Search Results for: people management

HR Directors turning their attention to workplace design and experience

HR Directors turning their attention to workplace design and experience

by • Flexible working, News, Workplace, Workplace design

The role of HR Directors is going to change in the future as they will increasingly become “curators” of the office, charged with generating the right atmosphere to inspire millennial workers, according to a study of 100 HR Directors by Unispace. The study claims found that there will be greater HR ownership of the physical workplace in the future as human resources becomes more focused on the employee “experience”. A key to future success will be ensuring workers are “engaged with the workplace” and enable them to collaborate in better ways and become more productive. A recurring theme identified during the interviews was a change to the overall decision-making process around physical space. Previously the remit of property and facilities management, it now includes HR representation as standard practice in large organisations. Bringing HR to the table enables the working environment to embody organisational values and contribute towards achieving strategic “people-led” business objectives, such as better staff retention and productivity.

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Workplace design continues to lag behind the needs of modern working life

Workplace design continues to lag behind the needs of modern working life

by • Flexible working, News, Technology, Workplace design

Companies around the world waste potentially billions of dollars on under-utilised office spaces that are unfit for purpose and do not reflect the needs of modern workers, a recent benchmark study of over 100 workplaces claims. The study, Optimaze Workplace Review, from Finland based workplace analyst Rapal Oy took place during 2016, aggregates space utilisation data collected from 15 countries. The 330 observational space utilisation studies involved more than 6,600 walk-throughs of 111 buildings and 53,600 work spaces around the world to explore the working practices and environments of more than 23,000 people. It also includes a dataset of around 354 million observations of workstation use in total. The report’s main conclusion is that leadership teams are increasingly placing workplace management issues higher on their agendas, aware of the need to align spaces with new working cultures.

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Gender, race, age and sex bias still pervades UK working life

Gender, race, age and sex bias still pervades UK working life

by • Legal news, News, Wellbeing, Workplace

Gender, race, age and sex bias still pervades UK working life

One in four (27 percent) women have been victims of sexism in the workplace and ageism, racism and homophobia continue to mar the working lives of minority groups claims new research. With high-profile reports of sexual harassment and assault in the entertainment industry dominating headlines, the Office Culture report, from Opinium Research, examined gender, race, age and sex biases that pervade modern UK working life and found that over 2.5 million women (20 percent) report being a victim of sexual harassment in the workplace, yet two thirds (67 percent) of women who have experienced this have not reported it to their company. Similarly, despite a perceived cultural improvement in race relations, only half (55 percent) of those subjected to racial discrimination have reported such incidents to somebody in their company. However, ageism is the least reported of all with almost three-quarters (72 percent) of incidents going unnoticed; of those that did report ageism, a quarter (25 percent) of cases were not acknowledged. Action taken on incidents of homophobia were also low; with over a third (43 percent) of cases not being dealt with after the acknowledgement.

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Frederick Taylor was a man of his time not a whipping boy for ours

Frederick Taylor was a man of his time not a whipping boy for ours

by • Comment, News, Workplace, Workplace design

Everybody likes a pantomime villain, and for many commentators on management and office design, they don’t come more dastardly than Frederick W. Taylor. Not only do pictures of him betray him as wealthy, white and starched, his ideas and the language in which they are couched are totally out of step with the way we think now. So for anybody writing about enlightened contemporary management practices, it’s no wonder that it is almost customary to start with a rejection of Taylorism in general and his theory of scientific management in particular. The gist of Taylorism laid out in his 1911 book The Principles of Scientific Management is that work should be analysed to establish the most efficient way of doing it, the right person to do that work must be chosen and managers are there to make sure that it all goes to plan. As far as workers are concerned, what we now think of as Taylorism is best (and partly unfairly) summed up as:‘You’re not paid to think. Shut up and do your job.’

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Office ping pong tables a waste of money as solution to low productivity

Office ping pong tables a waste of money as solution to low productivity

by • News, Technology, Wellbeing, Workplace, Workplace design

Over half (55 percent) of UK employees are productive for less than 30 hours per week yet UK employers plough money into quirky benefits that a majority of employees see as a distraction a new report claims. New research from Sage. ‘Why your workforce isn’t working’ found that while many companies invest in quirky benefits to keep staff happy, their employees aren’t impressed. Only 9 percent believe company outings are a valuable benefit, and even fewer were favourable on office games such as ping-pong – with only 6 percent saying they value it as part of the work experience. In fact, in some cases people felt these were doing more harm than good: with over half (55 percent) saying that they are distracting and decrease productivity. Commissioned by Sage People, the study spoke to 3,500 global workers to uncover what people really want from their employers. The UK findings show the disconnect between the benefits employers provide and what employees want.

