May 9, 2023

Three quarters of small business owners say overwork leads to strife at home

A new poll from Sky Business claims that whilst 67 percent of SME owners and decision makers would recommend someone should start their own business, more than half (54 percent) have found running their own business more stressful since the threat of impending recession in the middle of 2022. And one of the consequences of overwork for SME owners is a tendency for stress to spill over into other parts of their lives. More →

April 24, 2023

Reconnecting older workers with the office: have we retired what matters most?

by Julie Lecoq • Comment, Flexible working, Workplace design

Older workers now make up a larger percentage of the workforce than they did two decades ago. Data from Legal and General and the Centre for Economic Research (Cebr) suggests that the number of over 50s in employment has increased by 36 percent in the last 20 years, with 47 percent of this age group predicted to be in employment by 2030. A combination of the increase in retirement age and rising costs of living have made it a necessity for individuals to stay in work longer. From a corporate perspective, the growing skills shortages in a range of sectors has also meant that employers are consistently seeking to attract and retain those in the latter stage of their professional career. More →

April 4, 2023

Flexible working is the new “work-life currency”, claims new report

by Neil Franklin • Flexible working, News, Technology

A new report, Future of Work Life, from Ericsson Consumer & IndustryLab explores the ways in which employees and employers navigate the current work environment and their views on the future of work shaped by the pandemic, digitalisation and the fluctuating labour market. Almost half (48 percent) of the employees in the study say that they enjoy increased flexibility at work. 52 percent consider flexible work hours or locations as key requirements, and 25 percent say that flexibility is the top priority if they would start to look for a new job. Doing work rather than going to work is seen as central in this new way of thinking about work life. More →

March 30, 2023

Every workplace innovation contains the seeds of its opposite

by Mark Eltringham • Comment, Flexible working, Technology

The announcement by Apple that it wanted its employees to work in an office for three days a week sparked the usual, tedious pile-on about how many days people should spend in a physical workplace each week. This included the columnist at Grazia who joins the tens of millions of people around the world who not only know where Apple is going wrong, but also how to run every other organisation in the world and what’s best for everybody who works for them. More →

March 29, 2023

Work-related stress costing UK economy £28bn a year

by Neil Franklin • News, Wellbeing

New data and economic modelling from AXA UK and Centre for Business and Economic Research (Cebr) claims that people are struggling with burnout and work-related stress, with an estimated £28bn lost last year due to poor mental health at work. The majority of this cost is due to loss of working days because of stress, burnout and general poor mental health, with businesses losing 23.3m working days as a result of these issues. More →

March 29, 2023

Leesman partners with MIT Center for Real Estate to explore long term impact of hybrid working

by Freddie Steele • Company news, Flexible working

Workplace analyst Leesman has joined the MIT Center for Real Estate (MIT/CRE) as a Strategic Partner and will be working with its Real Estate Transformation Lab to examine issues related to hybrid working. This collaboration will support Leesman’s three year investigation into the impact of hybrid working on people, places and societies. The Leesman project, entitled ‘The Hybrid Future’, will survey over 10,000 participants from around the world, to explore the impact of hybrid working on everything from productivity, diversity and urban centres to the environment, wellbeing and even our love lives. With 24 surveys set to be issued every six weeks, the volume and diversity of data, length of study, and breadth of topic range, make The Hybrid Future the most comprehensive study of hybrid working ever conducted. More →

March 23, 2023

Getting back to basics in The Great Workplace Conversation

by Mark Eltringham • Comment, Flexible working, Technology, Wellbeing

There’s nowhere near enough talk about our base instincts in the Great Workplace Conversation. Objectively speaking, we remain relatively highly evolved, communal and intelligent primates. And so we are driven by things we like to admit to – love, empathy and the Golden Rule. But also things we don’t care to admit to in quite the same way – status, jealousy and self-interest. More →

March 22, 2023

Workspace Design Show goes from strength to strength this year with visitor numbers up by 76 percent

by Freddie Steele • Company news

The Workspace Design Show returned to the Business Design Centre from 27- 28 February 2023, with exhibitors and visitors alike hailing it as a must-attend addition to the trade show calendar and a place where the workplace community can come together to be inspired and network. The overarching theme for this year’s show was Destination Workplace: Places Where People Want To Be, exploring how to create environments where employees have a desirable experience at their workplaces. More →

March 17, 2023

Most hybrid workers worldwide don’t think they’ll return to old ways of work

by Neil Franklin • Flexible working, News, Wellbeing

A poll of 3,000 office workers by Insights Learning & Development claims that 70 percent of hybrid workers in the UK want to maintain the arrangement permanently. According to the report, UK employees are generally happy with their hybrid working arrangements – more so than employees in the US, Canada and France. Overall workers in the Netherlands are most satisfied with their hybrid working arrangements. More →

March 15, 2023

“Flexible working has been introduced very inflexibly”: IN conversation with Jeremy Myerson

by Mark Eltringham • Features, Flexible working, IN Magazine, Premium Content

One of the latest people to invent activity-based working is a sociologist, who combined it with the similarly familiar hub and spoke office model on her substack as a solution to the Great Office Problem and as a way of implementing flexible working. She’s not the first and is a less surprising pioneer of a decades old model than some other people who should really know better. That includes an architectural practice who came up with the idea earlier this year and whose name escapes me. More →

March 2, 2023

One in four people will work from abroad this year, and many won’t tell their employer

by Jayne Smith • Flexible working, News

One in four (23 percent) UK office workers plan to take advantage of remote working to log on from abroad in 2023, with a third (32 percent) doing so against company rules, according to new research by the risk management and insurance broker, Gallagher. The survey of more than 2,000 UK office workers claims that the dramatic increase in hybrid working post pandemic now extends to a “work from anywhere” culture. But employees choosing to locate themselves overseas brings risk implications for their employer, as well as themselves. More →

March 1, 2023

The rise of the pods shows how the workplace pendulum swings

by Ben Capper • Comment, Workplace design

Long before the office died (I read its obituary in several publications) there were hotly contested debates about open plan offices. That is of course before those debates were eclipsed by more current workplace rantings (ask the editor). Skimming through the open-plan office timeline, Herman Miller launched action office, L-shaped desks with screens became shared benches, and decades later tech brands rolled out efficient open-plan workspaces around the globe, with Facebook creating the biggest open-plan office of all time with 2,800 employees. Gulp. Open plan officer workers and workplace professionals moaned about acoustics, stress, and more recently, germs in large open workspaces. More →