"In the modern workplace, Friday is the happiest day of the week"

Way back in 2012 we were privileged to welcome Nic Marks to our stage to speak on “How (and why) happiness works as a business model”.

He has since become a TED speaker, and is one of the most sought after presenters in the arena of happiness and productivity at work.

Here’s our recording of his thought-provoking session, even more relevant given the current COVID-19 crisis.

Nic’s Friday Pulse platform measures how people are feeling and systematically collects feedback, providing real-time insights on individuals, teams and organizations as they adapt to new realities.

To help businesses through the crisis, Friday Pulse is now FREE for SMEs for 12 weeks. To find out more and register go to https://www.fridaypulse.com

Stay healthy and happy!

With all best wishes from the Workplace Trends team.

Design to Adapt: Future Offices within a Circular Economy

At our recent Climate Change and the Workplace event, David Cheshire, Regional Sustainability Director at AECOM, spoke about the hows and whys of design, construction and workplace management in the context of a Circular Economy.

 

 

David is also the author of Building Revolutions: Applying the Circular Economy to the Built Environment.

 


Designing Out Loneliness in the Workplace

We spend one third of our life working, but 60% of people feel lonely at work and 1.2 million office workers suffer from chronic loneliness (chronic loneliness is a harmful as having 15 cigarettes a day!) The problem hurts happiness and productivity, costing employers between £2–3.7 billion every year (that’s in the UK alone!)

The Loneliness Lab

You may remember last summer we asked our followers to take part in online research on Loneliness at Work. The full report is being written up at the moment, but the early results were presented at Workplace Trends London last October by Rachel Edwards (Lendlease) and Nigel Oseland (Workplace Unlimited).

We don’t usually release our conference videos except to registered delegates, but we really wanted to share this trending topic.

If you enjoyed this presentation, take a look at our Workplace Trends Research Spring Summit, coming up on 25 March in London. Virtual and in-person tickets and more information is at https://workplacetrends.co/spring2020/

Changes you’ll probably see in the workplace in 2020

The last decade has seen a number of changes in the structure of the average workforce. Advancements in technology, attitudes, and cultures are changing what it means to be a worker and what it means to run a business. As we are now into a new decade, we’ve seen hints of trends that will appear to be the new norm in the coming years. Here are some changes you are bound to see in 2020. 

Four-day work weeks

People have explored the idea of a four-day workweek for quite some time, but Microsoft Japan’s recent experiment proved it to be a success with productivity jumping by 40%. Not only did they see more work get accomplished and more goals met, meetings were also more efficient, more energy was saved, and workers were happier. At the centre of this concept is the idea of a work-life balance, and perhaps we will see more companies following suit. 

Dependence on technology

Throughout the years, technology has established itself as an integral part of various businesses and industries, so much so that even during the hiring process some HR teams rely on it to streamline their recruitment efforts. In Comeet’s post on ‘What is an Applicant Tracking System (ATS)?’, David Markowitz discussed the use of this cloud-based technology to increase the overall efficiency of operations. Modern ATS can revolutionise the process with real-time communication, automation, and analysis. 

Remote set-up

Workplace Unlimited’s online survey found that the most important workplace condition among employees is related to flexibility. The option to work remotely falls under this, and more organisations are considering this as a viable option and smart management strategy––reducing costs and driving revenue. This also allows workers to become more productive and engaged as they can perform at their optimal levels when and where they choose best. 

A greener office environment

With environmental degradation and climate change on the rise, it makes sense for big entities like offices to make greener choices. Whether this is through minimizing paper usage, forgoing fax machines, recycling, or opting for LED bulbs, these small practices have greater weight when the entire company undertakes them. It is not only a good practice but contributes greatly to the company’s Corporate Social Responsibility, which today’s workforce deems an important factor in their choice of work.

A disappearing ‘corporate ladder’

The corporate ladder was once an ideal career trajectory among workers who equated climbing it to success. Solomon Thimothy of OneIMS has found that this hierarchal culture is beginning to change in correlation to people’s work attitudes. Diverse workforces show that people find success in avenues other than promotions: exploring other hobbies, having “side hustles,” and not solely making work the centre of their lives.

This post was contributed by Megan Brennan.

Research results: Personal preferences in the workplace

The debate on open plan versus enclosed offices rages on, but workplace design is not a such a simple dichotomy. Office occupants clearly have different workplace preferences, depending on factors like personality, personalisation, flexibility and sense of belonging etc.

This summer Herman Miller and Workplace Trends commissioned Workplace Unlimited to conduct a short on-line survey to help unravel some of the more personal factors underlying preferences in the modern office that are often forgotten or ignored.

