Search Results for: office

October 12, 2017

New Scotland Yard wins Better Public Building Award at the 2017 British Construction Industry Awards

by Mark Eltringham • Architecture, News, Public Sector, Workplace design

The New Scotland Yard building on Victoria Embankment has been named as the winner of the 2017 Prime Minister’s Better Public Building Award. The Award sets out to ‘recognise excellence in publicly funded buildings and infrastructure, and highlights projects that bring real change to communities, demonstrate innovative and efficient construction and deliver value for money’. The winning building, designed by AHMM, is a £58 million project that remodelled and extended the former Curtis Green building. It represents a move back to Victoria Embankment for the Metropolitan Police service, having first previously occupied the address in 1890. The new entrance is designed ‘to create a welcoming and non-institutional yet secure front door’ and reinstates the iconic revolving sign. The project was completed as part of a major rethink of the organisation’s corporate real estate strategy, in line with UK Government objectives for the public sector estate.

October 10, 2017

We (still) need to talk about mental health in the workplace

by Liam Butler • Comment, Wellbeing

In recent years we have made huge strides in moving discussions around mental health into the public arena. Celebrities such as Cara Delevingne, Ryan Reynolds, Gwyneth Paltrow and Brad Pitt have all come forward to share personal stories of their struggle with mental health problems. The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge and Prince Harry have also championed mental health awareness through the Heads Together campaign, a charity that aims to help people feel more comfortable with their everyday mental wellbeing and offer practical tools to help support their friends and family. The campaign rose to prominence in the media as the 2017 Virgin Money London Marathon Charity of the Year.

October 9, 2017

Our Twentieth Century approach to ergonomics has to change

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

One of the big problems with the way some people talk about the term ‘ergonomic’ is that they tend to use it to describe the design of objects when really it’s about the relationship between a person and the things around them. It’s an abstract idea, about the relationships between design, facilities and management, so is dependent on a number of variables. When those variables change, what we understand to be good ergonomics changes too. The principle of ergonomics as we now understand it first came to prominence in the wake of the intensive growth in the use of computers. The legacy of this fixed view can be an approach based on an idea of desk-bound employees with a computer, whereas how we work now bears little resemblance to how we worked 20 years ago.

October 6, 2017

Seven workplace stories you should read this week

by Mark Eltringham • Features, Flexible working, Property, Technology, Workplace design

Poland has a rapidly ageing population but has just cut its state retirement age

Why IBM is bucking the trend and demanding its workers return to the office

US cities are offering all sorts of incentives for Amazon to move there

India is looking to create ten billion sq. ft. of green smart cities

WeWork’s $20 billion punt on the future of work

Does colour really affect the way we think and behave?

The silent killer of productivity and wellbeing is lack of civility

October 5, 2017

The current approach to creative workplace design relies on faddish, ineffective ideas

by Mark Eltringham • News, Workplace design

A new research paper published in the Journal of Management & Organization claims that while many organisations are focussed on creating workplaces that foster creativity, the results tend to ignore nuances about what makes people creative and instead focus on faddish ideas and playful, domestic design features to invoke ideas of creativity that may or may not be effective in practice. The study from Donatella De Paoli of the Department of Leadership and Organizational Behaviour, Norwegian Business School BI, Oslo and Arja Ropo of School of Management, University of Tampere concludes that organisations need to develop a more in depth understanding of creativity if they want to create creative workspaces.

October 5, 2017

Stop whinging about robots taking your job and develop the skills you need for a new era of work

by Mark Eltringham • AI, News, Workplace

A report from researchers at Pearson, Nesta and the University of Oxford called The Future of Skills: Employment in 2030 claims that while the new era of robots, automation and artificial intelligence in the workplace will be disruptive, it will not spell the end of work and people need to develop new skills to meet its challenges. The study claims to take an entirely new approach to forecasting employment and skill demands in the US and UK. In contrast to many recent headlines, the study finds that many jobs today will still be in demand by 2030 and beyond. However, while jobs may remain, the skills needed for success are changing. The researchers combined diverse human expertise with active machine learning to produce a more nuanced view of future employment trends. Using this innovative approach, the study forecasts that only one in five workers are in occupations that face a high likelihood of decline.

October 4, 2017

Top UK workplaces honoured at BCO national awards ceremony

by Mark Eltringham • News, Property, Workplace design

London workplaces dominated at this year’s annual British Council for Offices National Awards dinner last night as a record six awards went to offices in the capital. London’s Sky Central was awarded the Best of the Best workplace at the British Council for Offices’ (BCO) annual National Awards in London last night. The office was also recognised as the Best Corporate Workplace in the UK, joining a list of six other award winners recognised for excellence in office space. Sky Central was praised by judges for bringing 3,500 of Sky’s workforce under one roof at their landscaped campus near Heathrow, West London. The judges were impressed by the building’s eighteen 200-person workspace neighbourhoods, arranged around six cores that resurrect ‘Büro Landschaft’ inspired planning rules. Judges also commended the vast array of services and amenities on offer, including six restaurants and cafes, a 200-seat state of the art cinema, 200-person event space and a technology ‘lounge’. We know all about Sky Central and a full write up from Sky’s then Workplace Director Neil Usher can be seen here.

