Search Results for: people

November 2, 2018

A little local difficulty, treating people as pets, designing for serendipity and some other stuff you might like

The big news to be on the lookout for this month is the BIFM’s impending name change to the Institute of Workplace and Facilities Management. Now the interesting thing about this development is what it might tell us about the changing world of work and the distinction between the physical office and the places we actually work, including in digital space. So that’s what everybody’s focussed on right?

October 15, 2018

Lack of flexible working means people miss major life events

by Neil Franklin • Flexible working, News, Wellbeing

A new survey claims that 67 percent of employees have missed major life events due to a lack of flexible working within their organisation. The survey conducted by Liberty Mind, was commissioned to explore the impacts on employees who do not have the opportunity of flexible working. From those surveyed it was found that 40 percent had missed hospital or health-related appointments due to a lack of flexible working, while 15 percent had missed moving house, 10 percent had missed a child’s school activity and 8 percent had missed a family funeral.

September 24, 2018

Busy people tend to make healthier choices and enjoy more self-esteem

by Mark Eltringham • News, Wellbeing

Busyness is often thought of as a modern day affliction, but it can also help you delay gratification and make decisions that benefit you in the longer-term, according to new research from the global business school INSEAD. In a new paper, Chattopadhyay and his co-authors, Monica Wadhwa, Associate Professor of Marketing and Supply Chain Management, Fox School of Business at Temple University and Jeehye Christine Kim, Assistant Professor of Marketing at HKUST, show that the mere perception of being one of the busy people, or what they call a busy mindset, is a “badge of honour” that can be leveraged to promote better self-control. Their paper, titled “When Busy Is Less Indulging: Impact of a Busy Mindset on Self-Control Behaviours”, has been published in the Journal of Consumer Research.

September 21, 2018

When workplace strategy builds bridges between people and place

by Chris Kane • Features, Technology, Workplace, Workplace design

The world of work is changing rapidly and profoundly in a way that we haven’t seen since the time of the industrial revolution. Yet even as we stand at a momentous, game-changing inflexion point, the 21st century workplace strategy sector is still dithering about whether to join in the revolution. They are like the industrial mill owners of 19th century England who adopted a ‘make do and mend’ approach to business and failed to invest in new technology only to be forced out of business by foreign competitors who had invested in radical new, state of the art technology.Today the technological game changer is digital technology rather than weaving technology, but the effect is the same. Unless the workplace strategy sector embraces change and builds bridges between the ‘people’ side of the business and the ‘place’ side with other workplace specialists, their industry will become as dead as a dodo.

September 19, 2018

New report aims to debunk myth that AI will be intrinsically bad for people at work

by Neil Franklin • AI, News, Technology

The latest report that claims to debunk the myths surrounding AI in the workplace arrives from Tata Communications who worked with academics at UC Berkeley to interview 120 business leaders about their attitudes to AI. The report, AI and the Future of Work (registration required) claims to shift ‘the conversation from dystopian fears toward human collaboration and cognitive diversity, the study identifies how AI can diversify human thinking rather than replace it. The study identifies opportunities for businesses and employees based on insights from leaders such as Tony Blair, Executive Chair of the Institute of Global Change and former UK Prime Minister, who predicts that, AI will allow us to do what it is that we are uniquely meant to do: focus on high-level thinking, strategy, and paving the way for innovation.’

September 19, 2018

Better urban design could improve the lives and wellbeing of millions of people

by Neil Franklin • Cities, News, Wellbeing

Adjusting the planning system to put good design at the heart of urban development could lead to a £15 billion boost to the UK economy and improve the wellbeing and mental health of millions of individuals across the UK. The new report, A Design for Life, commissioned by British Land says that improving mental health and wellbeing in our cities could have significant and positive impacts in several ways, including boosting productivity in the workplace, reducing absenteeism and bringing down the NHS and welfare bills.

