Search Results for: culture

Arup announces first Manchester office relocation in over 40 years

by • Company news, Property

Arup new spaceArup has announced it is to take 20,000 sq ft of Grade A office space at the Carlyle Group’s Three Piccadilly Place in Manchester. The TSK Group has been appointed to design and deliver the engineering and property consultancy’s first new Manchester office relocation in over 40 years. Three Piccadilly Place comprises 190,000 sq ft of flexible workspace over 11 floors, with 9,300 sq ft of retail space on the ground floor. Keith Rudd, Arup Director and leader of Arup’s Manchester office explained: “The relocation has been a major decision, driven by the growth and breadth of services we now offer across a range of sectors. As an employee owned firm, it’s important we have the right environment to attract and retain the best people, to enable us to continue to deliver great work for our clients.” (more…)

Latest generation Y survey reflects characteristically idealistic thinking of youth

by • Comment, News, Workplace

Maybe it’s the cynicism of middle age, but the most recent exploration of arguably, the most over-analysed cohort of workers in history – Generation Y – seems to reflect the archetypal idealistic thinking of youth. For example, while most Millennials (74%) believe business is having a positive impact on society by generating jobs (48%) and increasing prosperity (71%), they think it can do much more to address society’s challenges in the areas of most concern: resource scarcity (68%), climate change (65%) and income equality (64%). And quelle surprise, 50 per cent of Millennials surveyed wanted to work for a business with ethical practices. You have to wonder wouldn’t an examination of the hopes and aspirations of the last couple of generations of younger workers reveal similar ideologies, albeit without the benefit of their digital sophistication? (more…)

Retaining valuable employees is top global priority for CEOS this year

by • News, Workplace

Retaining valuable employees is top global priority for CEOS this yearThe number one priority of business leaders worldwide this year is how best to develop, engage, manage, and retain existing talent. This worker-centric approach means that employee engagement and better management will take centre stage as the way to improve competitiveness, win new customers and raise productivity. According to new research from The Conference Board and UK partner CMI (Chartered Management Institute), CEOs will concentrate on creating a strong internal talent pipeline rather than seeking to recruit externally, with nine out of the top 10 global Human Capital strategies focused on current employees, including providing training and development, raising employee engagement and increasing efforts to retain critical talent. Other closely linked priorities identified in the CEO Challenge 2014 are customer relationships, innovation, operational excellence, and corporate brand and reputation. (more…)

CBI to embrace open plan working at new London HQ

by • Architecture, Facilities management, News, Workplace design

CBI's new HQ at Cannon Place

The CBI is to move its headquarters to new offices in Cannon Street, London, after more than 30 years at its present Centre Point home, which is to be converted into apartments. Staff at the UK’s leading business organisation will make the switch from the multi floor office layouts of the 1960s built tower to an open plan 25,000 sq ft space when they move into the fourth floor of the eight-floored Cannon Place development in the spring. The CBI director-general, John Cridland, said he was looking forward to the move to the new offices, on which the organisation has signed a 15-year lease and invited its members to make use of a dedicated member’s lounge at the new London HQ to meet their clients and CBI staff. (more…)

The nine enduring workplace tensions to keep an eye on in the year ahead

by • Comment, Facilities management, Flexible working, Public Sector, Technology, Workplace

The nine enduring workplace tensions to keep an eye on in the year aheadThere were a number of workplace issues that wouldn’t go away during 2013. And there’s no reason to believe we will resolve many of them during 2014 either. We can try to explain the recalcitrance of such things by referring to the enveloping fog that emanates from the commercial interests who promote problems to their customers so they can provide the solutions, but many are more deep-rooted. Technology and its constant radicalising effects is almost invariably the major driver of change, but it is only one thread in a complex web of social, professional, demographic, cultural and commercial changes. So here, in no particular order, are the issues we expect to spend the most time talking about on Insight over the next year. (more…)

The most read stories on Insight in 2013

by • Comment, Facilities management, Workplace design

Apple 11It’s been one year since Insight first hit the digital streets and it’s been fascinating to see what people have been most interested in. One of the great things about online publishing is you cannot escape from what people think. Printed trade magazines can tell you they send out 12,000 copies or whatever, but they can’t tell you whether the recipients are interested enough to read them or share their contents. Online, that is all made transparent. So it’s been great to start a publication that after just a few months was demonstrably the UK’s most widely read title covering workplace design and management issues. We even know what people like the most. So here, in no particular order, are our most widely read stories from 2013, ranging from the technical to the esoteric, news stories, case studies, the bursting of bubbles and the challenges to received wisdom.

