Search Results for: culture

August 31, 2016

Addressing the five negative influences on organisational culture ⁰

by Matias Rodsevich • Comment, Flexible working, Knowledge, Workplace

Organisational culture should represent a clear vision from a firm about its very nature and identity as well as its values. A culture one that everybody within the organisation should understand and share. But this is not always the case as a growing number of firms are discovering to their cost. According to a paper published last year by Deloitte University Press, only 12 percent of employees believe their company is effective at driving their desired culture. Another study from employee feedback software provider Stackhands, around two thirds of people (64 percent) feel they do not have a strong work culture within their organisation. Even so, whether people are aware of it or not, their company has its own culture. Without direction and positive influences, negative factors can take hold, shaping culture in a way that can become harmful for a business. These elements can hinder your company’s development of an effective culture:

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August 23, 2016

US Millennials ‘martyred’ behaviour helps drive culture of presenteeism ⁰

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

As the school holidays draw to a close, those Brits who’ve enjoyed their annual two-week holiday break will probably have squirreled away some days to take them through to the end of the year. Not so easy for the average US worker who earns on average just ten paid vacation days per annum, for each year of service. According to a survey carried out last year, many Americans even fail to take that allocated leave for fear of being seen as slacking. And now a new piece of research claims that far from breaking this tradition of presenteeism, US Millennial workers are the most likely generation to forfeit time off, even though they earn the least amount of vacation days. These findings, from Project: Time Off’s new report, The Work Martyr’s Cautionary Tale: How the Millennial Experience Will Define America’s Vacation Culture suggest that Millennials stay at work because they feel more fear and greater guilt about taking time away from the office than any other generation.

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August 19, 2016

Employers must lose ‘stiff upper lip’ culture to promote workplace wellbeing ⁰

by Sara Bean • News, Wellbeing, Workplace

A ‘stiff upper lip’ attitude towards wellness by UK bosses needs to change in order to advance employee wellbeing, argues a survey by Bupa. It is business leaders who are the key to overcoming the challenges facing employees’ health and wellbeing, it claims. The vast majority (94 percent) of those questioned believe there will be significant change in the employer-employee relationship in the next ten years. 91 percent of business leaders agree that technology will continue to impact the wellbeing of their workforce over the next decade and 71 percent agree the standard 9am-5pm working day is a thing of the past. Seven in ten (68 percent) noted a ‘stiff upper lip attitude’ at executive level, creating barriers to conversations about wellbeing, and three fifths (62 percent) of leaders think they need to show that they don’t suffer from ill health.

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July 14, 2016

Beyond Monoculture: how design eats strategy for breakfast ⁰

by Mark Eltringham • Insight Briefings, Premium Content, Workplace design

The idea that ‘culture eats strategy for breakfast’ holds a grip on our imagination and tends to be misunderstood in equal measure because at first glance it seems to suggest that strategy is less important or can be trumped by culture. In fact what Peter Drucker, who is the man commonly held to be responsible for saying it, identifies is that the two must go hand in glove. A strategy that does not heed culture is more likely to fail. A culture without strategy quickly becomes unanchored. The same need for balance is evident in the way we develop workplace strategies. Without understanding culture and knowing how a workplace can both reflect an existing culture and prompt a shift, the strategy runs the risk of becoming undone, or failing to fully meet its objectives. This link between culture and workplace strategy and design has never been more important than it is right now as the old bonds of time and place that once tethered people to an employer have loosened and dissolved. These issues are explored in our new Briefing, produced in partnership with Boss Design.

July 2, 2016

Beyond monoculture + Future shock + Confusion over productivity ⁰

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

In this week’s Newsletter; Mark Eltringham pays tribute to futurologist Alvin Toffler who died this week and is famed for introducing the concept ‘Future shock’; and Charles Marks looks at the ways our noisy world was foretold by some of the 20^th centuries’ greatest minds. A study finds that people find meetings more useful than is widely reported; many office workers struggle to understand the meaning of productivity; and spending on workplace technology doubled over the past five years. Older workers – not millennials – are most positive about working freelance; more US over 65s are working now than at any time; and agile workers report the highest levels of productivity. You can download our new Briefing, produced in partnership with Boss Design which examines the link between culture and workplace strategy and design; visit our new events page, follow us on Twitter and join our LinkedIn Group to discuss these and other stories.

June 13, 2016

Culture change needed to stem senior female executive attrition rate ⁰

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

With less than 10 percent of FTSE 100 companies in this country having a female CEO, a cross party group of MPs from the Women and Equalities Select Committee have been enquiring into ways of increasing the significant under-representation of women at executive levels. The introduction of quotas and regulation has been suggested to address this lack of gender diversity. In its submission to the committee consultant’s Mercer argue that although measures such as quotas can have a visible impact in the short term, the most effective and sustainable way of getting women into senior and executive roles is by focusing on growing and developing a pipeline of female talent in an enabling and supportive environment, tailored to their unique skill-sets, financial, and health needs. Its recently launched study ‘When women thrive, businesses thrive’ shows that senior women leave at much higher rates than men, which supports our argument that the prevailing business culture doesn’t support working mothers.

