Search Results for: mental health

January 29, 2014

Green Building Council slams PM’s plans to slash environmental guidance

by Sara Bean • Environment, Facilities management, Legal news, Property

The UK Green Building Council has condemned Prime Minister David Cameron’s pledge to scrap realms of environmental guidance. In a speech to the Federation of Small Businesses earlier this week, the Prime Minister said that by March 2015 Defra will have slashed 80,000 pages of environmental guidance, saving businesses around £100 million per year; “to make it vastly easier and cheaper for businesses to meet environmental obligations.” However Paul King, Chief Executive at the UK Green Building Council, branded the move utterly reprehensible. He said: “The Prime Minister’s boasts of ‘slashing 80,000 pages’ of environmental guidance is. It is the same poisonous political rhetoric from Number 10, devaluing environmental regulation in a slash and burn manner. These words are not only damaging and irresponsible, but misrepresent the wishes of so many modern businesses, both large and small.” (more…)

November 15, 2013

Quarter of the UK workforce report they’re suffering long-term ill health

by Sara Bean • Facilities management, News, Workplace

Administrative and support activities, which includes facilities management, is one of five UK industries where employees have reported the highest levels of long-term ill health. However across all the sectors a staggering eight million people, or a quarter of the UK’s workforce (27%) say they suffer from a health problem that’s lasted more than a year. According to the new Health at Work Index from the British Heart Foundation (BHF) one in ten workers (12%) – approximately 3.5 million people – said their ability to do their job is limited by poor health. This includes over half of diabetes sufferers (58%) and the same proportion of people suffering from depression, mental illness or panic attacks (58%). (more…)

November 4, 2013

Leading US organisations pledge to promote healthy buildings and communities

by Sara Bean • Environment, Facilities management, News, Property

Adobe, one of the first companies to adopt the US Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) standard, is to conduct a study of its LEED certified workplaces to determine if they measurably contribute to more collaborative, creative, innovative and healthy employees. The move is part of a new Building Health Initiative launched last week by the California chapter of the USGBC. Google, Arup and Interface are amongst the founding partners, along with approximately 20 other organisations from a range of sectors. The movement aims to elevate green building as a benefit to public health as well as encourage the development of transparency standards in building materials. (more…)

August 30, 2013

Sometimes health and safety failures can be a laughing matter

by Mark Eltringham • Comment, Facilities management, Legal news, Workplace

One of the regular refrains from those involved in health and safety management is that while they aren’t killjoys, protecting people from harm is no laughing matter. Well actually yes, sometimes it is. And if the health and safety profession wants to shake off the po-faced image it claims is unjust, it needs to realise that some of the people it is trying to protect are just bloody idiots. And however much you try to make things idiot-proof, you’re unlikely to make them bloody-idiot-proof. Some people will always come up with something you haven’t thought of and a new way to put themselves in harm’s way.

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August 16, 2013

Healthier people theme for this year’s World Green Building Week

by Sara Bean • Environment, Knowledge, News

The UK Green Building Council has published a calendar of events for this year’s World Green Building Week (WGBW) which takes place from 16-20 September 2013. The theme is ‘Greener Buildings, Better Places, Healthier People’, emphasising the value of green buildings to people – whether higher productivity for office workers, improved learning outcomes for students, healthier workplaces for nurses and teachers, or better homes for people. The key messages are that green buildings make better places to live, work and play; that improving indoor and outdoor environmental quality help us to create healthier places to live and work, and that green buildings can improve well-being and quality of life for everyone in the community. (more…)

August 8, 2013

The war against environmental cynicism puts an onus on suppliers to be honest

by Mark Eltringham • Comment, Environment, Furniture

Greenwash is one of those terms that has gone from needing an explanation to being in common usage in the space of a few years. The reason for that is quite simply that it is the perfect description of a particular form of marketing bullshit that we all recognise. However, while a degree of scepticism about what you hear from marketers is always healthy, but I fear the point has been reached where some people find it easy to dismiss real environmental claims as greenwash. The war against cynicism can partly be helped if more manufacturers and suppliers could get better at demonstrating the validity of their claims.