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Book Review: The Emergent Workplace

Book Review: The Emergent Workplace

by • Comment, Facilities management, Workplace design

Looking for patterns in the mash. © Columbia Pictures

Looking for patterns in the mash
© Columbia Pictures

It’s rather refreshing to see a book or report in which the word ‘Workplace’ in the title is prefaced by ‘Emergent’ rather than something misleading like ‘Tomorrow’s’ or ‘Future’. And so the authors Clark Sept and Paul Heath define their vision of the workplace presented in this slim but engaging book as a thing which is ‘in the process of becoming prominent’ to use the dictionary definition of the word emergent. By using this particular epithet, they are describing the consequences of the various forces that drive today’s workplace rather than lapsing into the fallacies most commonly associated with works of this kind; principally those of either assuming there is an evolution of all offices towards an ultimate model, or that already commonplace factors such as technology which frees us to work anywhere and at any time can in any way be associated with ‘the future’.

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US employees name top 50 firms to work for in 2014

by • News, Workplace

American flag cakeConsultancy firm Bain & Company has topped the list of the 50 best places to work in the US. The top five companies in the annual Employees’ Choice Awards, compiled by careers specialist Glassdoor includes the three leading social media companies, Twitter, Linkedin and Facebook, which came in fifth, just behind Eastman Chemical. The Employees’ Choice Awards rely solely on the input of employees who elect to provide feedback about their job, work environment and company, via Glassdoor’s anonymous online company review survey. Employees are asked to rate how satisfied they are with their company overall, how they feel their CEO is leading the company, as well as key workplace attributes like career opportunities, compensation and benefits, culture and values, senior management and work-life balance.

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Benefits of social media for employers are not being realised says CIPD

by • News, Technology, Workplace

Benefits of social media for business relationships and employee engagementResearch launched today at the CIPD’s Social Media in HR conference reveals social media is still a long way off from infiltrating the workplace to the extent it is used in our social lives. Three in four (76%) use social media in their personal lives, but just one in four (26%) use it for work purposes. Given the news this week that the attorney general is to publish guidance on Twitter to help prevent social media users from committing contempt of court, employers could be forgiven in being wary of the risks of social media. This is a mistake, as according to the research, ‘Social technology, social business?’ almost half (47%) of employees who use social media for work on a daily basis already see real benefits for their organisations. (more…)

Majority of businesses acquire employee data; far fewer apply it, claims report

by • Facilities management, News, Workplace

Broken rulerPeter Drucker’s old adage that ‘what gets measured gets managed’ may be a cliché, but it’s endured to become one because there is a lot of truth in it. Now a new report commissioned this year by recruitment consultants Alexander Mann Solutions and the HRO Today Institute has found that firms that use employee data to inform strategic decision making outperform their competitors around 58 percent of the time. Which is great except the survey of HR managers and directors at over 300 companies also found that only a third of businesses use data in this way. This is in spite of the fact that nearly all (90 percent) of companies acquire employee performance data. According to the report, Success: How metrics & measurement correlate with business, nearly a third don’t use the data in any way whatsoever.

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Case study: dPOP’s jaw-dropping new offices light the road ahead for Detroit

by • Case studies, Facilities management, Flooring, Furniture, Workplace design

P1020679If you think you know what’s going on in Detroit based on the stories of the city’s financial woes and pictures of some crumbling buildings, it is worth a visit to the offices of dPOP, the two month old design firm with origins in creating the award-winning office spaces for Quicken Loans and its family of companies.The design firm’s space in the basement of a long defunct Detroit bank embodies what being from the Motor City is all about — being tough, but talented; gritty yet glamorous; fun with a funky twist.They design like they don’t care what you think — and that might just be true. Their own offices and those they created for the 11,000 workers that were moved from divergent suburban sites to the center of Detroit are bold, bright and fun. Most of all fun. But the result is spectacular.

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The future belongs to those who leave themselves choices of how to deal with it

by • Comment, Facilities management, Flexible working, Technology, Workplace

unknown-futureEverybody likes to talk and read about the future. It’s one of the reasons we see so many reports about what the ‘office of the future’ will look like. Often these attempts at workplace prognosis are overwhelmingly  rooted in the present which might betray either a degree of timidity or lack of awareness of just how far along their standard list of trends we really are. Even when such reports appear to be bang on the money, they tend to disregard one of the most important factors we need to consider when trying to get a handle on the future, which is the need to leave ourselves choices. This is important because not only will the future be stranger than we think, but stranger than we can imagine, to paraphrase J B S Haldane.

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