Search Results for: performance

Money alone isn’t enough to attract and hold on to Gen Y employees

by • Comment, Flexible working, Workplace

Gen YThe retention of Gen Y employees is key for all organisations. No organisation wants to invest in their next generation of management only to find that they leave, and someone new needs to be trained. But the 20-30 year old workers of Gen Y exhibit a new-found job mobility. Which makes for a ticking time-bomb of potential cost and disruption to their employers. The iOpener Institute has gathered and studied questionnaire responses from over 30,000 professionals across the world, gaining insights into how employers can retain their Gen Y talent. The research clearly shows that while pay and financial rewards are important to Gen Y (i.e. they are not prepared to be under-paid for their work), there is no significant correlation between increased levels of pay and greater talent retention.

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Design skills cited as one reason why London is the world’s best city

by • Environment, Events, News, Workplace design

Clerkenwell design weekFor the first time, London is the world’s best city for business, culture and finance, according to the latest edition of PWC’s annual Cities of Opportunity report.  And the city’s reputation as a global leader in design is cited as one of the main reasons. The index of thirty of the world’s most important cities claims that London’s sheer economic clout, technological infrastructure and its design and development skills are just a few of the factors that led to the city usurping New York for the first time. When the survey was last carried out, it was ranked third. London is ranked one of the top three best places for intellectual capital and innovation alongside Paris and San Francisco and has leapt from eighth place last year to joint first place (with Seoul) in terms of its technological readiness.

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Four million people in UK now work from home, claims TUC

by • Flexible working, News, Technology

work from home

Figures released today by the TUC to mark National Work from Home Day show that more than 4 million people now regularly work from home; a rise of more than 62,000 over the course of the last year. The number of people who say they usually work from home increased by 62,000 over the course of last year to reach more than four million for the first time. The findings are from a new TUC analysis published to mark national work from home day, organised by Work Wise UK. The TUC analysis of figures from the Office for National Statistics shows that the number of regular home-workers has risen by over a half a million since 2007 – an increase of more than 10 per cent. Millions of workers across the UK occasionally work from home too, says the TUC. (more…)

UK one of the top global business destinations for sales growth and profitability

by • Furniture, News, Workplace design

Ad Lib detailGlobal manufacturing executives rank the UK as one of the top destinations for future sales growth and profitability, according to KPMG’s latest Global Manufacturing Outlook report published this week. This places the UK ahead of Germany, India and Japan and alongside China, beaten only by the US. The report also notes that the UK is leading the world in the growth of 3D printing. The survey of 460 executives representing business with an annual turnover in excess of $5 billion reveals that the UK is ranked third in terms of those countries in which global companies expect profit growth over the next two years. The focus on new technology and materials in the report reveals that 85 percent of UK manufacturers are already moving to 3D printing to reduce their product development life cycle, as British office furniture maker Senator did in prototyping its Ad-Lib range (pictured).

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We need to add another dimension to meet the stress management challenge

by • Comment, Workplace, Workplace design

The Eternal TriangleAs always, any discussion of stress starts with the headline figures. Work-related stress is evidently the UK’s biggest cause of lost working days. According to the HSE’s most recent data, around 10.4 million days were lost to it in 2012, the most significant cause of absenteeism and a massive 40 per cent of all work-related illnesses. The financial cost to the UK has been estimated at £60 billion, largely due to the psychological and physical harm stress does us. The reasons for this are clear in the minds of many: the demands made on us by employers and ourselves are intolerable. Our private time is eroded, we spend too much time at work in the first place, we’re under excessive pressure to perform when we are there and as a result we’re all knackered, unfulfilled, stressed, depressed and anxious. It’s no wonder we are so keen on stress management

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HR and Facilities Management bodies to collaborate on future of workplace

by • Facilities management, News, Workplace

Facilities managementOne of the main themes at the ThinkFM conference yesterday was the acknowledgement that facilities management and HR need to break down the silos that often exist between the two disciplines. This was the message of Chris Kane, CEO of BBC Commercial Properties, who explained that the British Institute of Facilities Management will be collaborating with the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development on a number of projects to investigate how both communities of professionals are evolving and adapting to the changing workplace. It marked the end of a conference which began the day with a talk by Peter Cheese, the CEO of the CIPD, who remarked that both professions were in the business of getting the most of people in the working environment and why it is vital that those tasked with managing these key resources within organisations need to work together to maximise the value of its workforce. (more…)

Workplace design, Facebook likes and the need of companies to be your friend

by • Comment, Environment, Facilities management, Workplace design

Facebook_like_thumbCompanies put an awful lot of time and money into getting people to like them on social media these days. While it would be easy to see the like button on Facebook as the primary conduit for this corporate neediness, but it cuts across many aspects of the ways in which companies work, including their relationships with employees and the ways in which they develop new forms of workplace design and management. This is most evident in the tech palaces which are aimed at the same digital natives that firms habitually target with their online marketing, but the need to make customers and employees friends of the business cuts across a wide range of sectors. The workplace is yet another channel of communicating chumminess, and it offers many of the same challenges as social media.