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Calls for commercial property sector to have a greater focus on customer experience

Calls for commercial property sector to have a greater focus on customer experience

by • News, Property, Workplace design

The UK commercial property industry is undergoing a fundamental shift towards a more customer centric approach, with an increasingly greater emphasis being placed on delivering outstanding customer service to occupiers. This is the key finding of a new report from The British Council for Offices (BCO) entitled ‘Office Service Standards and Customer Experience: a best practice guide’. While for those who hold a very traditional landlord occupier relationship this change in thinking, attitude and operation may feel revolutionary, the report argues we are already seeing the industry evolve across the board. It claims that this is accelerated by new ‘property sector disruptors’, who are driving a shift in the relationship between property owners and corporate occupiers. To ensure they are keeping pace with their changing requirements and aspirations, property owners and managers are increasingly realising the need to invest in building strong relationships with their occupiers

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Unequal access and usage could hold back potential of global digital economy

Unequal access and usage could hold back potential of global digital economy

by • News, Technology

Digital technologies continue to make impressive advances. Internet infrastructure is improving and the usage of digital tools is growing. The social impacts of digital innovation have also become more pronounced in diverse fields. However, progress is uneven across countries, businesses, and within societies. Broadening access to digital opportunities and helping those lagging behind to catch up would increase the benefits of the digital transformation and help ensure they are widely shared across economies and people, according to a new OECD report. The OECD Digital Economy Outlook 2017 says government policy has not kept pace with the digital innovation and transformation of economies and societies led by big technology firms. It calls on countries need to step up their efforts, invest more in education and skills and encourage greater use of advanced technologies like big data analysis and cloud computing, in particular by small businesses, to make the digital shift more productive and inclusive.

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Third of employees complain employers do not offer any wellbeing programmes

Third of employees complain employers do not offer any wellbeing programmes

by • News, Wellbeing, Workplace

Over half of employees would choose a company that cared about their wellbeing, over one that pays 10 percent more, a new survey claims. According to the research by Reward Gateway, over 22 million British workers, or seven in 10 employees (71 percent), have felt stress or financial strain in the last five years, however, a third of workers said their company currently offered no programmes and just 29 percent of respondents said that their company currently offers a physical programme. The findings also suggest a disparity of opinion between employee and employer. While over half (51 percent) of employers agree that their company shows they care about employees mental, physical and financial wellbeing, only 14 percent of employees say that their company couldn’t do more to show they care. But employers too would benefit from taking a more proactive approach to wellbeing, as more than half (52 percent) of UK employees agree that they would choose a company that cared about their wellbeing over one that pays more.

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Working conditions and office design shown to impact on employee performance

Working conditions and office design shown to impact on employee performance

by • Facilities management, News, Wellbeing, Workplace, Workplace design

Link made between impact of workplace conditions and office design on performance

New evidence of a strong correlation between productivity, creativity and even profitability with employee working conditions, such as: light, air, noise, health, culture, design, movement and the quality of furniture have been established in a new report. The syndicated research project, Wellness Together, carried out by Sapio Research, of 1000 UK based office workers and 50 Facilities Management experts, suggests a strong link between people feeling catered and cared for by their workplace/employers and how this impacts business performance. Wellness at work is a dominant theme in any discussion about the workplace. But this is not just a discussion about happiness, it is about creating cultures and environments that are conducive to commercial success. The study identifies that in order to achieve true ‘Wellness’ attention to every single component that can impact mental and physical health needs to be considered, from building structures and company cultures through to the physical furniture and fittings that employees require to work efficiently and effectively.

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A third of UK employees ready to quit their jobs as half their time is spent on “work about work”

A third of UK employees ready to quit their jobs as half their time is spent on “work about work”

by • News, Workplace

A new study claims that duplicated work, disorganisation, and micromanagement are widespread within UK businesses. The study claims that unproductive working practices in UK companies are rife, with 42 percent of employees saying they spend most of their time on futile “work about work” tasks, including status meetings, organising work, and tracking down information, as opposed to doing their actual work and moving projects forward. As well as impeding productivity, this is threatening staff retention: almost a third (31 percent) of UK employees admit they have either thought about leaving or actually left a job as a result of a culture which wastes their time on side issues.

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

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

by • 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.

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Our Twentieth Century approach to ergonomics has to change

Our Twentieth Century approach to ergonomics has to change

by • 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.

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