Search Results for: business

November 11, 2014

More than three-quarters of workers are reluctant to switch employer, finds CIPD

There is little appetite among workers to switch employer, despite the growth in employment prospects in the UK. This is according to the CIPD quarterly Labour Market Outlook report which suggests that employment will again grow strongly in the final quarter of 2014 but wage growth is likely to remain subdued. The latest report shows that near-term employment expectations have risen to a seven year high, which can be partially attributed to fewer employers looking to make redundancies, as well as an expected continuation of the trend for many employers to be hiring new staff. The proportion of employers reporting hard-to-fill vacancies is broadly unchanged (44%) and two fifths of these are reported as ‘skill shortage’ vacancies. With over three-quarters (77%) of employees saying that they aren’t currently looking to change employers, there is a resultant reduction in churn amongst the existing workforce. This, combined with a growing number of EU immigrants and older people seeking work and an ongoing skills shortage, goes some way to explaining weak pay growth. (more…)

November 10, 2014

Stockholm is Europe’s top tech start up location, claims interactive report

by Mark Eltringham • Cities, News, Property, Technology

A new study by videoconferencing firm Atomico shows that the European centre for billion dollar technology start ups in Europe is Stockholm, followed by London and Berlin. The interactive visualisation from the survey shows that Stockholm is second only to Silicon Valley as a successful founding location for successful Internet businesses with a current market valuation of over $1 billion founded since 2003. Silicon Valley remains in a completely different league to locations on the rest of the planet with 53 startups, followed by Beijing with 17, New York with seven and Stockholm with five. London, meanwhile, has only three tech start up businesses in the £1 billion category despite its reputation as a hotbed of tech entrepreneurialism, the same number as Berlin. According to the report, Stockholm’s ability to foster successful tech startups is even more impressive based on its population of around one million, which makes it the second most prolific per capita location worldwide,with 6.3 billion-dollar companies per million people compared to Silicon Valley with 6.9.

November 10, 2014

New report urges firms to protect against BYOD security breaches

by Mark Eltringham • Flexible working, News, Technology

According to a new report from BT, security breaches related to the practice of Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) and related forms of mobile working have affected 41 percent of UK organisations over the last year. Despite this, the report claims organisations are still not taking sufficient measures to protect themselves against threats such as lost or stolen devices and malware infections. The report reveals that at least one fifth of respondents’ organisations that suffered a mobile security breach, experienced more than four incidents in the last year. The research is based on a total of 640 interviews with IT decision makers from large sized organisations (1000 or more employees) across 11 regions: Australia, Brazil, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Middle East, Singapore, Spain, South Africa, UK and USA. Respondents’ organisations were from the financial, retail and public sectors. It shows that uptake of BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) and COPE (Corporately Owned Personally-Enabled) devices is very high, with 95 percent of UK organisations allowing employees to use these devices for work purposes.

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November 7, 2014

Worldwide fall in levels of trust by employees in their workplace leaders

by Sara Bean • News, Workplace

They say a fish rots from the head, and with overwhelming evidence this week that workplaces are torn by backbiting, lying and bitching, a global analysis on workplace trust reveals a deterioration in the levels of trust employees have for their bosses. Interaction Associates annual workplace trust research, Building Workplace Trust 2014/15, found that more than half of the people surveyed gave their organisation low marks for trust and effective leadership. More than half of the 500 people surveyed at companies worldwide, give their organisation low-to-poor marks for trust and effective leadership. When asked to rate the statement “Employees have a high level of trust in management and the organisation”, just four out of ten agreed. The majority (58%) found their organisation lacking, and in fact, trust may be going from bad to worse at many organisations, as a quarter (26%) of those surveyed say they trust their boss less this year than in 2013.

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November 7, 2014

Orgatec 2014 focuses on collaboration, quiet and wellbeing in the workplace

by Anna King • Comment, Events, Furniture, Workplace design

Anna King reports from the biennial office furniture and interiors fair Orgatec, which took place recently in Cologne: Collaboration seemed to be king once again at this year’s Orgatec trade fair in Cologne, so much so that you’d be hard pressed to find a conventional workstation amongst the thousands of products on display. Even ergonomic task chairs in the traditional sense were thin on the ground. Senator’s offering was typical in its focus on collaborative work and the provision of work settings. As well as the Ad-Lib Scholar range for educational establishments, it presented the Ad-Lib Work Lounge multipurpose chair, both the work of British design studio PearsonLloyd. This upholstered model complete with headrest is available on glides or castors so it can slot into a multitude of workplace scenarios. Shown in some rich shades such as moss green and turquoise, it comes complete with a fold-down worksurface for brainstorming or other group working.

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November 6, 2014

Unethical behaviour at work may reflect a blame culture with little trust or integrity

by Sara Bean • Comment, Wellbeing, Workplace

In the same week Mind revealed that many workers are reluctant to admit to feeling stressed, comes data which shows high levels of unethical behaviour in Britain’s workplaces. And the two pieces of research are not unrelated. In a survey of over 1,600 managers by the Institute of Leadership & Management (ILM), almost three quarters (72%) had witnessed employees lying to cover their mistakes, with the same number reporting their colleagues cut corners and delivered substandard work. A further 68% had seen people badmouthing team members behind their backs. The fault lies in workplaces that foster a blame culture, where staff are worried about owning up to mistakes. This causes undue stress and people taking a combative, rather than collaborative approach. The findings formed part of ILM’s ‘The truth about trust’ report into trust and integrity in the UK workplace, which highlights the business benefits of high-trust high-integrity working environments. (more…)

