams tells a little tale of how facilities management might bring an organisation’s value to life; Colin Watson considers what our colonisation of tall and floating buildings tells us about how we work; office workers gripe about the problems they experience with the technology that is supposed to help them; Manchester and Edinburgh emerge as the UK’s most dynamic regional property markets; employee benefits policies fail to reflect the needs of family life; and the UK is missing out on a chance to harness the commercial nous and experience of the over 50s. Sign up to the newsletter via the subscription form in the right hand sidebar and follow us on Twitter and join our LinkedIn Group to discuss these and other stories.

March 20, 2015

Happiness and wellbeing must be at the heart of the economy finds new report

by Sara Bean • Flexible working, News, Wellbeing, Workplace

To mark International Day of Happiness, a major new report has revealed that a country’s GDP fails to reflect levels of people’s happiness, which, it says, “are not easily reducible to monetary values”. Wellbeing and policy was commissioned by the Legatum Institute, which established the Commission on Wellbeing and Policy to advance the policy debate on social wellbeing and is chaired by the former head of the civil service Lord Gus O’Donnell. It finds there is growing recognition that the measures of a country’s progress need to include the wellbeing of its citizens. The report adds that with job satisfaction on a long-term downward trend in most advanced countries, and people ranking time spent with their manager as among their least happy moments in the day, there’s a lot more employers can be doing to address levels of wellbeing and happiness at work.

March 20, 2015

Internet of Things will connect ten billion devices over next five years

by Mark Eltringham • Cities, Facilities management, News, Technology

A new study from technology market research firm Gartner predicts a near tenfold increase over the next five years in the number of devices connected through the Internet of Things. The study, Smart Cities Will Include 10 Billion Things by 2020 — Start Now to Plan, Engage and Position Offerings, claims that there are currently just over a billion connected devices worldwide but that by 202, the number will rise to 9.7 billion. The key driver for the uptake of these devices will be the new generation of smart cities which rely on sensors embedded in infrastructure to allow authorities to monitor activities such as traffic levels, availability of car parking, the use of energy in street lighting and so on. The idea is that the sensors deliver real time data to allow planners and administrators to make better decisions about resources and infrastructure.

March 19, 2015

Office workers report difficulties with remote communications technology

by Sara Bean • Facilities management, Flexible working, News, Technology, Workplace design

Just as the adoption of digital communications technology is making the one-person per desk workstation model look outmoded, the design and layout of the typical conference room is no longer suitable for remote communications. That is one of the findings of a new survey by Steelcase which found that despite, or rather because of advances in technology, office workers are having difficulties when trying to communicate with work colleagues based elsewhere. The problem, which Steelcase has coined presence disparity can lead to an overall collaboration experience which is best described as unpleasant and taxing, with participants feeling strained physically, cognitively and emotionally. This isn’t helped by the fact that conference rooms, the most used spaces for videoconferencing, usually feature long rectangular tables designed for face to face meetings, not those to camera.

March 18, 2015

Increasing adoption of serviced offices within the corporate sector

by Sara Bean • Facilities management, Flexible working, News

Serviced offices have been viewed as the preserve of start-up businesses, rather than as a solution to the workspace needs of companies. However, with the growth in popularity of cluster and co-working spaces, that is changing. New research, admittedly by a global broker of serviced office space, Instant Offices, indicates the increasing acceptance of serviced office solutions within the corporate sector, ranging from SMEs through to FTSE 100 / Fortune 500 companies. Alongside that, the cost of desk space in serviced offices has grown by double figures across the UK in the past year, rising by 3.6 percent, in addition to an 11.4 percent increase in desk rates. Growth in the number of such spaces across Central London was as high as 17 percent in Southbank and 11 percent in the West End during 2014.

March 18, 2015

What the colonisation of new domains tells us about how we work

by Charles Marks • Architecture, Cities, Comment, Flexible working

Headlines about the world’s accelerating taste for skyscrapers tend to be dominated by the big numbers. This is a world in which size is important, but get behind the focus on height and you find some very interesting data about the rapid and significant changes in what these tall buildings are actually for and how this chimes with broader changes in the way we create and use workplace and shared spaces. According to the most recent annual report on the world’s skyscrapers from the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat, last year was a record breaker with 97 new skyscrapers completed globally. The devil here is in the detail. While the world’s tallest new building was One World Trade centre in New York, the overwhelming majority of new skyscrapers are to be found in Asia generally and China in particular.