Search Results for: flex

September 16, 2014

The culture of presenteeism is not all just fun and games

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

Ten or so years ago an office seating manufacturer commissioned me to prepare a report on the games industry. The idea was to target a market the company had decided was primed to hear their message about ergonomics and the deleterious effects of long hours spent sitting and peering at a screen. Not only would this develop a new market for the business, it would also showcase a new product they had launched specifically to target a younger and hipper audience, even one that was overwhelmingly male. All of the elements of a successful campaign appeared to be there – the right product, a sedentary workforce that often worked around the clock to hit deadlines in an industry that epitomised youthful cool and was willing to spend money to prove it.

September 10, 2014

Portfolio working could become the norm in ten years time says KPMG

by Sara Bean • Flexible working, News, Workplace

At last year’s Worktech London, Charles Handy discussed the ascent of the portfolio worker. In a new survey by KPMG, 63 per cent of business leaders agree that portfolio workers will gain mainstream commercial acceptance within the next ten years. But some confusion remains as to just what constitutes a ‘portfolio worker’ as distinct from employees on flexible work schedules or freelancers. Just over a third (35%) of Generation Y respondents understood the term “portfolio workers” but they felt that they were simply freelancers by another name (78%), as did three quarters of the senior executives (76%) and the older respondents (74%). According to the survey portfolio workers differ from freelancers by having contracts in place with a number of different companies simultaneously, with a guaranteed number of hours of work from all during any given period of time. This approach, as Hardy has predicted, looks set to become the new way of work. More →

August 21, 2014

Hotels allocating more public space to meet the needs of business travellers

by Mark Eltringham • Flexible working, News, Workplace design

Presenteeism isn’t restricted to the workplace. Growing demand from business travellers means hotels are increasing the amount of working and meeting space they provide in their facilities in cities across Europe and the rest of the world. Three quarters of British employees work while staying in a hotel according to the survey carried out by the Fraunhofer Institute on behalf of hotel business solutions firm HRS. Only Italians spend more time working in hotels (76 percent), followed the UK (75 percent), Poland and Switzerland (50 percent respectively), Germany (46 percent), China (45 percent), Russia (43 percent), Austria (42 percent) and France (25 percent). The firm has also identified a number of hotels around the world which it believes offers exemplars of the new working spaces available.

August 20, 2014

Rise in staff social media profiling will transform the workplace

by Sara Bean • News, Technology, Workplace

Whether or not the younger generation are in fact more technically astute is still open to debate, but one thing is clear, they’re far less perturbed at the idea of being digitally monitored than the older generation. New research reveals that the younger generation are more open to sharing their personal data with their employees, with 36 per cent of Generation Y workers saying they would be happy to do so. Nearly a third of people would be happy for their employer to have access to their personal data, such as social media profiles and this kind of data monitoring of employees will rise over the next decade as Generation Y enters the workforce. Given the fact that by 2020 this generation will form half of the global workforce – they’re set to bring with them their different attitudes to technology and personal data. More →

July 31, 2014

Yet another report into the Future of Work that is really about the present

by Mark Eltringham • Comment, Flexible working, Technology, Workplace design

Just a few days ago, a survey from Morgan Lovell and the British Council for Offices highlighted the value British workers placed on having somewhere to work, regardless of its drawbacks, privations and distractions. Now a new report from consultants PwC seems to draw the opposite conclusion. Heralded by predictably tedious headlines declaring the office to be dead or dying, The Future of Work: A Journey to 2022 claims that a quarter of the 10,000 people surveyed believe the traditional job will disappear and around a fifth claim to have already had enough of the 9 to 5 in a fixed physical space and would prefer to work in a ‘virtual place’ – which seems to mean anywhere with WiFi. As ever, any report addressing ‘The Future of Work’ is primarily and perhaps unwittingly about the present.

July 28, 2014

A vision of office design that is the exact opposite of all it claims to be

by Mark Eltringham • Architecture, Comment, Workplace design

The currently voguish idea that ‘sitting kills’ finds an interesting interpretation in this conceptual office design by Dutch architects RAAAF and the artist Barbra Visser. Designed with the good intentions of encouraging movement, the hellish outcome has the aesthetics of a stealth bomber crossed with an underpass in Peterborough reimagined by MC Escher, the functionality and appeal of a Snowdonian potholing weekend and is populated by 21^st Century hipsters and band members of Kraftwerk. This is the Outstanding Landscape of Affordances, commissioned by the Netherlands’ Chief Government Architect and set to become a real installation in Amsterdam next year. To be fair, the blurb does describe the idea as ‘a first step towards a future in which standing at work is the new norm’, but that doesn’t mean we should ignore its catastrophic shortcomings, even as a talking point.

