Search Results for: government

March 12, 2019

UK jobs boom set to end as finance and business sectors lose confidence

by Sara Bean • Cities, Facilities management, News, Workplace

The boom in the UK jobs market is coming to an end just as the Brexit countdown reaches its final stages. According to the latest ManpowerGroup Employment Outlook Survey, the national Outlook for the second quarter of 2019 has fallen to +4 percent, on a par with the weakest levels of confidence seen in recent years. More worryingly, the negative Outlook in the Business and Financial services sector – which employs nearly a fifth of all UK workers – suggests jobs are set to be lost in Britain’s most important sector. The report found that the Finance and Business Services sector has fallen five points to -1 percent, only the second time in the last decade it has been in negative territory.

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March 11, 2019

Northern English cities held back by lack of opportunities for low skilled workers

by Neil Franklin • Cities, News

Despite higher living costs, southern English cities such as Oxford and Exeter lead the country in their ability to provide opportunities for people with low skills. A new report from the Centre for Cities on low-skilled workers claims that employment opportunities are greater for people with fewer or no qualifications in southern English cities than those in the North or Midlands. The report Opportunity Knocks? claims that, despite higher living costs in cities in southern England, their stronger economies create significantly more jobs for people with fewer qualifications. (more…)

March 5, 2019

Designing a better workforce: how workplace design can impact wellbeing

by Mary Lawrence • Comment, Wellbeing, Workplace design

In a recent survey, 95 percent of office workers said their physical work environment is important for their wellbeing and mental health. However, half believe their current working environment does not have a positive effect on their mental health, wellbeing, mood and productivity. The issue of employee wellbeing has risen up business’ agendas in recent years, and, as part of the drive for better mental health support for workers, companies are looking at ways in which the physical workplace can improve the mental health of their employees.

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March 4, 2019

Filtering out the noise, the pathology of work, busy doin muffin and some other stuff

by Mark Eltringham • Comment, Features

We might think that an inability to absorb the vast amount of information generated by our fellow humans and their machines is something of a modern phenomenon, but we’ve always known we can have too much of this particular good thing. Distringit librorum multitude, wrote Seneca in the First Century. An abundance of books is a distraction.

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March 1, 2019

Radical new environmental approach is needed to fix the global system, claims report

by Mark Eltringham • Environment, News

Entire systems change and fewer ‘sticking-plaster’ solutions from world leaders are urgently needed to address global challenges, reveals a report from sustainability non-profit, Forum for the Future. The report calls for urgent collaboration between governments, businesses, NGOs and investors to avoid climate change disaster and secure the future of our society and economy. The Future of Sustainability 2019: Driving systems change in turbulent times reveals a ‘perfect storm’ of seven factors that are set to impact sustainability in the future – including climate migration, nationalism, plastics and biodiversity loss. (more…)

March 1, 2019

Businesses pledge to work towards mandatory ethnicity pay gap reporting

by Sara Bean • Legal news, News, Workplace

The government is being encouraged to implement mandatory ethnicity pay gap reporting when it announces the outcome of its ‘Ethnicity pay reporting’ consultation, which closed in January. Pre-empting that, fifteen companies have signed a commitment today to work towards mandatory ethnicity pay gap reporting. Signatories include the Bank of England, Deloitte, KPMG, WPP, Santander and EY. The commitment, driven by membership organisation INvolve, aims to get more businesses voluntarily reporting on their ethnicity pay gap. In 2018 The Resolution Foundation estimated the ethnicity pay gap at £3.2bn. A report from INvolve also showed that white people earn on average between £67 and £209 more per week compared to similarly qualified individuals of a different ethnic background, and that the most ethnically diverse workplaces are 35 percentage points more likely to financially outperform industry averages.

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February 27, 2019

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Workplace ⁰

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

We know, and have for a long time, that the workplace is in a state of near constant flux and so we often fall into the trap of assuming that there is some sort of evolution towards an idealised version of it. That is why we see so many people routinely willing to suspend their critical facilities to make extravagant and even absurd predictions about the office of the future or even the death of the office. This is perniciously faulty thinking. However we can frame a number of workplace related ideas in terms of evolutionary theory, so long as we accept one of the central precepts about evolution. Namely that there is no end game, just types progressing and sometimes dying out along the distinct branches of a complex ecosystem. As a nerdy sort of guy of a certain age, I’ve tended to frame my thoughts on all of this with reference to an idea from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by the great Douglas Adams.

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February 26, 2019

IFMA UK joins forces with Greenpeace and Kids Against Plastic

by Mark Eltringham • Environment, News

With over 12.7 million tonnes of plastic entering the ocean every year, killing over 1 million seabirds and 100,000 marine mammals, it is estimated that by 2050 plastic will outweigh fish in our seas. Humans produce nearly 300 million tonnes of plastic every year, half of which is for single use. This is simply unsustainable.

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February 22, 2019

The biggest problem for city centres is a lack of high skilled jobs

by Mark Eltringham • Cities, News

The Centre for Cities, in partnership with George Capital, has mapped the UK cities with the strongest city centre economies in the UK, and identified their common features. The report City Centres: Past, Present and Future found that focusing on the struggles of certain high streets ignores the success of well-performing city centres and misdiagnoses the core problem: insufficient footfall in city centres due to a lack of jobs.

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February 21, 2019

Why the gender pay gap is an enduring challenge for many organisations

by Heejung Chung • Comment, Workplace

In April of 2018, large companies with over 250 employees were obliged to report their gender pay gap for the first time. Headlines that week were dominated by some of the surprise and shock of the extent to which women were paid less in majority of the companies reported, while for many women it just confirmed our hidden beliefs. There was a slight optimism, however, that there can only be progress. However, many companies who are reporting their new pay gap for this year show that rather than progress, many have increased their gaps. Why is this the case?

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February 20, 2019

Work life balance remains greatest challenge for owners of growing businesses

by Neil Franklin • News, Wellbeing

A new survey from Vistage claims that work-life balance is the biggest challenge facing what it refers to as scaleup business leaders in the UK. Defined as a business with an average annualised return of at least 20 percent in the last three years – and with a minimum of 10 employees at the start of the period – scaleup businesses are seen as key to the success of the UK government’s Industrial Strategy. Of the 2,800 respondents who took part in the poll, Vistage found a whopping 46 percent believe juggling a healthy home life with the demands of work is the biggest challenge owners of fast-growing businesses face. Access to talent came in a distant second with 22 percent of the vote, while sustaining momentum ranked third.

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February 17, 2019

More than 600 people quit work to look after older and disabled relatives every day

by Neil Franklin • News, Wellbeing, Workplace

New research by Carers UK claims that 2.6 million have quit their job to care for a loved one who is older, disabled or seriously ill, with nearly half a million (468,000) leaving their job in the last two years alone – more than 600 people a day. This is a 12 per cent increase since Carers UK and YouGov polled the public in 2013. The findings also show that more people are caring than previously thought, with almost 5 million workers now juggling their paid job with caring – a dramatic rise compared with Census 2011 figures of 3 million.