January 6, 2017

Learning to love staff means letting them disconnect from work, and other stories ⁰

by Mark Eltringham • Flexible working, News, Technology

Topical workplace issues featured prominently at this week’s British Psychological Society’s Division of Occupational Psychology annual conference held in Liverpool. Four of the key takeaways from the event deal with issues such as the right to disconnect when working from home – a right recently enshrined in law in France, the way different personality types deal with emails, the toxic relationship between employers and employees and even how managers can learn to show their staff more love. The focus at teh event underlines a growing awareness of the complexities of our new relationship with work and workplaces.

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August 25, 2016

Research suggests individual responses to stress at work vary widely ⁰

by Sara Bean • News, Wellbeing, Workplace

No matter how compelling the evidence on the impact of stress at work there are always individuals who dismiss the very idea as self-indulgence. New research suggests this isn’t down to lack of empathy but simply because some people just don’t experience stress the same as others. The survey by the Deloitte Greenhouse Experience team found statistically significant variation in how respondents react to stressors which indicates that workplace stress is relative and not everyone experiences stress in the same way or to the same degree. The majority of respondents reported modest levels of stress. Fourteen percent reported being stressed only rarely and 57 percent reported being stressed sometimes, while 26 percent reported being stressed often, and 3 percent reported being always stressed. Different scenarios were also mooted to identify stress triggers. Making mistakes topped the list of stressors, with 82 percent of respondents indicating errors caused stress.

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August 11, 2016

Disabled workers continue to face barriers in the workplace ⁰

by Mark Eltringham • Legal news, Wellbeing, Workplace

A series of reports published in the past few days highlight the challenges faced by Britain’s disabled workers. The studies claim separately that disabled workers are keen to work but are less likely to be in employment and may be hiding disabilities from employers, are paid less when they are in work and that many employers do not feel they are well equipped to deal with the needs of disabled staff. The first study from Reed in Partnership and Disability Rights UK found that one in ten employers do not feel able to support a disabled employee. Meanwhile research from the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) found that employees who experience mental ill-health earn up to 42 per cent less than colleagues. A third report from Citizen’s Advice found that 40 percent of disabled people would like to work but can’t find a job. And finally a report from RIDI claims that many people applying for jobs may be hiding their disability from employers.

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February 23, 2016

Belief in a corporate wellness narrative is more important than action ⁰

by Mark Eltringham • Legal news, News, Wellbeing, Workplace

The complexities of wellness at work are laid bare in a new report from the US based pressure group Global Wellness Institute. The most eye-catching conclusion from The Future of Wellness at Work study is that it’s not actual wellness programmes that do most to boost worker health and productivity, but whether employees identify that company as ‘caring’. The report claims that ‘unwellness’ now costs the US around $2.2 trillion each year, equivalent to 12 percent of GDP. The report is published alongside a white paper which lays out the findings from a survey of American employees. Unlocking the Power of Company Caring gauges how employees feel about their work culture and wellness programmes. The main finding of the two reports is that to understand what has the most powerful impact on employee wellness ‘you must look well beyond the wellness programme’ itself. Instead, the pivotal factor is whether an employee identifies their company as caring about their health and wellness.

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July 15, 2015

The standard gender pay gap narrative is a myth, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t problems

by Mark Eltringham • Comment, Flexible working, Knowledge, Workplace

It is one of the great ironies of modern life that in a world drowning in data, a great deal of public discourse is driven by narratives that have little or no factual basis. If anything, the substitution of baseless and questionable stories. Sometimes these narratives are based on outdated realities. Sometimes on assumptions. Sometimes they are deliberately created and upheld by those with vested interests. Sometimes people lie, including to themselves. However they are formed, they can become pretty hard to dislodge, especially when they become so enshrined that the default response to inconvenient truths is a wall of cognitive dissonance and denial. I’m obviously building up to something here and it won’t necessarily be an easy thing to say or hear. And it’s this. The gender pay gap doesn’t exist. Or at least, it doesn’t exist in the way we normally assume so distracts from related issues that we may be able to address.

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June 8, 2015

Proximity determines how middle managers copy bosses’ unethical behaviour

by Mark Eltringham • Facilities management, News, Workplace design

Middle managers mirror their bosses’ unethical behaviour, regardless of how ethical they are themselves, claims new research from Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University. The research, conducted in partnership with Cambridge University, shows that in cases of unethical leadership at the top of an organisation, middle managers will treat their subordinates unfairly if the social and spatial distance between them and the top management is low. This can lead to employee dissatisfaction, lower organisational commitment and increased employee turnover. In contrast, the effect is reversed if the social and spatial distance between managers and top management is high. Middle managers, who are unfairly treated by their bosses, will treat their employees more fairly if, for example, they are based in different offices or buildings from their managers, and the social distance is high.

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May 28, 2015

It’s perfectly logical why we should apply emotion in workplace design

by Dan Callegari • Comment, Wellbeing, Workplace, Workplace design

Most of the arguments put forward for enlightened workplace design are fact based. That’s useful but such arguments can also ignore the fact that we respond to our surroundings on an emotional level as well as a functional one. Once you accept that office design is as much about how it makes people feel as how it helps them work, then the design process can be as much about EQ as it is IQ. While businesses can shy away from dealing with the emotional facets of working lives, there is a growing movement that advocates not only greater awareness of the importance of emotional intelligence but is also able to draw attention to the benefits it brings to organisations and individuals. This was the underlying message of a groundbreaking event that took place in London recently which explored the use of emotion in a business context.

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November 21, 2014

Worktech weaves together the strands of people, place and technology

by Mark Eltringham • Cities, Events, Flexible working, Technology, Workplace

Day two of Worktech London and affirmation that far from dying, as so many headline writers would have us believe, the office is merely entering a new phase. The underlying theme of Worktech continues to be how we find new ways of weaving together the strands of presence and connectedness formed by cities, buildings and technology. Worktech is a constant reminder that while our world may be shaped by algorithms, we still need each other and need to be with other people at least some of the time. The event is admirably hosted by long time collaborator and MC Jeremy Myerson whose knowledge and donnish charm holds things together while the real Don, founder Philip Ross, beams from the sidelines. It is now de rigeur for such events to have a poet in residence and this year’s was Matt Harvey who summed things up at the end of the day with reference to Worktech’s longstanding idea of jellybean working but who popped up in between sessions with lyrical summations including one that showed some real spunk (you had to be there).