Contract furnishings provider, Hightower received multiple awards at NeoCon 2021, including IIDA's 'Best Small Showroom' (under 4,000 sf) and 'Best of Competition' for its newly designed Chicago showroom.
Humanscale welcomes Elizabeth Margles to its Marketing Division in the role of Chief Marketing Officer. Margles comes to Humanscale with twenty years of experience in design, fashion and retail and a background in public relations and advertising.
The exclusive relationship with Kontrol's BioCloud® Technology will provide real-time detection of airborne pathogens such as SARS-CoV-2 to help make workplaces safer as organizations return to the office.
Over the weekend an exhibition opened at the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York. Entitled “Uniformity,” it displays 71 pieces from the museum’s collection of (surprise) uniforms, divided into four categories — military, work, school, sports — as well as a select group of the fashion looks they influenced, like Geoffrey Beene’s 1967 sequined football jersey gown and Rei Kawakubo’s 1998 military vest and pleated skirt for Comme des Garçons.
In a further nod to the growing relevance of flexible working, the ability to work anytime, anywhere is now key to job satisfaction with well over a third (38 percent) of employees in a global survey rating this as the number one factor, with the UK (43 percent) scoring this the highest. According to the “Mobility, Performance and Engagement” report from the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) and Aruba, employees in Western countries report themselves to be happier in their jobs, more loyal to their employers and more productive in their work compared to their counterparts in Eastern markets. When it comes to securing loyalty, the ability to hot desk was seen as paramount by many employees, notably in Singapore (37 percent), UAE (31 percent) and the US (34 percent), while the ability to collaborate with other employees was the number one choice for employees in Germany (43 percent), France (37 percent) and Japan (35 percent).
In media, technology and finance, the value of an employee is dictated by the hours they put in. But companies are starting to wake up – or rather, nap down – to the idea of slowing down our working days.
Over the years, mobile technology has turned out to be a staple for personal as well as business purposes. Owing to the convenience, speed and efficiency, mobile has become one of the go-to technologies for most. Corporate mobility has picked up momentum with the increased usage of mobile devices like smartphones and tablets by employees for their work-related activities. Such infiltration has also encouraged many companies to leverage the BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) concept to mobilize their workforce. With the new innovations in technology, the requirements of employees have evolved massively. Various mobile applications and services have mushroomed to address these needs. As a result, the impact of mobile technology on the workplace has been huge.
Raise your hand if you’re one of the many hunched over your keyboard at a desk in a not-so-comfortable office chair. Unfortunately this is the norm for the majority of the U.S. workforce. The Bureau of Labor statistics reports that we spend between 8 and 9 hours each day seated, in sedentary positions.
If you think the way people work is probably not quite as glossily portrayed in the media, then you’d probably be right. A lot more European workers than is commonly supposed still believe that fax machines are essential business tools, according to a new report from unified communications business Fuze. In a study of the working habits of 5,000 EU employees, it found that the fax machine is considered ‘essential’ by 30 percent of workers in the UK, 39 percent in Germany and 42 percent in France. The report also found that many also think that desktop computers are still more important in their day-to-day working lives that laptops, tablets or smartphones. Anybody horrified by the report’s findings will be heartened by its claim that the machines will die off in time as a new generation of people who don’t know what the hell a fax machine is supplant those who still cling to their battered, old, paper-based devices.
People have been talking about the death of the office for at least a quarter of a century. Leaving aside the often misleading conflation of flexible working with homeworking that is often involved, the underlying premise of such talk has been the same for all of that time. The main argument is, and always was, that there is an alternative to the tedium, aggravation and expense of travelling to an office solely to work inside its hermetically sealed and fluorescent-lit, blue-carpeted interior alongside people who can drive you spare, before you schlep home again. The problem with the argument is that, in spite of its evident drawbacks, office life maintains an attraction for both employers and employees and there will always be an upper limit on how long people want to spend home alone. Things are changing but the death of the office is a myth.
If you’re still confused about the proliferation of green building standards worldwide, then brace yourself. A new standard that seeks to measure the wellbeing inducing characteristics of a building has been launched as a counterpart to the WELL Building Standard developed by the Green Building Certification Institute and the International WELL Building Institute. The new standard is called Fitwel, was designed by The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the General Services Administration and is overseen by the Centre for Active Design. The standard uses a scorecard that ranks buildings on over 60 criteria such as indoor air quality, fitness facilities and lobby and stairwell design. According to its proponents these criteria apply well-established scientific principles to address seven characteristics of a healthy working environment. The standard is very much a product of the US public sector at this stage and was piloted in 89 federal buildings during 2015. Its full launch is scheduled for next year.
Unhealthy workplaces are not only depressing to behold, they constitute a significant financial strain. Research indicates that healthy employees are three times more productive than unhealthy employees. It’s estimated that employers can lose up to $4,600 of productivity gains per work year as a result of health-related absenteeism, and this number does not account for workers who are present but unable to perform at a high level due to poor working conditions.
