Search Results for: big data

February 8, 2019

Half of HR departments plan to offer new employee benefits

by Neil Franklin • News, Wellbeing, Workplace

According to Gallagher’s Benefits Strategy & Benchmarking Survey (registration required), 45 percent of HR practitioners are planning changes to current employee benefit offerings amid a highly competitive labour market. The survey shows an increasing number of organisations are fully aware of the measurable impact that benefits have on engagement and productivity. Among HR practitioners planning changes, 72 percent are seeking to enhance benefits, thereby improving their employer brand and becoming more competitive in recruitment. The second-most popular planned change is improving flexibility in benefits, with 47 percent attempting to bolster flexible options to extend individual choice. (more…)

February 6, 2019

Majority of businesses fail to see a return on their technology investments

by Neil Franklin • News, Technology

According to a new report from Accenture, the majority of businesses don’t see a return on their technology investments and just 14 percent of businesses manage to realise the full potential of their tech investments. Roughly $3.2 trillion was spent on new technology in the last five years. Businesses that were most successful with their investments were the ones investing in bold moves, rather than incremental shifts.

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February 5, 2019

UK cities joining the global movement to net zero building

by Natasha Stokes • Cities, Environment, Features

The UK is joining a global drive towards a ‘net zero carbon’ future, with its biggest cities setting ambitious decarbonisation targets in an effort to reduce their impact on the environment. Manchester plans to be a carbon-neutral city by 2038, while Bristol aims for full decarbonisation by 2030. In London, all new buildings will be net zero carbon by 2030, as the UK strives to meet targets set by the Paris Climate Agreement.

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February 1, 2019

Millennial headlines, eternal workplace truths, the pathologisation of sitting and some other stuff

by Mark Eltringham • Facilities management, Features, Technology, Wellbeing, Workplace design

The New York Times asked an interesting question this week. “Why Are Young People Pretending to Love Work?” it demanded, begging the immediate response ‘for the same reason everybody else does’. If only that pat, facetious response were enough to satisfy the actual questions concealed by the typically misleading headline. What the article actually wants to know is why some members of one particular tribe of young people have a toxic relationship with work. And that tribe (of course) is made up of the diverse, attractive, urbanite, coffee-fixated, stock image Millennials working for the world’s tech giants. Interesting in so far as it goes, but this tribe is not homogeneous to begin with and does not represent the world’s ‘young people’. It’s beyond time we stopped working on the basis that it does. Change the headlines.

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February 1, 2019

Are these the 2019 Top Employers to work for in the UK

by Neil Franklin • Company news, Wellbeing, Workplace

The Top Employers Institute, a certifier recognising employers that provide world-class employee conditions, has released its list of Certified UK Top Employers for 2019. Over 600 HR professionals gathered at London’s Hilton on Park Lane, on the 31st January 2019, to recognise the best employers in the UK. (more…)

January 24, 2019

Australian designers are fundamentally reshaping workplaces around the world

by Bronte Turner • Comment, Workplace design

Earlier this year, the QS World University Rankings revealed that the University of Melbourne, the University of Sydney and the University of New South Wales are better places to study architecture and the built environment than some Ivy League universities. The Asia-Pacific region accounted for eight of the top 20 architecture schools from the region. As a result, there’s an incredible pool of talent coming from Australia and entering the global market.

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January 21, 2019

Pointless meetings set to cost organisations $541bn this year

by Neil Franklin • News

Professionals spend two hours a week in pointless meetings, which will add up to over $541bn worth of resource around the world in 2019. That is the main claim in a new report from Doodle. The State of Meetings Report 2019, calls on proprietary data from the firm alongside new research conducted with 6,528 professionals in the UK, Germany and the USA. The report claims to be a comprehensive look at the time taken up by cancelled or unnecessary meetings, inefficient ways of working and preferred methods of meeting and features expert comment from organisational academics and psychologists.

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January 11, 2019

Good managers shown to play a crucial role in enhancing worker performance

by Sara Bean • News, Workplace

Employers make extensive investments in their employees; investing in hiring and retaining workers that match the firm’s needs. Now new research summarized by Kathryn Shaw, Stanford University, USA suggests that the hiring and training of good bosses may carry even more weight when it comes to workers’ performance. The study in the new IZA World of Labor Report shows a good boss can enhance the performance of their employees and can lower the quit rate. Good bosses have some universal traits: they coach and teach and offer insight into the strategy of the firm. According to Shaw economists are increasingly finding better data to measure the effects of bosses on workers’ performance, as well as the sources of these effects. A recent study of workers in a large firm that performs technology-based service (TBS) jobs found that the move from an average quality boss to one in the 90th percentile raised worker productivity by six units per hour, on a mean productivity of ten units per hour. Thus, when workers move from an average boss to a high-quality boss, productivity could rise by 50 percent. The study also showed that workers were more likely to quit when faced with bad bosses.

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December 17, 2018

Don’t be a turkey, get on the commercial property gravy train

by Jo Sutherland • Comment, Property

Last week, the RICS Commercial Property conference tackled the biggest issues impacting the built environment sector, arming delegates with fragments of the formula for future success. The morning CEO Question Time panel put a trio of CEOs in the spotlight. In addition to airing concerns about the current political climate, rapidly shifting societal attitudes, diversity and inclusion, the ageing population coupled with the ongoing housing shortage, climate change and the complexities involved in exploring new business models to drive and diversify revenue, they all zoomed in on the accelerated pace of change we’re witnessing, crowning it the key challenge for today’s C-suite.

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December 11, 2018

Report into the glass cliff claims women still need to break the glass ceiling

by Sara Bean • News, Workplace

Given the latest U turn regarding Brexit, with beleaguered British Prime Minister Theresa May announcing the cancellation of a commons vote on the agreement, a new report into the so called “glass cliff” appointment of women is pretty timely. The term “glass cliff” was coined by researchers Ryan and Haslam in the early 2000s to describe a phenomenon in which women are more likely than men to be promoted to precarious management positions with a higher risk of failure. Aside from May, exemplar cases often used to support the theory include Marissa Mayer, former CEO of Yahoo and Andrea Nahles, Social Democrat party leader in the German Bundestag. (more…)

December 7, 2018

Accelerating rate of digital tech and smart buildings to transform the built environment

by Sara Bean • AI, Cities, Facilities management, News, Technology, Workplace design

Technology is in the process of transforming almost every aspect of society, with change happening at an “accelerating rate,” and this is being made possible due of simultaneous rapid advances in several key areas of technology. This is according to a new White Paper on ‘Megatrends: Smart Building Technology’ from BSRIA (registration required) that predicts this will have a huge impact on construction and building services; from the way buildings are constructed to how they are managed and interact with occupants. (more…)

December 6, 2018

Rise in number of UK workers looking to leave their job, despite Brexit concerns

by Sara Bean • Legal news, News, Workplace

The ongoing uncertainty around Brexit has had little impact on both workers’ desire for job stability, and businesses’ assessments of their economic prospects according to Gartner’s latest Global Talent Monitor report. In fact, the UK reported the highest business confidence rating of all European countries surveyed at 60, and above the global average of 57. For employers this has the knock effect that the number of UK employees looking to stay in their current job has fallen sharply over the past 12 months, as 23 percent of employees indicated a low intent to stay with their current employer, a 13per cent increase from the same period last year and 10 percent higher than the current global average (13 percent). While fewer UK workers are committed to staying with their current employers, the number of workers who reported a higher willingness to go above and beyond at work remained flat.