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March 21, 2016

Staff value engagement and culture but many feel let down by employers ⁰

by Mark Eltringham • News, Wellbeing, Workplace

Real estate consultancy JLL has issued a survey to explore the results of its January 2016 report into workplace engagement. The new study reveals – perhaps unsurprisingly – that there is a mismatch between employee’s positive attitudes towards the issues of engagement and culture and their negative experience of them in their current roles. So, while 87 percent of respondents agree that engagement and culture are key drivers of organisational performance, 42 percent don’t believe that their employer effectively capitalises on the workplace to enhance employee engagement, 46 percent do not think that their workplace is used as a key competitive differentiator to attract and retain talent and 41 percent do not agree that their workplace is used as a tool to generate a positive company culture. The study highlights the issues associated with lack of engagement and suggests a number of solutions to help employers engage with staff.

December 21, 2015

From workplace wellness programmes to a positive workplace culture ⁰

by Mark Eltringham • Comment, Wellbeing, Workplace, Workplace design

Research presented at the recent 2015 Global Wellness Summit (GWS) titled “The Future of Wellness at Work” forecasts that workplace wellness investment will “explode in the next 5 to 10 years”. Results from the research revealed that 87 percent of employees surveyed feel disengaged at work, with 38 percent experiencing excessive pressure and stress. Despite more than half of the employees having access to a structured wellness “programme” only three out of ten actually use it in practice. The generally human resources led workplace wellness programs perform poorly because they don’t always address the issue at hand. They instead choose to focus on health issues experienced outside of work, rather than looking internally at the workplace itself. The design of an office has been proven to have a material impact on the health, wellbeing and productivity of its inhabitants.

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September 16, 2015

Employees exhausted by a culture of continuous change at work ⁰

by Sara Bean • News, Workplace

A culture of continuous change may be standard practice within larger organisations, but it can have a negative effect on employees, a new report claims. The seven-country Liquid Change Survey of senior executives at large corporations, commissioned by Ketchum Change, found that some leaders are unaware of the effects of so-called change fatigue, despite their employees struggle to keep up. Among partners and board-level executives, only 28 percent think change fatigue is highly prevalent. The survey suggests that to succeed in an environment of continuous change, a more collaborative approach must replace the old top-downmodel. Outlining a clear strategy and goals (43 percent) and engaging with leaders across the organization to co-create the new environment (41 percent) were cited as the most effective ways to get leaders to believe in and actively lead through change.

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September 11, 2015

New analysis claims to reveal resurgence of long hours culture ⁰

by Sara Bean • Legal news, News, Wellbeing, Workplace

The Government is being urged to reassess its plans to request an opt-out from the EU Working Time Directive, when it seeks to renegotiate the terms of the UK’s membership of the EU. The Directive stipulates a 48 hour working week, which the Government has argued is stifling competitiveness and flexibility. According to research by the TUC, the number of people working excessive hours has risen by 15 per cent since 2010, following more than a decade of decline in long hours working, with the number of employees working more than 48 hours per week reaching 3,417,000 – up by 453,000 since 2010. The union says many people are working unpaid overtime and at least a million report that they want to cut their excessive hours. The return of the long hours culture makes people feel pressured to ‘opt-out’ from the 48 hour limit as a condition of employment as currently, individual opt-outs are allowed by law.

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August 25, 2015

The long hours culture may be making us unwell and less productive ⁰

by Mark Eltringham • Flexible working, News, Wellbeing, Workplace

We should have worked out by now that long hours and productivity are not the same thing. It’s been a long-standing issue in the UK where people manage to combine some of the longest working hours in Europe with levels of productivity that fall habitually some way behind those of our partners on the mainland. Over the past couple of weeks a couple of reports have been published which not only make the point that the long hours culture and an obsession with work may actually be reducing our productivity and even harming us physically, emotionally and psychologically. The range of ailments associated with the dysfunctional ways we work include stress, stroke, deep vein thrombosis, relationship breakdown, a range of infections and feelings of isolation. The question they posit is whether it’s all worth it, especially if we’re not getting as much done as we’d like to think.

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July 28, 2015

Beyond branding – how workplace design can express a firm’s culture

by Gary Chandler • Comment, Facilities management, Workplace, Workplace design

When it comes to the incorporation of branding and identity into a workplace, there is a simple option, which is to produce a design that faithfully incorporates the firm’s logos, colours and straplines in the interior. There’s nothing wrong with this, except for the fact that it is literally superficial and so may miss the opportunity to create an office design that scratches beneath the surface to reveal what lies beneath. When you get past the layers of branding and identity, you uncover something that we call culture. This can take things to a whole new level because the challenge becomes how to create a workplace design that communicates and fosters both the identity and the culture of the organisation. The benefits to the organisation can be enormous, not least because this approach bridges a number of disciplines such as human resources and office design and so drives a number of strategic objectives.