Search Results for: business

February 15, 2016

The death of the office meme does not fit with a thriving property market ⁰

by Mark Eltringham • Comment, Flexible working, Property, Workplace design

You don’t have to look very far to find somebody or other proclaiming the death of the office. A quick Google search will come up with over 73 million results for the past year alone. This has been going on for decades, but a search engine now gives us a far better idea than the occasional feature in a trade magazine of just how the idea has evolved into a full-blown meme. The narrative has become so entrenched that the people who use it – typically the ignorant, the self-interested, the lazy and the ill-informed – rarely have their premise challenged. Usually it is an idea appended to some disruptive and supposedly apocalyptic trend and, at the moment, office kryptonite comes in the form of coworking, where once it was flexible working or mobile technology. And yet, for all the non-fatal wounds these innovations have inflicted on the traditional office, the idea of people travelling to work alongside each other in shared buildings endures.

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February 15, 2016

Government needs to play catch up with needs of the self-employed ⁰

by Mark Eltringham • Flexible working, News, Technology

Politicians and legislators are failing to keep pace with the changing nature of work and as a result many of the UK’s growing army of freelancers feel like second class citizens. That is the key finding of a new report commissioned by the Government and authored by entrepreneur Julie Deane. She claims that the Government should do more to bring the self-employed into line with legislation affecting the wider working population, including access to higher rates of parental leave and pay. The report sets out ten key recommendations, notably that the parental allowance should be brought into line with the rules for employees, who are paid a higher portion of their salary for the first six weeks of statutory maternity pay before the percentage drops. It also suggests that the education system should do more to prepare young people for a changing world of work and that more should be done to offer a choice of workplaces for the self-employed..

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February 15, 2016

Employers must meet productivity challenges of paying Living Wage ⁰

by Sara Bean • Facilities management, Flexible working, News, Workplace

A quarter of private sector employees will be directly affected by the implementation of the new National Living Wage, (NLW) over double the proportion of public sector employees. The research, conducted by the Social Market Foundation in partnership with Adecco Group UK & Ireland, warns these employers will need to overcome significant productivity challenges in order to cope with the cost. The NLW cut-off at age 25 means businesses will be faced with potential discrepancies in wages across their younger workforce. While almost a fifth (18 percent) of employees who will benefit from the NLW are younger workers surprisingly, workers aged 50 or over will make up a third. Part-time workers make up around half of the workforce in severely affected workplaces. The research also found that the workplaces severely affected by new National Living Wage tend to have low-skilled employees and are much less likely to offer in-work training.

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February 14, 2016

Office design & stress + Manchester office shortage + Global flexible working ⁰

by Sara Bean • Facilities management, Flexible working, Newsletter, Wellbeing, Workplace, Workplace design

In this week’s Insight Newsletter; Mark Eltringham explains what Douglas Adams could teach us about workplace design and Sara Bean says there are fewer promotion prospects for part time working mums. Rise in worldwide take-up of flexible working; £1bn in savings if NHS made better use of its estate and Manchester may soon run out of Grade A office space. 2016 will see an exodus of Tech firm’s from cities, almost three quarters of small businesses believe co-working spaces are the ideal for start-ups and unpredictability and workplace environment are two most common factors influencing work related stress. Download the latest issue of Work&Place and access an Insight Briefing produced in partnership with Connection, which looks at agile working in the public sector. Visit our new events page, follow us on Twitter and join our LinkedIn Group to discuss these and other stories.

February 12, 2016

Unpredictability and office environment are key causes of workplace stress ⁰

by Sara Bean • News, Wellbeing, Workplace

The two most common factors influencing work related stress levels are unpredictability (26 percent) and workplace environment (21 percent) according to a poll by US jobs site CareerCast.com. The results, based on 834 respondents found that most of the respondents (62 percent) rated their jobs as highly stressful, while just 11 percent felt the amount of stress on the job was low. Other key stressors were deadlines (20 percent) and safety of others (16 percent). Interestingly, few people felt that length of work day/week (7 percent), personal well-being in danger (5 percent), potential for promotion (3 percent) and travel (1 percent) were major job stressors. Any number of factors can contribute to an unpredictable workplace; either the flow of responsibility changes from day-to-day with new tasks added or changed at random intervals or expectations may change. Running a close second is the workplace environment and culture, which includes interactions with bosses, co-workers and clients/customers.

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February 11, 2016

New chair of Women on Boards to review FTSE 350 representation ⁰

by Sara Bean • Legal news, News, Public Sector, Workplace

The government has appointed a new chair to carry on the work of Lord Davies’s Women on Boards Review which was set up in February 2011 to determine the obstacles preventing more women from reaching senior executive positions. The Chair of GlaxoSmithKline, and former Chair of RBS and Sainsbury’s, Sir Philip Hampton, has been appointed to lead the review of representation at FTSE 350 companies. Dame Helen Alexander, Chair of UBM, will take on the role of Deputy Chair to the review. The new review will continue on from Davies’s voluntary business led initiative, which saw female representation on boards in the FTSE 100 rise from 12.5 percent to beyond the target of 25 percent. The next phase of the review will focus on one of the key recommendations from Lord Davies’s report, building a pipeline for female executives and emerging non-executive directors to improve representation at the executive layer of companies.

