Search Results for: productivity

July 25, 2016

Businesses worldwide ready to welcome robots into workplace ⁰

by Mark Eltringham • Property, Technology, Workplace

Businesses are ready to embrace the new era of robot workers, automation and artificial intelligence, according to a new report. The Robotic Workforce Research study by AI specialists Genfour claims that more than half of respondents globally are ready to embrace the arrival of robots in the workplace. Almost half of respondents believe that between 10 and 30 percent could be subject to automation. Across all businesses in the UK and US, 94 percent responded that they would either embrace robots or felt a robotic future would be inevitable. Almost half (46 per cent) of UK businesses say they are set to welcome robots at work. A similar proportion (47 per cent) believe it is inevitable, and a third (32 per cent) believe they’ll be able to automate as much as 20 per cent of their business as soon as the technology becomes available. Just seven per cent are worried robots would steal jobs and 16 per cent currently have not planned automation.

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July 25, 2016

Outmoded desk phone will disappear within next couple of years ⁰

by Sara Bean • Facilities management, Flexible working, News, Technology, Workplace design

A new survey has confirmed the imminent death of the ‘nearly useless’ desk phone, which while still in evidence within many organisations, is believed by one third of workers will disappear in two to three years. With both corporate and remote workers increasingly away from their desks, 65 percent already have a ‘desk phone optional’ work environment and over half (59 percent) believe the desk phone is outdated. The 2016 Report on Business Communications in the Era of the Anywhere Worker, by Dialpad, among end users to executives, on cloud communications adoption rates and expectations, also found that businesses of all sizes are adapting to the “anywhere worker” movement and as employees increasingly rely exclusively on mobile technologies, the organisations they work for are quickly evolving to meet their mobility demands and prepare for more anywhere workers in the future. In fact, 84 percent of responding companies already have remote workers.

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July 21, 2016

Young people entering the workforce are not prepared for office politics ⁰

by Neil Franklin • Flexible working, Wellbeing, Workplace

Office politics is the one thing many young people are least prepared for when starting their first job, according to a new study by the Co-op. The study comes as many them are about to enter the workforce for the first time. With more young people opting for the world of work in the form of apprenticeships and on the job training rather than higher education, the members of ‘Generation Y’ often find they are unprepared for these softer skills needed to get on in the office according to the poll of 1,100 16-25 year olds. Over half of young people (54 percent) said that they were not prepared or informed about office politics. The study is part of the Co-op’s campaign to champion young people in the workplace by taking a closer look at what motivates 16-25 year olds. The research suggests that young people could find it harder to express opinion and ideas in the workplace, which in turn could lead them to feel isolated and unsupported.

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July 21, 2016

Offices not yet smart enough to support new ways of working ⁰

by Sara Bean • Facilities management, Flexible working, News, Technology, Workplace design

Employees believe their workplace is not making best use of latest technology, but expect this to improve as remote work begins to provide both quality of life and productivity benefits. In the latest Future Workforce Survey conducted by Dell and Intel, nearly half of global employees believe their current workplace is not smart enough, while 42 percent of millennial employees say they are willing to quit their job if technologies are not up to their standard. The research suggest that the addition of collaborative tools and innovations such as internet of things (IoT) and Virtual Reality (VR) will soon become vital to the workplace. According to the poll of nearly 4,000 full-time employees in ten countries, over half (57 percent) believe they will be working in a smart office within the next five years, while 51 percent believe that better technologies will make face-to-face meetings redundant within the next five years.

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July 20, 2016

We need to keep a more open mind about open plan office design

by Maciej Markowski • Comment, Facilities management, Workplace design

Most people will be aware that there has been an historic and enduring debate about whether open plan offices are a good or a bad thing. Past articles whether in the Guardian, Dezeen or across the pond in the Washington Post would typically suggest that they diminish productivity and foster a number of other workplace ills. However introducing open plan design principles into your office is almost certainly a good idea. You really just need to make sure that you provide your employees with a choice of settings that allows them to work somewhere that suits the task in hand whether it’s space for concentration or privacy for confidential conversations in order to make it work. It’s a complex and contentious issue so it’s worth asking where open plan works and where it really doesn’t. If you ask many employees working in open plan offices what is bothering them, they’ll probably tell you two things: that they cannot focus and they have no privacy.

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July 20, 2016

New device has potential to store huge amounts of data at atomic level ⁰

by Mark Eltringham • News, Products, Technology

Over the past few years, there has been talk that we are approaching the end of the era of Moore’s Law. The law originated when the technologist Gordon Moore, who later founded Intel, wrote an essay in which he claimed that the process of miniaturisation would mean that computer chips would double in power every two years and they would eventually become so small they could be embedded in a wide number of objects including something he called a ‘personal portable communications’ device. Over the last half century, the eponymous law has held up pretty well and it has been the driving force of the world’s economy over that time. A 2013 McKinsey article argued that around 40 percent of the global productivity growth over the previous two decades could be attributed to the exponential increase in computer power described by Moore. So there was inevitably a great deal of interest in what would happen when further miniaturisation became impossible.

