Search Results for: flexible working

Time to address the missed opportunities and wasted resources of the modern workplace

Time to address the missed opportunities and wasted resources of the modern workplace

by • Comment, Wellbeing, Workplace design

Rapidly changing work and workplaces. Productivity languishing below optimum levels. Staff engagement well below where it should be. Ongoing recruitment and retention challenges. All this has been building over the last couple of years; it would appear that organisations have never had it so tough. There have been plenty of tough times before, of course, but we have been witnessing something of a ‘perfect storm’ in recent months, where a whole range of issues and developments, as well as advancements and opportunities, have come together to push these challenges up the management agenda. But there are things we can do to make the workplace a better experience for everybody.

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Boundary-less workplaces must offer contextual, personalised workspaces

Boundary-less workplaces must offer contextual, personalised workspaces

by • Facilities management, Flexible working, News, Technology, Workplace, Workplace design

'Boundary-less' workplaces must offer contextual, personalised workspacesThe future workplace will replace familiar, rigid hierarchies and departments with small, collaborative networks of teams and the lines between individual organisations and ecosystems will blur as companies increasingly cast their net wider to innovate. This is one of the predictions made in a Fujitsu-commissioned whitepaper ‘Workplace 2025’ which argues that businesses must rethink social and technology strategies to plan for the future workplace – or risk being left behind. To appeal to future employees with the right skills, the whitepaper, which was produced by European research firm Pierre Audoin Consultants (PAC) advises that businesses must ensure they are moving towards an environment that provides contextual, personalised workspaces aligned to the individual needs of users. At the same time, they should plan to encourage enhanced peer collaboration by implementing technologies such as augmented reality. The Workplace 2025 report foresees that today’s organisational structures will become more agile, adapting to constantly-changing economic conditions, competitive landscapes and customer demands.

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Progress on gender equality at work moving at a snail’s pace, report claims

Progress on gender equality at work moving at a snail’s pace, report claims

by • News, Workplace

The UK’s gender equality at work has barely budged in ten years, a new report claims. The Gender Equality Index 2017, which has been published by the European Institute for Gender Equality (EIGE), also claims that gender equality across the EU improved little between 2005 and 2015. The index measures gender equality at work using several factors, including the proportion of women in full-time employment, the availability of flexible-working arrangements and career prospects. According to the report, the EU’s score is just four points higher than ten years ago, now 66.2 out of 100. The top performing country is Sweden with a score of 82.6, while Greece moved to the bottom with 50 points. The award for the most improved country goes to Italy, which made a big leap and gained 12.9 points to place itself at rank 14 on the ladder.

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Seven (or eight) of the best workplace stories we think you should read this week

Seven (or eight) of the best workplace stories we think you should read this week

by • Features

A Google engineer has created a religion which will have an artificial intelligence as its God

Nobody seems to know what mindfulness actually is

Most people are neither extroverts nor introverts

We are literally sleepwalking into a health and productivity disaster

Are you working alongside a zombie?

The five major roadblocks to smart city infrastructure

Shooting the same people on the way to work for nine years

What Norman Foster got wrong about the Apple HQ, and what it means for everybody else

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New Scotland Yard wins Better Public Building Award at the 2017 British Construction Industry Awards

New Scotland Yard wins Better Public Building Award at the 2017 British Construction Industry Awards

by • Architecture, News, Public Sector, Workplace design

The New Scotland Yard building on Victoria Embankment has been named as the winner of the 2017 Prime Minister’s Better Public Building Award. The Award sets out to ‘recognise excellence in publicly funded buildings and infrastructure, and highlights projects that bring real change to communities, demonstrate innovative and efficient construction and deliver value for money’. The winning building, designed by AHMM, is a £58 million project that remodelled and extended the former Curtis Green building. It represents a move back to Victoria Embankment for the Metropolitan Police service, having first previously occupied the address in 1890. The new entrance is designed ‘to create a welcoming and non-institutional yet secure front door’ and reinstates the iconic revolving sign. The project was completed as part of a major rethink of the organisation’s corporate real estate strategy, in line with UK Government objectives for the public sector estate.

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Traditional department-based office layouts reduce efficiency and collaboration, say bosses

Traditional department-based office layouts reduce efficiency and collaboration, say bosses

by • Facilities management, Furniture, News, Workplace, Workplace design

Eliminating traditional departmental office seating improves efficiency say bosses

Nearly two thirds (64 percent) of senior executives say their offices are still structured on a traditional departmental basis, despite the fact that the majority of those polled in a recent survey (94 percent) believe project efficiency could increase significantly if they simply re-arranged their office seating plans to promote cross-departmental collaboration between team members. The new report Agile Ways of Working: The Great Leadership Disconnect from digital consultancy, Red Badger, claims that not only do these senior decision makers believe in the promotion of collaboration, but four out of five (81 percent) digital leaders in organisations who were additionally surveyed, strongly believed that an inflexible office layout actively led to delays in launching a product or service into the market or to customers. “Waterfall” ways of working (62 percent) and teams working on multiple projects at once (51 percent) were also among the most cited reason for delays in the past.

