April 16, 2021
Breathe has released the findings from a recent survey aiming to understand business attitudes and approaches to mental health in the workplace. According to the firm, the pandemic has fuelled a health crisis which continues to impact the mental and physical wellbeing of staff in a number of ways. As a result, employers are under pressure to introduce adequate safeguarding measures, according to the report. More →
April 16, 2021
Research from Ezra, provider of digital coaching claims that a fifth of UK workers feel they get less recognition within their career as a direct result of working remotely. It remains to be seen to what extent we will return to a full working environment, as Covid restrictions see many continue to work from home for part of, if not their whole working week. More →
April 9, 2021
If a robot worker makes a mistake on the job, or annoys customers, businesses may not give it a pink slip and a cardboard box for its office belongings, but companies may be forced to shut down these expensive machines, according to a team of researchers. Knowing how to better design and manage these robots may help service industry firms both avoid losing their investments in the robots, as well as secure an increasingly necessary source of extra help, the team added. More →
April 9, 2021
British Land has announced that JLL has chosen 1 Broadgate for its new UK flagship office. JLL, the global real estate services firm, has signed an agreement for lease for 134,000 sq ft on a 15 year term, representing a pre-let of nearly a third of the office space. More →
April 8, 2021
Lockdown has meant the majority of UK office-based employees have taken up working from home arrangements over the last year, and it seems that many employers lack trust in their employees when they can’t physically see them. Last year saw a rise in the implementation of surveillance software, to ensure that workers are acting in best corporate interests. However, this is having a negative impact on some employees – who are feeling forced to work longer hours due to a new perceived need to remain visible to their manager or team leader, revealed in a survey by cybersecurity firm Kaspersky. With remote working set to stay post-COVID, these findings indicate a worrying growing trend around broken working from home employee trust. More →
April 7, 2021
A year of unnecessarily binary conversation about work leads inevitably to this. A stupid question. Is Big Tech going off work from home? Betteridge’s Law takes care of that, just as it did another question from 12 months ago. Even though the article is slightly better than the headline, the insistence that the only two choices we have are home or office remains. More →
April 6, 2021
The UK civil service is set to pioneer a widespread hybrid working strategy with the announcement of a new deal with serviced office provider IWG. The details of the deal, reported first in The Telegraph newspaper (paywall), will include the creation of a nationwide network of ten coworking spaces for the use of civil servants when they are not in London. The report suggests that up to 430,000 employees could now have a better chance of adopting a hybrid working culture. More →
April 6, 2021
In those heady pre-lockdown days, the most common complaint about office life, and especially open plan office life, was the inability to get work done without distraction. Now a new paper from researchers at the University of Illinois suggests that the interruptions may have served some purpose in the way they helped people feel a sense of belonging in the workplace. More →
April 1, 2021
It is now a truism that society expects more of business than merely maximising shareholder value. Milton Friedman’s conviction that unswerving commitment to this single goal would ensure that business and society would prosper has come to be seen as blinkered, unfit for the twenty-first century and enabling of corporate greed. Instead of shareholder value maximisation, an idea that The Economist called ‘the biggest idea in business’ in 2016, businesses are now encouraged to recognise their responsibilities to an array of ‘stakeholders’, from employees, suppliers and customers, to the planet itself and other communities (real or imagined). So, it has never been more important for businesses to do good, have a clear sense of purpose and be seen as doing so. More →
April 1, 2021
A new survey of many of the world’s leading real estate investors finds that 92 percent of respondents expect demand for healthy buildings to grow in the next three years. The report claims that this is a compelling signal of the direction the real estate sector is heading. This finding, among others, is captured in a report titled A New Investor Consensus: The Rising Demand for Healthy Buildings (registration) which claims to be a comprehensive health and wellness study of global real estate investment managers and stakeholders representing aggregate AUM of $5.75 trillion and portfolio investments in real estate totalling approximately US$1.03 trillion. More →
April 1, 2021
The productivity benefits of homeworking appear to have increased during the pandemic, with employers now more likely to say that the shift to homeworking has boosted productivity (33 percent) than they were in June 2020 (28 percent). This is according to new research by the CIPD, based on a survey of 2,000 employers and in-depth interviews with seven organisations in different sectors. More →
April 16, 2021
Hybrid working risks becoming a meaningless term
by Ben Gillam • Comment, Flexible working, Workplace design