The participants were asked to rate their preference for a number of office solutions. Overall we found:

Fear of the unknown

When considering the current primary workplace of the respondents, those in private offices prefer private offices, whereas those in open plan, prefer open plan. It therefore appears that those who have not actually experienced open plan are more opposed to it, supporting the often observed “fear of the unknown”.

Similarly, home-workers prefer home-working. Furthermore, those with allocated desks have a higher preference for private offices and least prefer homeworking, hot-desking and agile working, compared to those who already hot-desk.

Personality

Preferences were also found to differ by personality. Introverts are more in favour of private offices and least prefer open plan, agile working and hot-desking compared to extroverts. Interestingly, there is little difference between introverts and extroverts in the preference for home-working; both groups rate home-working relatively high. There were fewer differences for those more neurotic and less emotionally stable.

Demographics

Preferences were found to differ by some socio-demographic factors. Those in the UK rated open plan and landscaped offices higher than elsewhere. In contrast, Eastern Europeans and North Americans rated open plan offices low and private offices the highest.

Age groups and length of service

No significant differences in office preferences were found for tenure or age group. So, previously reported differences in expectations of millennials etc are not supported. However, researchers do have a preference for private offices, which could influence their studies of open plan and resulting recommendations on office design.

The importance of workplace conditions

The participants were asked to rate how important they consider 26 different workplace conditions. For example, flexibility over work hours and place of work, having a social workplace, being able to personalise the workspace and not being overheard or overlooked by colleagues. For all the respondents, the most important workplace conditions relate to flexibility. For those currently accommodated in private offices, concentration and windows are also considered important. Those who rate private offices as their preferred workplace, consider personal desk conditions, like personalisation and privacy, to be most important.

In contrast, such personal conditions are negatively correlated with those who have a higher preference for agile working and desk-sharing. For those who prefer landscaped offices and home working, flexibility and connectedness are more important. For those who prefer open plan, connectedness is important and for home-workers flexibility is key. These observed conditions could be used as motivators in workplace change management programmes

Read the full report

The above is a summary: the full report may be viewed here.

Futures Wall at Workplace Trends London 2019

This is a guest post by our friends at Logovisual, who very kindly installed, hosted and curated our Futures Wall at Workplace Trends London earlier this month.


This year many of the speakers at the Workplace Trends London conference referenced the theme of making the workplace a human centric environment. Whether that’s through physical design; encouraging healthy and sustainable behaviours; engaging employees for change; or recognising the importance of mental as well as physical wellbeing, it all comes back to embracing the basic human trait of being a social animal.

Part of that is the desire and ability to communicate, and this year as a break from convention the conference embraced this by introducing an ‘ideas wall’

Ideas wall

We were delighted to have the opportunity to run what we decided to call a Futures Wall. We invited delegates to post their insights about the future of the workplace, as a basis for a sense making exercise. This was a valuable way of gathering diverse intuitions of what the future holds, picking up “signals from the future” as a counter and complement to the more data and research-based format that the main conference provides. What emerged from the futures wall perhaps signals less of a trend, and more a rapid, dramatic change as a consequence of the present environmental, digital and political emergencies.

Generating the ideas

We invited people attending the conference to drop by and post their ideas about the future of work, in response to the question: what does the workplace look like in 2035?

The idea of collecting input at the conference took some time to get going. Perhaps people were wary of being judged for their contributions. Or perhaps the idea of using magnetic rather than sticky notes on a whiteboard took a little getting used to. The wall certainly generated interest and discussion, and towards the end of the day some of these ideas had made it onto the wall itself. We might have to speak toSimone Leenders at WorkWire for some tips on nudging people into participating!

Insights from the Futures Wall

This was a real time look at what insights people have about their future, stimulated by being at the conference and hearing some lively presentations from people whose job it is to design for the future.

The output gives us intimations of what people want and expect. We could think of us all as being amplifiers of weak signals from the future.

The results are available to download as a pdf file if you’d like to see more detail.

future wallDownload

Broadly though, we can see the response to current concerns around climate change, work life balance, remote working and technological change. If we string together the headings of the clusters to form a story, we can interpret it like this:

By 2035, as humanity finally responds to the shattering impact of climate change, our definition of work changes and new possibilities emerge.

Those changed expectations drive structural changes in corporations. As people exercise their freedom to make personal choices, the balance between real and virtual contacts shifts to make work more wholesome.

Workplaces embrace life-long needs and technology is serving people – not the other way around. As people increasingly work in networked co-creative groups, we begin to re-discover the joys of being human.

Making your own interpretation

Our interpretation of the contributions is an optimistic one, to reflect the positive intentions of the conference. If seeing the results has sparked more ideas, just because the event is over doesn’t mean you can’t still add to the discussion.

You can download a free trial copy of the Logovisual Capture Software we used to recreate the Future Wall along with the data file. We’d be delighted if you have a go at adding more ideas and manipulating the clusters, or feel free to use this exercise as a basis for your own ideas session.

