April 7, 2023

The need for reimagination in an age of uncertainty

by Eugenia Anastassiou • Comment, Everything Omni

Since we are now very much in the age of uncertainty being the new certainty, with all the old playbooks out the window and no cookie cutter approach in the ways we work, since one size doesn’t fit all – what the hell do we do? Curl up in a ball and die? Go into panic mode and go around shouting ‘We’re doomed! We’re doomed’ manically? Or just ostrich the problem and hope it all goes away or at least reverts back to how it was before? (more…)

March 30, 2023

Every workplace innovation contains the seeds of its opposite

by Mark Eltringham • Comment, Flexible working, Technology

The announcement by Apple that it wanted its employees to work in an office for three days a week sparked the usual, tedious pile-on about how many days people should spend in a physical workplace each week. This included the columnist at Grazia who joins the tens of millions of people around the world who not only know where Apple is going wrong, but also how to run every other organisation in the world and what’s best for everybody who works for them. (more…)

March 23, 2023

Getting back to basics in The Great Workplace Conversation

by Mark Eltringham • Comment, Flexible working, Technology, Wellbeing

There’s nowhere near enough talk about our base instincts in the Great Workplace Conversation. Objectively speaking, we remain relatively highly evolved, communal and intelligent primates. And so we are driven by things we like to admit to – love, empathy and the Golden Rule. But also things we don’t care to admit to in quite the same way – status, jealousy and self-interest. (more…)

March 23, 2023

American employees spend 200 hours a year watching adult sites on their work computer

by Jayne Smith • Flexible working, News, Technology, Workplace

American employees are wasting hundreds of contracted work hours a year using their work equipment for personal tasks and activities, according to a new survey from ExpressVPN. The survey, conducted by the consumer privacy and security company, found that some people are spending only 33 percent of annual contracted hours on work tasks. With a steep rise in hybrid and home working in recent years, many companies have provided employees with work devices to use in the comfort of their own homes, including work laptops, desktops, phones, and microphones. (more…)

March 17, 2023

Most hybrid workers worldwide don’t think they’ll return to old ways of work

by Neil Franklin • Flexible working, News, Wellbeing

A poll of 3,000 office workers by Insights Learning & Development claims that 70 percent of hybrid workers in the UK want to maintain the arrangement permanently. According to the report, UK employees are generally happy with their hybrid working arrangements – more so than employees in the US, Canada and France. Overall workers in the Netherlands are most satisfied with their hybrid working arrangements. (more…)

March 6, 2023

The six skills managers will need for the future of work

by Lea Kimpele • Comment, Flexible working, Technology

Conversations around how work and leadership will change in the coming years have inevitably been accelerated by the pandemic. Companies all over the world have been urged to seek new digital tools, solutions and methods for communicating, making decisions, and activating projects remotely. The companies that emerged most successfully from the Covid era were those that, despite all the uncertainty at the time, decided to adapt and view the pandemic as an opportunity for change rather than an obstacle. When it comes to the future of work, we need new guidelines for building change-ready and vulnerable leadership. (more…)

December 12, 2022

In person work can make the signs of burnout easier to spot

by Jayne Smith • Flexible working, News, Wellbeing

A new poll from Barco claims that a third of people who mostly work in the office found it easier to tell when a colleague is overworked or stressed when seeing them face to face, leaving some remote workers at risk of struggling under the radar of management teams. This comes as over a quarter of staff report experiencing burnout over chronic work-related stress that has not been managed successfully. (more…)

December 9, 2022

The Great Relearning about the Great Office Problem

by Mark Eltringham • Comment, Flexible working, Technology, Workplace design

One of the latest people to invent activity-based working is sociologist Ana Andjelic, who combines it with the similarly familiar hub and spoke office model on her substack as a solution to the Great Office Problem. She’s not the first and is a less surprising pioneer of a decades old model than some other people who should really know better. That includes an architectural practice who came up with the idea earlier this year and whose name escapes me. (more…)

December 8, 2022

People in the West continue to express ambivalence about the metaverse

by Jayne Smith • News, Technology

A new poll from law firm Gowling WLG claims to reveal a stark difference in attitudes in Western and Eastern nations when it comes to the metaverse. It claims that the technology is set to change how we work and socialise forever, and that early adopters like China and the United Arab Emirates are already reaping the economic benefits. The firm’s Immaterial World report compared attitudes towards the metaverse in six international markets. The research found that four-in-five (83 percent) Chinese consumers would consider taking part in virtual experiences, more than twice as many as in the UK (37 percent). (more…)

November 23, 2022

The unspoken privilege of wellbeing

by Stephanie Fitzgerald • Comment, SF, Wellbeing

I sat in the main hall at a recent conference, listening to the keynote presentation. A Head of HR at a large manufacturing company described the implementation of their wellbeing strategy over the last year. So far, so important. There is no doubt that the conversation around wellbeing has been rightly amplified, as employees are seeking to gain and maintain more life in their work-life balance. However, as I sat there listening, I became uncomfortable. Seriously uncomfortable. Then I became cross. (more…)

November 23, 2022

Firms should focus on people in the drive for long term growth

by Neil Franklin • News, Wellbeing, Workplace

A new report by Economist Impact, sponsored by Kyocera Document Solutions, claims that human-centric strategies are needed for businesses to drive sustainable business growth, focusing on three pillars: productivity and infrastructure, employee engagement and culture. The Magnetic Workplace Barometer claims to gauge confidence both today and in five years’ time across what the report terms the three main pillars of productivity and infrastructure; employee engagement; and culture. The barometer scores are scaled from 1 to 7, 7 being the most confident. (more…)

November 17, 2022

The workplace circus continues to entertain, but back in the real world…

by Mark Eltringham • Comment, Flexible working, Technology, Wellbeing

The Great Workplace Circus headlines its 322nd show of the year with everybody’s favourite distraction, Elon Musk, being driven into the ring by his own shoddily built clown car, declaring he needs everybody at Twitter to be ‘extremely hardcore’ before sacking a few people from his space programme, then setting fire to the tent himself. The swarm of stories spawned by this extraordinary behaviour include this tired and predictable rant in the Telegraph about ‘lazy Brits’. Ironically, there’s nothing lazier than a columnist on this rag with some space to fill. (more…)