A significant proportion of businesses are still not giving their employees the support they need to effectively work remotely and flexibly, despite the fact that 72 percent of UK office worker believe the traditional fixed workplace is no longer relevant. For the vast majority the traditional nine-to-five is already a thing of the past, with nearly two thirds (62 percent) of people already working remotely at least one day per week. On average UK workers spend 2.5 days, half of their week, working remotely. The findings revealed in ‘The End of Nine-to-Five’ report commissioned by TeamViewer highlights that, despite the increased demands and expectations of employees, nearly 2 in 5 (37 percent) UK office workers said that their company’s IT department do not encourage remote working and do not make it easy. This figure went up as the size of the organisation increased, rising to 44 percent for companies with over 500 employees.
The Fitwel rating, from the CDC, measures things like access to public transportation and how easy it is for employees to take the stairs—and then suggests how to make your office healthier.
At the Tradeline Space Conference in Boston this May, I got the chance to share some work my firm, EYP, is doing with Harvard University’s School of Public Health, piloting a new measuring system for well-being: the Health and Human Performance Index (HaPI). In this latest premium offering, we’ll explore what it is and why it matters.
Read the article on workdesign.com > [paywall]
Technology is proving to be something of a double edged sword for the big hotel chains. On the one hand it’s helping them to engage with guests through easily scalable and cost-effective initiatives and drive loyalty in new ways. Apps and interfaces allow integration with other relevant products and service providers, and encourage customer engagement through multiple touchpoints. On the other hand, rapidly evolving technology is fueling fierce competition from online travel agencies.
Today’s workplace can incorporate highly open, collaborative, and strongly themed environments. Tech companies add to this mix an exaggerated sense of play, whimsy, and saturated colors; an overdone trend that has resulted in a public dialogue around the lack of focus, privacy, and individual place.
Three recent studies have joined the already extensive body of work linking workplace design and productivity. The most extensive is the research carried out by communications consultancy Lansons which looks at every aspect of the British workplace to uncover the experiences and most commonly held perceptions of around 4,500 workers nationwide. The study is broken down into a number of sections which examine topics such as workplace design, wellbeing, job satisfaction, personal development and leadership. The second is a study from the Property Directors Forum published last year which explores the experiences of occupiers and finds a shift in focus away from cost reduction and towards investing to foster employee productivity. The final showcases the results of a post occupancy survey conducted by National Grid following the refurbishment of the firm’s Warwick headquarters by engineering and project management consultancy AECOM.
Although flexible working remains an idea that is still often presented as some sort of novelty, challenge to the natural order of things, ‘trend’ or (spare us) a ‘craze’, at some point a lot of people will have to accept that it’s just the way an awful lot of people work nowadays. Earlier this year, The Work Foundation published a report suggesting that half of UK employers will offer flexible working by next year. Now, job site Monster.co.uk has published its own survey suggesting pretty much the same thing. It found that around a third of British employers already offer their staff some sort of flexible working arrangements and 26 per cent already offer them to all employees as a matter of course although it tends to apply somewhat disproportionately to senior employees. However, the research also claims that more than a fifth (21 per cent) of employees don’t know what their company’s policy is which is obviously a major constraint on its uptake.
We live in a world where technology has changed how we work as well as the physical workspace. Technology has been a huge driver of agile working which isn’t simply working remotely or part-time but involves work which focuses on performance and outcomes. “In an agile environment, ‘work’ becomes an activity rather than a place,” explains Martyn Freeman, managing director of Mitie’s facilities management business. “Agile working supports a much more collaborative way of doing business and with the right technology, it gives people the ability to work wherever they happen to be and whenever it suits them to do so.”
Throughout 2015, Metropolis’s publisher and editor in chief, Susan S. Szenasy, led the Metropolis Think Tank series of conversations on the seismic cultural shifts reshaping our society and the importance of injecting a new humanism into design and architecture in order to better deal with emerging challenges. As part of these ongoing discussions, Szenasy engages key industry leaders and gives a voice to different knowledge groups that participate in these processes—from architecture firms and clients to researchers and consultants.
Everyone 'knows' that Jamaica's workers are inherently lazy. This deeply ingrained corner of our psyche hasn't been questioned since work was organised in the first West Indian workplace the slave plantation. Avoiding work, we accept, was a matter of principle in those days. Doing so without being detected by 'backra' became an art-form.
At its most basic, productivity is the amount of value produced divided by the amount of cost (or time) required to do so. And while this equation seems simple enough on the surface, the strategies for optimizing it have evolved dramatically over the last two decades. Technology has enabled massive personal productivity gains — computers, spreadsheets, email, and other advances have made it possible for a knowledge worker to seemingly produce more in a day then was previously possible in a year. It’s tempting to conclude that, if individuals are able to perform their work much better and faster, overall productivity must be soaring.
