Thank you for reading this WordPress hosted blog, all future blog posts will be posted via the FM website. Make sure to check the website regularly to keep updated!
Kind Regards,
The FM Recruitment Team
The FM Blog is Moving!
Reply
Our Marketing – 2012
Happy New Year! (A belated one at least!) We hope everybody had a good festive break and you are all ready for an exciting 2013! We at the FM Network certainly had a great 2012 and would like to take this opportunity to review some of our marketing material from the year.
Our Movie/TV/Iconic poster advert’s that we’re sure you have all seen featured in FM World magazine and on our blogs were the brain child of our director Alex Sutherland. The ‘Usual Suspects‘ poster was the first to appear in the summer and its success promoted us to carry on the pastiche’ing with Taken, Nightmare on Elm Street and the A-Team all getting the ‘FM’ treatment. Not to forget out take on the traditional American Christmas family portrait, roaring fire and all.
It’s been a lot of fun making them, with all the wigs, dressing up and ludicrous photoshopping, and they certainly seem to have had an impact with the positive feedback we have received from candidates and clients alike.
We take our business and role as facilities management recruiters very seriously, but we’re not afraid to do things differently, have some fun, and not take ourselves too seriously along the way.
We are looking forward to an even better 2013, with a new marketing approach and direction. We hope to see you along the way!
What Amazing News!
Image
The Future of the Workplace – Part 2
In the previous blog we looked at how businesses are toying with the idea of having a ‘roaming’ workforce but ultimately employees need the cultural side of an ‘office’ environment to thrive. In this blog we will look at what factors will force the traditional workplace to adapt, and how it is likely to change, if at all. We still need an office in our lives, we love the ‘banter’, love the unity it brings. But what form will it take?
Setting the trend for workspace innovation for the last twenty years has been the West Coast tech companies, with their slides, touch screen everything and lots of very bright objects all over the place. When the term ‘office of the future’ is thrown around everybody looks to straight to ‘Silicon Valley’ innovators. But, is this the office of the future, or just extravagant and hedonistic interior design? These flashy offices look great, but working around a £450,000 art installation said to increase creativity and productivity by 20% isn’t really a viable option for the average business, especially businesses that aren’t driven by creativity. But what can regular Joe SME’s take from their lead? Bauhaus inspired ergonomic flexi chairs aside.
The workplace of the future has to be technology driven and design driven but above all else it has to be people driven. One trend coming out of the workspace Avant-Garde is a move towards communal workspaces. ‘canteen style’ workstations where everybody sits around large tables. In most workplaces allocated desks anchor people spatially to the spot. Wandering away from the desk is seen as procrastinating and avoiding work. This can prevent collaboration between employees in large offices.
Microsoft’s offices in Amsterdam, a canteen style communal workplace
In one of Microsoft’s new facilities based in Amsterdam the staff no longer have a desk to themselves. They are encouraged to decide where they work when they arrive in the morning, and the nature of work they have to tackle that day dictates the seating arrangements. The idea that the office should be split up in to different ‘task’ rooms is an interesting one. A room for creative tasks, a room for new business development, a separate room for admin and email correspondence etc. This would surely improve productivity as everybody is on the same task, motivating each other and hubs of activity can be created around the workplace. As well as these benefits, providing open workspaces and desk sharing can improve office space utilisation by up to 77% a channelinsider.com report has shown.
So the ‘Desk’ is dead and the seating plan has been thrown out the window. But is that what employees want? And after all the workplace of the future should be ‘people’ driven. In our office of about 30, we all sit at allocated workstations, I’m sure like most offices of that size. About every six months we have a desk re-shuffle, and it is a painful process. Nobody ever wants to move as they have lost their space by the window, or they are too close to the door, or they have have lost their ‘good chair’, or ‘good screen’, or are no longer sitting next to the printer/biscuit tin/their office crush. This shows how people grow attached to the space around them, they take ownership of it and see it as ‘their desk’. This doesn’t sit well with the idea of having communal workspaces. The ‘form’ of the office that we spoke of in the previous blog (that hasn’t really changed since the fifties) maybe it hasn’t really changed because people have grown accustomed to it, and are attached to it. They want their desk, and failing that they want something that looks very similar, or they can’t settle into a regular pattern of productivity.