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Employers urged to plan ahead as recruitment prospects rise

by • News, Workplace

The nine enduring workplace tensions to keep an eye on in the year aheadFresh evidence that the recession is over as the CIPD reports employment intentions are at the highest level for six and half years. However, pay continues to perform well below pre-recession levels, and the HR body warns that with the economy picking up, now is the time for employers to consider both the levels of pay and employment conditions they have to offer; and the reputation and branding of their organisation. Although CIPD’s quarterly Labour Market Outlook finds little evidence that the buoyant jobs market is feeding through into recruitment difficulties for the majority of employers in the short term, in some areas; such as engineering and management/executive there is already a struggle to fill high-skilled vacancies. The CIPD is therefore urging employers in all sectors to start planning ahead to mitigate the risk of widespread skills shortages in the longer term. (more…)

Employers fail to monitor wellbeing and mental health alongside staff engagement

by • Flexible working, News, Workplace

Mental ill health still not being addressedMonitoring of employee engagement and wellbeing by FTSE 100 companies improved over the past year, but organisations are failing to measure or address the psychological health of employees. The latest Business in the Community (BITC) Workwell FTSE 100 benchmark showed an increase in the average company scores from 21 per cent to 25 per cent while reporting across the five identified areas of BITC’s Workwell Model; Better Work, Better Relationships, Better Specialist Support, Better Physical and Psychological Health and Working Well increased from 53 to 63. 86 per cent of companies now report on four or five of these themes. But despite this, there was almost no evidence that psychological health is being measured or addressed, and the provision of mental health support continues to be a low scoring area (11%). (more…)

US employers hold very mixed views on flexible working, claims report

by • Flexible working, News, Technology, Workplace

Glued to the desk

It’s not just companies in the UK who appear to have mixed and sometimes contradictory views on the principles of flexible working. A new study from the US based Families and Work Institute in partnership with the Society for Human Resource Management has found that while more and more firms are open to the idea of working from home for permanent employees, other forms of flexible working such as job sharing, career breaks or sabbaticals to deal with personal and family issues. The 2014 National Study of Employers found that two-thirds (67 percent) of US organisations now allow employees to work from home at least some of the time, up from 50 per cent in 2008. In addition, 41 per cent of firms let workers decide their own working hours, compared to 32 per cent in 2008. However there are falls in the proportion of employers willing to let staff work flexibly in other ways.

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New report aims to guide future direction of facilities management

by • Facilities management, Knowledge, News

loxley-building-image01The Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) has published a new report authored by Dr Matthew Tucker of Liverpool John Moores University which aims to help shape the future direction and policy of the facilities management sector in the UK. Balancing the performance scorecard: how to maximise customer feedback in Facilities Management develops a customer performance measurement framework for facilities management based on a range of critical themes which emerged from the vast amounts of qualitative data collected across 23 in-depth interviews with a diverse range of FM professionals. The interview subjects came from both an in-house and outsourced background and across a range of business sectors. The report claims to offer a key set of recommendations to enable facilities managers  to maximise their ability to capture customer feedback to improve the provision of space and facilities.

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Hierarchical organisations ‘stifle’ employee productivity, claims CIPD

by • Knowledge, News, Workplace

I know my placeRigid organisational hierarchies hamper the development of management, employee productivity and leadership skills within the workplace, warns the CIPD. Their report, ‘Leadership – easier said than done,’ finds a growing trend in developing the capability of individual leaders and managers, an approach known as ‘distributed leadership’. However, faced with outdated organisational structures and cultures – these managers are unable to apply what they’ve learnt in the training room. The report recommends that leadership development should give greater consideration to the organisation-wide factors that can help or hinder the practical application of great leadership skills by employees at all levels. It urges HR managers to take the next step from training individual leaders, to improving the leadership capacity of the organisation as a whole; focusing on understanding what kind of leadership it requires and what changes are needed. (more…)

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