At our basic level as human beings we can’t help but to undergo psychological, physiological and behavioural changes depending on what environment we are in. Responses to certain stimuli or the lack of them is hard-wired into our design, so it stands to reason that the office environment can dramatically change the way we react to the world, and our perceptions of the world around us. We spend a large amount of our time in the office, and social life is increasingly affected by and replaced by aspects of our work life. As a management issue, the ‘design’ of the office environment can surely make the difference between high or low performance, productivity and profits.

Wide Open Spaces

Working practices and office design

Working practices are most commonly decided by management initiatives. Employers establish what is needed to be done and managers direct workers how they can best perform their tasks. Not anymore.

The world of social networking, wireless communication and ubiquitous internet access is allowing employees to work from home, share ideas and better influence their firm’s direction.

This societal change is stimulating research into how office space, design office design and new IT systems affect workers, and the results are surprising.

A report by the Commission for Architecture & the Built Environment (CABE) and the British Council for Offices (BCO) has revealed office interior design affects staff satisfaction, motivation and retention.

Furthermore, it affects productivity, responsiveness to technological change and their knowledge and innovation levels.

Paul Morrell, CABE commissioner and president of the BCO, explained: “Those employers who ignore the evidence of office design as an enabler of staff satisfaction and performance risk the loss of key staff and ultimately business success.”

The report, Impact of Office Design on Business Performance, found the workplace is responsible for 24 per cent of job satisfaction and this can affect staff performance by five per cent for individuals and 11 per cent for team workers.

The Calgary Herald reported researchers at the city’s university found open spaces help workers feel better. However, it was having co-workers nearby that pushed productivity. Tim Welsh, assistant professor in kinesiology, noted how important it was for people managing office moves to consider design.

”If they’re looking to maximise idea generation, communication and just a general feeling of social well-being, then open-concept offices would be the better way to go.”

The end of ‘cubedom’

Writing from across the US border, Edward Marshall, in the Portland Journal has predicted the end of ‘cubedom’ and the partitioned working space. He claims by giving employees individual boxes to work from, “a premium is put on efficiency rather than relationships” and relationships are then reduced to “transactions”.

This, he claims, hampers teamwork as soon after meeting, members of newly formed groups then disappear to their own semi-closed areas.

Mr Marshall describes the current move to openness as a quiet movement to “tear down the walls that exist between us”.

The solution, in his opinion is “having the physical office design serve the work culture, rather than having the work culture be a reaction to a design done by the facilities department”.

Much of this move to open systems can be attributed to workers bringing their outside experience to the workplace.

Thousands of businesses have banned employees using social networking sites as they are thought to affect productivity. Employment law firm, Peninsula has claimed 69 per cent outlawed using the sites despite 12 per cent of bosses checking their own pages during work, onrec.com has reported.

How an office communicates

Despite this, some companies are adopting similar tools to those found online, hoping to enable their staff to better communicate and feed ideas into the business.

This ‘network society’ is providing employers with real challenges – if they adopt more social practices do they also re-jig their office design to suit new, open thinking?

Property company, Savills, thinks so. Its research, What Workers Want…and What it Means for Property, found “understanding the needs of workers has never been more important”.

”Immediate workspace conditions were rated the most important by over 82 per cent of respondents i.e. comfort of work area, lighting and temperature.”

So when considering their corporate relocation strategy and organizing who will be managing office moves, senior managers have much to consider. Help in moving offices,
getting the office moves on time and budget are only three of the factors they will need to get right.

The key to their firm’s long term success could be its next office design, and how it understands the psychological result of new open attitudes to working and collaboration.

The Administrative offices house both the management team and managerial staff like General Manager, Secretaries etc. The computer systems with high technology installed in offices increases the consumption of energy. The central heating and air conditioning systems in the hotels areas also consume a lot of energy. If an analysis is done, we would find that in most of the cases energy consumption is unnecessary and inefficient. Mostly, what lacks is an energy saving program in various departments in hotels. Internal controls in the hotels are not taken care of and importance is given to customer satisfaction and hotel service quality.

