Search Results for: communicating

July 19, 2018

When it comes to change management, culture sometimes eats strategy for breakfast

by Gary Chandler • Features, Flexible working, Workplace design

21st Century organisations are under constant pressure to evolve. They are beset by a number of forces that demand they change constantly. These include the need to restructure the organisation, adapt to new technologies, respond to competitors and changes in the economy and legislative environment. Inevitably, this constant need to change affects both people and the built environment in very profound ways. However, according to a study of Culture and Change Management published by the Katzenbach Center, only around half of all transformation initiatives meet their objects over time. Among the biggest obstacles to successful change management cited by the study is change fatigue, which is characterised by a lack of empathy and a widespread failure to engage with the change process.

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June 12, 2018

Firms ignoring employee anxieties about workplace communications

by Neil Franklin • News, Wellbeing

UK companies are failing to support employees suffering with work-related performance anxiety, the business world’s equivalent to stage fright, despite it being a regular occurrence for many workers, according to new research. RADA Business, the commercial subsidiary of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art which provides communication skills training for corporate individuals, has published the report Beating Workplace Performance Anxiety, which surveyed 1000 workplaces. The report found that, on average, workers report feeling anxious at least once a week (five times per month). Despite this, few workplaces act effectively to counter incidents of workplace communications anxiety. Only 13 percent of people surveyed said that anxieties round communicating in the workplace are picked up and resolved by the management team.

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January 30, 2018

Public sector procurement must foster digital innovation and growth says report

by Sara Bean • Facilities management, News, Public Sector, Technology

If the Government is to deliver its plans of driving digital transformation to improve the UK’s public services it must make a step change in procurement within central government and the wider public sector. That is one of the main findings of Procuring the Smarter State: key steps to promote innovation and growth in the public sector, published today by techUK. The Government spent more than £12.2bn with SMEs in 2015/16 and thousands more tech SMEs have signed up to sell their services to Government in the last year through agreements like G-Cloud and Digital Outcomes and Services. But the Government needs to do more if it is to reach its aspiration of spending one pound in every three with SMEs by 2022. This new report sets out how procurement can act as a tool for Government to deliver its vision for the future of public services and use public sector procurement to help foster innovation in the supplier community.

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January 11, 2018

Anxiety over communications skills performance affects majority of senior leaders

by Sara Bean • News, Wellbeing, Workplace

Employees in senior positions are more prone to experiencing workplace performance anxiety than any other role, despite their extra experience and authority, claims new research. The report by conducted by RADA in Business, the commercial subsidiary of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art found that the highest rates of anxiety for directors are around communicating, affecting 94 percent of those surveyed. 39 percent of senior directors cite networking with new business prospects and pitching as the situations where they feel the most unsure about their performance. Furthermore, almost a third (31 percent) say they are nervous of their ideas being shot down or being talked over, while a similar number (31 percent) say they are fearful of people thinking less of them. The next most-affected group was those in junior positions, with 92 percent reporting the effects of anxiety around communicating. With most people expressing the pressure to make an impact – whether being interviewed for a new job, moving into a more senior role, or presenting to colleagues or customers – as the main situations that bring on anxious feelings the most.

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November 7, 2017

Over half of remote workers say their colleagues don’t treat them equally

by Sara Bean • Flexible working, News, Technology, Workplace

Over half (52 percent) of people who work remotely feel their colleagues don’t treat them equally, claims a new study. Working remotely has become a highly sought-after job perk and having the flexibility to live and work where you please, regardless of corporate headquarters, often draws people to take one job over another. But a survey from VitalSmarts produced by David Maxfield and Joseph Grenny, authors of the bestsellers Crucial conversations and Crucial Accountability, found that remote employees have a significantly harder time with a number of workplace challenges than their onsite colleagues. 67 percent of remote employees complained that colleagues didn’t fight for their priorities compared 59 percent of onsite employees. 41 percent of remote employees believed colleagues say bad things about them behind their back compared to 31 percent of onsite employees and 64 percent of remote employees had changes made to a project without warning vs. 58 percent of onsite employees. Over a third (35 percent) of remote employees thought colleagues were lobbying against them vs. 26 percent of onsite employees.

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October 10, 2017

Presenteeism leads a quarter of UK workers not to take a sick day unless hospitalised

by Sara Bean • Flexible working, News, Wellbeing, Workplace

A quarter (23 percent), or 7 million UK workers, wouldn’t take a sick day unless they were hospitalised or had no other choice, claims a new survey by Canada Life Group. Nine in ten (89 percent) UK workers say they’ve gone into work when feeling ill, a proportion which is virtually unchanged compared to 2016 (90 percent), suggesting employers’ efforts to improve wellbeing are failing to reduce presenteeism. The issue is pronounced, with the survey indicating that 47 percent of respondents would come into work with a stomach bug and more than half (55 percent) would go into work if they had the flu – despite the high chance of this illness spreading to their co-workers.

