Search Results for: generation z

British Council for Offices launches competition to imagine the office of 2035

British Council for Offices launches competition to imagine the office of 2035 0

by • News, Property, Workplace design

Participants in a new competition to define the ‘office of the future’ will be asked to consider ‘what it will look like, and how it will support the way we will work’ by the British Council for Offices (BCO). The free-to-enter competition is seeking ‘forward-thinking and innovative responses, challenging the conventionalities of today’s workplaces and anticipating future needs’. The BCO hopes that the NextGen programme will allow it to ‘mentor the next generation of professionals – designers, agents, developers, consultants and others – and provides a platform for emerging talent to share their ideas’. The announcement cites social, economic, cultural and technological factors as the main agents of change, leading to changes in the expectations of employers and workers. It suggests that ‘ubiquitous and instantaneous technology; a growing interest in health and wellbeing; a greater desire for organisational flexibility; and an increased awareness of individual’s needs are now all competing factors within the workplace’.

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Inventing the Future: techUK launches 2017 manifesto

Inventing the Future: techUK launches 2017 manifesto 0

by • News, Technology

techUK, the association that represents a large part of the UK’s technology sector, has published a new manifesto ahead of the General Election which it claims ‘sets out a bold and ambitious vision for the next Government to create a modern and dynamic digital economy that works for everyone’. The organisation has set out a series of recommendation that aim to show how Britain can remain at the forefront of global tech innovation while it navigates Brexit and other forces. Its objectives include: boosting the UK’s productivity; harnessing digital transformation to build a smarter state; creating new jobs and a new skilled, adaptable workforce; and protecting and empowering people in a digital age.

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Quarter of UK workers would move jobs for office with a better mobile signal

Quarter of UK workers would move jobs for office with a better mobile signal 0

by • Facilities management, News, Technology, Workplace

One in four (25 percent) of British office workers say they would consider moving jobs (or have already moved) due to a lack of mobile coverage in their building, claims new research from Arqiva, which highlights the worrying extent of the UK’s struggle for adequate indoor mobile coverage and its potential impact to businesses in the future. The survey, conducted among 1,000 UK office workers, revealed that as many as 1 in 2 (49 percent) respondents have experienced poor mobile coverage (i.e. dropped calls or a lack of signal) within their office building. Of those, almost three quarters (72 percent) say this is an occurrence that happens every week, and a quarter (25 percent) say it is something they face daily.

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Number of CEOs with technical background grows to meet demands of digital economy

Number of CEOs with technical background grows to meet demands of digital economy 0

by • News, Technology, Workplace

Growth of the digital economy

The number of CEOs from a financial background is falling as firms put more sway into technology skills, a new report claims. The annual Robert Half FTSE 100 CEO Tracker shows that in the last four years the number of CEOs with a technology background trebled as businesses prepare to compete in an increasingly digital economy. In 2014, only three CEOs had a background in technology while today this number has increased to 11. There is a also a generational shift occurring in the FTSE 100, with just eight CEOs under the age of 50 on the FTSE 100, a quarter less than in 2010 when there were 33 CEOs under the age of 50. The typical age of a CEO is 55 years old and the average tenure is five years and two months. While a majority of CEOs still have a background in finance, this figure has fallen to 43 percent from 55 percent last year and the lowest level in three years. Of those CEOs with a financial background, nearly half (19 percent) are Chartered Accountants.

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Millennials’ career choices give them the best chance of adapting to automation

Millennials’ career choices give them the best chance of adapting to automation 0

by • News, Technology, Workplace

As alarm grows in some circles over the impact of technology on future job prospects, a new survey suggests that Millennial’s jobs are likely to be at lower risk of automation. Research into how different generations choose jobs by jobs site Indeed compared the online search patterns of millions of UK jobseekers over the six months to March and found that younger people are substantially more likely to choose roles deemed to be at lower risk of automation. Nearly half of younger jobseekers were drawn to automation-resistant jobs, compared to fewer than four in 10 over-50s. These baby boomers are two thirds more likely than millennials to seek the manual jobs at highest risk of automation. While nearly half of millennials (48 percent) were searching for what economists term ‘non-routine’ roles, 61.1 percent of baby boomers were looking for ‘routine’ jobs. Routine jobs – which include sales, admin, transport and construction roles – are seen as being at higher risk of automation than non-routine work, which includes management, professional and service roles.

