Search Results for: culture

October 2, 2015

For once and for all, please stop with this ‘death of the office’ stuff ⁰

by Mark Eltringham • Comment, Furniture, Property, Technology, Workplace design

I was involved in a meeting with an office fit-out company this week which involved a discussion of how their clients can develop misconceptions about the extent to which their contemporaries are introducing new office design and management models based on agile working, shared space, mobile technology and all that other good stuff. This presents a particular challenge for firms in the sector because their day to day experiences of what clients talk about and ask from them can be pretty removed from the things talked about in the media. If you were to judge the state of the office solely on the basis of what you read and hear and see at shows, it would be easy to conclude that the office is indeed dying and dragging down with it the markets for office furniture, commercial property and traditional technology. The problem is that the facts don’t support that notion at all.

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October 2, 2015

Caring employers key to improving mental wellbeing at work ⁰

by Sara Bean • Events, News, Wellbeing, Workplace

With one in four adults experiencing a mental health condition in any given year, a caring and supportive boss is the missing link between employee engagement and mental health. This was the message of a MetLife breakfast briefing in partnership with Buck Consultants at Xerox, where the impact of ignoring mental health in the workplace was discussed. MetLife’s UK Employee Benefit Trends Study has found that for every one point increase in “having a caring and supportive boss” there is a 9 percent increase in employee engagement. Key themes of the briefing included the best strategies for identification and prevention of mental health issues, and how to build a more resilient workforce. It also emerged that employers are almost unaware of the negative impact insufficient sleep has on employees’ mental wellbeing, yet along with stress and work life balance – insufficient sleep is seen as a key health concern.

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September 30, 2015

Majority of people believe employers should publish gender pay gap ⁰

by Sara Bean • Legal news, News, Workplace

Over half of respondents to a new report into the gender pay gap are doubtful that men and women working at the same level or doing similar work earn the same – even though unequal pay is unlawful. Most of those who took part in the survey believe that employers should publish not only their overall gender pay gap but also pay data broken down by grade and job type. The new report by Business in the Community found that closing the gap matters to employees and its extent may impact how people feel about their employer, with respondents saying they may use publicly available data to inform decision making about their career. However, they would not act impulsively – instead employees want to discuss the pay gap openly with their employer, understand its causes and find out what action their employer is taking.

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September 25, 2015

Nearly half of UK workers complain of wasted time in office meetings ⁰

by Sara Bean • News, Technology, Workplace, Workplace design

If you’ve sat through meetings where half the participants pay more attention to their phone than the people in the room you’re not alone. A recent YouGov study commissioned by arvato UK found an ‘always on’ culture and raft of distractions at people’s fingertips mean an average 33 percent of workers confess to checking personal emails, social media or sending personal SMS messages during meetings. An astounding six percent of workers find it such a struggle to stay focused they even take naps during meetings. And despite new technology causing a distraction, old technology also plays a role in meeting efficiency, with almost half of workers (45 percent) experiencing delays and interruptions due to IT issues. A lack of discipline and poor adherence to best practice processes is another challenge, with 43 percent of UK employees regularly experiencing meetings that start late or overrun.

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September 24, 2015

Weighing up the pros and cons of the BREEAM environmental standard ⁰

by Charles Marks • Comment, Environment, Facilities management, Workplace design

For some years there has been a growing awareness of the need to improve the environmental performance of buildings. This is closely linked to both the Government’s own international commitments to reduce carbon emissions by 80 percent over the next 35 years and the need of organisations to act ethically and cut costs while they’re about it. Buildings are important in this regard because of their impact on the environment (and the bottom line). According to The Carbon Trust, buildings produce around 37 percent of the UK’s total carbon emissions, 40 percent of it from commercial buildings.This is commendable stuff but the real problems arise when it comes to meeting such laudable goals in practice. We are learning all the time about how to achieve the best results and we are helped in that with the availability of a number of increasingly sophisticated building environmental standards.

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September 24, 2015

Colleagues more likely than managers to make people feel engaged at work ⁰

by Neil Franklin • Knowledge, News, Workplace

A new report from Oracle claims that the people most likely to make employees feel engaged at work are their peers rather than their managers. The study, Simply Talent, also suggests that employees think their employer’s HR function is least likely to have a positive impact on their engagement levels. The study, which sets out to understand the drivers and benefits of employee engagement in Europe, polled 1,511 employees at large European businesses. The survey claims that 42 percent of employees across Europe believe that their peers have the most positive impact on how engaged they feel at work, well ahead of line managers (21 percent) and business unit managers (7 percent) and HR (3 percent) Conversely, when it comes to negatively affecting engagement, employees believe the senior leadership team (19 percent) and line managers (11 percent) are the most responsible.