September 12, 2018

Quarter of people who work during twilight hours add billions to UK economy

by Sara Bean • Flexible working, News, Wellbeing, Workplace

New research from Huawei has suggested how much the dusk-to-dawn workforce is significantly boosting the ‘twilight economy’ by contributing an estimated £487 billion annually to the UK economy. The study of more than 2,000 UK workers found that a quarter (25 percent) of us now work outside of the traditional 9 – 5. Looking across the UK, a number of ‘twilight hubs’ have emerged, with Norwich (34 percent) topping the list of cities whose residents work whilst the rest of the nation sleeps, followed closely by London and Manchester (both 31 percent), and Liverpool and Cardiff respectively (both 30 percent). People who spend their working moments in the twilight hours say they feel more inspired and creative (30 percent) during this time, as well as more productive (28 percent). Meanwhile, a fifth of British workers prefer the flexibility that twilight working allows when it comes to balancing time with their kids (19 percent), and 20 percent describe themselves as night owls who find it easier to work later.

September 6, 2018

Creating a productive workplace for people is all about context

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

The quest for a proper understanding of the links between the places we work, the things with which we fill them and our wellbeing and productivity has been ongoing for a very long time. It predates our current thinking on productive workplace design and the facilities management discipline as we now know it by decades and has its roots in the design of early landmark offices such as Frank Lloyd Wright’s Larkin building and research such as that carried out at the Hawthorne Works in Chicago in the late 1920s. Yet the constantly evolving nature of work means that we are forever tantalised by an idea that we can never fully grasp and makes established ideas seem like revelations.

August 22, 2018

People working in fully open plan spaces are generally fitter and less stressed

by Mark Eltringham • News, Wellbeing, Workplace design

The open plan debate grinds on, and the latest grist to its mill is a study from researchers led by Esther Sternberg of the University of Arizona which suggests that it is those people who work in open plan spaces that are fitter and happier than their associate employee contemporaries in cubicles and private offices. The study, published in the journal Occupational & Environmental Medicine, used wearable sensors to study 231 US workers in four government office buildings. It’s worth noting that this is five times as many workers and twice as many offices as the much publicised recent study that we were told by various media outlets and commentators was the ‘final word’ on the subject.

August 21, 2018

People might be more productive when supervised by a bad robot

by Freddie Steele • AI, News, Technology

We will have to get used to a lot more talk about how we interact with artificial intelligence and it might involve addressing some difficult ideas. Try this for a start. People might perform better on certain tasks when supervised by a ‘mean’ robot rather than a ‘nice’ one, according to a new study published in the journal Science Robotics (registration or subscription required). The study involved asking 58 young adults to complete a Stroop test which involves subjects stating the colour of font used in a written word. The difficult comes from the cognitive difficulty of identifying a colour when the word itself indicates a colour, for example when the word red is printed using a blue font.

July 31, 2018

Absenteeism at record low and it may be because people are worried about their jobs

by Neil Franklin • News, Wellbeing, Workplace

A new report from the Office for National Statistics suggests that the number of sickness days taken by UK workers has almost halved over the past two decades to reach a record low. It dropped from an average of 7.2 days in 1993 to 4.1 days in 2017, and had been steadily falling since 1999. The total days lost for all workers last year was 131.2 million, down from 137.3 million in 2016 and 178.3 million in 1993. Since the recession, sickness absence rates have declined by 0.5 percentage points to 1.9 per cent last year. The reasons are not explored in the report but one possible explanation would be the growing number of people prepared to work when they should really take time off. A May report from the CIPD claims that the number of companies reporting a rise in employees going into work when they were ill had more than tripled since 2010 and warned that organisations should do more to discourage “presenteeism”.

July 30, 2018

The satisfaction of self-employed people depends on skills development rather than business growth

by Neil Franklin • News, Wellbeing

Developing skills and knowledge is more important for self-employed people’s sense of career progression than increasing their rate of pay, a new report by IPSE (the Association of Independent Professionals and the Self-Employed) and the IPA (the Involvement and Participation Association) claims. The report, Working well for yourself: What makes for good self-employment?, surveyed 800 people across the country about what constituted ‘good work’ for them. First of all, it found that work satisfaction levels are remarkably high among the self-employed. This reinforces the findings of a 2015 CIPD Employee Outlook survey, which showed that general work satisfaction is higher among the self-employed (81 percent) than employees (61 percent).