Search Results for: technologies

September 14, 2015

Staff already dreading the advent of Gen Z at work, claims report ⁰

by Mark Eltringham • Wellbeing, Workplace

If, like us, you’ve grown tired of the endless media focus on Generation Y and its often unfair portrayal based on a clump of stereotypes, then brace yourself. Generation Z, defined as people currently under the age of 19, is now entering the workforce and, according to a new study commissioned by Ricoh Europe, the three demographics it will join at work are dreading it. Nearly two thirds (63 percent) of Baby Boomer, Generation X and Generation Y employees surveyed in in Europe, Middle East and Asia say they expect workplace tensions to increase with the arrival of a fourth generation and half (52 percent) say their employers are already failing to meet the needs of different generations in the workplace. More positively, there was almost universal agreement (89 percent) amongst the 3,300 respondents that a diverse workforce is an asset to a business.

August 27, 2015

People are surprisingly ignorant of basic technological terms ⁰

by Mark Eltringham • News, Technology

One of the assumptions we might make about people in our increasingly digital world is that everybody has a pretty good grasp of what some of the more basic technological ideas actually mean. That cosy assumption is challenged by a new study from IT firm Daisy Group which claims that a fifth of the UK population don’t know what WiFi is, three quarters have no idea what is meant by VoIP, nearly half (43 percent) don’t know what The Cloud is and a similar number (44 percent) are baffled by the term ‘fibre broadband’. Even business owners and managers, for whom a basic grasp of this kind of stuff would seem essential, are at a disadvantage. Nearly a third (29 percent) of 1,100 surveyed couldn’t define fibre broadband (29 percent), a quarter (26 percent) hadn’t the foggiest about The Cloud and pretty much everybody is left cold by data centres.

August 17, 2015

What Edward T Hall (and Jerry Seinfeld) can teach us about stress and design

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

Work-related stress is the biggest cause of working days lost in the UK. According to the HSE’s most recent statistics, around 11.3 million days were lost to it in 2013/14, the most significant cause of absenteeism. The reasons for this are clear in the minds of many: the demands made on us by employers are increasingly intolerable, our own time is being eroded by work, we spend too much time at work, we’re under excessive pressure to perform and as a result we’re all either knackered, unfulfilled, stressed, depressed or anxious. Or guzzling a noxious cocktail of all of them. But there is another factor that has come into play over the last few years. As workstation sizes have contracted in response to new technologies and new space planning models, people have been forced closer to their colleagues, meaning that not only has their time been eroded, so has their space.

August 14, 2015

Apathy, laxity and ineptitude continue to dog data security issues ⁰

by Mark Eltringham • Flexible working, News, Technology

How firms must hanker for the days when the issue of corporate data security could usually be addressed simply by asking what somebody had in their bag when they left the building or were fired. Amongst other things, the practice of Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) means that the ways for data to leak out of the organisation are now numerous, if not generally malicious. A new cluster of reports has emerged that highlight how carelessness, indifference, cultural ineptitude and the complexities of unmanaged, privately owned technology make it increasingly difficult for firms to maintain the security of their data. While some of the sources of this leakage are generally well known, a couple that are not generally acknowledged is the apathy of employees when it comes to keeping work files safe and secure and the lax attitude of employers when breaches occur.

August 5, 2015

Near universal uptake of flexible working driving increased use of Cloud ⁰

by Mark Eltringham • Case studies, Flexible working, News, Technology

One of the consequences of the near universal uptake of flexible working practices amongst smaller businesses is a growth in the use of the technology best suited to make them work such as Cloud based data services. That is one of the key findings of a new study from BT Business and the British Chambers of Commerce (BCC). According to the survey of just over 300 small and medium sized business owners and decision makers, nearly all (91 percent) have at least one member of staff working away from their main place of work for significant periods, and a fifth (19 percent) claim that more than half of their staff have adopted some form of flexible working. The report concludes that this is the main driver in the growth of Cloud data services with 69 percent of firms already using cloud-based applications and more than half (53 percent) saying that they are essential for agile working.

