June 29, 2020
Search Results for: Gen Z
June 29, 2020
Winners announced for 2020 KI Award from Royal College of Art and Imperial College
by Freddie Steele • Company news
The winners of the annual KI Award, now in its fifth year, were announced in the lead up to the upcoming digital graduation show. The awards and cash prizes are given to final year students selected from the RCA’s ‘Design Products’ and the RCA/Imperial College London’s ‘Innovation Design Engineering’ double masters course. The winning projects showed an outstanding approach to functionality, durability, sustainability and enhancement to user experience for our future working or learning experiences. A summary of each award winner is included below. (more…)
June 26, 2020
Acts of kindness create a virtuous circle in the workplace
by Mark Eltringham • News, Wellbeing
This is the very definition of a Friday story. The results of a research project, published in the American Psychological Association journal Emotion suggests that the small kindnesses we show to others at work tend to propagate across an organisation. For the study, a group of researchers from the University of California told workers at Coca Cola’s Madrid headquarters that they were taking part in a piece of research to measure their levels of happiness, job satisfaction, relationships with colleagues (good and bad) and their positive and negative experiences of other people’s behaviour as well as an assessment of their own behaviour over a period of four weeks.
June 24, 2020
The links between coffee, shared ideas and the office go back a long way
by Mark Barrell • Briefing, Premium Content, Wellbeing, Workplace design
The BBC recently published a piece on its website to commemorate the 40th Anniversary of Ridley Scott’s movie Alien and what it could tell us about office design and the workplace (of whatever sort). One of the interesting points raised in the piece was how the depiction of the conditions on board the spaceship Nostromo did away with the gloss and swish of previous visions of the future, replaced by grime, exposed services and strictly utilitarian interiors. The environment was one of the characters, a trick Ridley Scott later repeated in Bladerunner. (more…)
June 23, 2020
Law firms plan overhaul of business structures in wake of pandemic
by Neil Franklin • News, Working culture
Around two thirds of legal firms plan to review their business structures and processes in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, and well over half are planning a major change in strategy. That’s according to a survey of more than 100 law firms of all sizes conducted by accountants and business advisors association MHA. The survey, carried out during lockdown, also claims that 85 percent of firms say the pandemic will have a ‘moderate’ or ‘major’ impact on fee income. Around 59 percent of firms say they will use the opportunity to change their business strategy with a focus on better IT, review of specialisms, and improving profitability. (more…)
June 19, 2020
A third of employees asked to commit furlough fraud in lockdown
by George Eltringham • News
New research on 2000 furloughed full time employees, suggests that a third of UK bosses are committing fraud and trying to ‘cash in’ by seeking to abuse the Government’s Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme (‘CJRS’) since lockdown. According to the survey by Crossland Employment Solicitors, 34 percent of employees have been asked by their boss to work while being furloughed by their company – an act of fraud under the current rules of the CJRS. (more…)
June 18, 2020
A third of workers feeling disconnected from company culture and colleagues
by George Eltringham • News, Working culture
Employee recognition provider Achievers, have today released research taking a look at whether employees in the UK feel connected to their company’s culture and colleagues during the COVID-19 pandemic. The research suggests that a third of British workers feel less connected to their workplace culture and colleagues due to the ongoing situation. (more…)
June 18, 2020
Positive employee experience expected to significantly dip as ‘a new burnout’ looms
by George Eltringham • News, Wellbeing
Kincentric today announced the results of a survey representing over 130,000 employees across 100 companies globally. The findings suggest a strong positive employee experience, however, Kincentric believes these are artificially high due to the extraordinary circumstances and will likely erode within nine months, which is consistent with how most people process change or loss, claims Global Culture & Engagement Practice Leader, Ken Oehler.
June 17, 2020
Time to apply the lessons we learned during lockdown
by Louise Bancroft • Features, Flexible working, Wellbeing
So far, 2020 has not gone to plan. For businesses, and the people they employ, the next few months may be just as bumpy, as each country, state and city takes its own approach to a phased return to work after lockdown. Today, in Houston, offices are limited to 25 percent capacity, in London, the underground is capped at 13-15 percent capacity, while in New Zealand and other countries hospitality and retail are returning with heightened hygiene measures and social distancing in place. (more…)
June 16, 2020
Virtual work has the potential to harm trust, social cohesion and knowledge sharing
by Neil Franklin • Flexible working, News, Wellbeing
Trust, social cohesion and information sharing are the most potentially vulnerable to damage when people work virtually, according to a study of around 750 academic papers conducted on behalf of the Advanced Workplace Institute (AWI), a global workplace management body. As organisations rapidly embrace home working and virtual work in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, the study warns that without active management to respond to changes in working, team dynamics are under risk with a knock on effect on both employee happiness and performance. (more…)
June 16, 2020
Workplace technology enters new `golden age`
by Neil Franklin • News, Technology
A ‘golden age’ of workplace technology could be coming, in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic according to a new report, co-authored by Professor Michael Dickmann from Cranfield University which investigated the Global Mobility response to COVID-19. The report claims that some multinational companies were completely lacking crisis response plans when the pandemic hit, and many are now adjusting their goals because of movement restrictions and employee wellbeing. (more…)
June 19, 2020
We are in danger of reanimating some bad ideas about work
by Mark Eltringham • Comment, Working culture