February 7, 2019

Employees think Internet of Things will be most important workplace technology trend

by Mark Eltringham • Flexible working, News, Technology

A team from Savills’ flexible office platform Workthere has predicted the top five tech trends we’re likely to see arriving into offices across the UK in 2019. Supporting the research, Workthere also completed a survey of 2,000 office workers to find out their views on the future of workplace technology as defined by the original study. The poll suggests that employees think that the Internet of Things will have the biggest impact on their day to day working lives followed by voice activated technologies and wireless charging.

February 6, 2019

Majority of businesses fail to see a return on their technology investments

by Neil Franklin • News, Technology

According to a new report from Accenture, the majority of businesses don’t see a return on their technology investments and just 14 percent of businesses manage to realise the full potential of their tech investments. Roughly $3.2 trillion was spent on new technology in the last five years. Businesses that were most successful with their investments were the ones investing in bold moves, rather than incremental shifts.

February 6, 2019

Green Building Council sets out to define net zero carbon building

by Mark Eltringham • Environment, News

The UK Green Building Council has published a consultation paper inviting feedback on a proposed definition for net zero carbon buildings. The consultation sets out the initial proposals from the Net Zero Carbon Buildings Task Group which is developing a framework definition in line with the ambitions of the Paris Climate Agreement.

February 4, 2019

Financial services firms slow in offering flexible working to all employees

by Neil Franklin • Flexible working, News

New research from TeleWare claims that 94 percent of employees in financial services firms believe it is important for them to be able to choose the hours they work and where from. Yet, only just over a third (36 percent) of employees in the sector work for firms that offer flexible working. Of those firms that do offer it, more than a fifth (22 percent) of employees said it isn’t available to all employees – only those of a certain level of seniority.

February 4, 2019

Businesses need to build far more employee trust in their use of workforce data

by Mark Eltringham • News, Technology, Workplace

Business leaders need to improve the way they implement and communicate responsible workforce data strategies if they are to build the employee trust that will help generate sustained revenue growth, according to a new report from Accenture. The report, Decoding Organizational DNA, is based on qualitative and quantitative research, including global surveys of 1,400 C-level executives and 10,000 workers across 13 industries.

February 1, 2019

Employee experience of the workplace does not match employer rhetoric, claims report

by Mark Eltringham • News, Workplace

A new report (registration needed), based on a survey of UK employers and employees, claims to reveal a significant and increasing gap between employees’ experience of being employed and what employers believe this experience to be. Barnett Waddingham’s four research papers claims that while the majority of employers (61 percent) believe the levels of wellbeing in their organisation to be high, only 19 percent of the employees surveyed report high wellbeing. According to the authors, this suggests employers do not sufficiently know or understand the needs of their people.

February 1, 2019

Are these the 2019 Top Employers to work for in the UK

by Neil Franklin • Company news, Wellbeing, Workplace

The Top Employers Institute, a certifier recognising employers that provide world-class employee conditions, has released its list of Certified UK Top Employers for 2019. Over 600 HR professionals gathered at London’s Hilton on Park Lane, on the 31st January 2019, to recognise the best employers in the UK. More →

February 1, 2019

Employees call for more user-friendly workplace technology

by Neil Franklin • News, Technology

A new report claims that because workplace technology is perceived as less intuitive and intelligent than consumer technology lags behind. The survey commissioned by The Workforce Institute at Kronos Incorporated conducted with UK-based Coleman Parkes Research, asked more than 2,800 hourly and salaried employees across a variety of industries in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Mexico, New Zealand, the UK and US to explore the impact existing and emerging technologies have on the employee experience.

January 24, 2019

Cambridge continues to attract science and technology firms

by Mark Eltringham • News, Property

A new report claims that Cambridgeshire continues to attract science and technology companies despite the current Brexit uncertainty. The analysis (registration required) from Bidwells of the Cambridge office and laboratory market claims that 0.6 million sq ft of new space will be complete during the first half of 2019. This is the highest level of new supply in over a decade. This perhaps sounds alarm bells given the apparent slowdown in demand for labs and offices combined to 1.154 million sq ft at the end of 2018. More →

January 23, 2019

Work’s not working; to be productive we need to get creative

by Zoe Humphries • Comment, Workplace design

Productivity in the UK workforce is dropping; output per hour fell 0.4 per cent in the last quarter of 2018 compared with the previous and grew just 0.2 per cent on the third quarter of 2017, according to the Office for National Statistics. Yet the UK workforce log the longest hours in Europe, working 42.3 hours per week on average. Clearly something isn’t lining up. So we must surely ask the question, what is going wrong and what can we do to improve the situation?

January 21, 2019

Robot delivery dogs, digital pollution, why tech firms like ping pong and some other stuff

by Mark Eltringham • Features, Technology, Wellbeing

Today is officially* Blue Monday and instead of offering up an endless series of clickbait pieces telling you how to cope and make the day better for your colleagues, we’re turning our attention to more interesting things. Such as this recent piece arguing that our obsession with ‘millennials’ can cloud our perspective on more important issues about people, their characteristics, advantages and inequalities. It argues that birth dates are rather less important to people’s life chances than their background, individual abilities and structural issues in the economy and society. Who – as they say – knew?

January 21, 2019

What we have wrong about why some companies are more successful than others

by Mark Eltringham • News

New research published in the Strategic Management Journal suggests a firm’s competitive advantage can last more than three times as long as previously believed. INSEAD Assistant Professor of Strategy Phebo Wibbens found that companies with “higher-order” resources can greatly outlast their competitors. Traditionally, strategy experts have focused on a firm’s operating resources – assets and capabilities that directly affect profit – when analysing its competitive advantage. Based on that assumption, high-performing firms were believed to have a run of success lasting on average about five years. But as IKEA, Apple and other firms have shown, a much longer period of success is available to some companies.