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July 13, 2016

Gensler publishes latest US and UK Workplace Surveys for 2016 ⁰

by Mark Eltringham • Architecture, Facilities management, Features, Flexible working, Workplace design

Gensler has announced the results of its Workplace Survey 2016 for both the UK and the US. Key claims of the UK report based on a study of 1,210 respondents include that the UK workforce seems to be divided into ‘haves and have-nots’, with mid and lower-tier workers confined to poor quality environments, 67 per cent of the workforce feel drained due to their office environment at the end of each day and that ‘innovators’ spend just 3.5 days of the working week in the office, highlighting the need for greater flexibility. Meanwhile, the key finding of the US study of 4,000 respondents is that a statistical link between the quality and functional make-up of the workplace and the level of innovation employees ascribe to their organisation, and found that a workplace that prioritises both individual and group work creates ‘an ecosystem of innovation’ across organisations and is a crucial predictor of how innovative an employee sees their company to be.

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July 13, 2016

World FM Day and the workplace design and management elephant

by Mark Eltringham • Comment, Events, Facilities management

There is an ancient Asian parable which has found its way into a number of cultures including Hindu and Buddhist lore. In one version, the Buddha tells of a king who has nine blind men summoned to his palace. An elephant is brought in and they are asked to describe it. Each man feels a different part of the elephant and describes it to the king. In turn they tell him it is a pot (the man who feels the head), a winnowing basket (ear), a ploughshare (tusk), a plough (trunk), a granary (body), a pillar (foot), a mortar (back), a pestle (tail) or a brush (tip of the tail). They disagree violently with each other to the amusement of the king, and the Buddha surmises that ‘in their ignorance they are by nature quarrelsome, wrangling, and disputatious, each maintaining reality is thus and thus.’ Around 2,500 years later, groups of people continue to describe big things solely based on the bits with which they come into contact and bicker with others who are close to other bits.

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July 12, 2016

British workers’ patience with slow technology lasts just sixty seconds ⁰

by Neil Franklin • Technology, Wellbeing

The patience of British workers to put up with slow and malfunctioning technology lasts just sixty seconds on average before they lose their temper, according to new research from tech firm Crucial. The survey of 2,000 Brits claims that one in five (21 percent) lose their patience once a week, a fifth (19 percent) every couple of days, and 7 percent kicking off over slow technology every few hours. And when slow technology does strike, it takes 60 seconds on average before people lose patience. However, some Brits lose it even quicker, with 32 percent saying they lose patience with slow technology after just 30 seconds. While there is no one single reason cited for a PC freezing, almost half (46 percent) of respondents said that opening web pages caused their PC to freeze. Other causes include opening programmes and apps (27 percent), opening files (21 percent), loading videos (17 percent) and when saving down an important file (12 percent).

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July 8, 2016

Overwhelming majority of employees putting in unpaid extra hours ⁰

by Neil Franklin • News, Wellbeing, Workplace

The overwhelming majority of UK employees (81 percent) are working beyond their contracted hours, claims a report from recruitment firm Morgan McKinley. Overall, 81 percent of people put in the extra hours with senior staff most likely to work more than 10 hours over their contracted hours (42 percent) each week compared to 21 percent of those who had just started working. The Morgan McKinley Working Hours survey of 2,600 professionals in sectors such as banking and finance, claims that 75 percent of employees felt obliged to work beyond their contracted hours, yet just 13 percent of respondents to the survey say they are paid for working extra hours. The study claims that only 32 percent of professionals believe that they are productive during the extra hours that they work. A third (34 percent) don’t take a lunch break of any kind, with Millennials (21 percent) being the largest group to have a working day without their lunch break.

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July 7, 2016

Employers and staff disagree on root causes of workplace stress ⁰

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

Seventy-five percent of US employers say workplace stress is their number one health concern, but a disconnect between employers and employees on the causes of stress could undermine efforts to address the problem. Data from Willis Towers Watson’s 2015/2016 Global Staying@Work Survey along with its 2015/2016 Global Benefits Attitudes Survey reveals that the top causes of stress has picked by employer tended to fall into categories of large organisational issues, such as change and ubiquitous technology connections which can make employees feel that they are always on the job. By contrast, employees pointed more directly to specific elements of their personal work experience. For example, employees ranked organisation culture — including a lack of teamwork and a tendency to avoid accountability — third on their stress list, while employers ranked it last. Conversely, employers identified insufficient work/life balance as the top stressor for workers, while employees ranked it sixth.

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July 6, 2016

Which aspects of workplace design are most important to personal wellbeing? ⁰

by Marc Bird • Comment, Wellbeing, Workplace design

There is no doubt that the UK’s office based knowledge industry is facing a crisis in the form of a ‘wellbeing deficit’. Both the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) and Health and Safety Executive (HSE) have reported record levels of absenteeism, with the latter attributing 23.3 million lost working days to work-related ill-health, such as depression, stress, anxiety and musculoskeletal disorders. A great deal is already known about the causes of the key issues of employee stress and demotivation, but more work needs to be done to establish how organisations can meet their corporate goals with regard to these issues, whilst still engaging, motivating and nurturing their workforce. A significant body of published research has identified that a sense of ‘personal control’ can have a hugely positive impact on employee wellbeing, but how can we engender that control when it comes to creating a productive working environment?