Our aim at BESA is to raise awareness about indoor air quality and encourage more people to be mindful of the best solutions for particular buildings and building types to ultimately promote a healthy workplace environment. The BESA revealed the results of a recent YouGov survey (released on 17 August 2016), which looked into views of office workers and their attitudes toward indoor air pollution in office environments across the UK. The aim of the study was to illustrate attitudes, behaviours and perceptions in order to understand how office workers feel, think and act. Our survey, combined with our ongoing research and collaborations, shows us that opening a window isn’t always the most effective solution to accessing ‘fresh air’ in offices. BESA wholeheartedly agree with Mark Eltringham’s comment that clean, fresh air, is the best way to ventilate a workplace environment. Our survey was commissioned to highlight that in the urban, office environment, this is not always possible.

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When thinking about the future of work, especially in regards to freelance or gig jobs, do you think it is better to be a generalist or a specialist? A generalist is someone who is fairly good at performing a broad range of jobs, whereas a specialist is very skilled in one particular type of work. For example, a handyman vs. an electrician. A handyman can come into your house and work on a large array of problems such as basic plumbing, electrical, or appliance issues. An electrician is only going to be able to come in and fix electrical problems, but he is going to be able to do so with much more expertise than a general handyman. Some people might say it is better to be one or the other, but when looking at the future of work I think it is important to be both a generalist and a specialist.

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People are the chief currency and greatest asset of any business. With up to 80 percent of a company’s expenses coming from human resources, it’s vital that their workforce is productive, engaged, and empowered. Unfortunately, 68 percent of U.S. workers are disengaged, according to the latest edition of Gallup’s annual engagement survey. Though there are many factors contributing to this alarming statistic, attitude plays a major role in workplace engagement. And although a well-designed space will have a positive impact on the occupants, we cannot discount or downplay the impact of individual attitudes. In this article, Kay Sargent, senior vice president and director of HOK’s Strategic Accounts practice, looks at how we can create a curated experience, where everyone has the opportunity to be happy, healthy, empowered, and engaged.

Read the article on workdesign.com > [paywall]

Lewis Carroll’s second best known work The Hunting of the Snark is a long nonsense poem that describes the pursuit by a group of adventurers of an elusive creature called a Snark. This turns out to be a much more dangerous Boojum when it is finally seen, causing one of the crew members to vanish. The poem may or may not be an allegory for the pursuit of happiness but it could easily be about our pursuit of anything elusive, imaginary or ephemeral. The author never really explains, although the illustrator Henry Holiday believes that the poem is a tragedy, which may back up the original claim. In the parochial world of workplace design and management we can extend the allegory by claiming the Snark as The Office of the Future, the pursuit of which has been ongoing for decades with little success. We’re sometimes shown pictures of it but on closer inspection these always turn out to be hyper-realised versions of The Office of the Present. What we see in them is a Boojum.

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