October 4, 2017

Convergence of work and life defines September London workplace design shows

by Paul Goodchild • Comment, Events, Flexible working, Furniture, Workplace design

It has always been a characteristic of the 100% Design exhibition that it has segmented along the demarcations of workplace, home, interiors, kitchens and bedrooms. This used to make perfect sense as the same distinctions existed in our lives, reflected in the form and function of the products we allocated to those spaces. This is no longer the case to anywhere like the same extent and consequently, the workplace section of the show is full of products that could make the crossover into a domestic, cafe or hotel setting with not an eyebrow raised. That is not to say that the mainstay products of the workplace – desks, task chairs, storage, screens – are no more. They are still specified in vast numbers. It is just that the interesting aspects of workplace design are to be found in its shared and public spaces. It is here where we witness the convergence that characterises modern working life. We might still talk about work life balance (too much) but there is a growing realisation that the distinction grows more meaningless with each passing year.

October 3, 2017

List of the UK’s most family friendly workplaces announced

by Mark Eltringham • Flexible working, News, Wellbeing

A list of the organisations across the UK who are ‘leading the way in building flexible, family friendly workplaces’ has been published by the charity Working Families. The list is devised by asking employers to answer questions which are scored in four key areas, to build a comprehensive picture of their flexible and family friendly working environment. These are: integration which looks at culture, attitude and how far flexibility has become embedded; policy which looks at the creation, development and deployment of flexibility; consistent practice which considers how well flexibility is supported and measurement and results which looks at the effects of flexibility on the organisation, and their ability to understand those effects.

September 28, 2017

Majority of workers are optimistic that automation will enhance their work life balance

by Sara Bean • AI, Flexible working, News, Technology, Workplace

Majority of workers are optimistic that automation will enhance their work life balance UK workers are largely optimistic about the impact automation will have in the workplace, with three in four believing it will give them more time to concentrate on their primary job duties and work more flexibly, claims new research. Workfront’s annual State of Enterprise Work report, which aims to capture not only how work is being done and what challenges office workers see in the present, but also how they see current workplace trends playing out in the near future reveals that 84 percent agreed with the sentiment that “the use of automation in the workplace will let us think of work in new and innovative ways.” 82 percent expressed excitement at the chance “to learn new things as the workforce moves toward more automation;” and while the overwhelming view on automation was positive, around 2 in 5 (38 percent) feared that rising automation will place humans and robots in competition for the same jobs in the future.

September 28, 2017

Insight Briefing: the business case for design and build ⁰

by Charles Marks • Briefing, Facilities management, Insight Briefings, Premium Content, Workplace design

The best way of getting what you want is invariably to follow the simplest route. Research, experience and common sense tell us that in most cases, simple systems achieve better, faster and less expensive results and that the success of any project will often be in inverse proportion to the number of people involved in the system used to implement it, the number of decisions these people have to make between them, and the number of times they have to communicate with each other. Complexity is the enemy of success. Simplicity is all. And it is this that is the underlying principle behind ‘Design and Build’; often the best, fastest and least expensive method of developing and implementing an office design project, yet also one of the least understood, especially with regard to its ability to deliver exceptional design. This White Paper is aimed both at those who want to find out more about this uniquely effective method of completing a project, but also at those who may have mistaken preconceptions about Design and Build. This is an idea whose time has come and it is all based on the most fundamental of all fundamental principles: by keeping things as uncomplicated as possible, it can often deliver the best value, best design and the best response to a brief in the quickest time and at the lowest cost.

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Charles Marks is the Managing Director of office design and fit-out company Fresh Workspace. www.freshworkspace.com

September 28, 2017

How smart workplaces increase performance and attractiveness ⁰

by Kati Barklund • Case studies, Facilities management, Premium Content, Technology, Work&Place, Workplace design

The workplace can and should be used as a strategic tool to support work and cooperation, to shape the experience of the brand and to produce competitive advantage for the organization. Even when not used as a strategic tool the workplace still affects all these parts and there is always a risk that the workplace has instead a negative impact if we are not aware of the relationship and really use workplace as a strategic tool to affect attractiveness, productivity, efficiency and sustainability. The workplace makes a great difference and it is becoming an important differentiator between successful and less successful organizations. I also strongly believe that the workplace management area is a key for us in the FM industry to bring FM to a higher level, to shift from cost focus to more value focus, and this is something we need to do together within the FM industry and we really should take the driver’s seat. But, let’s start from the beginning.