Extracts about WFH follow from an article in the HBR (Harvard Business Review) by Mark Johnson and Josh Suskewicz Mark Zuckerberg recently shared his plans for the future of remote work at Facebook. By 2030, he promised, at least half of Facebook’s 50,000 employees would be working from home. “We are going to be the most …
Category: 16. Organisations
Aug 21
COVID brings productivity into sharp focus
An article follows which was published by the ICAEW – Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales – it helps explain what the strangely named ‘Be the Business’ organisation is actually doing to improve UK SME productivity levels – after three years of trying, maybe COVID can explain their lack of any quantified success …
Jul 28
Are office clusters as crucial to productivity as they once were?
More grist for the pandemic mill from Paul Ormerod writing for cityam.com The Prime Minister is now demanding that offices reopen to revive economic activity in the centres of towns and cities. But there is not yet much sign of a return to work. The preferences of the workforce are an important factor in …
Jul 21
How a Fully Distributed Company Keeps Its Team Engaged
A useful article follows from Inc. by Matt Haber, their San Francisco Bureau chief If you’ve had to adapt to working from home in the last few months, you could learn a few things from Matt Mullenweg – the co-founder of website-building platform WordPress (as used by this website) and Automattic, the parent company Mullenweg lives in …
Jun 09
Chinese Companies’ Response to Covid-19
A very interesting article just published in the HBR by Das Narayandas, Vinay Hebbar and Liangliang Li – it offers many lessons for western companies, big and small The past four months have provided an opportunity to study a once-in-a-lifetime moment — how companies function during an unprecedented global pandemic while also navigating an …
May 09
How to make ‘remote work’ more productive
An interesting slant on the pandemic impact follows – published by FastCompany.com and written by behavioural scientist Kristen Berman It might seem like the glorious era of remote work is upon us, driven by a pandemic push. Zoom! Slack! Who needs the office? The promise of uncompromised productivity paired with freedom is alluring. While software …
Apr 25
Office productivity
OFFICES ARE ABOUT TO CAUSE PRODUCTIVITY TO EXPLODE So claims Mike Phillips in one of Bisnow.com’s featured series on the ‘Future of Work’ – it’s more realisation that the pandemic has given a massive kick-start to many business changes needed given the enabling technology has been around but not used well for many years now …
Apr 20
A shorter work week?
Some interesting views from The Socialist, an Australian publication Microsoft recently granted its workers in Japan five Friday’s off in a row, resulting in a 40% productivity jump. Similar recent experiments have resulted in healthier, happier more efficient workers. Around the world the idea of reducing working hours is a topic of debate and discussion …
Apr 12
M/S says “Remote working is here for good”
An Inc.com report by Jason Aten follows – with only a few changes: If nothing else, in these past few weeks, we’ve learned that as a whole, people are quite resourceful when it comes to figuring out how to adapt and stay productive, even in extraordinary circumstances. You have to admit that it’s impressive how …
Apr 10
Will the Pandemic make us more productive?
The following thoughts, published by Bloomberg Opinion, are from Karl W. Smith, a former assistant professor of economics at the University of North Carolina and vice president for federal policy at the Tax Foundation. The Great Suppression will continue to cause enormous economic and personal hardship for scores of millions of Americans. It is possible, …
Mar 17
A pandemic positive!
Hamza Mudassar, writing in ‘Entrepreneur’, believes the global Covid-19 pandemic currently raging around the world ‘will shape businesses for decades to come’ Black swan events, such as economic recessions and pandemics, change the trajectory of governments, economies and businesses — altering the course of history. The Black Death in the 1300s broke the long-ingrained feudal …
Mar 09
Important trends for SME productivity
All business managers want their teams to get more done in less time – this means there needs to be a focus on prioritising efficient workflows while remaining consistently effective. According to therealtimereport.com, there are some important business productivity trends that all business owners and their teams need to be aware of : 1. The …
Sep 08
Beware ‘snooptech’
Ben Gallagher, co-founder of B+A, a management consultancy, raised an interesting slant on new digital possibilities ‘Snooptech’, as the Telegraph reported recently, is a £2.7billion industry The increasing sophistication of digital tools, as well as the continued stagnancy of productivity in the UK, has created a market for technology whose sole purpose is to allow companies …
Feb 10
Wealth gains and distribution
US Fed Chairman Jerome Powell believes our two greatest challenges for the next decade are ‘the widening wealth gap and sluggish productivity’ But Lawrence Fuller, in an article for Seeking Alpha, claims the Fed’s attempts to create a wealth effect by inflating the value of financial assets has mostly benefited the top 10%, and even …
Oct 25
The perfect working environment?
