January 12, 2021

Burnt out workers need to regain some balance

by Dan Zakai • Comment, Wellbeing, Workplace design

The pandemic and months of Zoom calls and remote work have begun to wear on us, so much so that in a recent survey from Blind – the anonymous workplace community app – 68 percent of respondents said that they are experiencing more feelings of being burnt out now, than they were before the pandemic began. Perhaps unsurprisingly, 29 percent of the respondents said their relationship with their direct boss was now worse than it had been before they began working remotely. And it’s not just top-down relationships at work that have deteriorated. (more…)

December 18, 2020

The shape of things to come for the world and the workplace

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

Originally published in March, right at the start of all this. Makes me wonder how far we’ve come in nine months. In Dorian Lynskey’s The Ministry of Truth, a “biography” of Nineteen Eighty-Four, the author describes how Orwell’s book was the end point of an obsession with utopian (and ultimately dystopian) fiction that characterised the first half of the Twentieth Century, and reflected the competing political, social and economic ideologies of the era. (more…)

December 18, 2020

Working from home stresses have had the greatest impact on women

by Neil Franklin • Flexible working, News, Wellbeing

A review of research in organisational and workplace psychology conducted by an international team of academics claims that working from home has been more disruptive for women than men. The review paper, entitled COVID-19 and the Workplace: Implications, Issues, and Insights for Future Research and Action and originally published in American Psychologist, features urgent insight from UCL School of Management Professor, Sunny Lee into the sex- and gender-related implications of changes in work practices that have taken place over the course of 2020. (more…)

December 4, 2020

The lost art of office furniture peacocking and the growing mental health crisis at work

by Mark Eltringham • Comment, Technology, Wellbeing, Workplace design

When Donald Trump was pictured recently sitting uncomfortably at a table that looked like it had been retrieved from a skip, it provoked the sort of sneering commentary about furniture choices last seen when Dominic Cummings popped in to the Downing Street garden to deliver some self-serving blather from behind a rickety trestle table. (more…)

November 30, 2020

Rise of remote work monitoring technology to be investigated by taskforce

by Neil Franklin • News, Technology

Union body the TUC has today launched a new taskforce to look at the “creeping role” of artificial intelligence (AI) in managing people at work. The taskforce launch comes as a new TUC report, Technology managing people: the worker experience, claims that many workers have concerns over the use of AI and technology in the workplace. (more…)

November 26, 2020

People still struggling with shift to remote living

by Jayne Smith • News, Technology, Wellbeing

A lack of balance through lockdown has been felt most dramatically by Brits living in house shares according to new research released by Microsoft Windows. The research claims that over 40 percent of people living with house mates, friends or professionals are finding it increasingly difficult to destress and unwind after a long and challenging day; while a further 1 in 5 of the UK population admit that work and play has become blurred in 2020. (more…)

November 25, 2020

Several factors impact wellbeing of people working from home

by Jayne Smith • News, Wellbeing, Working lives

A new study on work-life balance claims that the COVID-19 crisis is a crucial factor – but not the only one – behind low levels of wellbeing among employees working from home. A research team including Professor Ilke Inceoglu, Professor of Organisational Behaviour and HR Management at the University of Exeter Business School, analysed data from 835 university employees, who completed a baseline questionnaire on wellbeing and took a weekly survey. (more…)

November 13, 2020

Productivity and wellbeing highest in companies with a connected culture

by Jayne Smith • Flexible working, News, Working culture

RingCentral UK Ltd, has released the findings of its Connected Culture Report claiming that employees working for companies that foster a “connected culture” are twice as likely (34 percent vs. 15 percent) to be productive when working from anywhere, than those that don’t. (more…)

October 28, 2020

It`s not just businesses that need to wake up to changes in the way we work. Governments do too

by Jeremy Stein • Comment, Workplace design

We have come a long way since the government began encouraging home working in March, ahead of the national lockdown. It seems wildly naïve now to assume that we would all be back in the office two or three weeks later as if nothing had ever happened. After many months of mixed messages regarding ‘stay at home’ versus ‘go back to work’, many business owners and employees quite rightly feel that the whole process seems like one step forward, two steps back. And yet, one thing that has become clear for all office-based businesses is that working life has changed forever. (more…)

October 21, 2020

Young people suffer most from lack of motivation at work

by Jayne Smith • News, Wellbeing, Working lives

New research by management consultancy Lane4, claims 44 percent of employees under 35 years old say that a lack of motivation has been hindering their performance at work since the start of the coronavirus outbreak in March.

The study of over 1000 UK employees, carried out by YouGov, suggests that the performance of younger workers (under 35 years old) is twice as likely to be impacted by a lack of motivation than that of 45-54-year olds (22 percent), and significantly more likely to be impacted by a lack of motivation than the average for all age groups (28 percent). (more…)

October 8, 2020

Most people with mental health issues would prefer a robot therapist to a human

by Jayne Smith • News, Technology, Wellbeing

2020 has been the most stressful year in history for the global workforce and people want robots to help, according to a new study by Oracle and Workplace Intelligence, an HR research and advisory firm. The study of more than 12,000 employees, managers, HR leaders, and C-level executives across 11 countries claims that the COVID-19 pandemic has increased workplace stress, anxiety, burnout and other mental health issues for people all around the world, and would prefer a robot instead of other people to help. (more…)

September 22, 2020

Millions of working days lost each year through poor mental health

by Jayne Smith • News, Wellbeing

More than 11 million UK working adults have taken time off work for poor mental wellbeing, costing businesses an estimated 40 million working days each year, claims new research from healthcare provider, Benenden Health. As many as a third (35 percent) of UK employees took time off work due to poor mental health in 2019, with workers absent for between two and five days on average, costing UK businesses an estimated 4o million individual days of work. (more…)