Search Results for: productivity

Britain should make it easy for high skilled immigrants in the wake of Brexit vote

Britain should make it easy for high skilled immigrants in the wake of Brexit vote

by • News

The UK Government should restrict levels of  immigration by low-skilled workers after Brexit, but at the same time make it considerably easier for for medium-skilled and high-skilled workers from around the world, according to a new report from the Migration Advisory Committee. The detailed report was commissioned in July 2017 by Home Secretary Amber Rudd. Its main conclusion is that there is a great deal of hard evidence of the benefit enjoyed by the UK as a result of the migration of highly-skilled migrants and that future policy should reflect this. The study published today, Tuesday, is expected to have a significant effect on the contents of the government’s immigration white paper, due for publication later this year. The report’s conclusions closely match the policy proposals that Home Office officials have outlined to immigration specialists. However, no special preference would be given to EU citizens in the UK’s future immigration system post-Brexit.

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Half of all workplace tasks will be performed by machines within seven years

Half of all workplace tasks will be performed by machines within seven years

by • News, Technology

The world is going through a workplace revolution that will bring a seismic shift in the way humans work alongside machines and algorithms, according to new research by the World Economic Forum. By 2025 more than half of all current workplace tasks will be performed by machines as opposed to 29 percent today. Such a transformation will have a profound effect on the global labour force, however in terms of overall numbers of new jobs the outlook is positive, with 133 million new jobs expected to be created by 2022 compared to 75 million that will be displaced. The research, published in The Future of Jobs 2018, is an attempt to understand the potential of new technologies to disrupt and create jobs. It is also seeks to provide guidance on how to improve the quality and productivity of the current work being done by humans and how to prepare people for emerging roles.

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Employees often too busy keeping up with workloads to innovate

Employees often too busy keeping up with workloads to innovate

by • AI, News, Technology, Workplace

Employees too busy keeping up with workloads to innovate

The majority of workers say their workplace regularly asks them to innovate, but a full 65 percent say they’re so swamped with day-to-day work that they don’t have time to think about the future, a new report by Workfront claims. Yet their work remains important to employees, as over half (57 percent) says what they do matters to them personally. The report also found that UK workers rate their own contributions higher than those of their colleagues. On average, most workers scored their productivity at 7.84/10, compared with 7.05 for co-workers and 6.28 for company leadership. Most do believe though that automation will boost personal productivity, as seventy-seven percent thought that the rise of automation will help people and teams think of work in new and innovative ways. There are concerns too regarding too many time wasting activities, with staff spending only 39 per cent of their workday on their primary tasks. Emails and pointless meetings topped the list of things that keep knowledge workers from getting work done.

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AI will be commonplace in the working lives of staff very soon

AI will be commonplace in the working lives of staff very soon

by • News, Technology

Experts at Henley Business School have announced that the majority of the graduate workforce in the UK will be working with artificial intelligence on a daily basis by 2030, with technology such as ‘AI assistants’ expected to be commonplace in the next decade. New research released at the Henley annual World of Work 2030 conference, claims that a third (35 percent) of UK workers are excited about the prospect of their own personal AI assistant. With the average worker currently spending 3.5 hours a week on admin tasks, assistants’ could give workers back 12 working days a year (over two working weeks) by taking on these activities and freeing up time for more productive tasks.

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Crown Estate HQ becomes first office in Europe to achieve WELL Platinum Certification

Crown Estate HQ becomes first office in Europe to achieve WELL Platinum Certification

by • Environment, Facilities management, News, Property, Public Sector, Wellbeing

The Crown Estate has announced that it has been awarded WELL Certification at the Platinum Level for its head office at No 1 St James’s Market, London by the International WELL Building Institute. The Crown Estate earned the distinction based on seven categories of building performance—air, water, light, nourishment, fitness, comfort and mind—and achieved a Platinum level rating.