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Wiring your brain to the Internet? What could possibly go wrong?

Wiring your brain to the Internet? What could possibly go wrong? 0

by • Comment, Technology, Wellbeing

Neuralink – which is “developing ultra high bandwidth brain-machine interfaces to connect humans and computers” – is probably a bad idea. If you understand the science behind it, and that’s what you wanted to hear, you can stop reading. But this is an absurdly simple narrative to spin about Neuralink and an unhelpful attitude to have when it comes to understanding the role of technology in the world around us, and what we might do about it. It’s easy to be cynical about everything Silicon Valley does, but sometimes it comes up with something so compelling, fascinating and confounding it cannot be dismissed; or embraced uncritically. Putting aside the hyperbole and hand-wringing that usually follows announcements like this, Neuralink is a massive idea. It may fundamentally alter how we conceive of what it means to be human and how we communicate and interact with our fellow humans (and non-humans). It might even represent the next step in human evolution.

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Requests to work remotely increase as stigma around flexible working diminishes

Requests to work remotely increase as stigma around flexible working diminishes 0

by • Facilities management, Flexible working, News, Technology

A majority of workers (65 percent) now feel comfortable requesting to work from home, while a third (33 percent) of UK employees would decline a job offer if they weren’t able to work flexibly. This is according to a new study from Maintel which claims that today’s multi-generational workforce prefers flexible working to traditional office hours and location; with flexible work policies perceived as an important workplace benefit. Nearly three quarters (73 percent) of respondents say the company they work for has good flexible work policies in place, 64 percent of remote workers don’t feel micromanaged, and 58 percent would take the opportunity to spend even less time in an office, if it were available. Well over half (60 percent) of respondents believe technology can replace in-person interaction in the workplace. Yet there remain challenges with flexible work, including indifference regarding the security of company data (66 percent) and distractions at home (31 percent).

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Commercial property lenders should drive sustainability through financial innovation

Commercial property lenders should drive sustainability through financial innovation 0

by • Environment, News, Property

The commercial real estate finance sector is witnessing a dramatic shift in attitudes towards the issue of sustainability, according to a new report from the Better Buildings Partnership. It claims that major commercial property lenders are already exploring new opportunities that go well beyond traditional risk management through sustainability initiatives that ‘drive new business, strengthen customer relationships and improve the data they hold on the buildings in which they have underwritten’. The report, Beyond Risk Management: How sustainability is driving innovation in commercial real estate finance, is sponsored by CREFC Europe, GeoPhy, ING Bank and Lloyds Bank Commercial Banking, and claims to reveal pioneering examples of how lenders are incorporating sustainability into their core business activities.

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Governments need to address perfect storm of low wages, productivity and automation

Governments need to address perfect storm of low wages, productivity and automation 0

by • News, Technology

Governments need to act now to address issues such as productivity, automation and stagnating or falling wages, according to two new reports from the International Monetary Fund (IMF). In both its Spring global policy agenda and world economic outlook, the IMF claims that workers are subject to a perfect storm of factors that will destabilise their jobs and lives unless governments implement robust policies to help them work more flexibly, acquire new skills and work alongside the new generation of automated technologies instead of in competition with them. Addressing the issues in a speech last week, IMF managing director Christine Lagarde said that governments need to create a new economic and social architecture that allows everybody to take advantage of the opportunities offered by technology and the current growth in the world economy.

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US millennials hold complex and even traditional attitudes to working families

US millennials hold complex and even traditional attitudes to working families 0

by • Flexible working, News

working familiesA report from the US based Council on Contemporary Families claims that younger millennials have a much more complex and even traditional attitude than recent generations towards issues such as gender roles, workplace equality and working families arrangements. The study has monitored the attitudes of 50,000 18-25 year olds in the US since 1975. The most recent study, based on data from 2014, found that fewer of the current generation in that age category support egalitarian family arrangements than the same group 20 years ago. It suggests that while attitudes became uniformly more egalitarian throughout the 40 year period of the research, a more complex picture has now emerged in which positive attitudes towards traditional gender roles in families seem to be returning to the levels they were at the beginning of the 1980s, even though there is near universal agreement with ideals such as equality in the workplace and parental leave.