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How smart workplaces increase performance and attractiveness 0

by • Case studies, Facilities management, Premium Content, Technology, Work&Place, Workplace design

The workplace can and should be used as a strategic tool to support work and cooperation, to shape the experience of the brand and to produce competitive advantage for the organization. Even when not used as a strategic tool the workplace still affects all these parts and there is always a risk that the workplace has instead a negative impact if we are not aware of the relationship and really use workplace as a strategic tool to affect attractiveness, productivity, efficiency and sustainability. The workplace makes a great difference and it is becoming an important differentiator between successful and less successful organizations. I also strongly believe that the workplace management area is a key for us in the FM industry to bring FM to a higher level, to shift from cost focus to more value focus, and this is something we need to do together within the FM industry and we really should take the driver’s seat. But, let’s start from the beginning.

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Growing concerns about staff wellbeing will transform real estate over coming years, claims study

Growing concerns about staff wellbeing will transform real estate over coming years, claims study

by • News, Property, Wellbeing, Workplace design

The UK commercial property market will be transformed over the next few years as a growing number of firms use their workplaces to address the physical and mental wellbeing of staff, claims a new report from law firm CMS. The report, Smart Healthy Agile, is based around the findings of a survey of 1,000 office workers and 350 real estate firms. It claims that the most common problems associated with office life and sedentary lifestyles, such as weight gain, stress, depression and musculoskeletal disorders are encouraging employers to adopt a different approach to working culture and office design.

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Groundbreaking White Collar Factory building opens in London

by • Company news, Property, Workplace design

Derwent London has announced the opening of White Collar Factory. The firm claims that the project is one of the most visionary developments of recent years, White Collar Factory combines the look of a well-built industrial space with modern office design. Located near Old Street Roundabout in North East London and designed by architectural practice Allford Hall Monaghan Morris (AHMM), the features of the White Colla Factory include 3.5m high ceilings, concrete core cooling, a 150m rooftop running track, communal roof terrace, a new landscaped public space and the ability to accommodate flexible occupation. The 293,000 sq ft mixed-use development includes a 237,000 sq ft office tower, where the first tenants are already in occupation. Tenants include Adobe, AKTII, BGL, Box.com, Capital One, Runpath, Spark44, The Office Group and Workshop Coffee. The tower forms part of a new urban campus with a further 56,000 sq ft of offices, studios, incubator space, restaurants and apartments, set around a new landscaped area of public realm, ‘Old Street Yard’.

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The government announces a major new office for public servants in the West Midlands

The government announces a major new office for public servants in the West Midlands

by • News, Property

Thousands of public servants in the West Midlands will move to a new building in central Birmingham, as the government continues its drive to modernise its office estate. HMRC working with the Cabinet Office has signed a 25 year lease to take 238,988 sq ft at 3 Arena Central, which is a new office development in the centre of Birmingham. The building will see around 3,600 public servants from several government departments move there from 2020, including from HMRC and Department for Work and Pensions (DWP). The hub will be the base for one of HMRC’s regional centres. DWP plans to move staff into the hub from existing offices in the city. The move is part of the Government Hubs Programme, which will reduce the number of isolated and under-used offices that the government has by co-locating departments in shared buildings across the UK. Departments moving to hubs will need less space as they adopt smart working principles, which will reduce their operating costs. Providing modern, flexible office space will further deliver value for money by improving staff wellbeing and productivity

The mega trends that continue to reshape the workplace around the world

The mega trends that continue to reshape the workplace around the world

by • Events, Features, Property, Technology, Workplace design

Last week, over 600 workplace and property experts met in London at the CoreNet Global Summit 2017 to discuss some of the most important trends affecting the sector. The debates underlined one important fact about property and workplaces, which is how they are shaped by major, globalised events as much as they are local needs and the objectives of specific organisations. This quickly became evident on day one, which demonstrated how dramatic shifts in the geopolitical landscape, all of which are impacting corporate real estate – from America First to Brexit – remain key talking points for the industry. Opening speaker Linda Yueh (University of Oxford and London Business School) explored several possible scenarios, including how the focus of ‘Trumpism’ would have a significant effect on the U.S. role on the world stage, with the priority on the domestic economy leaving little scope for global trade. She also predicted that a ‘hard Brexit’, with no new trade deal with the EU, will be the most likely outcome for the UK’s withdrawal process; and that businesses will need to focus on alternative WTO rules as an urgent priority. Other impacting factors covered by Yueh included the rise of a dominant global middle class, and China’s need to rebalance its economic growth drivers.
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Employees with higher levels of trust and autonomy at work are more productive

Employees with higher levels of trust and autonomy at work are more productive

by • Facilities management, Flexible working, News, Workplace

Employees who feel trusted by their employer to manage how and when they work for themselves can improve their levels of productivity, a new survey suggests. The research by Peldon Rose claims that UK workers rate feelings of trust and autonomy from employers and colleagues as increasingly important in keeping them productive and happy in the workplace. But the survey also shows that many employers are failing to provide employees with the resources and support they need to manage their workload and keep them motivated. Although the majority of staff (59 percent) say they work most productively in the office, a third (33 percent) wish they were more trusted to manage how and when they work and 42 percent say that their office does not support a culture that allows them to work flexibly. Despite the clear value that staff place on trust and autonomy, employers are overlooking an opportunity to create a confident and self-motivated workforce.

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