April 23, 2021

AMBITUS luminaire by Rainlight Studio for Zumtobel wins ‘Best of the Best’ at prestigious Red Dot Awards

Rainlight Studio has been awarded the ‘Best of the Best’ product prize at this year’s Red Dot Awards for AMBITUS, an innovative high performance luminaire designed for Austrian manufacturer Zumtobel, combining state-of-the-art technology within a nuanced form. Yorgo Lykouria, founder and creative director of Rainlight, collaborated with Zumtobel, one of the world’s most well-respected lighting manufacturers, over a ten-year period to create AMBITUS, distinctive because of its compact profile and circular shape to emit maximum light distribution, in a sector dominated by linear forms. (more…)

April 22, 2021

Business leaders lose touch with remote working employees

by Jayne Smith • Business, Flexible working, News

EMEA business leaders are out of touch with what employees want in the hybrid workplace experience, and 66 percent of organisations plan to adopt a different operating model than they had before the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a new survey from Unisys Corporation. (more…)

April 21, 2021

Workers do double the work because of disconnected tech

by Jayne Smith • News, Technology, Working lives

New research by Templafy claims over a third (37 percent) of UK employees do around double the amount of work because their technology stack lacks useful integrations in its business enablement report. This leaves UK workers spending large amounts of time switching between applications, with over one in four, 27 percent, using six to ten different applications each week. (more…)

April 21, 2021

HR professionals expect employees to split their time between the office and home

by Jayne Smith • Flexible working, News, Working lives

Research commissioned by CANCOM, conducted with UK HR professionals about post-COVID work habits claims that only one-in-ten organisations does not intend to run a hybrid way of working – with nearly two-thirds (65 percent) of HR professionals of the opinion that employees will divide their time between the office and home after all COVID restrictions have lifted. (more…)

April 20, 2021

Buildings with a digital twin have a lot to tell us

by Peter Loeffler • Features, Technology, Workplace design

The expression “if these walls could talk” is taking on an entirely new meaning with the emerging opportunity to create digital twins for buildings. Across the entire lifecycle of structures such as office buildings, hospitals, airports and hotels, creating a digital twin can significantly reduce costs, improve efficiencies, speed construction delivery, as well as enhance performance and the user experience. (more…)

April 20, 2021

Developers who capitalise on wellness will benefit in post-pandemic world

by Jayne Smith • News, Property, Wellbeing

Just as the pandemic has forced many to re-think their relationship to the office, developers and building owners have been forced to reassess the service they offer to meet the altered needs of occupiers, according to research by JLL. (more…)

April 20, 2021

FUTURE Designs awarded the IMMUNE Building Standard

by Freddie Steele • Company news

FUTURE Designs, a UK based designer and manufacturer of luminaires and lighting solutions, obtains the first IMMUNE Building Standard certification in the world for an Industrial Building, awarded by Healthy by Design Building Institute (HDBI). The factory and headquarters achieved the label ‘IMMUNE – Strong’ following the company’s successful implementation of the health and safety set of measures for its employees. (more…)

April 16, 2021

Hybrid working risks becoming a meaningless term

by Ben Gillam • Comment, Flexible working, Workplace design

Hybrid working runs the risk of becoming a blanket term, interpreted on a very surface level, when it has the potential to offer a much greater opportunity for businesses to open up and re-examine the culture and experience of their staff, alongside where they want to take their business in the future, as well as fast-tracking mental health and wellbeing to play a central role in workplace strategy. (more…)

April 14, 2021

The digital transformation dilemma: UK employees want pandemic-era tech to stay

by Jayne Smith • News, Technology, Working lives

As the UK prepares to return to normal in the coming months and industries reopen, research from The Workforce Institute at UKG claims that as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, 87 percent of UK workers have been propelled into the future of work by accelerating their digital transformation projects. Furthermore, 86 percent are enjoying the benefits of these new technologies, and 38 percent are fearful that their organisation will go back to the “old way” of doing things post-pandemic. (more…)

April 12, 2021

Employee experience is top priority for CIO’s but UK held back by lack of tools

by Jayne Smith • News, Technology, Working culture

Elastic (NYSE: ESTC), the company behind Elasticsearch and the Elastic Stack, have announced a new study, claiming that employee experience has become a new priority for IT leaders as they reinvent their infrastructures to support remote workforces. The Changing Role of the IT Leader was conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Elastic in February 2021, one year into the global pandemic, and published in April.
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April 7, 2021

The binary choices and multiple outcomes of flexible working

by Mark Eltringham • Comment, Flexible working

A year of unnecessarily binary conversation about work leads inevitably to this. A stupid question. Is Big Tech going off work from home? Betteridge’s Law takes care of that, just as it did another question from 12 months ago. Even though the article is slightly better than the headline, the insistence that the only two choices we have are home or office remains. (more…)

March 31, 2021

From the archive: A new approach to office design is redefining property ⁰

by Gary Chandler • Comment, Facilities management, Property, Workplace design

At the end of the 18th Century it was becoming apparent that overpopulation was something the human race would need to address for perhaps the first time. Advances in technology and the urbanisation that followed the Industrial Revolution had created a new set of challenges. These were most famously laid out in a 1798 book called An Essay on the Principle of Population, written by an English cleric called Thomas Malthus.