Search Results for: people

January 2, 2014

Why we should be wary of expert predictions for 2014

by Mark Eltringham • Comment, Facilities management, Workplace design

As ever the first day back at work coincides with a flood of forecasts about what will happen in the world in the year ahead. But predictions are often more interesting in retrospect than they are in their own time. For example, each year The Economist produces its one-off ‘The World in…’ publication which asks well-informed academics and writers to tackle an issue that relates to their own specialism. This year these relate to issues such as Scottish independence (it’s a ‘no’, by the way), the rise of African economies and a potential customer backlash against technology businesses and the rich geeks who own them. Interesting though it is to read all of this, The Economist is at least honest in publishing a list of its hits and misses, whereas most people appear to just pretend the misses never happened.

December 29, 2013

The most read stories on Insight in 2013

by Mark Eltringham • Comment, Facilities management, Workplace design

It’s been one year since Insight first hit the digital streets and it’s been fascinating to see what people have been most interested in. One of the great things about online publishing is you cannot escape from what people think. Printed trade magazines can tell you they send out 12,000 copies or whatever, but they can’t tell you whether the recipients are interested enough to read them or share their contents. Online, that is all made transparent. So it’s been great to start a publication that after just a few months was demonstrably the UK’s most widely read title covering workplace design and management issues. We even know what people like the most. So here, in no particular order, are our most widely read stories from 2013, ranging from the technical to the esoteric, news stories, case studies, the bursting of bubbles and the challenges to received wisdom.

December 20, 2013

Driving home for Christmas? Forget Chris Rea and try Sigur Ros

by Tess Gaze • Comment, Technology

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Six in ten commuters travel by car. This was the finding of a survey conducted by the RAC earlier this month. Inevitably a busier road leads to congestion, and therefore stress. It’s no shock to learn, according to a Sky News report, that almost half of British drivers claim to have been involved in some form, with road rage. In fact, Britain is the shamed ‘winner’ of the highest road rage (Daily Mail), a surprising truth for such a stereotypically polite-prone nation. Road rage is a worrying occurrence – both for stress levels – but also for road safety. The Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents attributed ‘aggressive driving’ to the deaths of 122 and the serious injury of almost 1,000 in 2011. It goes without saying, that lowering these high-stress experiences for drivers is a necessity.

December 20, 2013

Google is a better source of information than HR team, say line managers

by Sara Bean • News, Workplace

The image of the cosy Personnel Manager, part mentor part counsellor, has little in common with the reality of the modern Human Resources professional, steering the organisation through the upheavals of a prolonged recession and engaged in strategic thinking, such as big data. In many ways the professionalisation of HR, which (unlike FM) has achieved Chartered Status, is an encouraging sign that organisations understand the importance of their most important assets – the people. However, the rise of the HR professional has also created barriers between them and line managers. A lack of openness and slow response to queries from HR is driving line managers to Google the answers rather than wait for their increasingly preoccupied HR colleagues to respond. More →

December 18, 2013

Companies need to work out what they want to emerge from the BYOD pile-up

by Mark Eltringham • Comment, Facilities management, Flexible working, Technology

Anybody who tells you they understand what is happening with BYOD, doesn’t understand what is happening with BYOD. Even by the standards of workplace technology, trying to get a firm grasp on the current state of play when it comes to the practice of Bring Your Own Device is particularly challenging. Surveys, opinions, research and case study pile up each day, crashing and bouncing off each other like the culmination of the multiple car chases in the Blues Brothers and just as difficult to untangle. The latest batch of news and views highlights exactly how disparate and conflicting the available information is. But underlying it all appears to be a single discernible and consistent point; while organisations may be less focussed on BYOD’s perceived advantages and rather more worried about the consequence of not implementing the practice, they still don’t trust it.

