Search Results for: working lives

June 12, 2017

What will the UK General Election mean for the workplace? Some experts respond ⁰

by Mark Eltringham • Architecture, Comment, Flexible working, Property, Workplace, Workplace design

Any residual feelings of certainty that anybody in the UK may have had about the country’s future following last year’s Brexit vote, will have had them pretty much eradicated by last Thursday’s General Election result. However, we must try to make sense of things for society and the wider economy as well as specific facets of it, such as the world of work. The whole thing looks like the pig’s ear that it is, of course. Fortunately, as some experts have already argued, there are some reasons to see some positive outcomes, including a soft (or softer) Brexit and the chance of a more positive approach to workplace rights, now that the Government needs to maintain a broader consensus. The fear or hope that the UK would lighten its already soft touch approach to workplace legislation would seem at least to be less well founded.

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June 2, 2017

Sprinkling a little stardust on the workplace design debate

by Mark Eltringham • Comment, Facilities management, Workplace, Workplace design

The idea that extraterrestrial organisms have throughout time seeded the surface of the Earth is not the sole preserve of loonies, mystics, conspiracy theorists, the permanently stoned and various wishful thinkers. This idea of panspermia has some pretty high profile and serious adherents. Perhaps one of the most surprising was the renowned but controversial astrophysicist Sir Fred Hoyle; pillar of the scientific community for much of his life, atheist, Darwinist and the man who coined the term Big Bang, albeit as a way of disparaging it. Yet also a man who believed that the global 1918 flu pandemic, polio and HIV were each the result of micro-organisms that fell from the skies rather than developing here on Earth. The broader scientific community dismisses such thinking because it derives in part from either an incredulity at the processes involved – as was the case with Hoyle – or an ignorance of them.

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May 22, 2017

Long commutes cost firms a week’s worth of staff productivity each year ⁰

by Neil Franklin • Flexible working, News, Wellbeing

Long commutes are causing poor health and productivity outcomes for the UK’s employees, according to a study of more than 34,000 workers, developed by VitalityHealth in partnership with the University of Cambridge, RAND Europe and Mercer, examined the impact of commuting as well as flexible and home working on employee health and productivity. The study found that employees commuting less than half an hour to get to work gain an additional seven days’ worth of productive time each year compared to those with commutes of 60 minutes or more. Longer commutes appear to have a significant impact on mental wellbeing, with longer-commuting workers 33 percent more likely to suffer from depression, 37 percent more likely to have financial concerns and 12 percent more likely to report multiple dimensions of work-related stress. These workers were also 46 percent more likely to get less than the recommended seven hours of sleep each night and 21 percent more likely to be obese.
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April 13, 2017

UK productivity crisis deepens…but technology probably isn’t the solution ⁰

by Neil Franklin • News

Following last week’s report from the ONS on the UK’s intransigent productivity challenge, and the Bank of England’s Chief Economist Andy Haldane’s intervention on the issue, a new report from accountants and business advisers BDO claims that the UK’s productivity crisis is deepening, rather than improving. The latest report claims that while firms are continuing to hire more staff, business output is struggling to pick up. The amount of output produced for each hour worked is therefore likely to slow further, undermining the UK’s already low productivity levels. This is despite the steady increase in employment levels which have been relatively unaffected by the uncertainty surrounding Brexit.

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February 20, 2017

Always on culture of work is literally killing people ⁰

by Mark Eltringham • Flexible working, News, Wellbeing

Workers in the City of London are often more stressed about work when at home than in the office, claims a new peer reviewed study published in the journal Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. The study of workers at some of London’s major banks suggests that more than half find they are more stressed when trying to balance their home and professional lives with the result that they are more at risk of cardiovascular disease. The stress levels of participants were measured using wrist monitors and found that there are significant spikes in heart rates when people interrupt their domestic lives with work. The authors conclude that the culture of always on working is literally killing people.

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February 14, 2017

Level of wellbeing higher for those who ‘wind-down’ into retirement ⁰

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

New research into the effect of retirement on wellbeing commissioned by The What Works Centre for Wellbeing claims that those who gradually reduce their working time with more flexible hours improve their levels of wellbeing. The study looked at all existing research and found that part-time working towards the end of our careers improves life satisfaction. It advises that employers should support older workers to ‘wind-down’ into retirement with bridging jobs or reduce their working hours to avoid poor wellbeing, a new international study reveals. However, the research highlights that this depends on whether employees had control over when they retired, rather than being forced out through ill health or restructuring. If people take up bridging jobs because of financial strain, their wellbeing drops. Even after accounting for income and health, wellbeing is higher for those who have control over the timing or plan for their retirement, and voluntary retirees derive greater pleasure from free time in retirement. On the contrary, wellbeing is lower for those who are involuntarily retired, especially due to health reasons.

