Search Results for: four day week

Faced with era of AI, employers focus on skills and employees crave jobs with purpose

Faced with era of AI, employers focus on skills and employees crave jobs with purpose

by • News, Technology, Workplace

According to Mercer’s 2018 Global Talent Trends Study – Unlocking Growth in the Human Age, 96 percent of UK companies have innovation on their core agenda this year and 92 percent are planning organisation design changes. At the same time, employees are seeking control of their personal and professional lives, with more than half asking for more flexible work options. As the ability to change becomes a key differentiator for success in a competitive global climate, the challenge for organisations is to bring their people along on the journey, especially as the top ask from employees is for leaders who set clear direction, claims the report.

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Excessive workloads and lack of communication is increasing workplace stress

Excessive workloads and lack of communication is increasing workplace stress

by • Facilities management, News, Technology, Wellbeing, Workplace

UK office workers are under a tremendous amount of stress, and much of it is directly related to the way their work is being managed. That is the conclusion of a report by Workfront, which finds that office workers are becoming frustrated and burned out by poor work tools, processes, and communication. Four out of five office workers confessed that they feel burnt out and 73 percent expect their stress levels at work to increase in the near future. Nearly three quarters (74 percent) admit to feeling unrecognised and un-useful at work. With lack of communication and not knowing what others are working on (37 percent) cited as the number-one pain point across the board for stressed UK workers, it’s clear that businesses need to break down current silos, allowing people to engage more freely with senior staff members and see how their efforts impact the wider team. The study found that poor communication and visibility into work is UK workers’ number-one pain point in terms of work stress. It also reveals that 42 percent of office workers put in more than 6 hours of overtime per week and that 7 out of 10 office workers expect their stress levels at work to increase into the future.

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The very idea of good work in a gig economy remains a distant ideal

The very idea of good work in a gig economy remains a distant ideal

by • Comment, Flexible working

Don Lane’s employment contract for his work as a courier described him as an “independent contractor”. This meant he was neither an “employee” nor a “worker”, so not entitled to legal rights such as protection against dismissal, paid holidays, or statutory sick pay. The 53-year-old also suffered from diabetes, and had previously been fined £150 by the delivery firm he worked for for missing work to attend a hospital appointment. He died in January 2018 after working through the Christmas season despite his illness. The following month, the British government revealed its response to an earlier official report on modern working practices and the gig economy. That report, by Matthew Taylor, contained 53 recommendations to improve the working environment, or achieve the report’s title, namely ‘good work’.

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Diversity shown to help drive business performance but discrimination is still widespread

Diversity shown to help drive business performance but discrimination is still widespread

by • News, Workplace

Diversity shown to help drive business performance but discrimination is still widespread

The economic cost of workplace discrimination to the UK Economy is £127 billion a year, claims new research.  Of the £127 billion, £123 billion is due to gender discrimination, £2.6 billion as a result of discrimination against ethnic minorities and £2 billion due to discrimination as a result of sexual orientation. These are the claims of a new report commissioned by INvolve, a membership organisation that champions holistic diversity and inclusion in the workplace, and Cebr, an economics consultancy which analysed over 500 workplaces uncovered a significant positive correlation between diversity and financial performance.

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Open plan offices are distracting and reduce rather than improve productivity, says report

Open plan offices are distracting and reduce rather than improve productivity, says report

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

Open plan offices are distracting and reduce rather than improve productivity says report

Open, collaborative work environments have been hailed as a boost to collaboration and performance, but since individual tasks that require high levels of concentration and minimum disruption still account for over half of the typical working day, noise and distraction within open plan workplaces prevent employees from focusing properly and may reduce productivity, claims a new report. According to research by Unispace, 60 percent of the average working day is devoted to individual task-focused work; 25 percent to collaboration, 7 percent to socialising and the same for learning. The research found that the issue of noise has actually become much worse over the last 12 months, with more workers complaining compared to the same research conducted in 2016. Survey respondents flagged noise (15 percent) as the primary cause of inefficiency during the working week, a number that has risen by four per cent in just 12 months. Second to this was a lack of quiet areas (13 percent), a lack of privacy (9 percent) and 7 percent felt that the temperature and air quality of their office was also a factor. The findings come as part of Unispace’s research of more than 11,000 workers in a global study of working practices and workplace design.

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Luther, Marx, Engels and a nailed-on manifesto for workplace change

Luther, Marx, Engels and a nailed-on manifesto for workplace change

by • Comment, Facilities management, Workplace design

In October 1517 Martin Luther nailed his Ninety-Five Theses to a church door in Wittenberg, thereby setting in motion the process that we know now as the Reformation. At least since that time, it has been apparent that a revolutionary manifesto needs to be laid at somebody’s door – or nailed to it – at the right moment for it to achieve its aims. Revolutionary manifestos are easy enough to set out, but the tract is nothing without traction.