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September 22, 2015

The worldwide demographic timebomb is transforming the workplace ⁰

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

There are a number of reasons why we shouldn’t be drawn into blindly accepting the narrative about Generation Y’s impact on the workplace. It seems the most important is also the least talked about. It is that the workforce is actually ageing in the world’s leading economies. While it may be true that 27 is middle -aged for employees at technology companies, for pretty much everybody else, shifting demographics, longer lives, improving health, falling pensions and changing personal preferences are likely to mean they stay in the workforce for longer. This is true in both the UK and US, where Millennials may make up the largest demographic grouping in the workplace but are still in a minority within an increasingly diverse workforce. The dynamics of these changes are playing out in different ways in different countries, but the forces are essentially universal.

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September 21, 2015

Five essential office design trends to look for in the near future ⁰

by Tom Brialey • Comment, Facilities management, Flexible working, Workplace design

Since the early Twentieth Century, business leaders have been experimenting with office design in an attempt to improve productivity. From the sea of forward-facing desks imagined by Frederick Taylor, to the infamous cubicle of the late 1960s, to today’s open-plan office, each innovation has said something about our changing relationship to work. In a Gensler survey with more than 2,000 participants, 90 percent of respondents indicated that better workplace design and layout result in better overall performance. The greatest developments of recent times have emerged from the tech giants of Silicon Valley, where businesses have blended playfulness, company culture and the collaborative benefits of open layouts to craft unique and engaging spaces. So where are we headed? Here are five major trends that are likely to have a lasting impact on the way we work.

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September 18, 2015

What Robert Frost can teach us about the changing workplace

by Mark Eltringham • Comment, Facilities management, Flexible working, Technology

The great Twentieth Century American poet Robert Frost is arguably best known these days for two quotations that have – usually in bastardised versions – entered into common usage. The first is the final verse of his poem The Road Not Taken, and especially the final three lines: “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I /I took the one less traveled by, / And that has made all the difference.” The second is a quotation: “The brain is a wonderful organ; it starts working the moment you get up in the morning and does not stop until you get into the office”; which should be pinned up in every reception area and is usually rendered as something like ‘when you get to work, don’t leave your brain at the door.’ Both come to mind when you read something like the report entitled ‘Next Generation Working Life’ from Ericsson’s Networked Society Lab.

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September 11, 2015

London’s allure for Millennials is less than it was, claims report ⁰

by Mark Eltringham • Flexible working, News, Workplace

The allure of London for Generation Y appears to be fading, according to a new report from Lloyds Commercial Banking. According to the study of 200 Millennials and 400 SMEs, the most talked about Generation appears increasingly happy to work for a small firm, wherever they are located. The survey claims that relocating to London is not on the agenda for half (51 percent) of Millennials, who would be happy to move anywhere for the right job. Over a third (35 percent) don’t want to move away from home, while less than a tenth (eight percent) insist they will only work in the capital – which the report claims is good news for SMEs located outside of London (assuming they want to employ Millennials in the first place, obviously). According to the report, location ranked seventh on the list of factors that would attract Millennials to a business.

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September 10, 2015

Five ways in which your colleagues might be driving you completely nuts ⁰

by Mark Eltringham • Comment, News, Wellbeing, Workplace

It’s always worth reminding ourselves that while a well designed workplace and favourable working conditions are very desirable prerequisites of a good job, what really makes work enjoyable and what really makes a great culture are the people with whom we work. This simple fact is one reason why some people are happy in poorly designed offices full of all the things that supposedly make them unhappy and unwell, while other people can be miserable in airy, daylit, tastefully furnished corporate palaces. Just as Peter Drucker once said that culture eats strategy for breakfast, we also know that it washes it down with a piping hot mug of office design. Culture is defined in large measure by the people around us, it can be they who determine how much we enjoy work. Here are just five ways they can drive us nuts based on recent data.

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September 9, 2015

The way we talk about workplace productivity needs another dimension

by Mark Eltringham • Comment, Facilities management, Workplace, Workplace design

One of the most typical claims that suppliers in this sector make about their products is that they will make people more productive at work. Many go so far as to put numbers on what this means, and usually not just 0.4 percent or whatever but something far more. We can understand why they do this because they are seeking to link workplace productivity to whatever it is they have to sell. This is often tenuous for at least two reasons. The first is that even when such a causal link is demonstrably true, it still assumes that all other things at work are equal, whereas they never are because there are so many factors involved. That is why you will find some people cheerfully working in shabby, cluttered, underlit offices while others mope around unhappily in gilded cages with expensive chairs, soaring daylit atria and olive groves. The second is that such claims simply ignore what makes people tick.