July 25, 2014

We may not know what the future holds, but we can certainly be prepared for it

by Justin Miller • Comment, Facilities management, Furniture, Workplace design

Given the track record of people when it comes to making predictions about the future, it’s easy to grow cynical, especially when it involves a profession as subject to the vagaries of technological and cultural change as facilities management. But while we should be wary of more fanciful and long term thinking, any natural scepticism shouldn’t blind us to those predictions that we know will largely come true, especially those based on what we know is happening already. For example, recent research carried out by Cass Business School and Henley Business School and presented in the book Future Work: How Businesses Can Adapt and Thrive in the New World of Work found that two-thirds of managers believe there would be a revolution in working practices over the coming ten years. Given what we’ve seen over the past ten years, it’s impossible to argue any different. In fact the only quibble we should have with this is that it won’t take another ten years for this to happen because the process is already well underway.

July 24, 2014

The collaboration between BIFM and CIPD unites the workplace tribes

by James Sutton • Comment, Facilities management, Workplace

The world of work and the workplace is always changing. We know it. You know it. In fact, there are a whole host of people that know it, but depending on what side of the professional fence you sit on, you might approach it in different ways, looking through a different lens or with a specific focus. Or are you already bridging the professional gap? Workplace change and the numerous ramifications of it are well documented. In a world that is changing, at frightening pace, it is strange to think that many of the ways in which we work are so entrenched in 20th century thinking. We need to break away from this and outline what the future is going to look like and how we should adapt. Or do we already have the answers? This ground is well trodden. However, it could be time to reassess our thinking and the way we approach this challenge, ensuring it becomes the norm for organisations around the world.

July 22, 2014

BCO study finds office remains the best place to do business

by Sara Bean • Facilities management, Flexible working, News, Workplace design

The challenge for the typical office is that it is meant to satisfy a broad range of individuals and a variety of working practices; which means what some may describe as a distracting open-plan layout, others would view as a busy collaborative workspace. These conflicts are highlighted in a new study by the British Council for Offices (BCO), Morgan Lovell and Hatch, which surveyed 2,000 UK office workers’ working conditions, attitudes and expectations. For example while over two thirds were critical of the distractions of the open-plan office, nine out of ten employees believe that support from colleagues enhances their wellbeing. Putting aside the open-plan debate, the study espouses the continued importance of the office as the best place to do business and comes up with three key starting points to help employers create a culture of wellbeing: care; control and collaboration. More →

July 16, 2014

Three ways in which politicians display their ignorance of the workplace

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

The recent Cabinet reshuffle in the UK Government won’t alter one fact; politicians simply don’t get it when it comes to technology, the workplace, the way people work and the needs of small businesses. Once you dismiss the paranoid idea that they DO get it but don’t care because they’re too busy looking out for The Man, you have to conclude that one of the big problems they have (this won’t go where you think) is that they don’t understand anything about technology and work, especially when it comes to emerging technology, the working lives of individuals, the needs and functions of small businesses and the fact the self-employed exist at all. These things exist outside the bubble. This is obviously a problem because they are implementing policies and making big, uninformed and anachronistic decisions about the things that shape every aspect of our lives, help to define us as people and determine how companies and individuals function. Here are just three examples.

July 14, 2014

How Arthur C Clarke and other writers predicted tablet computing and the iPad

by Mark Eltringham • Comment, Technology

Arthur C Clarke was one of those scientists and science fiction writers who made a pretty decent fist of getting his technological predictions right. Not only did he foretell general trends such as flexible working and the future nature of work in cities, he also got a number of details right, too. His screenplay for the Stanley Kubrick directed 2001: A Space Odyssey featured astronauts using something uncannily like an iPad. Indeed, so uncanny was the resemblance that when Apple came to have their long-running global patent tussle with Samsung following the 2010 launch of the iPad, the film was cited by Samsung as evidence that Apple hadn’t come up with the idea of a rectangular screened device at all. The judge ruling in the US case ultimately dismissed this specific argument but did conclude that other real world examples of devices would be admissible.

July 14, 2014

The latest Workplace Insight newsletter is available to view online

by Sara Bean • Facilities management, Newsletter, Work&Place, Workplace design

In the latest copy of the Workplace Insight newsletter available to view online; Chris Kane argues that people and place are a company’s most valuable assets and only by developing them both in tandem will you unlock their true value. We reveal that far from improving their work/life balance, flexible working means nearly half of managers work an extra day each week; the Dutch beat the Germans in workplace happiness and productivity levels, and the UK’s public sector spends almost twice as much on outsourced services as the country’s private sector. The BBC announces plans to move more staff out of its central London offices as part of its strategy to reduce property costs, and news of a transformation in the way the US corporate real estate market approaches the environmental performance of buildings. We also include a link to the new issue of Work&Place, the journal we publish in partnership with Occupiers Journal.