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Over three quarters of workers prefer traditional employment to the gig economy

Over three quarters of workers prefer traditional employment to the gig economy 0

by • Flexible working, News

Much has been written about the inexorable rise of the gig economy. However, a new survey from jobsite Glassdoor, claims that only 13 per cent of workers across all employment types would even consider this route for future employment, and the vast majority of employees (76 percent) feel more secure sticking to permanent employment in 2017. As with any work arrangement, using temporary or “gig” workers has both benefits and drawbacks when set against traditional employment.

The survey suggests that the major perceived benefit is flexibility, both for job seekers and employers. When asked the question, “What do you think would be the biggest advantage of working in the gig economy?”, most (35 percent) of employees selected  “flexible working”, followed by “better work-life balance” (11 per cent) and the ability to “be my own boss” (10 percent). Furthermore, 39 percent of female employees feel that the biggest advantage of working in the gig economy would be the flexible working, compared to just 31 percent of men. However, 73 percent of women also reported they already enjoy a good work-life balance in their current roles.

Salaries and benefits remain the most important workplace factors for both men (56 percent) and women (63 percent), something which is typically less stable in gig or contract work.

Gig employment for task-based jobs like car rides, accommodation rentals, and food deliveries are all now mainstream services. Glassdoor’s previous research for the US labour market suggests a slowdown for gig work in 2017, especially as job seekers weigh the pros and cons of this employment type. This new UK survey finds that only 12 per cent of those already self-employed feel they would earn more if they left a job to take on work which paid “per activity” (rather than an annual salary), with 21 per cent of those in full time work feeling the same. On a wider level, just one in ten of all respondents across all forms of employment believe that the gig economy would become the “future of work,” with double that amount (20 per cent) feeling it actually exploited workers and harmed employees’ rights.

In terms of job generation, only 13 per cent of all respondents predict that the gig economy would be a good way to reduce unemployment and create jobs in the future. When broken down by gender, nearly a third of women (31 per cent) feel that the gig economy would only ever be for a “limited number of workers” and was not accessible across a “wide range of roles”. This was opposed to just a quarter of men.

The millennial generation of employees has been labelled as the group who will structure and shape the way we work in coming years. However, only 10 per cent of 18-24 and 9 per cent of 25-34 year olds are of the opinion that the gig economy will eventually become the “future of work.”

Dr. Andrew Chamberlain, Glassdoor’s Chief Economist said: “The gig economy may be associated with prodigious growth of app-based taxi rides and food delivery, however, as we’ve already witnessed in the U.S., the impact on the UK workforce could remain minimal in the longer term.

“The main reason is size. Although many ride-sharing and travel platforms have popped up in recent years, they’re still confined to a small corner of the workforce. Further, gig roles only really work for relatively simple jobs that are easy to measure, don’t require deep institutional knowledge, and don’t rely on long-term relationships. The majority of the fastest growing jobs in the labour market today require human creativity, flexibility, judgment, and soft skills. For some jobs, the UK gig economy is here to stay. But don’t expect the majority of the workforce to be part-time contractors any time soon.”

Image: Jack Lemmon finally gets a corner office in The Apartment

Post Brexit UK sets out its case at MIPIM 2017

Post Brexit UK sets out its case at MIPIM 2017 0

by • Cities, Features, Property

Cannes-based international real estate fair MIPIM has always been a magnet for cities, determined to extoll their virtues to investors, developers and occupiers, but this year the UK was in charm overdrive. Buoyed no doubt in part by the presence of the UK government’s Department of International Trade (DIT), waving its ‘open for business’ flag for UK PLC, many of the towns and cities that would normally have ploughed their own furrow, instead came together to leverage critical mass. So Bradford and Leeds combined, conurbations across the central belt conjoined on a Midlands pavilion, and so on. Whether it was panic or confidence, the net result was an unusually prominent UK presence, up a quarter on last year. Of course the UK is just one nationality among the 24,200 real estate and city professionals from 100 countries who come together in Cannes every March.

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