It was walking along the excellent Welsh Coastal path (above) with Debbie that I decided on my next challenge, to write a diary for the next 30 days. It was clear to me that I wanted to write it as part of my blog, because diary posts would document the...
It’s appraisal time at work right now and it’s our custom to seek 360 degree feedback, which is starting to stream in. One recurring theme over the years has been that some of my work is too conceptual or theoretical and this makes it hard to directly implement. I’ve thought...
I’m not one to drift through life without a plan of action, even at school and university I was always focused on doing just enough work to succeed, but not too much as to curtail the rest of my life. So one of the first things that I did when...
I’ve been helping out with office designs at work over the last few weeks and it’s interesting to watch the challenges raised when I make suggestions that compromise density in the service of increasing productivity. This is a common theme, every time I’ve done an office design the facilities manager...
I’m seeing a lot more burnout at work for many reasons, all of them very disturbing. It’s bad for the employer because people become disengaged, productivity suffers, stress increases all around, sickness levels increase and retention suffers. It’s clearly bad for the individuals and their families and it’s also bad...
Unfortunately most of us have come across metrics that are used to measure individual performance, to provide a quantified ‘stick’ with which to beat the under-performing individual, I hate them with a passion. Whilst they might have some validity in an assembly line, they have no place where I work,...
I’ve been passionate about workplace design for over 20 years, in fact I think my interest started way back when I redesigned my bedroom in preparation for my GCSEs. My Dad had bought me a large office desk that was surplus to requirements and it transformed my home working environment. ...
Back in April I wrote a blog post outlining what I was hoping for in Windows 9, well Microsoft have started to reveal the feature set of ‘Windows 10’ skipping 9 in the hope that they will convince people that they are really making a huge leap forward from Windows...
I’ve never been particularly impressed by the marketing that most companies do in the area that I work. It’s generally marketing the obvious, or desperately trying to find an interesting case study that we can polish up. Personally I’d rather dispense with the traditional marketing budget and let our expertise...
I work from home which has a lot of advantages so I don’t begrudge it, but sitting alone in a room is a sure way to kill every ounce of creativity that I have. Not one to be easily beaten though I’ve experimented with ways to boost creativity and it’s...