February 25, 2024

Memories of the Office Age

by Mark Eltringham • Cities, Features, Working lives

No author uses the built environment like J G Ballard. In his 1975 novel High-Rise, the eponymous structure is both a way of isolating the group of people who live and compete inside it and a metaphor for their personal isolation and inner struggles. Over the course of three months, the building’s services begin to fail. The 2,000 people within, detached from external realities in the 40-storey building, confronted with their true selves and those of their neighbours, descend into selfishness and – ultimately – savagery. (more…)

February 7, 2024

Whenever I hear the future of work, I reach for my pistol

by Mark Eltringham • Comment, Flexible working, Workplace design

For years it has been evident that there is no ‘future of work’. There is only a journey with no destination and no single way of not getting to it. That hasn’t stopped people talking about it all endlessly. And each time they have, I’ve reached for my pistol. (more…)

February 1, 2024

Underutilised office space? I just can’t be bothered with it

by Mark Eltringham • Comment, Flexible working, Workplace design

A while ago, Antony Slumbers asked me why I thought firms had never done anything much about the underutilisation of their offices. This was in the first throes of lockdown-driven remote work hysteria, prompted by one of those headlines about how offices being half empty was some signifier of hatred for them.

(more…)

January 23, 2024

Salford’s record breaking sustainable office building reaches completion

by Freddie Steele • Environment, News, Property

The City of Salford is now home to Eden, one of the UK’s most sustainable office buildings, containing Europe’s largest living wall. From the site of a derelict surface car park with no benefits to the people of Salford, English Cities Fund (ECF) has created a 115,000 sq ft development that will transform this neglected urban area into a diverse mixed-use destination and form a key part of ECF’s £1bn regeneration of the Salford Central area. (more…)

January 22, 2024

London’s office market is reshaping the city and the way people experience the workplace

by Sam Mardon • Comment, Property

London’s office market continues to adapt to evolving workforce demands. The normalisation of hybrid and flexible working since the pandemic remains the biggest cultural shift that the office sector has witnessed in decades. In addition to the rise in demand for quality-as-a-must in 2023, collaboration, culture, and connectivity will lead the charge for office space trends in the year ahead. (more…)

January 11, 2024

Third of employees resent return to office mandates

by Jayne Smith • Flexible working, News

A new poll from Scalable Software of 2,000 UK knowledge workers claims more than a third (35 percent) resent being told they have to go into the office for a set number of days. Half (50 percent) of respondents say their employer has “productivity paranoia” over employees working away from the office, with 62 percent reporting their organisation has implemented a return to office policy within the last two years. (more…)

November 29, 2023

Creating the epicentre: unlocking the untold benefits of next-generation office spaces

by Nathan Thomas • Comment, Flexible working, Property, Technology

Many associate the notion of futuristic office spaces, filled with equipment like sleep pods and beer taps, with companies that have a young workforce or challenger brand identity. The association is often linked to tech giants like Google, which created quite a stir when it originally revealed its indoor slides. Whilst the inclusion of playground furniture in the office is not right for every business, the assumption that unconventional workspaces should be limited to unconventional companies simply isn’t true. (more…)

November 15, 2023

People spending more time in offices in search of social interaction

by Neil Franklin • Flexible working, News, Wellbeing

Office workers now spend more time in the office, with the average creeping up to three and a half days per week compared to three days in 2022, according to a new report from international law firm, Gowling WLG. The report, titled Strategic moves: why the office is now a business-critical decision [registration], surveyed senior representatives responsible for making office lease decisions in companies, and a selection of office workers. It identifies that a more permanent approach to office usage is now emerging, as the shadow of the pandemic recedes, as well as demonstrating the changing metrics being applied by occupiers to decisions relating to premises requirements and the more complex environment for landlord asset management. (more…)

November 15, 2023

‘Return-to-office’ rates vary widely across Europe

by Jayne Smith • Flexible working, News

A new survey from JLL, Is hybrid really working? [registration] claims that the majority of international organisations (87 percent) are encouraging employees to work from the office at least some of the time. In fact, only 20 percent of employees who can work remotely all of the time or one-two days in the office now do so, down from 39 percent a year ago. However, the data demonstrates varying approaches to the so-called return to office across Europe, with France and Belgium leading, spending an average of 3.5 days working from the office. Germany, Netherlands, Spain and the UK are however lagging behind with an average of 2.5 days working from the office. (more…)

November 12, 2023

Want people to spend more time in the office? Give them a little piece of home

by Yaron Rosenblum • Comment, Workplace design

For many people, a large portion of the day is spent at the workplace. In fact, the average person will spend 90,000 hours at work over a lifetime. The Covid-19 pandemic saw the typical ‘workplace’ setting change for many people, after businesses around the globe were forced to adjust to a ‘work-from-home’ model. Now, three years later, we are starting to see more employees return to the office, with large corporations including JPMorgan, Chase, Apple and Google all announcing plans to bring their workers back to base. (more…)

October 9, 2023

Bosses need to get their priorities right, say office workers

by Jayne Smith • News, Wellbeing, Workplace

A new poll carried out in the US and UK claims that almost all office workers (93 percent) believe business leaders’ priorities need to shift in the current economic climate. the traditional role of leadership – as the future priority. The proportion is 98 percent of those aged 18-24. The study, Work Remastered, surveyed more than 1,000 office-based workers across the UK and the US and was carried out by consultants United Culture. (more…)

October 9, 2023

The future of work has no destination, there is only the journey

by Mark Eltringham • Comment, Workplace design

One of the truisms about depictions of the future is that they often have more to say about the world in which we live than the one to come. So, when George Orwell wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four the story goes that its title was derived by inverting the numbers of the year in which it was written – 1948. Whatever the truth of this, Orwell understood it was a book as much about the world in which he lived as the one it portrayed. Our images of the future are invariably refracted through the prism of the present. This is just as true for predictions about the future of work, many of which are explored in the new issue of IN Magazine.