July 22, 2020
New statistics released by workspace provider The Argyll Club suggest that the main concern for London’s businesses post lockdown is whether employees can get to and from work safely. Also, in an encouraging sign for the City’s office market, 50 percent of businesses are already making enquiries into larger office space.
July 5, 2020
However much we know about the forces we expect to come into play in our time and however much we understand the various social, commercial, legislative, cultural and economic parameters we expect to direct them, most predictions of the future tend to come out as refractions or extrapolations of the present. This is a fact tacitly acknowledged by George Orwell’s title for Nineteen Eighty-Four, written in 1948, and is always the pinch of salt we can apply to science fiction and most of the predictions we come across. More →
June 24, 2020
The BBC recently published a piece on its website to commemorate the 40th Anniversary of Ridley Scott’s movie Alien and what it could tell us about office design and the workplace (of whatever sort). One of the interesting points raised in the piece was how the depiction of the conditions on board the spaceship Nostromo did away with the gloss and swish of previous visions of the future, replaced by grime, exposed services and strictly utilitarian interiors. The environment was one of the characters, a trick Ridley Scott later repeated in Bladerunner. More →
June 2, 2020
The future of work is likely to be even more precarious and unequal, according to a new research review from academics at Durham University Business School, Kings College Business School and University Paris-Dauphine. Dr. Jeremy Aroles, Assistant Professor in Organisation Studies at Durham University Business School, alongside colleagues, Dr. Nathalie Mitev (King’s College) and Professor François?Xavier de Vaujany (University Paris-Dauphine), reviewed a wide range of research related to working life new work practices and summarised this into a number of predictions for the future of work. This research review paper was published in the journal ‘New Technology, Work and Employment’, which is open access throughout June. More →
May 7, 2020
Many of us have had little choice but to resort to remote working in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic. It is just days since Google, Apple and Twitter were making headlines by ordering their employees to work from home, but you could now say the same about lots of companies. More →
May 5, 2020
This piece was originally published five years ago. While we now read it with different eyes, what is interesting is how the ideas have stood up. Some better than others perhaps but a welcome reminder that the conversations we are now having about life after lockdown began some time ago. One of the particular and often unspoken issues that shadows in any debate about flexible working is what we mean by the term. We’ve been talking about new ways of working for a good quarter of a century now and what is generally understood about the practice has evolved considerably. The very idea was conceived at the birth of the new online era so is inextricably tied up with the Internet and new technology. More →
April 28, 2020
Office work has existed in some form ever since people started writing on tablets and papyrus. Depictions of clerical staff are common in the Bible and on the walls of pyramids. In the mid 14th Century the Church of San Nicolò, commissioned the artist Tomaso da Modena to create the fresco in the chapter room of the church depicting forty monks of the order hard at it at their desks. The word office itself derives from the famous Uffizi in Florence, created in 1560. More →
April 22, 2020
Setting aside the drastic personal tragedies, the financial devastation and the strain the virus has placed on government infrastructure, business, finance, and healthcare systems worldwide, the coronavirus has been able to achieve what legions of workplace strategists and change managers have been unable to do: encourage middle managers to give remote working a try. More →
April 8, 2020
As the impact of the COVID-19 global pandemic becomes apparent, and the vast majority of workers are now remote working, CFOs are working closely with their real estate teams to re-assess workspace costs both now and in the future. More →
April 1, 2020
Innovation in the commercial property market is the driving force behind a revolutionary new approach to the design and fit-out of office space from Modus. Tenant-Ready is a solution aimed at both landlords and operators, to deliver pre-fitted or fitted-to-demand workspace specifically for coworking spaces, serviced offices and other forms of flexible workplaces in which fit-out is not procured by tenants and occupiers. More →
March 11, 2020
For as long as I have been in the industry, workspace has focused on the “next” generation whether that has been the overly-discussed millennials or Gen-Z. As it has grown, the market for flexible offices has inevitably followed the same path, but in doing so its providers could have taken their eyes off the ball by lacking focus on the most cash-rich and flexible generation of all – Generation X. More →
May 29, 2020
The role of workplace professionals in the new era of work
by Kelly Bream • Comment, Flexible working, Property