December 18, 2013

Workforce to grow across the regions next year, bolstered by flexible working

by Sara Bean • Flexible working, News, Workplace

The management issues which dominated 2013 centred on the rise of flexible working; if pay scales would remain below inflation; and whether jobs recovery would continue and if so, could expand beyond the fringes of London. As today’s ONS figures show unemployment at the lowest rate since 2009, the latest CBI/Accenture Employment Trends Survey reveals that more than half of UK companies expect to create jobs over the next 12 months for the first time in over five years. It says private sector workforces are anticipated to grow across all regions, Yorkshire and Humberside and the east midlands being the most buoyant. Bosses will continue to take a cautious approach to pay however, with flexible contracts used to bolster economic growth and job creation. More →

December 17, 2013

New survey reveals extent and nature of workplace change programmes

by Mark Eltringham • Comment, Facilities management, Property

The newly published Workplace Transformation Survey from property consultancy Cushman and Wakefield begins with the now routine statement that “there is no doubt the corporate workplace is rapidly transforming”. So tell us something we don’t know – and in the subsequent report they pretty much do. That said, the methodology of the survey does skew the results by focussing on a particular part of the workplace elephant, because the report was compiled in conjunction with CoreNet Global, based on a questionnaire of over 500 occupiers and other participants from around the world taking part in events in Los Angeles, Amsterdam and Shanghai. So inevitably the results are weighted to at least some degree in favour of those with an interest in commercial property and the regions from which it draws its data. More →

December 16, 2013

Festive burnout is latest ailment to strike unwary office workers

by Sara Bean • Flexible working, News, Workplace

As we enter the last full working week before the Christmas holidays, the reason why the office is already half empty isn’t just because staff have faked a sickie to do their Christmas shopping. Many of them may be genuinely sick – with Christmas the primary reason. The new ailment of “Festive Burnout” has been coined to mark the countdown to Christmas, as stress, exhaustion and illness begins to strike offices. According to the findings of a new investigation from AXA PPP healthcare; while one in four Brits say that Christmas is their favourite time of the year, a third tend to start their holiday feeling burnt out from the stress of the run up to the holiday break.

December 16, 2013

Book Review: The Emergent Workplace

by Mark Eltringham • Comment, Facilities management, Workplace design

Looking for patterns in the mash. © Columbia Pictures

It’s rather refreshing to see a book or report in which the word ‘Workplace’ in the title is prefaced by ‘Emergent’ rather than something misleading like ‘Tomorrow’s’ or ‘Future’. And so the authors Clark Sept and Paul Heath define their vision of the workplace presented in this slim but engaging book as a thing which is ‘in the process of becoming prominent’ to use the dictionary definition of the word emergent. By using this particular epithet, they are describing the consequences of the various forces that drive today’s workplace rather than lapsing into the fallacies most commonly associated with works of this kind; principally those of either assuming there is an evolution of all offices towards an ultimate model, or that already commonplace factors such as technology which frees us to work anywhere and at any time can in any way be associated with ‘the future’.

December 13, 2013

One of the most important things we need at work is shelter from the storm

by Nigel Sikora • Comment, Workplace design

The challenge of providing the optimum level of acoustic performance in an office is one of those issues that everybody accepts is very important, has at least some understanding of and has a degree of awareness of the solutions. Yet it has proved to be one of those intractable issues that suffers both from some important misperceptions and which also has to be balanced against other challenges when it comes to designing offices, not least the most significant trend of the past twenty or thirty years, namely the shift to open plan working. At the same time we have seen a shrinking of workstation footprints and the greater use of mobile phones and other technology. All of these changes have focussed attention on workplace acoustics – currently one of the most talked about issues in the workplace, and visual privacy – one of the least talked about.

December 12, 2013

The creative talent in the UK’s regions (other than London) is quietly thriving

by Charles Marks • Comment, Property, Technology, Workplace

We can now be very confident that the UK economy is on an enduring upward path. We can also be sure that the UK that emerges from five years of recession will be very different to the one that entered it. And on that score things look pretty promising too, because we have the skills and talent needed in some of the world’s most in-demand sectors such as digital media, banking, software development, telecoms and publishing. In fact a recent report from Deloitte says that London employs more people in these and similar knowledge-based sectors than any other country in the world. But while London has an inevitable tendency to grab these sorts of headlines, it’s also great to acknowledge that London doesn’t have a monopoly on this pool of talent, and may even be less attractive as a base for some firms.