According to an article by Michael Odell in The Times, Basecamp is a US software/ tech company that supposedly runs without the scourge of 80 hour weeks, unrealistic deadlines, weekend emails and meetings Two American guys, Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson, run Basecamp – they’re also authors of a new book called It Doesn’t have …
Sep 29
UK manufacturing to become ‘smarter’
The UK magazine Drives & Controls has just reported that a group of UK manufacturing business leaders and academics have joined forces with the government to create the Made Smarter Commission (MSC) which aims to make UK manufacturing “smarter”. The inaugural meeting of the commission was chaired by Siemens CEO Professor Juergen Maier and Business Secretary …
Jul 16
NHS must suppress demand and cut waste
The UK’s NHS (National Health Service) is widely considered to be a national treasure – it’s also the biggest employer in Europe with around 1,500,000 staff: Healthcare services for all ailments are offered ‘free at the point of delivery’ (except such as dentistry, some prescriptions and eye tests ) to all UK citizens Poor families, …
May 19
Freelancing is good for many
Freelance employment should be used much more by most organisations in sectors which: Need certain specialist skills, but not on a full-time basis Have fluctuating demand patterns making employment of a full-time workforce to supply in good time prohibitively expensive Using freelance labour (say 20% part-time, 80% full-time) is much like outsourcing some processes – …
Mar 19
The birth of life insurance
In 1744, two Presbyterian clergymen, Alexander Webster and Robert Wallace, decided to set up a life-insurance fund that would provide pensions for the widows and orphans of dead clergymen Each of their church’s ministers would pay a small portion of his income into the fund which would invest the money If a minister died, his …
Jan 29
Clusters of SMEs are a priority
According to research conducted by Opus Energy, the top three geographical areas in the UK where SMEs (Small and Medium Sized Enterprises) have productivity issues are: West Midlands North East London To compete, SMEs there are being forced to implement a wave of changes, including: Introducing flexible working Paying employees above the average wage Offering …
Jan 15
Scrap traditional organisation structures
Alison Vekshin, a freelance journalist, says: “Companies have followed a linear top-down organisation structure, but that approach is quickly becoming outdated – business leaders now favour a more flexible structure, and have seen that workers are more productive and innovative in an autonomous work environment” The traditional linear organisation chart was designed to ‘create order …
Apr 15
Passports to productivity Improvement?
Some say the ‘Productivity Puzzle’ is the result of a storm of problems affecting both supply and demand in G7 developed nations viz: Supply: In the past, major technological advances (aka Schumpeter discontinuities) enabled quantum leaps in productivity levels – G7 nations would all adopt them and improve at about the same rate – now, without more …
Apr 01
Diageo appoints a CPO
Many companies employ inspectors and quality controllers in an effort to minimise waste and boost good output volumes Very few indeed have anyone specifically in charge of productivity or widespread employment of best practices, whether from internal or external sources Now, at long last, a major company has appointed a Chief Productivity Officer (CPO) – …
Afrikaans
Albanian
Amharic
Arabic
Armenian
Azerbaijani
Basque
Belarusian
Bengali
Bosnian
Bulgarian
Catalan
Cebuano
Chichewa
Chinese (Simplified)
Chinese (Traditional)
Corsican
Croatian
Czech
Danish
Dutch
English
Esperanto
Estonian
Filipino
Finnish
French
Frisian
Galician
Georgian
German
Greek
Gujarati
Haitian Creole
Hausa
Hawaiian
Hebrew
Hindi
Hmong
Hungarian
Icelandic
Igbo
Indonesian
Irish
Italian
Japanese
Javanese
Kannada
Kazakh
Khmer
Korean
Kurdish (Kurmanji)
Kyrgyz
Lao
Latin
Latvian
Lithuanian
Luxembourgish
Macedonian
Malagasy
Malay
Malayalam
Maltese
Maori
Marathi
Mongolian
Myanmar (Burmese)
Nepali
Norwegian
Pashto
Persian
Polish
Portuguese
Punjabi
Romanian
Russian
Samoan
Scottish Gaelic
Serbian
Sesotho
Shona
Sindhi
Sinhala
Slovak
Slovenian
Somali
Spanish
Sudanese
Swahili
Swedish
Tajik
Tamil
Telugu
Thai
Turkish
Ukrainian
Urdu
Uzbek
Vietnamese
Welsh
Xhosa
Yiddish
Yoruba
Zulu