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February 9, 2016

Better workplace design and management could save the NHS £1 billion ⁰

by Mark Eltringham • Facilities management, News, Property, Public Sector, Workplace design

The National Health Service could make around £1bn in savings if it made better use of its estate, including more efficient workplace design, according to Lord Carter’s wide-ranging 18-month review into the operations and productivity of the NHS. The wide ranging review claimed that a total of £5bn could be saved by adopting a range of best practice standards. Carter examined 32 hospitals as well as looking at systems in the US, Germany, Australia, Italy and France for the report. Among the differences highlighted were variations in the use of floorspace, with one trust using 12 percent for non-clinical purposes and another using 69 percent. Overall, the review suggests that the NHS could save £1bn by 2020 via from the better management of estates, such as lighting, heating and the utilisation of floor space. The challenges of running the NHS estate efficiently have been something of an issue for some time, as we have reported.

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February 9, 2016

Report reveals huge surge in use of flexible working worldwide ⁰

by Mark Eltringham • Flexible working, News, Technology

Three quarters of companies worldwide have now introduced flexible working to enable employees to vary their hours and work from home or on the move according to one of the largest global surveys of its kind conducted with 8,000 employers and employees across three continents. The Flexible: friend or foe? survey was commissioned by Vodafone and took place between September and October 2015. The countries surveyed were Germany, Hong Kong, India, Italy, Netherlands, Singapore, South Africa, Spain, the UK and the USA. A total of 8,000 employers and employees were interviewed online. The rapid adoption of high-speed mobile data services, fixed-line broadband and cloud services is playing an integral role in this workplace revolution: 61 percent of respondents now use their home broadband service to access work applications and 24 percent use a mobile data connection via their smartphone, tablet or laptop with a broadband dongle.

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February 9, 2016

Career progression stalled by lack of respect for mums who work part-time ⁰

by Sara Bean • Comment, Flexible working, Legal news, News, Workplace

A recent UKCES report suggested it is career and personal choices that explain the gender pay gap, because so many women work part time after children. Now a new report supports the view that the dearth of women in senior management roles is a result of a lack of access to promotion for those in a part time role. A survey conducted by Mothers Mean Business, claims that mothers returning to work are frustrated at the lack of opportunities to further their careers. The survey canvassed the views of women from a wide range of sectors and varying levels of seniority and found that nearly three quarters (71 percent) returned to work part-time after having their children but 83 percent feel there has been a potential or definite limit to their career options, 71 percent haven’t received a promotion since working part-time and 42 percent said they had received negative comments from colleagues after switching to part-time hours.

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February 8, 2016

High urban rents and falling rural land prices drive flight of startups to countryside ⁰

by Mark Eltringham • Flexible working, News, Property, Technology, Wellbeing

We’ve reported before on the flight of tech firms and other startups from the UK’s cities to the countryside. Now it appears that 2016 will see an acceleration in the exodus, as a consequence of the perfect storm of expensive rents in the cities, falling rural land prices and a growing number of people using technology and improving digital infrastructure to live somewhere they feel they have a more balanced life. That is the striking conclusion of a new survey from the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) and Royal Agricultural University (RAU) indicates. Over the second half of 2015, non-farmers, such as those starting-up cottage industries, accounted for around 25 per cent of rural land sales. This figure was up from just 18 per cent in the first half of 2015, according to the RICS/RAU Rural Land Market Survey H2 2015 and the trend was strongest in South East England where non-farmers accounted for 32 per cent of all sales.

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February 8, 2016

CIPD joins forces with the UK Government to tackle workplace cyber security ⁰

by Neil Franklin • Legal news, News, Technology, Workplace

Human resources has a key role to play in improving the cyber security of UK workplaces. That is the key challenge addressed by a new joint initiative from the Chartered Institute for Personnel and the Development and the Department of Culture, Media and Sport. Data breaches cost companies up to an average of £1.46 million are often a result of human error and malice, according to the CIPD. The initiative includes a free online course called Cyber Security for HR professionals as part of a wider initiative to promote the importance of cyber security at work, as well as the critical role that HR has to play in ‘mitigating the competency and behavioural risks present in the workplace’. Government figures released last year indicated that the costs associated with the most severe breaches now start at £1.46 million for large businesses, up from £600,000 in 2014, and can reach up to £310,000 for small businesses, up from £115,000.

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February 5, 2016

Embracing the inevitable rise of the robots in the workplace ⁰

by Gary Chandler • Comment, Flexible working, Technology, Workplace design

We often have reason these days to speculate on the truth of an idea known as Amara’s Law. First coined by the researcher Roy Amara it states that “we tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run”. But defining what we mean by short and long term can be very difficult when technology is changing so quickly. Nothing better illustrates this than the issue of how automation will transform society and workplaces. For the past few years, the effects have mainly been the subject of academic and scientific research alongside some lurid headlines in the mainstream media. So, a fairly typical 2013 paper from researchers at Oxford University assessed the risk faced by over 700 professions and discovered that nearly half of all jobs in the US could be categorised as at high risk of automation. Less academic studies such as a report published last year by Deloitte draw similar conclusions.