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Millions of UK workers unaware of employer’s policy on statutory sick pay

Millions of UK workers unaware of employer’s policy on statutory sick pay

by • Legal news, News, Wellbeing, Workplace

Millions of UK workers unaware of employers policies on statutory sick pay

Over 2.5 million UK workers are unaware of their employer’s policy on statutory sick pay and would face a significant salary shortfall if they were unwell and unable to work, claims new research from Direct Line.  Just 4 percent of employees know how much they would be paid in statutory sick pay if they fell ill and many mistakenly believe that on average they would receive full salary for three and a half months if they were unable to work due to illness. In fact, 43 percent of firms reduce an employee’s wages to statutory sick pay after two weeks of an employee being off sick and one in six firms reduce wages to statutory sick pay after just four days. It is not only salaries people lose out on if they are off sick; one in five (21 percent) firms that pay bonuses withhold these if an employee has been off work on long term sick leave. More than a third of firms (33 percent) will pay bonuses based on pro-rata analysis of days worked and 14 per cent will pay a discretionary reduced rate.

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Managers’ increasingly long hours behind rise in stress and mental ill health

Managers’ increasingly long hours behind rise in stress and mental ill health

by • Flexible working, News, Wellbeing, Workplace

Managers' increasingly long hour resulting in stress and mental ill healthManagers are working an extra 44 days a year over and above their contracted hours, up from 40 days in 2015. These long hours are taking their toll, causing a surge in sick leave amongst managers suffering from stress and mental ill health, claims the Chartered Management Institute (CMI), which is calling on UK employers to provide greater support. Long hours and constant communication are having a detrimental effect on the wellbeing of managers it argues resulting in one in ten managers taking time off for mental health in the last year, and for those who do take time out, it’s for an average of 12 days. Of the 1,037 managers surveyed for the report, the average boss puts in an extra day each week.  This is an extra 7.5 hours beyond their contracted weekly hours (44.4 hours actual compared to 37.3 contracted), adding up to an extra 43.8 days over the course of the year. This is up from 39.6 days in 2015. The rising gap between contracted and actual hours of work is in addition to an ‘always on’ digital culture, with 59 percent of managers saying they ‘frequently’ check their emails outside of work – up from 54 percent in 2015.

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One in ten people have fantasised about killing their boss

One in ten people have fantasised about killing their boss

by • News, Workplace

A new survey of 2,200 people claims that one in ten have fantasised about killing their boss at some point. Construction workers emerged as having the worst relationship with their line managers with nearly a quarter admitting to murderous thoughts (22 percent), followed closely by those working in the media industry (15 percent). The report from B2B comparison site Expert Market claims that more than half of respondents (52 percent) said that they hate their job specifically because of their boss. In fact, one in five workers said that they would actually turn down a pay rise in favour of firing their manager and it’s because people think their boss is not fit for purpose. The majority of those asked (73 percent) believe that they could do their boss’ job far better than them, particularly those in the energy and entertainment industries; 86 percent and 81 percent, respectively.

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We need to have an honest conversation about presenteeism

by • Comment, Flexible working, Workplace design

We have talked before about the risks of over thinking problems. It is not just something that consultants, designers and the workplace intelligentsia are guilty of – everyone does it.  It is why we do not switch off when we are ill and still insist on going to work. We over think the consequences of not being in our workplace. Likewise, many traditional line managers simply cannot get their head around their teams working from home. After all, modern management mantras all talk about creating a great atmosphere in which teams all work together – in the same space at the same time? We all tend to over complicate most things and that is one of the main reasons in the UK we struggle with the concept of working from home. A consequence of this is the rise in presenteeism, which is mainly linked to illness, people ignoring how bad they feel and because of a perceived pressure, still turning up for work.

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Government targets 50 percent cut in greenhouse gases from the built environment

by • Environment, Facilities management, News, Property

The UK government has set some ambitious targets for construction and the environmental performance of buildings following the announcement of a Sector Deal for the construction sector. The sector deal was an integral part of the Industrial Strategy White Paper published earlier this week. In a statement, Business and Energy Secretary Greg Clark revealed more details of the deal supported by £170m of government investment and £250m of match funding from the built environment sector. The announcement sets out ambitious new targets for the built environment and infrastructure including a 50 percent reduction in greenhouse gases and a third reduction in the costs of construction and whole life costs of buildings.

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The contribution of personality to the performance of agile workers

by • Features, Flexible working

The introduction of agile working into organisations has typically focussed on the workstyles of different job roles, but has tended to treat the jobholders within these groups in the same way. The successful introduction of new ways of working clearly relies on the willingness of the people occupying the job roles to embrace new ways of working; yet there has been little investigation of the needs of agile workers with different personality types beyond looking at the needs of extroverts and introverts. These studies have tended to focus on the workplace; for example, the Cushman Wakefield Workplace Programme briefing paper examines how organisations can accommodate the needs of extroverts and introverts working together in the workplace. However, using OCEAN personality profiles, Nigel Oseland found that different personality types have different preferences, which in turn are likely to affect their performance at work.

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