You can walk into any Staples store and buy day vouchers for office space, whether that’s a single hot desk, or a whole office floor. The workspaces are globally available, and there are 52 different offices in London alone. It seems that even when people are travelling away on business, they actively seek out the familiarity of an office space to get work done, where a hotel desk and hotel Wi-Fi would surely do the job. The traditional office form of desks and allotted space is ingrained into us; we have inherited it from our predecessors, seen it in films and read about it in books. It is a part of our culture and and we associate it with getting things done. Picture the main guy from that popular film pulling a late one at the office, he’s not perched on a stool with a laptop in his communal canteen style workspace, he is sat behind a desk, his desk.
Tom Hanks, getting some serious work done – sat behind his desk.
Like the other blog, we seem to just be creating problems not solutions, in piecing together the workplace of the future. The traditional workplace is going to be a hard one to shrug, even if it doesn’t always make spatial, cultural and commercial sense. We haven’t even covered the technology side of things yet, the lasers, holograms and robots that we’re all hoping will be involved in some mythical capacity. In the next blog we will, finally, be focusing on how technology will dictate change in the way workplaces will function, again tackling the inevitable backlash from trying to meddle with the traditional form of the ‘office’.
In the mean time have a look at this Microsoft concept video of what it will be like 2019. A bizarre world where Apple, Ikea, and paper manufacturers have disappeared, everything looks impossibly complicated to navigate, and Microsoft seem to have monopolized everything from magic plane tickets to magic mugs to magic newspapers.
What’s your view – Is the ‘traditional’ office a dying breed or is it here to stay. How should it adapt? Are employees holding back progress for the sake of familiarity? So many questions. What do you think?
Maybe you Can Hire……The FM Team.
If you have a recruitment problem and if no one else can help you – maybe you can hire The FM Team.
This month’s advert for FM World magazine has been one of our best yet. With Alex Sutherland as ‘Hanibal’, Danny Woodcock as ‘B. A. Baracus’ (Mr. T), Patrick Farrelly as ‘Murdoch’ and Ryan Keogh as ‘Face’ we all come together to form the FM Team. Or, The FM Network as we also like to call ourselves.
We were helped to authentically recreate the 1983 A Team image by the miraculous hair growing skills of Recruitment Consultant Danny Woodcock, who managed to produce an outstanding beard and Mohawk in just a week for the shoot.
I’m not sure about our chances of “promptly managing to escape from a military stockade” and we definitely aren’t roaming the “Los Angeles underground wanted for a crime we didn’t commit”, but we do survive as “soldiers of fortune”…
If you do have a facilities management recruitment problem, The FM Network can help you, and resolve the problem with the efficiency of the real A Team (only with heaps of industry knowledge, and less of a taste for a bar brawl). From temporary to permanent FM roles, we at the FM Network are helping facilities management professionals meet their potential and helping clients successfully fill their vacancies on every occasion.
We love it when a plan comes together….
The Facility Where the Internet Lives…
On their new web site entitled ‘where the internet lives’ Google bares all, revealing pictures of inside it’s data centres and server rooms around the globe. It gives some very interesting information into how the staff at Google, and the facility itself, keep some of the most important servers in the world up and running. It’s big, brash and pretty surreal, but it’s Google so what would you expect?
The colourful pipes pictured above send and receive water to cool down the facility. The blue pipes supply cold water and the red pipes return the warm water back to be cooled. Google bikes are dotted around to quickly travel throughout the large complex.
They keep pipes like these ready with highly-pressurized water in case of a fire. This water, in particular, is cleaned and filtered so if they use it, it will not contaminate the facility.
