Search Results for: office

January 3, 2019

Demand by global businesses for London office space remains high

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

Office investment volume in Central London in 2018 is expected to come close to £20 billion, despite the ongoing economic and political uncertainties of Brexit. According to Savills London witnessed notably above average levels of office take-up in 2018 and achieved the best ever City of London rent (£80 per sq ft). The list of global businesses committing to long term leases has continued to grow with announcements in the last 12 months from Facebook, LinkedIn and Sidley Austin. The constrained development pipeline has seen more office pre-lets over 50,000 sq ft agreed in 2018 than ever before, while a shortage of available Grade A options has matured into a greater number of development opportunities. Savills also predicts a greater number of value-add and development opportunities coming to the market and that trading in London will insure the ongoing creation of the world’s best office buildings in a city where people will continue to want to work. This in turn creates new investment opportunities for global investors searching for prime assets.

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December 18, 2018

As we enter our darkest hours, quality of office lighting needs attention

by Sara Bean • Facilities management, Lighting, News, Wellbeing

As we enter the darkest days of the year, office workers in the UK are set to get virtually no natural light. For instance, today (18 December) sunrise in London is at 08:01 and sunset is 15:52, meaning office workers are commuting to and from their offices in the dark. The quality of lighting within many workplaces is often not much better, as despite 80 percent of UK office workers, saying good lighting in their workspace is important to them, two-in-five (40 percent) say they have to deal with uncomfortable lighting every day and a third (32 percent) said better lighting would make them happier at work. However today some Londoner’s will have the chance to get a much-needed dose of light at an uplifting Light Station supplied by Staples at Southwark Bridge tunnel which will be open to the public from 9:00 to 16:15.

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December 18, 2018

Only small number of workers happy with their office temperature

by Sara Bean • Coworking, Facilities management, News, Wellbeing

Just 16 percent of workers are satisfied with the temperature of their office, while a majority (89 percent) claim they lose productivity if the temperature isn’t quite right, new research suggests. Nearly half (46 percent) experiencing cold office temperatures say this makes them the most unproductive, according to research by Workthere. Only 8 percent of those based in coworking and shared workspace and 10 percent of staff in leased workspace, believe that their office is always the right temperature, while just 3 percent of respondents revealed they have a separate space to work in if they’re too hot or cold. It seems that keeping warm is the biggest challenge for British office workers with 47 percent admitting to wearing additional layers at their desk and 37 percent often making themselves a hot drink to fight the office chill. A surprising 17 percent of respondents even admitted to bringing in a personal heater to warm up which is a worry for employers, given that it costs £3.43 on average to run a 3 kilowatt heater for eight hours.

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December 14, 2018

Getting a better handle on the psychology of office design

by Paul Goodchild • Architecture, Comment, Workplace design

It was the Finnish architect Juhani Pallasmaa who described the door handle as ‘the handshake of the building’ in his book The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses. Buildings greet us in other ways too and we respond to those greetings in very human ways. So much so, in fact, that when we make decisions about the ways in which offices introduce themselves, we should take account of the psychological factors that can mean the difference between a successful or failed office design. (more…)

December 14, 2018

New Deloitte London office: a world-leading building for sustainability and wellbeing

by Neil Franklin • Company news, Environment, Workplace design

Deloitte’s new UK and North West Europe headquarters at 1 New Street Square, EC4, is claimed to be the largest office in the world to achieve leading certifications for being both an exemplar green building and one designed to enhance the wellbeing of its people. The new 270,000 sq ft HQ, which Deloitte occupied in July, is the culmination of a four year programme redefining the workplace of the future for the firm’s people and clients. The space was designed by ID:SR with furniture supplied by Sketch Studios.

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December 10, 2018

The best office designs of 2018, the future of work in 2019, and some other clickbait

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

This week’s beachcomb of the best workplace stories is brought to you in the wake of the first flood of retrospectives and predictions that wash up in the media at this time of year. The first piece of flotsam [sound of a metaphor snapping] is Dezeen’s listing of the world’s best office designs of 2018, which appears to be based on the answers to three questions. Is it a coworking space? Does it look like an office? Is there anybody actually working there? Answer yes, no, no to those three simple questions and you’re in the frame.