July 30, 2015

Far from dying out, the office is becoming more essential than ever

by Luke Finch • Comment, Technology, Workplace design

Samsung recently released a new report which explores how our offices might look in the year 2025. The death of the office has been predicted over and over again, however the Samsung Smarter Futures Report goes against the grain and predicts that the office could actually become more important than ever. Driven by the adoption of smart technology the report claims that offices will become hubs for productivity and collaboration and what Samsung calls ‘Creative Villages’. Smart technology will create devices and systems that take notes, automate admin tasks, organise meetings and deliver information as you need it. This will mean employees have more time for face to face communication and collaborative work. As a consequence, current trends such as flexible working and agile workspace could actually become less of an issue than they are currently.

July 28, 2015

Beyond branding – how workplace design can express a firm’s culture

by Gary Chandler • Comment, Facilities management, Workplace, Workplace design

When it comes to the incorporation of branding and identity into a workplace, there is a simple option, which is to produce a design that faithfully incorporates the firm’s logos, colours and straplines in the interior. There’s nothing wrong with this, except for the fact that it is literally superficial and so may miss the opportunity to create an office design that scratches beneath the surface to reveal what lies beneath. When you get past the layers of branding and identity, you uncover something that we call culture. This can take things to a whole new level because the challenge becomes how to create a workplace design that communicates and fosters both the identity and the culture of the organisation. The benefits to the organisation can be enormous, not least because this approach bridges a number of disciplines such as human resources and office design and so drives a number of strategic objectives.

July 22, 2015

Workers of all ages want employers that commit to digital progress

by Sara Bean • News, Technology, Workplace

Employees across all age groups want to work for businesses committed to digital progress, and companies that are slow to embrace digital technology will not thrive and are more likely to lose talent, according to a new global report. Strategy, Not Technology, Drives Digital Transformation from MIT Sloan Management Review and Deloitte Digital is based on findings from the fourth annual global survey of more than 4,800 business executives across 27 industries and 129 countries. It suggests the ability to digitally transform and reimagine a business is determined in large part by establishing a clear digital strategy, supported by leaders who foster a culture that can change and reinvent their organizations. People want to work for digitally maturing organizations, with nearly 80 percent of respondents preferring to work for a digitally enabled company or digital leader. This sentiment crossed all age groups nearly equally, from 22 to 60.

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).

July 6, 2015

Humans will remain at the heart of the emerging digital workplace

by Maciej Markowski • Comment, Flexible working, Technology, Workplace design

The speed of technological development over the last 30 years has been pretty mind blowing. Of course, some technologies came and went, for instance you would struggle finding fax machines in your office nowadays or people using Pagers to contact one another. It’s no wonder that in the early nineties futurologists predicted the death of the office. Technology was shaping the way we worked and was leading us away from office buildings towards a digital workplace. Yet videoconferencing hasn’t destroyed the need for business travel. Team meetings haven’t been abandoned because of messaging services like Yammer, Slack, Lync and Webex. We still do a lot of business face to face over coffee in a meeting room. Although technological advances have greatly improved the way we connect and do business, companies still appear to value human interaction.

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 17, 2015

Neocon workplace design show announces this year’s award winning products

by Mark Eltringham • Events, News, Products, Workplace design

Today is the final day of the vast Neocon workplace design
convention in Chicago. It is one of the world’s last remaining bastions of the supposedly dying art of the exhibition, in which tens of thousands of like-minded people from around the world descend on a city to live on alcohol, nibbles and hot fluorescent light in between discussing the products and ideas that hold their careers together. From the outside of any sector, this all looks like a collective madness, but from the inside things look very different. For some reason, the first day is the day on which those products which are judged to be Neocon’s best are presented their accolades. So even before our review of the show (coming soon), here are its award winning products including gongs for familiar names such as Boss, Humanscale, BuzziSpace, KI and Steelcase.