Search Results for: workplace

A cheap day return to Farringdon, please

A cheap day return to Farringdon, please

by • Comment, Facilities management

Timing is everything. Re-launching a professional body while the country’s politics unceremoniously implode could not have been foreseen, but the vacuous space was full of the registered and invited, many with a trail of string going back a few decades or more. What a lovely gathering of old friends it was. On Monday 12th The BIFM formally changed its name to the Institute of Workplace and Facilities Management. This event was to reveal the new creative collateral and celebrate the optimism/excitement/apprehension (delete as applicable).

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Teams collaborate more effectively when they break off constant contact

Teams collaborate more effectively when they break off constant contact

by • News

Despite the understandable impulse organisations have to encourage people to be in constant communication with each other, teams often get better results when they collaborate only intermittently, according to a report How Intermittent Breaks in Interaction Improve Collective Intelligence, written by Ethan Bernstein, the Edward W. Conard Associate Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School; Jesse Shore, assistant professor at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business; and David Lazer, professor at Northeastern University.

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What The Midwich Cuckoos can teach us about Millennials

What The Midwich Cuckoos can teach us about Millennials

by • Comment, Workplace

Children of the damned

John Wyndham’s 1957 novel The Midwich Cuckoos is the story of a fictional English village in which, following an unexplained event that causes everybody within Midwich to fall unconscious, all of the women in the village fall pregnant and 61 children are subsequently born all at the same time. The children bear absolutely no physical resemblance to their parents, with pale skin, blond hair and piercing eyes. As they grow older it also becomes apparent that they are strange, emotionless and have a telepathic bond with each other. It’s not much of a spoiler to tell you that things don’t go well. The only rationale for what had happened to create the children in the first place is an unexplained incident of xenogenesis – the birth of offspring unlike their parents. Something similar must have happened on a global scale from the beginning of the 1980s onwards, at least based on what we are told about Millennials.

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Facebook is the new smoking, orgasms at work, a ghost airport and some other stuff

Facebook is the new smoking, orgasms at work, a ghost airport and some other stuff

by • Features

A slow news week here in the UK so the opportunity presents itself for quiet consideration of some important issues about the workplace. The big story has been the change of identity for the British Institute of Facilities Management, unveiled after weeks of debate and speculation. We’ll be running some commentary on what this all might mean in the next few days but for now, suffice it so say that any parallels with Brexit are entirely coincidental.

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Biophilic design the key to improving mental health, productivity and stress levels

Biophilic design the key to improving mental health, productivity and stress levels

by • Architecture, News, Wellbeing, Workplace design

An expert panel at this week’s Welcome to the Biophilic Concrete Jungle event in London made the case for incorporating the principles of biophilic design into the workplace, including for health and wellbeing considerations, the promotion of productivity and to address workplace stress and urban disconnection from nature. HOK organised the event.  Panellists included Joyce Chan, Head of Sustainability and Trina Marshall, Regional Leader of Consulting from HOK, Professor Derek Clements-Croome from Reading University, Alexander Bond from Biophilic Design and Dr Ed Suttie from BRE.

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More needs to be done to bridge the digital gender divide, says OECD

More needs to be done to bridge the digital gender divide, says OECD

by • News, Technology

Barriers to access, education and skills, as well as ingrained socio-cultural biases, are driving a digital gender divide that is holding back women’s participation in the digital economy, according to a new OECD report. Bridging the Digital Gender Divide: Include, Upskill, Innovate says women are not currently empowered to take advantage of the opportunities offered by the digital transformation. While G20 economies have taken important actions to narrow gender gaps in general, more needs to be done to increase the participation of women and girls in the digital economy so that they too can contribute to and benefit from the digital transformation that is under way.

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New report writes an obituary for the commercial office lease

New report writes an obituary for the commercial office lease

by • News, Property

A new white paper from Magenta Associates (registration required) explores the fate of the traditional commercial office lease in the context of deep social, political and economic changes. Earlier this year, a group of senior corporate real estate (CRE) and facilities management professionals were invited to participate in a roundtable, led by author of The Elemental Workplace Neil Usher, to discuss whether time is up for the traditional commercial office lease and how viable alternatives might look in the future.

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The top airports in the world for remote working (and the worst)

The top airports in the world for remote working (and the worst)

by • Flexible working, News

Web meeting provider PowWowNow has carried out research to find out which airports around the world are the best for remote working. The research is based on data provided by AirHelp and LoungeBuddy, and looked at on-time performance, quality of service, passenger service, Wi-Fi score, as well as number of passengers and available lounges. PowWowNow collated these statistics to make their overall index of the top 36 airports. They developed an overall score from 1 to 10 in order to rank the airports accordingly.

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Are you ready for the world of agile working we will experience in the 2020s?

Are you ready for the world of agile working we will experience in the 2020s?

by • Comment, Facilities management, Workplace design

Some organisations believe they have ‘done’ Agile Working. They have increased the ratio of people to desks and achieved a saving in accommodation costs. They have provided flexible working arrangements across the organisation and have enabled their people to work at home for part of their working week. Staff surveys show employees are pleased with the opportunities and benefits this provides them. But organisations cannot afford to become comfortable or complacent, there are greater opportunities to grasp. As in any transformation initiative, Agile Working is more than a project it is a cultural journey involving continuing change to achieve continuous improvement. Agile Working is moving on.

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Two new studies set out business case for contemporary office design

Two new studies set out business case for contemporary office design

by • News, Workplace design

A brace of new reports sets out to identify the challenges organisations set themselves by inhabiting dated offices and how modern office design principles could address them. According to the Meeting Expectations report, released by K2 Space, workplace productivity is being impeded as a direct result of dated office design. The second study from Saracen Interiors focuses more on the role of office design as a recruitment tool. The reports follow the recent publication of a major report on similar themes from Worktech Academy and Fourfront Group.

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Bureaucracy and low morale a particular challenge for UK workforce

Bureaucracy and low morale a particular challenge for UK workforce

by • News, Technology, Workplace

Bureaucracy is holding UK workers back, with over half (51 percent). well over the global average, having ranked bureaucracy as a top five workplace issue, according to new research undertaken by Slack to reveal international perceptions of work. Morale however, is the number one work challenge, cited by more UK respondents (7 percent) than in any other European country.  UK employees also consider hierarchy more a problem than their German counterparts (8 percent compared to 2 percent).  (more…)

Far too few people cycle to work despite promotion and investment in infrastructure

Far too few people cycle to work despite promotion and investment in infrastructure

by • News, Wellbeing

In spite of the government investing £1.2 billion into cycling, new research claims that it is still only a few people who are cycling to work, with many citing nervousness about cycling in traffic as the reason. A survey of more than 7,600 UK adults published by Decathlon in the Decathlon Activity Index 2018, shows that only 7 percent of the nation is commuting to work with a bike. Despite cities including Manchester, Cambridge and London having made improvements to accommodate cycling, more than 1 in 4 (26 percent) still feel it is too dangerous to do so. This was followed by 21 percent who said they are still too scared to cycle the roads to work.

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