Search Results for: office design

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 20, 2019

The changing shape of the insurance workplace

by Mark Eltringham • News, Workplace design

HOK’s WorkPlace group has released The New Insurance Workplace (registration required), a report which sets out to examine the forces reshaping the insurance industry and how workplace design can position these companies for success. The report’s concludes that insurance firms take pride in their conservative approach to risk management and traditional business models. They also have high-performance cultures that demand strong results. Yet changing regulations, emerging technologies and increasingly obsolete work processes have left many legacy players with underutilised, outdated office and retail space that hinders their ability to meet the fast-changing expectations of customers.

January 18, 2019

Employers must take better action to avoid sick building syndrome

by Steve Loughney • Company news, Facilities management, Workplace design

Sick building syndrome is a collective term to describe when occupants of a specific building suffer from a related illness. Problems can either be localised to a specific room or more widespread throughout a building. The symptoms can manifest as headaches, blocked or runny noses, skin irritations, sore eyes or tiredness and difficulties with concentration. A number of building-related factors are linked to the condition with ageing offices and factories acting as magnets for sick building syndrome. Studies have shown that headaches and respiratory problems among office workers were directly related to the use of air conditioning and inadequate ventilation. Room temperature, light and noise, humidity, carbon dioxide, chemical contaminants (volatile organic compounds – VOCs), air quality and naturally occurring poisons can all inflame symptoms for sufferers requiring more precise control over environmental factors in the workplace. Making sure buildings are healthy for their occupants is a challenge. More →

January 7, 2019

What Leonardo da Vinci can teach us about the six hour working day ⁰

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

The latest idea to grip the sometimes limited imagination of the world’s workplace chatterers is that of the six hour working day or the four day working week. This has its original roots in a Swedish experiment designed to limit the hours people work in an attempt to improve their work-life balance and possibly even increase their productivity. Now a growing number of firms are looking to introduce a nominal four day working week or restrict the use of emails outside of office hours. These are always commendable goals and you can see the logic. We know people find it increasingly hard to switch off, we know that this is bad for them and we know that long hours don’t necessarily equate to greater productivity.

December 21, 2018

The ten most read stories on Workplace Insight for 2018

by Mark Eltringham • Facilities management, Features, Property, Technology, Workplace, Workplace design

We can’t help but feel that the world caught up with us a bit during 2018. We’ve been talking about the intersection of people, place and tech since we started up five years ago. Of course, we weren’t even the first to do this. As we’ve always acknowledged, we’re standing on the shoulders of the giants who first recognised what was happening a quarter of a century ago. Many of the ‘trends’ with which we are presented are nothing more than the crystallisation of ideas first expressed by people in the 20th Century. They seldom get their due.

December 21, 2018

Are open plan workspaces truly evil or is this just fake news?

by Dr Caroline M. Burns • Features, Workplace design

A recently published paper describing the results of an academic study by Ethan S. Bernstein and Stephen Turban[1], both of Harvard, has become another unwarranted casualty of the debate within our industry and in the mainstream media on ‘open plan’ offices versus anything else. The researchers conducted two controlled studies in different organisations before and after a workplace refurbishment from dedicated cubicles to dedicated open plan (benching) neighbourhoods, and concluded that face to face interaction reduced significantly, while email and other digital communications increased in the new environment.

December 17, 2018

Meatspace, cyberspace, the uncertainty of expertise and some other stuff

by Mark Eltringham • Features, Technology, Workplace, Workplace design

The sign that somebody knows their stuff about a subject is often that whatever they say about it is full of questions, equivocations and caveats. They’ll often start out by saying things are complicated in mitigation of their opinion on a particular topic. They’ll say there are no silver bullets. It’s almost always neophytes, chancers and the conflicted that offer certainty. To prove my point here is David D’Souza of the CIPD making a point about the tendency to look for pat, narrow solutions to complex, broad challenges. Not only does he have something interesting to say, you know that he has the depth and breadth of knowledge to expand on each of the points he makes with yet more sophistication. It’s fractal thinking.

December 17, 2018

Don’t be a turkey, get on the commercial property gravy train

by Jo Sutherland • Comment, Property

Last week, the RICS Commercial Property conference tackled the biggest issues impacting the built environment sector, arming delegates with fragments of the formula for future success. The morning CEO Question Time panel put a trio of CEOs in the spotlight. In addition to airing concerns about the current political climate, rapidly shifting societal attitudes, diversity and inclusion, the ageing population coupled with the ongoing housing shortage, climate change and the complexities involved in exploring new business models to drive and diversify revenue, they all zoomed in on the accelerated pace of change we’re witnessing, crowning it the key challenge for today’s C-suite.

December 12, 2018

People are great: a conversation with James Woudhuysen on the future of work ⁰

by Mark Eltringham • Features, Podcasts, Technology, Workplace design

At a conference at the WWF’s Living Planet Centre in Woking staged by the office furniture firm Kinnarps, I had an off the cuff chat with James Woudhuysen who had just delivered one of his typically entertaining, erudite and challenging talks on the future of work alongside equally renowned speakers such as Philip Tidd and Namrata Krishna from architecture firm Gensler. James is an academic, writer, commentator and (dread word) futurologist. More →

December 11, 2018

Promotion: Humanscale opens new Manchester showroom

by Freddie Steele • Company news, Furniture, Workplace design

Humanscale has opened the doors to its latest showroom in the City of Manchester, reinforcing its presence in the North of England. Located in the Old Town, formerly home to the famous Factory Records label, this is Humanscale’s second showroom in the UK this year, after moving to a new space in the heart of London’s design quarter. When Humanscale originally put down roots in Clerkenwell in 2001 it was the first outpost beyond North America.

December 6, 2018

Constant switching between tasks kills productivity

by Neil Franklin • News, Wellbeing, Workplace

A new report claims that the modern habit of switching constantly between tasks is draining productivity. In a study of live desktop activity, the results suggest employees are forced to switch between up to 35 job-critical applications nearly once a minute – or more than 1,100 times every day – adding unnecessary complexity that reduces efficiency and frustrates workers. The study from Pegasystems analysed nearly 5 million hours of desktop activity of operational support employees – who primarily perform routine back office, data entry, or contact centre tasks – at Global 2000 companies from January to September 2018.

December 6, 2018

Siemens new Swiss campus showcases workplace technology and use of BIM in construction

by Mark Eltringham • Case studies, Company news, Facilities management, Technology, Workplace design

Siemens AG has officially opened its new campus in Zug, Switzerland. The Siemens Zug campus features a new office building with 1,000 work spaces and a newly constructed production building. The investment volume for new buildings, renovations and related measures amounts to CHF 250 million. The campus is the international headquarters of the Siemens Building Technologies (BT) Division, which has 29,000 employees. Construction of the office and production buildings began in May 2016 and was completed in July 2018. The Siemens Zug campus is one of the first new projects to use Building Information Modeling (BIM) for design and construction. The digital twin – a 3D model of the building, enhanced with technical information relevant for later operations – is the foundation for efficient, cost-optimised and forward-looking building management. More →