May 17, 2021

Long working hours increase deaths from heart disease and stroke, says WHO

Long working hours led to 745,000 deaths from stroke and ischemic heart disease in 2016, a 29 per cent increase since 2000, according to the latest estimates by the World Health Organization and the International Labour Organization published in Environment International today. In what the authors claim is the first global analysis of the loss of life and health associated with working long hours, WHO and ILO estimate that, in 2016, 398 000 people died from stroke and 347,000 from heart disease as a result of having worked at least 55 hours a week. Between 2000 and 2016, the number of deaths from heart disease due to long hours increased by 42 percent, and from stroke by 19 percent. (more…)

May 13, 2021

The pivotal role of remote working in the journey to jab the nation

by Michael Whitmore • Comment, Flexible working

At 6.31 a.m. on Tuesday, December 8, 2020, the UK became the first country in the world to administer the COVID-19 vaccine. Just over five months earlier, I had been deployed to the NHS England and NHS Improvement COVID-19 vaccination programme to help drive the highly complex design and planning needed to bring the nation to this point. My role involved leading the set up and embedding of the Estates, Equipment, Consumables and Logistics workstream. The purpose of this was to establish and combine the new and existing infrastructure required in England to manage the distribution, regulation and administration of multiple vaccines so that all systems would be ready to vaccinate on the ‘go-live’ date. (more…)

May 11, 2021

UK business leaders pave the way for a hybrid working future

by Jayne Smith • Flexible working, News, Working culture

New research by Applaud, claims that UK business HR decision makers are paving the way for a new era of work post-pandemic, with organisations across the country looking to close or downsize their offices and focus instead on hybrid, remote working. (more…)

May 5, 2021

Use of flexible working hours has dropped during the pandemic

by Jayne Smith • Flexible working, News, Working lives

While working from home has surged in recent months, the use of flexible working hours – such as part-time, flexi-time and compressed hours – has fallen over the course of the Coronavirus pandemic, according to new CIPD analysis. (more…)

April 22, 2021

Business leaders lose touch with remote working employees

by Jayne Smith • Business, Flexible working, News

EMEA business leaders are out of touch with what employees want in the hybrid workplace experience, and 66 percent of organisations plan to adopt a different operating model than they had before the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a new survey from Unisys Corporation. (more…)

April 22, 2021

Relationships with colleagues are harder to build while remote working

by Jayne Smith • Flexible working, News, Working culture

New research by employee engagement and culture app, Totem, claims that 54 percent of workers feel it has been harder to build relationships with colleagues while working from home. The results demonstrate the difficulty many have faced over the past year, with 58 percent also saying that remote working has made joining a new company harder. (more…)

April 21, 2021

Problems at home impact employee creativity more than problems at work

by Jayne Smith • News, Wellbeing, Working lives

Feeling ostracised by family members has a negative effect on employee creativity, more so than feeling ostracised at work, claims new research from Nazarbayev University Graduate School of Business. (more…)

April 21, 2021

HR professionals expect employees to split their time between the office and home

by Jayne Smith • Flexible working, News, Working lives

Research commissioned by CANCOM, conducted with UK HR professionals about post-COVID work habits claims that only one-in-ten organisations does not intend to run a hybrid way of working – with nearly two-thirds (65 percent) of HR professionals of the opinion that employees will divide their time between the office and home after all COVID restrictions have lifted. (more…)

April 20, 2021

Nearly a million workers struggling with mental wellbeing due to remote working

by Jayne Smith • News, Wellbeing, Working lives

As April is Stress Awareness Month, Instant Offices researched how the last year has affected employees mental health also what business and individual employees can do to improve and support mental wellbeing. (more…)

April 16, 2021

Hybrid working risks becoming a meaningless term

by Ben Gillam • Comment, Flexible working, Workplace design

Hybrid working runs the risk of becoming a blanket term, interpreted on a very surface level, when it has the potential to offer a much greater opportunity for businesses to open up and re-examine the culture and experience of their staff, alongside where they want to take their business in the future, as well as fast-tracking mental health and wellbeing to play a central role in workplace strategy. (more…)

April 16, 2021

A fifth of UK workers feel remote working has reduced recognition in the workplace

by Jayne Smith • Flexible working, News, Working culture

Research from Ezra, provider of digital coaching claims that a fifth of UK workers feel they get less recognition within their career as a direct result of working remotely. It remains to be seen to what extent we will return to a full working environment, as Covid restrictions see many continue to work from home for part of, if not their whole working week. (more…)

April 7, 2021

The binary choices and multiple outcomes of flexible working

by Mark Eltringham • Comment, Flexible working

A year of unnecessarily binary conversation about work leads inevitably to this. A stupid question. Is Big Tech going off work from home? Betteridge’s Law takes care of that, just as it did another question from 12 months ago. Even though the article is slightly better than the headline, the insistence that the only two choices we have are home or office remains. (more…)