Search Results for: culture

What Søren Kierkegaard can teach us about workplace design and management

by • Comment, Facilities management, Workplace design

KierkegaardSøren Kierkegaard was a Nineteenth Century Danish philosopher and proto-existentialist. Not for him the hazy, romantic ideals of many of his contemporaries. He was one of the thinkers who gave birth to the Twentieth Century with its focus on the individual, reality and life in a sometimes uncaring world, although he was no atheist like many of the true existentialists. If he’s generally well known for anything these days it is for a single quotation that reads like a greeting card aphorism but is no less true for that. He said: ‘Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.’ Looking back can give you a real handle on the present. I moved offices recently and as these things happen, a number of books that I routinely ignore fell open while I was looking for some displacement activity.

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Majority of employers support flexible working but perception problems persist

by • Knowledge, Legal news, News, Workplace

flexible work

As we reported last week, the Millennial generation of workers born in the 80s and 90s would describe work as a “thing rather than a place”, and want more flexibility in where and how they work. While the Yahoo home working ban debate uncovered a lot of exasperation and suspicion towards this trend, it’s interesting to see two separate studies, from the UK and the U.S. that show a far less combative attitude. But, as the U.S study discovered, while a majority of employees enjoyed real productivity benefits from home working, nearly half would still go into the office because it is what is expected of them and a small percentage still go because it gets them out of the house. (more…)

CIBSE creates diversity panel to reflect varied workforce

by • Facilities management, News, Property, Workplace

Diversity in the workplace

Efforts to encourage a more inclusive culture within the built environment appear to have moved up a gear. RIBA President Angela Brady has voiced concerns on the “gender inequality that continues to pervade the profession,” and now the Chartered Institution of Building Services Engineering (CIBSE) has launched a Diversity Panel. Formed to encourage diversity in all its forms, whether race, gender, age, sexual orientation or disability, it is made up of CIBSE members who are keen to increase the routes to the profession through educational paths and by promoting a diverse workplace. Commented CIBSE: “The employment and retention of a varied workforce is integral to meet the building services engineering skills gap and to therefore improve building performance.” (more…)

Female-friendly employers named as progress of women in boardrooms stalls

by • Comment, Knowledge, News, Workplace

Top 50 Employers for Women named

In an interview this week on BBC’s Newsnight, Facebook’s CFO Sheryl Sandberg, revealed how she’d come to notice a growing gender imbalance as she moved up the corporate ladder. As her new book Lean in, points out, 30 years after women became 50 per cent of the college graduates in the United States, men still hold the vast majority of leadership positions. This is just one of many reasons why the publication this week of the Times Top 50 Employers for Women list of the UK organisations that are leading the way in gender equality in the workplace is to be welcomed.

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Why we might all get more done if we did things more slowly

by • Comment, Technology

Tree OctopusThe idea that for every action there is a reaction applies just as much in culture as it does in physics. So just as life speeds up to the point where it is self-evident that many people are struggling to keep pace with its most basic demands, a small number of people are looking at ways of putting on the brakes. Most famously in 2004, the Canadian Carl Honoré established the Slow Movement. James Gleick was banging the same drum with his book Faster. We could all hope that as a result of such people asking for the brakes to be applied, things would slow down just a little now our attention had been drawn to the problem so that we could all feel a little better, take time to do things properly and maybe even do them better.

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Rigid attachment to best practice “killing” talent management

by • Knowledge, News, Workplace

KPMG talent management white paper

A rigid attachment to ‘best practice’, rather than a focus on business needs, is preventing many organisations from unearthing and nurturing staff to drive their business forward and the danger of such an inflexible approach is killing organisations’ ability to properly manage talent. According to Anna Marie Detert, KPMG’s UK Lead for Talent – a tendency to copy or adopt the latest fad or fancy must be challenged if employers are to understand the talent they truly need to succeed, and plan effectively to find and keep it.  (more…)

Employers missing employee health and productivity link

by • Knowledge, News, Workplace

Employers missing health & productivity link

Only a minority of employers understand the productivity benefits of their health and wellbeing initiatives, new research reveals. Towers Watson’s latest Health, Wellbeing and Productivity survey found that 66 per cent of employers thought the link between health and employee performance was a relatively limited part of their health and wellbeing programme, with the main drivers being the desire to be seen as a responsible employer and the need to focus on more preventative health measures to manage rising healthcare and disability costs. (more…)

Will an upturn spark a revival of interest in the idea of employer branding?

by • Facilities management, Technology, Workplace, Workplace design

Employer brandingYou may recall that a few years ago there was a voguish interest in the idea of employer branding. This is the kind of thing that has always gone on but can always be defined and popularised,  in this case following the publication of a book on the subject in 2005. By 2008 Jackie Orme, the head of the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, was calling it ‘an integral part of business strategy’. Still, it appears to have dropped off the radar a bit over the last few years, a fact we might put down to the effect of the recession. Firms certainly seem to have their mind on other things. Research published last year by PriceWaterhouseCoopers showed that  in 2009, 54 per cent of businesses said they placed a special focus on retaining talent. By 2012 that had dropped to 36 per cent.

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Facebook hits like button for low-key Gehry campus building

by • Architecture, Environment, Facilities management, News, Property, Technology, Workplace design

Normally it would strike you as a bit odd that a company would appoint one of the world’s most high profile architects to design its new headquarters, a man with an immediately recognisable and frequently stunning visual style, only to then ask him to rein it all in and produce something pretty sober and unobtrusive. But that is precisely what Facebook has done with the appointment of Frank Gehry who has been tasked with producing a low key design for its new headquarters building  and campus in California which gained approval at the end of last week.

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We shape the world’s cities, then they shape us

by • Architecture, Comment, Knowledge, Property

UrbanisationThe story of the world’s cities is often told not in words but in numbers. This is especially the case with the megacities – those with a  population in excess of 10 million – which obtain enough critical mass not only to produce eye boggling statistics but also to distort the fabric of whole regions and change the way people live and behave. This is true for the established megacities of London, New York and Tokyo as well as the emerging global metropolises in Sao Paolo, Beijing, Mumbai, Shanghai, Cairo and Istanbul. It is also increasingly true for cities many people have never heard of.

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U.S. employers plan penalties to boost wellness participation

by • Knowledge, News, Workplace

Following on from the revelation that wellness programmes are only as good as the willingness of staff to participate, comes a study from the U.S. which highlights the role incentives can play in employers’ efforts to improve workforce health and performance. Aon Hewitt’s survey of nearly 800 large and mid-size U.S. employers representing more than 7 million U.S. employees found that 83 per cent now offer employees incentives for participating in programmes, while 58 per cent plan to impose consequences on participants who do not take appropriate actions for improving their health.

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Survey: Raised levels of staff empowerment and engagement

by • Knowledge, News, Workplace

There has been a positive change in employees’ levels of engagement according to new research from recruiter hyphen. Nearly three fifths (58.6 per cent) of UK workers are proud to work for their current organisation, and over three quarters (76.1 per cent) believe their manager gives them the support and autonomy needed to aide their performance. Zain Wadee, managing director at hyphen, said: “Engaging workers is now becoming an integral part of employment and retention strategies; not least to ensure workers are happy but also to help them perform to the best of their ability.”

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