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July 11, 2013

Green Building Council Awards recognise European environmental leadership

by Sara Bean • Environment, News, Property, Public Sector

The UK Green Building Council is accepting nominations for the first-ever European Regional Leadership Awards, part of the World Green Building Council Leadership Awards 2013, which recognise international best practice in city-level government policy for green building initiatives. The regional awards are for best practice in green building initiatives, projects, and policies that are supporting healthier and more sustainable communities within the European Region. “The awards promote leadership and inspire governments to replicate best practices in green building policy,” said the WorldGBC’s Chief Executive Officer, Jane Henley. “Buildings represent an unrivalled opportunity to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions, and cities play an increasingly critical role in seizing this opportunity.”

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June 10, 2013

Daylight exposure has ‘remarkable’ effect on office workers’ health

by Sara Bean • Architecture, Facilities management, Lighting, News, Workplace, Workplace design

The architectural design of office environments should take into consideration how natural daylight exposure contributes to employee wellness say the authors of a new study which observes a strong relationship between workplace daylight exposure and office workers’ health. Compared to workers in offices without windows, those with windows in the workplace received 173 per cent more white light exposure during work hours and slept an average of 46 minutes more per night. Workers without windows reported poorer scores than their counterparts on quality of life measures related to physical problems and vitality, as well as poorer outcomes on measures of overall sleep quality, sleep efficiency, sleep disturbances and daytime dysfunction. (more…)

April 5, 2013

Employers missing employee health and productivity link

by Sara Bean • Knowledge, News, Workplace

Only a minority of employers understand the productivity benefits of their health and wellbeing initiatives, new research reveals. Towers Watson’s latest Health, Wellbeing and Productivity survey found that 66 per cent of employers thought the link between health and employee performance was a relatively limited part of their health and wellbeing programme, with the main drivers being the desire to be seen as a responsible employer and the need to focus on more preventative health measures to manage rising healthcare and disability costs. (more…)

February 27, 2013

American Institute of Architects opens design and health project

by Sara Bean • Architecture, News, Workplace design

Via Verde

The American Institute of Architects (AIA) is working with the Clinton Global Initiative and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Center for Advanced Urbanism (CAU) to examine the relationships between design, urbanism, and public health. The collaboration is part of the AIA’s Decade of Design Commitment to Action, which aims to make positive changes through design in the global urban environment. Alexander d’Hooghe, director of the MIT CAU explained: “We are investigating the scale of urban design, architecture, as well as planning, in relation to health today, whether related to obesity, or to climate change.” (more…)

November 4, 2026

Entrepreneurs who struggle to understand their emotions are less committed to business goals, study finds

by Neil Franklin • Business, News, Wellbeing

Entrepreneurs who struggle to recognise and make sense of their own emotions are less likely to feel attached to their businesses and less committed to achieving their goals, particularly in high-stress periods, according to new research from the University of Bath School of Management. And while management development programmes often focus on areas such as strategy, finance and leadership skills, the study – No words for feelings, no attachment to ventures? Alexithymia, venture attachment, and venture goal commitment under perceived stress – also suggests there may be significant value in helping entrepreneurs improve their emotional self-awareness. (more…)

October 27, 2026

One in five workers think they are poorly served by offices

by Neil Franklin • News, Wellbeing, Workplace design

A major new study of workplace experience has found that offices are failing to meet the needs of employees with disabilities and health conditions, younger workers enjoy a better experience than older colleagues, almost a quarter of workplace investments make things worse, and noise remains a persistent problem, while AI threatens to reshape how employees work and learn from one another. The findings come from Leesman’s new Big Questions report, which draws on a database of more than 1.6 million employee responses across 10,775 workplaces in 124 countries to examine whether offices are meeting the needs of the people who use them. (more…)