Search Results for: skills

What the Chancellor’s Spring Statement means for the employment landscape

What the Chancellor’s Spring Statement means for the employment landscape

by • Comment, Workplace

It may only have lasted 26 minutes, but chancellor Philip Hammond’s inaugural Spring Statement included a number of very encouraging points. Critics were quick to criticise Philip Hammond’s first Spring Statement. But that is perhaps simply the nature of politics. If an impartial party carefully dissects the 26-minute speech, there are undoubtedly many positives to take away. Yes, growth projections still lag slightly behind those highlighted in March 2016. However, it must be accepted that pre-Brexit forecasts are a different story altogether. On 24 June 2016, very few people would have predicted the growth story that was told in the House of Commons today – one of continued economic development with further growth on the horizon. This story is therefore an extremely encouraging one, and a welcome narrative amidst the doom and gloom that so often dominates the media headlines and political debates.

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Future cityscape will feature driverless transport, smart buildings and co-working says JLL

Future cityscape will feature driverless transport, smart buildings and co-working says JLL

by • Cities, Facilities management, News, Property

Future cityscape will feature driverless transport, smart buildings and co-working says JLL

Wi-Fi trees, driverless transport, smart buildings and co-working will be commonplace in 2040 predicts a report (registration required) published by JLL that outlines the ideal cityscape by 2040. The report incorporates a transformation framework aimed at enabling real estate businesses to adapt and thrive in a future city. According to the report, “The Transformation Framework”, the ideal cityscape in 2040 will have adapted to the trends driving the real estate sector over the next 20 years and will include co-working and living space, smart and healthy buildings, Wi-Fi trees, reverse vending machines, driverless transport and multi-generational housing as standard. To create the future cityscape, JLL asked some of the UK’s leading real-estate owners, occupiers, developers and investors what they thought the ideal city would look like in 2040, while taking into account the seven trends that JLL predict will influence real estate and infrastructure globally over the next two decades. These trends included tech innovation, urbanisation, land & resource scarcity, the low carbon economy, demographic & workplace change, health & wellness and transparency & social value.

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Schools aren’t doing enough to prepare children for collaborative working life

Schools aren’t doing enough to prepare children for collaborative working life

by • Flexible working, News

schools and working lifeNew research from the organisers of UC EXPO claims that just 44 percent of British people believe that the current school curriculum does enough to provide students with the collaboration skills they need for modern working life. According to the study of 2,000 respondents carried out in February of this year, 70 percent of the UK workforce already believes that collaboration is very important in the work environment. But just over half (51 percent) either never collaborated or collaborated infrequently in school, and 37 percent stated that collaboration wasn’t an important focus of their education.

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Women working in construction sector three times more likely to miss out on promotion

Women working in construction sector three times more likely to miss out on promotion

by • Architecture, Facilities management, Legal news, News, Property, Workplace

Women working in construction sector three times more likely to miss out on promotion

The built environment still has some way to go to achieve gender parity a new report suggests, as women in construction are paid up to 45 percent less than men and are three times more likely to miss out on promotion than men due to perceived gender discrimination. According to the survey by Randstad of more than 5,500 construction workers and 540 employers across all job functions and levels – 75 percent of those passed over for a more senior role were women compared to 25 percent men. The findings  suggests women in the industry typically are not being given the same opportunities to progress as their male counterparts even though almost every respondent (93 percent) said having a female manager either wouldn’t affect their way of working or would in fact have a positive impact. (more…)

New working styles are risking the health and wellbeing of people, claims report

New working styles are risking the health and wellbeing of people, claims report

by • AI, Flexible working, News, Technology, Wellbeing

A new report from the British Safety Council and consultancy Robertson Cooper, explores what it claims is the probable impact of new working practices and technology on people’s physical and mental wellbeing, and what employers, unions and legislators should do to address them. The report, Future risk: Impact of Work on Health, Safety and Wellbeing, argues that the safety, health and wellbeing of older workers will become more important and new risks will arise related to the adoption of artificial intelligence and automation.

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Automation will lead to greater inequality rather than job losses

Automation will lead to greater inequality rather than job losses

by • AI, News, Technology

The total level of wages associated with jobs that have the technical potential to be automated in the UK is £290 billion per year, which represents 33 percent of all wages and earnings from labour in the economy, according to a new report published by IPPR  for the IPPR Commission on Economic Justice. The report further claims that low-wage jobs have more potential to be automated than high-wage jobs and so it’s not just automation’s impact on the number of jobs that need to be considered but the impact on inequality. If automation leads to lower average wages or working hours, or loss of jobs in aggregate, a significant amount of national income could be transferred from wages to profits. And while increased automation of activities will replace some workers and labour earnings, employment and wages will rise in other areas of the labour market due to higher output and productivity, offsetting some of the original £290 billion lost but increasing pay inequality.