The fiber optic networks connecting Google’s sites can run at speeds that are more than 200,000 times faster than a typical home Internet connection. The green LED’s show that everything is running smoothly and the temperature is at the right level.
Here hundreds of fans funnel hot air from the server racks into a cooling unit to be recirculated. Server floors like these require massive space and efficient power to run the full family of Google products for the world. In one of their facilities in Hamina, Finland, they renovated an old paper mill to take advantage of the building’s infrastructure as well as its proximity to the Gulf of Finland’s water for cooling. They choose the location of their facilities to make them run as efficiently as possible.
Take a look at the whole gallery here
Recruitment Doesn’t Have to be a Nightmare!
Here, for Halloween, carrying on with our movie poster theme is our latest advert featuring in the current edition of FM World Magazine.
This month, the classic 1984 horror film, A Nightmare on Elm Street’ got the ‘FM Network Treatment’ and we hope it isn’t too jaw droppingly terrifying for you.
It was a hard choice as there are so many iconic horror films to choose from that were ripe for a pastiche. Halloween, Jaws, The Shining were all up for contention, but the we had to go with one of the best horror Villains of all time to take the lead; Freddy Krueger.
Beyond the sheer horror of the advert, there is though a serious message. Recruitment doesn’t have to be a nightmare, and if you are a Facilities Management professional looking for a new role, or you are a potential client with a vacancy that is being a terror to fill, the FM Network can guide you through the process with our recruitment expertise and our extensive industry knowledge. With us it’s more ‘pleasant dream’ than ‘nightmare’.
We would like to take this opportunity to thank our special guest Freddy Krueger, who took the time out of his busy schedule, so close to Halloween to shoot with us. His knowledge of FM was slim, but he just understood our artistic direction and what it was we were trying to achieve. Thanks Freddy.
The Future of the Workplace – Part 1
In the first part of a three part series, we take an in depth look into the formation of a ‘modern’ workplace, how it has stood the test of time and whether we can scrap the old and confused ‘office’ altogether.
Sat in the open plan office where I work, at a faux pine desk, surrounded by 9 other identical workstations, I am sat in the office of 2012.
As well as the desks there are chairs, telephones, printers, computers, piles of paper, pots of pens and folders. Take a walk downstairs to the boardroom and you will see a wooden boardroom table, a paper flip board and a water cooler. I’m sure you can see similar sights in your office.
If you zoom back 60 years or so, or for those of us that don’t have so many years of wisdom to fall back on, think of an episode of Mad Men. You will notice not much has changed in the formation of a place of work. Sure, the phones now have screens and typewriters have lost out on desk real estate to an LCD screen or three, but the open plan environments, large boardroom tables, private offices for executives and many other concepts that make up a ‘place of work in the 50’s’ are still in place now. It’s just in the modern day office, a lot less ‘scotch’ is drunk.
The 1950’s office, look familiar?
I’m sure this is the case for most SME’s in the UK, workplaces have fallen in to a system that works, and although technological advances have dramatically changed the way most jobs are carried out, the role is being carried out in the same old environment that is proving to stand the test of time, until now. According to Lynda Gratton, Professor of Management Practice at London Business School, the world is currently changing at a pace faster than the industrial revolution (yet in the office of 2012 the average SME still spends £200 a month on paper, so much for the ‘paperless office’ envisioned early in the twentieth century) and workplaces will have to start being flexible to these changes.