November 6, 2014

Two new reports claim firms and employees are out of step on flexible working

by Mark Eltringham • Flexible working, Legal news, News, Workplace

The two latest stones to be tossed into the flexible working maelstrom in the hope of creating a ripple both suggest that employers are out of step with the expectations of their staff when it comes to working hours and conditions. The CIPD launched a new report Getting Smart About Agile Working, at the start of its annual conference in Manchester on 5 November which claims that a third (35 percent) of employees would like to change their working arrangements with nearly half (43 percent) saying they would most like to change the start or finish time of their working day. Meanwhile a separate report from BUPA claims that half of employees of SMEs think their employees underestimate the part that benefits including flexible working have to play in the overall feel of the company, and a similar number (51 percent) believe that not offering such benefits damages an employer’s attractiveness to new recruits.

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November 5, 2014

Employers warned that landmark legal decision could cost them dearly

by Sara Bean • Legal news, News, Workplace

A ruling by the Employment Appeal Tribunal (EAT) is significant and could be potentially financially crippling, employers have been warned, following yesterday’s ground-breaking decision by the EAT to uphold an earlier Employment Tribunal’s decision that both compulsory and voluntary overtime must be included in addition to basic salary for the purposes of calculating a worker’s holiday pay. According to Shivali Chaudhry, an Employment solicitor at law firm Hamlins LLP: “Not only will employers have to increase the amount of holiday pay they pay workers to take into account all overtime, they may also face historic underpayment liabilities going back up to 16 years in respect of some workers.” However, Mike Emmott, Employee Relations Adviser at the CIPD says the ruling still leaves much to be resolved – particularly on the issue of backdating. He said: “The ruling means that employers will have to change how they calculate holiday pay in future to take account of voluntary overtime. However it does seem to have limited the scope for substantive retrospective claims, which was the biggest concern in terms of possible costs for employers.” (more…)

November 5, 2014

Failure to adopt strategic facilities management costs UK £1bn annually

by Mark Eltringham • Facilities management, News, Public Sector

A new report from the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) claims that over a quarter of UK organisations are failing to adopt a strategic approach to facilities management. For those firms without this approach, the annual average cost is calculated by the report’s authors as £120,000, suggesting a total cost to the economy of nearly £1 billion. The claim is based on a study of around 700 organisations in both the public and private sector and across a range of organisational types and sizes. Around half of those with a ‘dedicated FM programme’ said that doing so had saved their organisation money, 59 per cent reported an increase in productivity, a fifth (21 percent)reported a drop in absenteeism and nearly half (49 percent) claimed it had made them more attractive to customers. The best results were recorded in the public sector with 70 per cent saying strategic facilities management had increased productivity and 71 percent claiming they had seen an increase in employee engagement.

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November 4, 2014

Badmouthing, arse-covering and bluff are main unethical behaviours in workplace

by Mark Eltringham • Knowledge, News, Workplace

A new report from the Institute of Leadership and Management reveals the most common unethical behaviours displayed by employees in the workplace. Unsurprisingly they form a catalogue of low-level, generalised obfuscation, bluff, blame-shifting, bullshit and outright lying that will be very familiar to many people. The three most cited unethical behaviours according to the survey of 1,600 managers are cutting corners (72 percent), lying to cover one’s own mistakes (72 percent) and badmouthing colleagues (68 percent). People are, unsurprisingly, also prone to pass the buck when they miss deadlines (67 percent), cover up for the mistakes of colleagues (63 percent) and pinch low value items from work (52 percent). The ILM claims in its ‘The Truth About Trust’ report that these behaviours arise from a miasma of misunderstanding of what might be considered unethical behaviour, although equally they could just be things that people do if they think they can get away with them.

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November 4, 2014

Built environment argues economic benefits of meeting climate change challenge

by Sara Bean • Environment, Facilities management, News

Following the publication of the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, warning about the effects of global climate change; the chief executives and senior leaders of 18 major businesses in the construction and property sector have written an open letter, published in The Daily Telegraph to highlight the economy opportunity presented by climate change and to defend the UK’s ground breaking Climate Change Act. In the letter, which includes signatories from Land Securities Group, BAM Construct and Balfour Beatty, the leaders warn that “undermining of the Climate Change Act is deeply unhelpful, and creates uncertainty”, and that “it should continue to be the central framework against which to deliver clear and consistent policy. It states: “Our businesses are convinced that Britain can and should be a world leader, and that far from being a burden to UK Plc, clear commitment to tackling climate change will open up opportunities for businesses both at home and abroad.”

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November 3, 2014

BIM adoption set to soar in UK and US over next two years, claims report

by Mark Eltringham • Architecture, Facilities management, News, Property, Technology, Workplace design

Building owners are embracing building information modelling (BIM) as a powerful technology benefitting the design process, managing project schedules, controlling costs and minimizing project errors, according to the recent McGraw-Hill Construction SmartMarket Report “The Business Value of BIM for Owners”. The latest report focuses on the business value of BIM from the perspective of building owners in the United States and United Kingdom for whom the technology has been deployed. Initially adopted as a design tool and later evolving into an important tool for contractors, its adoption among building owners is expanding, the report claims, and that building owners are becoming more directly involved as “their power is even greater to align BIM use with their specific goals, engage more effectively with all stakeholders and extend the value of BIM beyond construction into facility management.” The study claims that 40 percent of US owners and 38 percent of UK owners expect that more than 75 percent of their projects will involve the technology in just two years.