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September 21, 2017

British organisations must step up to the challenges of artificial intelligence, robotics and automation

by Mark Eltringham • AI, News, Technology

A report published by the RSA think-tank has encouraged UK businesses to embrace artificial intelligence, automation and robotics. arguing that new technology has the potential to raise productivity levels, boost flagging living standards, and phase out ‘dull, dirty and dangerous’ tasks in favour of more purposeful and human-centric work. The Age of Automation report warns, however, that the UK is fast becoming a ‘laggard’ in the adoption of new machines and called on UK business leaders to accelerate their take-up of technology. The RSA found that sales of robots to the UK decreased over 2014-15, with British firms falling behind the US, France, Germany, Spain and Italy. A YouGov poll of UK business leaders, commissioned by the RSA, found that UK business leaders are currently wary of adopting AI and robotics, with just fourteen percent of firms currently investing in this technology or soon planning to. Twenty-nine percent of businesses believe AI & robotics to be too expensive or not yet proven and twenty percent want to invest but believe it will take several years to ‘seriously adopt’ the new technology.

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August 24, 2017

Too much information is leading to a communications overload for many employees

by Sara Bean • Flexible working, News, Technology, Wellbeing, Workplace

Employees are experiencing ‘communications overload’ as a result of their organisation’s attempts to keep them continually informed, a new survey claims. According to research by Clarizen, 81 percent of employers say despite taking steps to improve communication among employees, they still lack a way to keep projects on track and provide management oversight. This is because efforts to improve collaboration among employees by opening new lines of communication can have the opposite effect. Instead, employees suffer from the modern workplace malady known as ‘communication overload,’ a productivity-killing infirmity characterised by too many meaningless meetings and an excessive number of emails, notifications and alerts that are devoid of importance, context or urgency. A common challenge reported by a majority of respondents is that employees, departments and teams are spread across several sites, or team members work from home. 70 percent say they need to go beyond creating additional lines of communication, and facilitate better collaboration among employees so they can work together to meet objectives, coordinate activities and monitor progress.

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August 15, 2017

UK organisations remain unprepared to deal with effects of cyber attack

by Mark Eltringham • News, Technology

A new report from insurance broker Lockton, claims that UK businesses are unprepared for the potential length and severity of a cyber security breach. In ‘Cyber Aftershock: How UK companies underestimate the seismic waves produced by a data breach’, the firm claims that fully half of UK companies (50 percent) expect to be entirely operational 48 hours after a large-scale cyber security breach. The survey of senior decision-makers shows that only 2 percent of UK businesses think a breach will affect them for more than 10 days. The report challenges these ways of thinking and sets out the key steps organisations should now be taking.

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August 14, 2017

Seven ways in which flexible working is making our lives more rigid

by Mark Eltringham • Comment, Flexible working, Technology

One of the main reasons why books such as Catch 22 and 1984 make such mediocre films, is because celluloid struggles to capture the books’ preoccupation with the ways in which language can be used to subvert meaning and rationality. We don’t always have to lean on the bookcase to see how this works. It’s been evident recently in the coverage of the massive growth of zero hours working worldwide, although they have now been banned in New Zealand. There are now up to 1.5 million people on zero hours contracts in the UK and the adjective most commonly associated with the practice in the media coverage has been ‘flexible’, despite the fact that from the perspective of the majority of the people working on such contracts they are anything but. It’s yet another example of the subversion in our use of the term flexible working. It’s Doublespeak; an expression which means something completely different to, or indeed the opposite of, the thing it is describing.

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May 17, 2017

UK employees three times more likely to work when ill than to pull a sickie ⁰

by Sara Bean • News, Wellbeing, Workplace

Seven in ten UK employees – equivalent to 18 million nationally – have gone to work feeling unwell when they should have taken the day off, while less than a quarter (23 percent) say they have taken a day off work sick when they were not actually unwell, indicating that UK employees are three times more likely to go to work unwell than they are to ‘pull a sickie,’ a new report claims. The fourth edition of the Aviva Working Lives Report, which examines the attitudes and experiences of employers and employees on issues affecting the present and future of the UK workplace – also carries a wake-up call to businesses, as more than two in five (43 percent) employees feel their employer puts the results of the company ahead of their health and wellbeing as more than two in five (41 percent) say their work will pile up if they are off sick.

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January 6, 2017

Over half of employers struggled to find newly graduated employees last year ⁰

by Sara Bean • News, Technology, Workplace

Over half of graduate employers are struggling to fill their graduate vacancies, partly due to students reneging on offers. A poll by the Association of Graduate Recruiters (AGR) claims that 52 percent of employers did not fill all of their graduate vacancies last year and while one in five offers were declined, 7.1 percent of offers made were accepted and then reneged. The size of the challenge differs by sector. Accountancy, banking and engineering firms are the most likely to find reneging an issue. It is less of a problem in the public sector and among law, utility and IT businesses. However, employers are finding ways to tackle the issue with 97 percent communicating and 78 percent holding events for graduates between offer and join date. As a result the proportion of job offers reneged is falling – in the AGR’s 2015 poll 8.2 percent were reneged. Employers are also being advised to take more of a digital approach to reaching ‘tech savvy’ graduates.