The workplace of the future will be born out of how facilities management professionals, HR professionals, company Directors, designers, architects and many others respond to a variety of factors that place our current idea of an office space in a position of flux. These factors are pointed out by Matthew Gwyther, Editor of Management Today magazine as: ‘cost, carbon, technology, sustainability and culture.
workers less fixed to a physical location set a higher precedent on performance
So the first question to wrestle with is: why can’t we just get rid of a communal office space all together? Scrap it, everybody work from home. 40% of the average office is left vacant on a normal working day, and 40% of an average working day is unproductive anyway. In the office where I work I would say that 100% of employees could do their work from home or any space that has Wifi and phone signal. Meetings can be held via Skype, or face to face, at what Ray Oldenburg defines as ‘third space’ environments, such as coffee shops that blur lines between work and home. Call stats and KPI’s can still be monitored in the same way. It saves on cost and on carbon and reports show that it would result in a happier and more productive workforce. A report by tech company ‘Dell’ has found that workers less fixed to a physical location set a higher precedent on performance and feel that their ‘output’ is open to be more harshly judged. They can’t hide behind simple attendance figures and just by being seen putting in the hours sat behind a desk. Even more so than normal, it’s just about the numbers.
New administrative roles can be created from this flexible location work format, and they can be funded from the money saved by reducing the physical business space. ‘The Office of the Future Report’ lists new fangled roles such as a ‘workflow controller;’ who would serve as a mission control to the roaming workforce, a ‘virtual meetings organiser;’ to schedule and maintain the technology enabling video conferencing, and ‘knowledge managers;’ who help enforce and maintain a consistent code of practice between the disjointed team of staff. A difficult task.
Hotdesking is Microsoft’s solution – Their Amsterdam facility has 1000 hot desks
But going back to the original five factors threatening the current workplace status quo – ‘cost, carbon, sustainability, technology and culture, with this proposed ‘roaming workforce’ format 4 of the 5 factors are challenged; except culture. No shared workspace means no coherent and consistent company culture. Even in the digital age, nothing can replace real interpersonal communication. A survey by unwork.com found that 71% employees wouldn’t choose to start working from home for fear of isolation and lack of productivity due no office’ buzz’. Office banter serves a purpose after all, surprisingly as the saviour of the conventional workplace. The same office ecosystem can not be reproduced virtually to the requirements of us social creatures.
This is where the current workplace conundrum comes to a head – people want to collaborate more but travel less, use current technology to lead a more flexible working lifestyle yet still feel the unification of ‘going to work’. The workplace as we know it will still survive but it will have to adapt, how it will adapt is what we will cover in the next blog of this series. So come back next time for all the things you wanted to read about in an article entitled ‘the workplace of the future’ with gadgets such as a robot that can fix your tie, and an app that can monitor your productivity and share the results with your boss and hologram desks. 2 out of three of those things are actually real. Find out which, in part two.
Lifting ‘burden’ or increasing ‘risk’
Now that the dust has settled and people have had time to reflect upon the government’s recent snipping of red tape, the debate over the competency of these changes still ensues. The legislative changes result in the scrapping of over 3000 regulations. This now means that proposed ‘low risk’ workplaces such as shops, offices, pubs and clubs (How a club; inebriated individuals en mass, confined to often far too small premises, falls into a low risk category is beyond me) will no longer have to face inspection.
Can we rely on Employers to keep workplaces safe without inspections?
But many reports on the subject have been skewed and are misleading. The headline, ‘3000 health and safety regulations scrapped’, simply doesn’t portray the true reality of the situation. With only about 200 Health and Safety regulations in action in the first place, only 21 are being amended or scrapped. In a report by Zurich in to the effect of ‘red tape’ on SME’s across all sectors, employment regulations place higher than health and safety on the list of top regulatory challenges, and the great ‘3000’ regulatory changes largely refer to changes to employment law and pensions, amongst others . But numbers aside, whether it’s 10 or 10,000 changes to regulations, what’s important is their effect on the workforce.
Does ‘red tape’ just halt business growth or serve an important purpose?
This has of course caused fierce debate between Facilities Management professionals, who see the laxing of regulations as lifting a burden on their time and rightfully putting ‘common sense’ back into Health and Safety. And HSE professionals, who see the policy changes as a real threat to the safety of workers across the whole of the U.K.
