Search Results for: Mark Eltringham

The latest issue of Insight is now available to view online

Chaplin (Modern Times)The new issue of the Insight newsletter is now available to view online here. This week, we look at the growth in demand for offices in the UK’s regions, the growth of interest in flexible working. Mark Eltringham argues for a more honest debate about workplace productivity, while Dave Coplin of Microsoft and one of the speakers at this year’s London Worktech argues we need to reimagine work completely. Workplace Week offers you a chance to visit some of the public sector’s most innovative workplaces including the HQ of the Department for Education. And we have news of a new task force which has been launched to define what zero carbon actually means with regard to domestic buildings. And if all that isn’t enough, it’s only meant to give a summary of the great things that have been on Insight this last week.

100% Design debate: Is there really a backlash against flexible working?

Ben Munn of Regus and Andrew Mawson of AWA

Ben Munn of Regus and Andrew Mawson of AWA

The decision by Yahoo to ban flexible working earlier this year prompted a bout of navel gazing based on the premise that this marked the beginning of a backlash against the practice. But was that really the case or did it instead prompt a mature and reassuringly widespread  debate about the nature of work and workplaces. Discussing this and related ideas today at 100% Design today will be Ben Munn, MD of Regus Enterprise and Andrew Mawson, MD of Advanced Workplace Associates, chaired by Insight publisher Mark Eltringham. The discussion starts at 3.30 in the Hanging Room in the Office zone.

Sound design: a debate on openness and privacy at work, 100% Design, 18 September

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Insight publisher Mark Eltringham will be chairing a debate at 100% Design on Wednesday the 18 September on the ever topical and ever changing issue of designing for sound. The discussion will consider whether we have the balance right when it comes to providing people with a mixture of spaces to work quietly and privately and others in which they can work with colleagues and even- dare we admit it – enjoy the racket they create? The panel includes noted workplace experts Tim Oldman of Leesman, Monica Parker of Morgan Lovell and Colin Rawlings of Icon who will discuss the conflicting forces involved and challenge with examples and data the lazy assumptions and received wisdom that can distort decision making on this most sensitive of topics.

The war against environmental cynicism puts an onus on suppliers to be honest

Roller Painting House Siding GreenGreenwash is one of those terms that has gone from needing an explanation to being in common usage in the space of a few years. The reason for that is quite simply that it is the perfect description of a particular form of marketing bullshit that we all recognise. However, while a degree of scepticism about what you hear from marketers is always healthy, but I fear the point has been reached where some people find it easy to dismiss real environmental claims as greenwash. The war against cynicism can partly be helped if more manufacturers and suppliers could get better at demonstrating the validity of their claims.

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Latest edition of Insight newsletter now available to view online

Access to Kinnarp's Trend Report 2013

The latest issue of the Insight newsletter features the Trend Report 2013 by Workplace furniture specialist Kinnarps [pictured], which focuses on eight key themes that will influence the workplace of the future. In another look into the future HR body the CIPD unveils a major new discussion document Megatrends: The trends shaping work and working lives. We look at the increasing role played by BYOD in retaining staff, while Mark Eltringham reflects on what Shakespeare can teach us about our obsession with technology. To view this week’s newsletter, which also reveals why London firms are looking to leave the capital and the challenge for FMs in embedding sustainability into business operations, click here.

Latest edition of Insight newsletter available to view online

Office Insight announces partnership with WorkTech 13

In the latest issue of the Insight newsletter we are pleased to announce a partnership with Worktech 13, which will be held at the British Museum in London on the 19th and 20th November. Over the next few months look out for content from some of the world’s foremost thinkers on office design and management including Frank Duffy, Philip Ross, Dave Coplin and Greg Lindsay. Also this week, according to two new property reports the London office market continues to thrive; why flexible workers may be limiting their career prospects and how desk size can influence behaviour. Regular contributor Simon Heath warns that the BIFM partnership with DWP may prove an ill-advised and short-lived union and Mark Eltringham hails the Design Museum’s move to the long empty Commonwealth Institute building in Kensington. To view this week’s newsletter click here.