About Logovisual

Logovisual are the creators of the ThinkingWall range of whiteboards for thinking, planning and collaboration. We used one of our ThinkingWall Dividers as the wall surface, a double sided magnetic whiteboard on wheels. The magnetic sticky notes are Magnotes, available in a range of shapes, sizes and colours. The methodology we used is called LogoVisual Thinking.

Copyright VanessaChampion.co.uk

Podcast : Workplace Trends London 2019 Special

Podcast : What do people really want at work?

Branding specialist and Spacecraft Podcaster Dan Moscrop recently spent some time talking with workplace expert and psychologist Nigel Oseland. In the podcast they look at what people REALLY want at work; whether open plan is as rubbish as everyone says it is; how to use data to prove design works; and touch on Nigel’s current research projects with Lendlease and Herman Miller.

Towards the end of the podcast Dan and Nigel also kindly give a mention to our Workplace Trends: Towards a new era of work and workplace conference in London on 15 October. They’ll both be attending on the day and would love to pick up the conversation with you there!

Here’s the full podcast, and to hear more from Dan and his other Spacecraft Podcast sessions, subscribe to the feed here.

Lessons from burnout: why wellbeing is the next frontier of workforce management

We’re delighted to feature this guest post by Madeleine Evans, who will be speaking at Workplace Trends: Towards a New Era of Work and Workplace, in London on 15 October 2019. For details on her presentation, “Mental health and productivity in work culture”, fellow speakers, attendees, and how to register, visit the conference page here.

The bad news – 340 million workers are still struggling to get their basic needs met

Exhaustion, burnout, chronic stress, frustration, and dis-engagement impact 60% of workers, differentially women, those in high-pressure services jobs, and in high-demand low-resource industries. According to data collected from Levell’s proprietary survey of 2,000 UK and European workers together with Streetbees, as well as insights from the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence’s Emotion Revolution in the Workplace dataset – these mental and emotional health barriers are significantly correlated with lower life satisfaction, lower job satisfaction, and greater intention to leave.

The good news – companies are starting to become aware of, and act on, the impact of poor mental health on productivity and performance in the workplace

In an interview for MadWorld, Dr Shaun Davis, global director of safety, health, wellbeing and sustainability, Royal Mail Group, explained the importance of culture and conversation – and internal forums – in creating a healthy and sustainable population. Another leader to mention is Andy Croxford, in the government’s Environment Agency, who facilitated a shift in social norms and expectations around mental health by creating space for employees to build an inter-departmental network that enabled greater peer-to-peer support.

Individual conversations about mental health in the workplace, and strategies to break the taboos around mental health issues, are gaining traction. Employees are beginning to get the psychological and physical opportunity to exchange information about their wellbeing, mental and emotional health, and life satisfaction alongside or in tandem to conversations about work performance. This is a fantastic shift.

Over the next five years, the leading companies will go further. Frontier companies will build on the opportunities afforded by today’s movement for greater mental health awareness, combined with a refreshed attention to diversity and inclusiveness, to make comprehensive workforce organisation, work environment, and process changes.

These changes are – and will be – triggered by a new level emotional honesty and self-reflection by C-level leaders and reinforced by the increasingly obvious desire of employees (particularly Millennial women) to have more inclusive, psychologically satisfying, and emotionally rich experiences at work.

These are the questions that will be asked in the C-suite:

In response, this is the question that will be asked by mission-driven technologists, wellbeing and mental health activists, and social innovators:

This is the question I set out to answer, together with Dr. Julia Moeller, specialist in emotion and motivation in the workplace, Yale affiliate and our lead Research Adviser at Levell.

Research gives us statistics on incidence, as well as frameworks for finding a solution. At Levell, we’ve done a comprehensive review of academic literature to create an integrated model of the links between engagement, performance, retention, and burnout, and overlaid this with the framework proposed by the Mayo Clinic – developed after 20 years of research – for defining and operationalising organisational wellbeing.

Here are the components.

At the first level, we look for four critical feelings, which we call wellbeing signals – mood, stress, energy, motivation – that link to key components of engagement, performance, burnout, and mental and emotional health.

Why are these signals important?

We all know stress is fundamentally linked to performance (see the Lazarus & Folkman model). Stress also links to creativity (we like this meta-analysis), which impacts strategic and innovative performance over the long term. Energy is required for delivering on work product, but it is also a primary sub-component of engagement, as made clear by the widely-accepted component model of engagement (vigour, dedication and absorption) in academic literature today. The state of being motivated is effectively the state of engagement – but is differentiated in practice by a sense of drive and desire rather than just the capacity to act. Mood – let’s call it positive or negative valence, as well as arousal – can be a signal of emotional energy as well as satisfaction or frustration with work.

