Search Results for: people

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

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

by • Flexible working, News, Wellbeing, Workplace

Quarter of workers who work during twilight hours boast UK economy

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.

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Creating a productive workplace for people is all about context

Creating a productive workplace for people is all about context

by • Comment, Facilities management, Workplace, Workplace design

commercial property innovationThe 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.

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

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

by • 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.

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People might be more productive when supervised by a bad robot

People might be more productive when supervised by a bad robot

by • 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.

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

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

by • 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”.

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

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

by • 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).

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The talents of older people are going to waste because of discrimnation, claims government report

The talents of older people are going to waste because of discrimnation, claims government report

by • News, Workplace

The talents of more than a million people aged over 50 who want to work are being wasted because of discrimination, bias and outdated employment practices, claims a new report from the UK government. The report from The Women and Equalities Committee also concludes that Government and the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) are failing to enforce the law on age discrimination and must be clearer that prejudice, unconscious bias and casual ageism in the workplace are all unlawful under the Equality Act 2010. Although the Committee concludes that the Government’s employer-led approach has its advantages, it does not present a strong enough challenge to discriminatory practices or attitudes.

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Fewer than a third of people see their employers as technology leaders

Fewer than a third of people see their employers as technology leaders

by • News, Technology

The key to keeping today’s digital worker productive, positive about their job and around at all is to arm them with the most updated technology possible. That is the perhaps unsurprising conclusion of a new study by Unisys Corporation  that explores the importance of deploying current and future digital capabilities in the workplace in the UK and eleven other countries around the world. The report is available here but you’ll be obliged to register.

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Improving employment of older people could boost UK GDP by £180bn 

Improving employment of older people could boost UK GDP by £180bn 

by • News, Wellbeing, Workplace

GDP could be boosted by around £180 billion a year if the UK could match New Zealand’s employment rates for the over-55s. While employment of older workers has improved in the UK in recent years, it still ranks only 21st out of 35 OECD countries according to new analysis from PwC. The consultancy’s Golden Age Index is a weighted average of indicators – including employment, earnings and training – that reflect the labour market impact of workers aged over 55. Iceland tops the rankings followed by New Zealand and Israel. For the OECD as a whole, there is a potential $3.5 trillion economic prize from matching New Zealand’s employment rates for the over-55s.

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Noise pollution in offices is worsening and people are leaving jobs as a result

Noise pollution in offices is worsening and people are leaving jobs as a result

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

The majority of executives and employees report near-constant noise in their workplace and many say they lack quiet space for meetings or to focus, a new report from Oxford Economics, commissioned by Plantronics has claimed. According to the report, conditions are much worse now than three years ago when Oxford Economics conducted its first study. The report polled senior executives and non-manager employees in the UK and across the globe to learn more about productivity and collaboration as it relates to the open office. It found that open offices aren’t delivering on collaboration and productivity goals. Instead, employees are finding alternative ways to find quiet space and focus. In fact three quarters of employees say they need to take walks outside and 32 percent listen to headphones to focus and block out distraction, while employees in the noisiest office environments are more likely to say they’ll leave their job in the next six months.

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The week in seven stories about work, technology and people

The week in seven stories about work, technology and people

by • Features, Technology, Workplace, Workplace design

Digital addiction: how technology keeps us hooked

Plumber wins gig workers’ rights battle

Why exhaustion is not unique to our overstimulated age

Ten red flags signalling your analytics program will fail

The CEO society and our culture of metric fixation

The bottom line on coworking spaces

It’s time we value our data – as people and society

The CIPD says adoption of people analytics in the UK by HR is still too low

The CIPD says adoption of people analytics in the UK by HR is still too low

by • News, Technology, Workplace

CIPD says UK lags behind other markets in people analytics confidence and capabilityOrganisations with a strong people analytics culture are much more likely to report strong business performance claims new global research from the CIPD in association with Workday. However, the survey also highlights that the wide scale adoption of people analytics practice is still low and that more needs to be done to improve skills and confidence in the HR function, particularly in the UK which is lagging behind other markets in both capability and confidence. The research also highlights the importance of access to data. It found that access to people data improves outcomes but only 71 percent of HR professionals have access to this data, and just 42 percent of finance professionals do. For those with access to people data, just 22 percent use it daily in their decision-making and almost a quarter (23 percent) use it in decision-making just once a month or less. The research, People Analytics: driving business performance with people data, surveyed 3,852 business professionals globally – including HR and finance professionals – to understand attitudes towards people analytics and how it is being used in organisations.

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