September 27, 2018
The forces that are changing the world, from AI and the current digital and technological transformation, to the short and long-term implications of Brexit, provided many of the key lessons during the first day of the CoreNet Global Summit in Madrid.
September 25, 2018
Almost two thirds (64 percent) of SME employees believe that companies should make a positive contribution to society, while half of all UK workers (50 percent) would be discouraged from working for an organisation with no interest in community or ethical goals. According to The Future Workforce from Unum and independent researcher The Future Laboratory this emphasis on a company’s ethical credentials comes in the wake of a movement towards greater awareness of global issues, which has led to demands for more transparency in how organisations do business and less tolerance of unethical corporate behaviour. As a result, an ethical employer can be an important factor when it comes to deciding whether to join or stay with an organisation –In addition, The Future Workforce report found that just under a third (30 percent) of UK workers believe that companies who are not participating in any civic or ethical contributions should be fined.
September 19, 2018
New mandatory requirements that will ensure service charges to commercial tenants are transparent, upfront and fair, and that any costs incurred are in accordance with the terms of the occupational leases, have been announced by RICS. The Institute, which has long called for a fairer and more professional approach to property management to help outlaw “rogue” landlords and managing agents says ‘Service charges in commercial property’ will help regulate the activities of landlords and their agents, whilst protecting tenants from having to pay for unscrupulous repair or maintenance costs. It has worked with major property bodies representing owners, occupiers and managing agents – including BPF, BRC, BCO, PMA, CoreNet, REVO, PMA alongside ICAEW and Law Society, the professional bodies for accountants and lawyers – to produce the recommendations that reflect the needs and opinions of landlords and tenants and the specific considerations of different sectors.
September 18, 2018
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.
September 17, 2018
Why it’s so hard to be a working mom. Even at Facebook
Let’s bring back the Sabbath as a radical act against ‘total work’
What Starbucks gets that architects don’t
Silicon Valley’s company towns are doomed
Complexity & chaos — the new normal
The price of regeneration in London
To restore civil society, start with the Library
September 13, 2018
Coworking is not the norm yet, but it is headed that direction. In fact, a sign of its success is the fact that it has moved from being labelled a fad to asking if it is a bubble about to burst. Here’s a short answer: it is not going to go pop, fizzle out or run out of steam anytime soon. Why would it? Coworking is not something driven by real estate and developers. It reflects how our society is changing.
September 12, 2018
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.
September 12, 2018
A new McKinsey study sets out to address the reasons why the United Kingdom experiences chronically low productivity and what can be done to use technology to improve its performance. In the report, Solving the UK’s productivity puzzle in the digital age, the authors argue that “Britain stands out as one of the worst productivity performers among its peers”. They argue that there are four distinct reasons for the weakness since the economic crisis: “boom and bust” in the financial sector, the strength of employment growth, weak investment and uneven “digitisation”. It claims that the UK is operating at only 17 per cent of its digitisation potential, indicating how much scope for improvement there is.
September 7, 2018
In 1775, Thomas Jefferson was a busy man. As part of the Committee of Five men and at the tender age of 33, he had been charged with drafting the Declaration of Independence that was to be presented to Congress the following Summer. By all accounts, Jefferson was a self-contained and self-sufficient man and, like many great people, a mass of contradictions.
September 6, 2018
Visions of hybrid workforces, episodic employees, gig leadership and acceptable failure have been unearthed in a new study, ‘Work 2028: trends, dilemmas and choices’, revealing business and society leaders’ projections for the fourth industrial revolution. The project was led by Professor Bernd Vogel at Henley Business School and run in collaboration with Deutsche Telekom and Detecon Consulting, who commissioned Henley to carry out the survey. The research involved interviews with over 50 influential leaders from across a variety of sectors and countries including senior figures from Amazon and Unilever to look at the challenges facing organisations and their future workforce.
August 31, 2018
A call for employers to pay staff for the time they spend emailing while commuting has opened up the debate on what constitutes working time for employees. Researchers from the University of the West of England who found that commuters used free Wi-Fi provision on their journey to and from work to ‘catch up’ with work emails, have argued this supported the argument that the commute be counted as work. Until now, there has been little research to evaluate the impact free Wi-Fi provision has had in the UK, despite government encouragement for companies to provide access on transport networks. Traditionally, the government has been more concerned about the benefits of free Wi-Fi for business travellers, but the research team believe that the impact on commuters may be more important. When the researchers looked to Scandinavia to see how commuting time could be measured differently, they found that in Norway some commuters are able to count travel time as part of their working day.
September 24, 2018
It is not particularly easy to change human behaviour by design
by Mark Eltringham • Comment, Facilities management, Workplace, Workplace design
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