As the debate unfolded, we spoke to some professionals from both the HSE and FM industries about their thoughts on the subject:
Ian Wright – Soft Services Manager, University College london:
‘This just formalises the reality on the ground. For some time resources have not been available for spot checks on low or high risk areas so this won’t make a great difference in practice, and corporate, personal and legal responsibilities all remain in place. However others may feel differently’ – and people do feel differently, HSE professionals in particular have a very different view on the matter’
Martin Stevens – Borough Liaison Facilities Manager
‘I can see the validity of reducing inspections where there is a sustained low risk in workplaces, but is this going to allow for an increase elsewhere?’
Paul Phillips – Assurity Consulting
‘One point this present administration keeps forgetting to say is that ‘low hazard’ work places are only ‘low risk’ if the right controls are in place and are regularly reviewed. Reducing H&S inspections is perhaps a convenient smoke screen for reducing the resources available to the inspectors. For those who are committed and conscientious it may mean an uneven playing field and an uncompetitive environment.’
Simon Lowe – Managing Director of Handsam Ltd
The problem I envisage is that the way this is being ‘sold’ will lead people, especially managers in businesses whose finances are under pressure or big businesses who are looking to ‘rationalise’, to believe that they can ignore this whole vital area of compliance. While legislation and formal guidance might be being rolled back, compensation claims continue to rise and those who have let their guard down will find themselves under threat of civil suits. On top of that, the HSE’s new charging culture which hits home next month will deliver a double-whammy when businesses get charged for being investigated for failures in an area that the government’s PR machine is pushing as ‘no more red tape’. Of course everyone understands businesses have to have less real red tape, but reducing risk and protecting employees and directors alike is essential when ensuring any business continues in the short, medium and long term.
James Thornhill – HSSE advisor at BG Group
‘With the way government decides to reduce regulations, this could really be a safety nightmare. Employees may be in more than harms way than they have ever been. The government usually goes the way big money wants them too.’
There is a good case on both sides of the argument. Consistently ‘low risk’ workplaces of course should be treated with a different approach. A corner shop is not a quarry, and does not pose the same risks. But can any workplace really be considered ‘low risk?’ And with such a public relaxation of regulations could this result in some employers becoming complacent in keeping their workplace as a safe working environment for their employees? Ultimately isn’t that what’s important? That all employees have the right to work in a safe environment, that right should never be classed as a ‘burden’.
What do you think? Please leave your comments below
The FM Network is one of the UK’s leading Facilities Management and Building Services recruiters. If you are looking for a job in Facilities Management then get in touch www.thefmnetwork.co.uk
Give us a difficult to fill vacancy – We will find them. We will fill it…
If you’ve not seen it already, here it is – our next movie poster marketing campaign. This time we’ve done a spin on the Taken poster (you know the film starring Liam Neeson right?). Check out our consultant Alex, doesn’t he look menacing *cough cough*.
Our new advertising campaign – what do you think?
This campaign is all about executive search. There’s a famous line in the film which is on the front of the movie posters – “I don’t know who you are. I don’t know what you want. But if you don’t let my daughter go I will find you. I will kill you”. We’ve changed this to read “We don’t know who you are. We don’t know what you want. But if you give us a difficult to fill vacancy we will find them. We will fill it”. In a nutshell, what we’re trying to get across with the new campaign is that we’re executive search professionals and we can help you employ the right people in that hard to fill role. While Liam Neeson’s character has a particular set of skills which he uses to catch his daughters kidnappers, we have a particular set of skills which enable us to fill YOUR vacancy. Ingenious.
The originial Taken poster
You don’t have to take our word for it. Why not take a look at our website and see for yourself what executive search entails or take a look to find out what other people think about our recruitment service.
So, what do you think of our new campaign? Do you like it? Is it any good or are we “Taken” it too far?
Jennie Everall – Digital Marketing Executive, The FM Network
The FM Network are one of the UK’s leading Facilities Management and Building Services recruiters.
thefmnetwork 