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Employers still have huge reservations about permitting more flexible working

Employers still have huge reservations about permitting more flexible working

by • Flexible working, Legal news, News, Workplace

Employers still have huge reservations about permitting flexible workingEmployers considering new flexible working options for their employees are concerned about the security and management implications, according to a recent poll, despite the fact that staff now have the legal right to request flexible arrangements. The survey of medium sized businesses, carried out for RSM by YouGov, found that over the next five years, three quarters of respondents were considering introducing flexible terms of employment, allowing workers to work outside 9 to 5 or increasing the use of remote working.

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Reinventing jobs for an automated future workplace

Reinventing jobs for an automated future workplace

by • AI, Comment, Technology

Earlier this year, the European Commission announced it will invest €20 billion in Artificial Intelligence (AI) research and development by 2020 to boost the adoption of AI and robotics across multiple industries, which will have a significant impact on the way work across sectors gets done. Facing demographic deficits, Europe and Japan – and to an extent the US and China – are highly motivated to continue investment into AI, which is growing at an annual rate of 15 percent, and set to reach $1 trillion globally by 2050, according to Morgan Stanley.

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Employees more productive when they understand the company goals

Employees more productive when they understand the company goals

by • News, Workplace

Employees more productive when they understand the company goalsBeing made to feel you’re making a positive contribution to your organisation is an important motivator, but a new study suggests over half of employees believe they would be more productive if they knew how their work fitted into overall company objectives. According to the research from Asana this lack of transparency means a third of UK employees believe their business suffers from a lack of direction, with employees complaining that they do not know what their company stands for and are completely unclear of the company’s long term and short-term goals. This unsurprisingly is having a direct impact on employee motivation, with and framed within the context of the UK’s productivity conundrum.  A lack of clarity of company goals across businesses is not the sole reason that the UK is experiencing a productivity conundrum, but there is a clear disconnect between strategic goals and the jobs being executed on a day to day basis.

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Four day working week could become a reality soon, claims report

Four day working week could become a reality soon, claims report

by • Flexible working, News, Wellbeing, Workplace

A four-day working week could become a reality this century, according to the general secretary of the Trade Union Congress and a new TUC report. In a key speech to the TUC’s annual congress set to be delivered later today, Frances O’Grady will call for firms to use technology in a way to improve the lives of workers and cut the number of hours they spend working. However, the union also concedes that it may take government intervention for this to happen, given the way technology has encouraged the extension of working time over past few decades.

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We should measure wellbeing and security if we want to create Good Work, claims the RSA

We should measure wellbeing and security if we want to create Good Work, claims the RSA

by • Flexible working, News, Wellbeing, Workplace design

Job security, workplace mental health, and how well-supported workers feel by their employer, should be monitored annually by the government, a report led by the RSA and the Carnegie UK Trust recommends. The need to better monitor quality of work in the UK was called for in RSA chief executive Matthew Taylor’s 2017 employment review for the Prime Minister. The UK Government subsequently committed to delivering on this proposal; and Measuring Good Work now sets out a roadmap for how the ambition can be achieved. The report highlights that employment has a major impact on people’s wellbeing and quality of life, arguing that since the 2008 financial crisis, despite record employment, the overall figure on the number of people in work fails to account for issues like worker pay; whether employees feel they are trapped in a job below their skillset; are working too few or too many hours; or are facing excessive workplace pressure.

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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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Firms need to distinguish between job and organisation when it comes to employee engagement

Firms need to distinguish between job and organisation when it comes to employee engagement

by • News, Workplace

Organisations need to distinguish between employee engagement with a job and engagement with the organisation if they are to improve the employee experience and their overall competitive advantage, a new research paper claims. Published by the Institute for Employment Studies (IES), the paper claims to highlight how traditional, one-dimensional views of engagement fail to make a distinction between job and organisational engagement, viewing employee engagement as a single concept. However, employees can be highly engaged with the organisation but have low levels of job engagement, or vice versa. The research paper, Bridging the gap: an evidence-based approach to employee engagement, suggests that this lack of understanding about what engagement really is and how it influences organisational success can lead to inefficient and ineffective strategies to improve employee engagement.

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