What Jeremy Clarkson can’t teach us about workforce productivity

In 2011, one of Top Gear’s regular bits of lazy casual racism caused a bit more fuss than the rolling of eyes it typically deserves. The presenters had mocked a Mexican sports car with Richard Hammond – who has never said anything interesting or funny in his life – claiming  that ‘cars reflect national characteristics. A Mexican car’s just going to be a lazy, feckless, flatulent oaf with a moustache, leaning against a fence asleep, looking at a cactus with a blanket with a hole in the middle on as a coat.’ There was a bit more of this kind of stuff with Jeremy Clarkson suggesting that the Mexican ambassador to Britain would be too lazy to make any kind of complaint. He was wrong about that (he did) and they were all wrong about Mexicans anyway because according to a new report into global productivity,  Mexico has the world’s most productive workforce.

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NeoCon and ThinkFM offer two different views of the facilities management elephant

This week sees two events taking place on opposite sides of the pond that should hold a mirror up to the way we currently design and manage workplaces. In Chicago, it’s time for NeoCon, the annual office furniture behemoth held in the vast Merchandise Mart and attracting some 40,000 visitors, while in London it’s the distinctly  low-key Think FM conference from the BIFM held at the Royal College of Physicians – for today only, as they say. While these are two very different events in terms of scale, content and format and both are nakedly commercial, only one strikes me as particularly meaningful. And even that is only about the meaning of one part of the facilities management elephant.

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Artists sing about office furniture. Part 1 – Harry Nilsson

Artists sing about office furniture. Part 1 – Harry Nilsson

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Given the complete and utter failure of the world’s artists to draw inspiration from office furniture, this is likely to be the shortest series we’ve ever run. It will start and end here. I’d love to be proved wrong but there cannot be many artists prepared to use something as mundane as a desk to express their feelings about the lack of solidity in their lives. In this case the desk can be interpreted as God or – well – a desk. Nilsson was no sap of course. He was one of the most commercially successful artists of his era without extensive touring and counted amongst his drinking buddies both John Lennon and Keith Moon.

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Will the Great Trade Association Merger have any impact on office design?

Ceci n'est pas un bureauAnybody who has been working in and around the facilities management sector for any length of time will know that the FM profession/discipline (delete as appropriate) regularly undergoes protracted periods of existential angst about its role. It strikes me however that this is actually quite an easy question to deal with because the answer is the same as it is for similarly amorphous professions such as marketing. It all seems to depend on who you are and what you are trying to do. That’s the twist. The average facilities manager, like the Urban Spaceman, doesn’t exist. I might think that but it won’t stop the associations and institutes currently working together to establish a new super-body for FM in the UK having to continue the debate.

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Green Office Week kicks off with a focus on individual behaviour

elephant-in-the-roomThis week is Green Office Week. Obviously it’s corporate sponsored, self-designated and arbitrarily timed with all the ways that leaves it open to criticism. It also offers pretty standard advice for the most part and many people and organisations will be well aware of it.  What is interesting is that so much of the advice is about individual behaviour, across the daily themed topics. In some ways this is a welcome reminder that the solution to environmental issues is as much about personal behaviour and management as it is  technology. The answer to needlessly burning lights should be somebody remembering to turn them off, rather than a movement sensor. Or it should be both. In practice, people don’t meet their own stated commitments to the environment and there are some pretty good reasons for this.

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The biggest challenge is building flexibility into an office design

Flexible pencilThe design of offices and the furniture that fills them matters because of what they tell us about how we work, how organisations function and even what is happening in the economy. If you want to know what’s going on, take a look at the places we work and the things with which we surround ourselves and how they change over time. Because the way we work changes so quickly, buildings need to have flexibility built into them so that they meet our needs today but anticipate what we will need tomorrow.In his book How Buildings Learn, Stewart Brand outlines the process whereby buildings evolve over time to meet the changing needs of their occupants.

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