Beneath these signals lie wellbeing and performance drivers, which can be split into four factors.

At the heart, is the balance of demands vs. resources that individual experience on a daily basis, along with their values and motivational alignment to their situation at work. Over time, the balance of demands and resources should be viewed from the lens of stress vs. recovery, and person-work alignment needs to be evaluated to see if it is translating into meeting individual needs.  

Beneath this lie, individual habits, their work and life environment, and workplace culture.

These factors influence the presence or perception of demands vs. resources, and the likelihood of alignment of a person’s values and motivations with their situation at work.

Given the nature of these interlinkages, the next obvious solution is to integrate wellbeing directly into the management process and make it a cornerstone of workplace culture.

Companies can apply these insights from occupational and applied psychology, and the science of stress and performance, in a strategic roadmap for making integrated changes.

Here are the steps.

1. Deep individual awareness.

Frontier companies will help their leaders, and all their employees, accelerate the process of self-awareness through a consistent and structured process of self-observation and self-reflection on wellbeing and performance drivers, as well as blockers or enabling factors from habits or culture.

2. Structured communication.

To optimise joint performance, companies will need to consistently gather about how where and when their employees are struggling with their wellbeing or facing blockers. To overcome the trust barrier, companies need a bottom-up “need to know” process that enables individuals to share data on personal status (relevant to performance), alongside information on common blockers or ideas for improvement, up to leaders in the company or their teams.

3. Coordinated changes.

Exhaustion, frustration, and burnout – and on the flip side, wellbeing – are driven by factors that are individual-specific, company-specific, and/or a result of an interaction between the individual and their environment. To address this problem, frontier companies will empower their employees with clear sets of expectations, as well as latitude, to innovate in both individual behaviour as well as collective work process. This means supporting individual habit-building, team-based innovation, and coordinated multi-department structural change. 

In conclusion

Over the next five years, new companies will emerge that go way beyond wellbeing perks, and breaking mental health barriers, to position wellbeing as the frontier, and core, of workforce management.

These frontier companies will directly integrate people management processes with processes for managing wellbeing and mental health at the level of the company, team and individual.

To get there, these companies’ leaders will make strong statements about creating work great workplace cultures – which require human wellbeing alongside performance, provide a common definition of wellbeing and performance drivers, and set the tone and expectations for the quality and quantity of innovation through self-reflection, communication, and experimentation at all levels.

This means empowering their employees to work together, to build a much deeper level of individual and interpersonal awareness, share work-relevant information about their wellbeing through a structured and secure platform for communications, and utilising collective inputs and advanced data analysis to identify prioritised culture changes – designed to optimise for both company performance and human wellbeing.

In one of my early conversations I spoke to Geoff McDonald, ex-global VP and HR lead at Unilever, who made Unilever one of the most sought-after places to work over his tenure of 10+ years. His words sum it up nicely.

“Most organisations are paying lip service to wellbeing at the moment, with bananas in the staff room and so forth… What is needed is to directly integrate, as you say, wellbeing into the management process, as a systems intervention. That is really the solution and the frontier.”

Our takeaway

If you’re at the frontier, keep going. If you’re not there yet, hop on board.

Guest post by Madeleine Evans, who will be speaking at Workplace Trends: Towards a New Era of Work and Workplace, in London on 15 October 2019. For details on her presentation, “Mental health and productivity in work culture”, fellow speakers, attendees, and how to register, visit the conference page here.

Madeleine is an ex-investor and social activist with varied experience across mature, high-growth and transforming companies. She is also the founder/CEO of the management technology company, Levell. Levell helps people and companies integrate wellbeing into work culture, improving personal productivity, team performance, and company results.

First published at Mad World Summit

Help Design Out Loneliness From The Workplace

Does your workplace bring people together? Or do you feel its design actively pushes people apart?

Loneliness at work is a growing problem, and although advances in technology make it easier than ever before to be connected to others, in reality people are feeling increasingly isolated from their peers.

IQL, in collaboration with British Red Cross and BuroHappold want to understand this problem better, and to investigate to what extent the design and layout of a workplace can impact the feeling of connectedness amongst its occupants.

Connecting in the Workplace’ is a new research study looking at the problem of loneliness in the workplace. It originated from the Loneliness Lab, an incubator for collective action to design out loneliness from our cities, founded by Lendlease and Collectively.

Please help with this important research by completing this survey, letting us know how you feel about your workplace, whether it be a large-scale corporation, or the comfort of your own home.   The survey takes approximately 10 minutes to complete, and all responses will be anonymous.

We’re honoured that our friends at Lendlease have kindly agreed to present the results of the survey to delegates at our up-coming London Conference, Workplace Trends: Towards a New Era of Work and Workplace on 15 October in London.

Please take ten minutes to complete the survey here!