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December 7, 2018

Seven reasons why this will not be the office of the future

by Mark Eltringham • Comment, Facilities management, Furniture, Workplace design

At this time of year, it seems like we don’t have to wait more than a few hours before some or other organisation is sharing its prognosis about how we will be working in the future. The thing these reports usually share in common, other than a standardised variant of a title and a common lexicon of agility, engagement and connectivity, is a narrow focus based on their key assumptions about what the office of the future will be like. While these are rarely false per se, and often offer valuable insights, they also frequently exhibit a desire to look at only one part of the great workplace elephant. While the more informed reports make excellent points and identify trends, across most there are routine flaws in thinking that can lead them to make narrow and sometimes incorrect assumptions and so draw similarly flawed conclusions. Talk of the office of the future tells us rather a lot about how we view offices right now.

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December 3, 2018

A challenge to traditional law firm design at new London offices for Wikborg Rein

by Freddie Steele • Company news, Workplace design

ThirdWay Interiors has recently completed the office design of international law firm; Wikborg Rein in central London. The 12,000 sq. ft space has been designed to challenge the traditionally conservative style of a corporate workplace to create an office that is unique and innovative within the legal sector. With a recruitment drive underway, Wikborg Rein needed space for the current team, future expansion and for visiting colleagues from overseas.

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December 3, 2018

Sociopathic corporations, the office as home, self-promotion anxiety and some other stuff

by Mark Eltringham • Features

There is a theory that when companies talk about issues such as corporate social responsibility they are doing so because it helps them to achieve their business goals. This is the coldly rational thing to do according to people like free market guru Milton Friedman who argues that companies should not actively pursue altruistic ends unless that pursuit is ultimately in the interest of their shareholders. As Friedman puts it: ‘Hypocrisy is virtuous when it serves the bottom line. Moral virtue is immoral when it does not’.

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November 29, 2018

New workplace trends will bring people back to the office, Gensler report suggests

by Neil Franklin • Architecture, Cities, News, Workplace design

The next generation of office buildings will draw employees back to the workplace, a new report from architect and design firm Gensler suggests. It suggest that an increased number of employees are set to be drawn back to the office, as the importance and power of face-to-face interaction grows, and office design increasingly caters towards this. This year’s 2018 Design Forecast report, Shaping the Future of Cities (registration required), created by the Gensler Research Institute explores over 200 of the latest trends that are changing cities across the world. The overarching prediction is that design will “put people back at the centre” and become the driving force behind resilient, liveable cities. Buildings that react and respond to the people within it will be critical to the workplace experience, harnessing data to interpret internal workplace data and make intelligent adaptations.

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November 27, 2018

Coworking and creative sectors help boost London office space

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

Take-up of office space in Central London has shown a year-on-year increase of 30 percent, reaching 1.3m sq ft in October, according to CBRE. Take-up was strong from creative firms, representing 18 percent of all deals, including the largest deal of the month which saw McCann Erickson take 146,400 sq ft at 135 Bishopsgate EC2. Flexible office operators took 122,300 sq ft of space during the month, bringing the proportion of take-up represented by the flexible office sector in the last 12 months to 19 percent. The largest flex acquisition in October saw Landmark Spaces acquire 37,800 sq ft at Portman House in the West End. (more…)

November 22, 2018

Workers waste too much time in poorly designed offices

by Sara Bean • Facilities management, News, Property, Workplace, Workplace design

One in five UK workers has around two unproductive hours every week caused by poor or inadequate office and work environments, claims new research published today. Disruptive colleagues, no natural light, a lack of coffee and tea facilities and noisy offices are just a few factors cited in the report from Mace and its facilities management arm Mace Macro. Across the whole of the UK the average number of hours lost to unproductive workplaces is 2.4 hours a week, and using Office of National Statistics value of time data, this translates to a cost of £4bn in lost output every year to the UK economy. (more…)