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February 10, 2017

Reflections on the future of work from a mirrored room ⁰

by Neil Usher • Comment, Facilities management, Technology, Workplace design

This is the first of two responses to an excellent article by Antony Slumbers, in this instance offering that his views offer too conservative a view of how technology will shape the future of work. Dr Pangloss, the teacher of metaphysics in Candide, Voltaire’s hilariously sarcastic attack on Leibnizian optimism, offered a timeless and universal explanation of the most cruel and tragic events as “the best of all possible worlds”. I would argue however that far from creating a landscape of optimism, it facilitates a dismissal of all significant change as an irrelevance given that effectively we have no option other than to happily accept it. For example, whether property transitions to a service or remains locked in its existing institutional quagmire, it doesn’t matter. Either way its fine as it’s the best we can hope for. Accept it, happily. A Panglossian future only looks appealing if you’re –well, Dr Pangloss.

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February 9, 2017

Birmingham creates city development blueprint with global dimension ⁰

by Mark Eltringham • Cities, News

Researchers at the University of Birmingham have developed a way of investigating or diagnosing the challenges facing their home city that could be used to help improve the lives of city dwellers around the world. And the blueprint they are working with could help city policy makers and other countries to take more effective actions to boost the quality of life for residents by providing better outcomes. Project leaders are already looking at how the work might be applied in countries like India, Brazil and South Africa. The first part of the Urban Living Birmingham pilot project used a wide range of data and evidence used by city leaders to inform policy combined with an analysis of 248 datasets – identifying the challenges facing Birmingham.

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January 24, 2017

The impact of technology on corporate real estate: A Panglossian future? ⁰

by Antony Slumbers • Features, Property, Technology, Workplace design

Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman introduced the concept of Loss Aversion in 1984, highlighting people’s tendency to strongly prefer avoiding losses to acquiring gains. Most studies suggest that losses are twice as powerful, psychologically, as gains. Lose £100 and we will feel a remorse that easily outweighs winning £100. In a similar fashion we find it very hard to see future positives when confronted with short term loses. We understand easily what we have lost but cannot imagine what there is to be gained. Furthermore, as Frederic Bastiat wrote in an 1850 paper, “That Which is Seen, and That Which is Not Seen”, man has a tendency to “pursue a small present good, which will be followed by a great evil to come, rather than a great good to come, at the risk of a small present evil”. Put these together and it is no wonder that, by and large, the future of work, corporate real estate and the workplace is so widely misunderstood.

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January 10, 2017

A unity of opposites at Sky Central ⁰

by Neil Usher • Case studies, Facilities management, Features, Work&Place, Workplace design

It’s drummed into us from an early age that we can’t have it all, as a result we consider choices as being a binary either/or situation. The workplace design brief (where it’s actually undertaken, an entirely separate discussion) positions choices similarly – open or closed, focussed or collaborative, modern or traditional – the decision point existing along a sliding scale from one natural extreme to the other. Yet there is a way to consider workplace design as an attempt to achieve the “unity of opposites”, an idea proposed by the pre-Socratic aphoristic philosopher, Heraclitus, the original thinker on change. This holds that the existence of an idea is entirely dependent on the existence of its opposite, that one cannot exist without the other. The framework is considered here in its application to the recently completed Sky Central in Osterley (West London), a newly constructed 38,000m2 NIA activity-based workplace over three floors that is home to 3,500 of the total 7,500 people on the Campus. It may be considered as tool for aiding workplace brief development, or for understanding how a workplace has been conceived and functions.

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January 6, 2017

Learning to love staff means letting them disconnect from work, and other stories ⁰

by Mark Eltringham • Flexible working, News, Technology

Topical workplace issues featured prominently at this week’s British Psychological Society’s Division of Occupational Psychology annual conference held in Liverpool. Four of the key takeaways from the event deal with issues such as the right to disconnect when working from home – a right recently enshrined in law in France, the way different personality types deal with emails, the toxic relationship between employers and employees and even how managers can learn to show their staff more love. The focus at teh event underlines a growing awareness of the complexities of our new relationship with work and workplaces.

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November 8, 2016

Work-life balance is especially important to millennials, finds US study ⁰

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

Work-life balance is especially crucial to millennials, with nearly six in 10 members of this generation (57 percent) saying that work-life balance and well-being in a job are “very important” to them. What’s more, millennials — whose propensity for technology has the potential to keep them constantly tethered to work emails and projects — care a lot about having a job that actively promotes their well-being. Results from the US-based Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index survey shows that millennials are more likely than those of other generations to be thriving in physical well-being and are improving in key areas of health. But it also shows that employees who are thriving in all five elements of well-being are 81 percent less likely than those thriving only in physical well-being to seek out a new employer in the next year. These findings are particularly compelling, considering that millennials are the most likely generation to job-hop.