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BIFM to change its name to reflect greater focus on workplace issues and pursue chartered status

BIFM to change its name to reflect greater focus on workplace issues and pursue chartered status

by • Facilities management, News

The British Institute of Facilities Management (BIFM) has today announced plans to embrace ‘workplace’ as a key ‘differentiator’ for its members and to help establish facilities management as a chartered profession. The manifesto for change announced by BIFM Chair Stephen Roots, sets out to ‘reposition facilities management, emphasising its ability to make a real contribution to organisations’ performance’. It sets the Institute the ‘twin tasks of helping members to improve their skills and their status to meet the needs of modern organisations, and to raise the profile of facilities management and the understanding of the value it contributes’. The proposed new name is the Institute of Workplace and Facilities Management (IWFM).

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Report outlines the impact of universities on regional economies and entrepreneurship

Report outlines the impact of universities on regional economies and entrepreneurship

by • News, Public Sector

Although universities contribute to one in every hundred new business births in the UK, but 35 percent of universities did not contribute to the production of a single graduate start-up last year, according to a new report from Localis. It claims that while there are pockets of excellence in the way universities support enterprise and entrepreneurship across the country, too many of them are doing too little. Published in partnership with University College London (UCL) and the University of Huddersfield (UoH), the report explores what more can be done to encourage university entrepreneurial activity and its role in local economies.

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Modest growth in UK construction activity is driven by commercial office projects

Modest growth in UK construction activity is driven by commercial office projects

by • Facilities management, News, Property

Modest growth in UK construction activity driven by commercial office projects

Construction activity in the UK has stabilised after a prolonged period of decline, according to the latest JLL and Glenigan UK Commercial Construction Activity Index. Key findings for the last quarter of 2017 show an overall increase in construction activity for the second consecutive quarter, driven mainly by commercial office developments. This follows overall growth of 7.9 percent in the third quarter of 2017, halting a sharp decline seen since mid-2015. Highlighting movement across different sectors, growth in office construction was up 11.2 percent to £4.5 billion, education (up 12.0 percent to £3.5 billion) and community (up 19.9 percent to £0.6 billion) sectors.

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The UK needs a new approach to low pay, equality and flexible working

The UK needs a new approach to low pay, equality and flexible working

by • News, Workplace

A new research paper from the Institute for Employment Studies (IES) claims to identify areas where employers and policymakers should act to reinvigorate their pay and rewards practices to improve employee engagement and productivity. According to the IES, with the likely intensification of current recruitment shortages, skills gaps and the fall in living standards as the UK leaves the European Union, the paper argues that both employers and policymakers should act on three key areas – low pay, gender pay and total rewards – to help halt the relative decline of the UK’s already below-par productivity performance.

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Report calls for better understanding of the future risks of tech to workplace wellbeing

Report calls for better understanding of the future risks of tech to workplace wellbeing

by • AI, News, Technology, Wellbeing, Workplace

Better understanding needed of the future risks of work to health, safety and wellbeingIn a workplace dominated by insecurity, gig work and intelligent machines we need to improve our understanding of their potential impact on health, safety and wellbeing claims a new report. Future risk: Impact of work on employee health, safety and wellbeing, commissioned by the British Safety Council from RobertsonCooper researchers argues that the public debate on the future of work has centred so far on the likely shape of the workplace and its implications for both employers and employees. There has been far less focus on what this might mean for workers’ health, safety and wellbeing, with discussions centring on the present, rather than preparing us for the challenges of the future. Yet, the impact of automation on the workplace will be more fundamental than is commonly understood, with 11 million jobs predicted to be lost in the next 20 years in the UK. As we are already seeing with some ‘gig’ working, it may undermine such basic human needs as social identity, economic security and a sense of belonging. The report reviews the existing literature on this subject and makes a number of recommendations.

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Built environment needs to address the talent gap to make the digital transition says WEF

Built environment needs to address the talent gap to make the digital transition says WEF

by • AI, Architecture, Facilities management, News, Technology, Workplace

Built environment needs to address the talent gap to make digital transition says WEFThe construction industry needs new talent and skills to help in the adoption of new technologies to meet the challenges of digital transformation. It must also become more diverse, including increasing the percentage of women in the industry. These are the recommendations of a new report from the World Economic Forum, developed in collaboration with The Boston Consulting Group (BCG), Shaping the Future of Construction: An Action Plan to solve the Industry’s Talent Gap. The report argues that the Infrastructure and Urban Development (IU) industry has failed to innovate as quickly as other sectors, resulting in stagnating productivity and negative effects on the economy, society and the environment. An ongoing industry-wide shortage of qualified workers is among the key reasons for this issue. It has undermined project management and execution, adversely affecting cost, timelines and quality. It also has impeded the adoption of new digital technologies, such as building information modelling (BIM), automated equipment and cloud-based collaboration tools, which could improve productivity. The report provides twelve key actions which needs to be implemented to close the structural talent gap of the construction industry.

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