To save energy and resources, an effective energy management program or system is a must to implement. For example: Lightning control system as people forget to switch off lights very often. Ecogreen provides you with some more energy management ideas that can be implemented:

- Do not use artificial lighting in offices when the natural light is sufficient

- Open draperies and raise shades whenever adequate light from windows is available

- Use energy-saving fluorescent lights and lamps

- Switch off lights and appliances in unoccupied offices

- Turn off the bathroom’s fan and lights whenever they are not occupied

- Install the light sensors to remind and educate office users about wasted light

- Use rechargeable batteries for calculators and other office devices

- Turn off computers that are not used, and utilized computer’s energy/power management tools ( i.e. sleep mode, hibernate mode, screen saver)

- Reduce the use of lighting during night cleaning

- Arrange office meetings or conferences in the day time

- Keep office doors and windows closed if heating and air conditioning is on

- Purchase and use high efficiency office equipment and devices

- Set up a self-adult system for the office energy consumption

- Train and educate office employees to follow correct procedures of energy uses

All organisations need to keep abreast of regulatory developments relevant to their business but to do so they need to enter into a regulatory and legal minefield.

Human resource personnel now need to grapple with the nuances of employment and health and safety law, in some industries corporate manslaughter charges are a real risk and for others licensing laws have reached new heights of complexity. With the growth in e-commerce where consumer protection is dependent on jurisdiction, trademark and intellectual property laws are becoming confused and the ‘risk’ list for all organisations is now seemingly endless.

Small businesses in particular are finding that a casual and informal approach to these issues can result in regulatory censure and regulatory fines that can have no bearing on the financial health of the individual company; for larger companies there is the potential of material, financial and reputational damage.

Small to medium businesses will rarely have the luxury of employing a full time Compliance Officer but they should charge someone with the responsibility and although larger organisations can afford a dedicated person they are finding that with compliance issues mushrooming the Compliance Officer now has a team, a department and if not already, how long before compliance becomes a division?

Regardless of size, the first step in compliance for any organisation requires them to identify the areas of compliance that are applicable to them. Rules and regulations are being introduced monthly on a local, regional, national and international level, covering everything from data protection and freedom of information, anti-money laundering to environmental waste control, race relations to health and safety; with ignorance being no defence there is a requirement on the individual businesses to know their responsibilities, and fines for those that wait to be told.

Having identified the areas of compliance the company then needs to understand what they need to do to ensure they comply. It is becoming conceivable that with the shear volume of compliancy issues that companies who can show a good faith effort in complying will, even when they fall short, reduce the risks of fines; to do so they need to demonstrate that they had every intention of acting within the spirit of the rules and that specific and timely action was being taken in relation to any failings or breaches. This is where the culture of the organisation is key.

With Compliance issues identified and understood the Compliance Officer needs to define and implement policy and disseminate the information throughout the organisation

It is important for the Compliance Officer that they do not inadvertently become the company’s patsy. Senior managers are not averse to ignoring the internal memos they receive advising them of their responsibilities. Compliance Officers need to deliver their messages up and down the corporate food chain and record that their advice and directives have been received and more importantly understood.

The Compliance Officer has to avoid becoming the company scapegoat. This won’t happen by itself, a sales team that has a long history of success though a relaxed attitude to selling is not going to willingly adopt new, and what they will see as restrictive, practices without a fight. ‘I didn’t get the memo’, ‘I didn’t understand it’, ‘I thought it meant something else’, ‘I thought these were only guidelines’ are likely to be stock replies, along with the one or two old timers that didn’t think compliance issues applied to them. It used to be a safe bet to blame IT, blame Compliance is rapidly taking its place. This is where follow-up and disciplinary action by senior management is imperative.

To survive in this challenging environment, the compliance officer needs to have several spanners in the tool kit, buy-in of senior management, a strict reporting process and a good flow of management information. But what else – an excellent means of communication – this is key – the compliance officer needs to connect and communicate with the business – one tool that can bring real results is the online survey and questionnaire.

online survey can deliver a message internally to the individual; it can be informative like a memo and educational by referencing detailed policy. Importantly it can become a valuable self registering record that confirms that the information has been properly disseminated and understood.

A single survey question can achieve all these objectives at the same time. Take an example:-

Are you aware that section 45 of the Companies (Auditing and Accounting) Act 2003 imposes an obligation on directors of certain companies to prepare statements on their company’s compliance with its relevant obligations?
Click here for a summary of Company’s Policy on Compliance Reporting Obligations)
Yes
No

For those Directors that have not read the policy the survey will give an opportunity to view the company’s policy online (using an embedded live HTML link). Should Directors answer ‘No’ the Compliance Officer knows who to target.

The survey also records the manager’s response and shifts the responsibility away from the Compliance Officer to the individual manager where the responsibility needs to rest for a company to meet its compliance obligations.

Using an online website such as http://www.surveygalaxy.com/ where multiple surveys can be managed, easily modified, updated and re-issued on a periodic basis across an organisation online surveys can be the Compliance Officer’s killer application.

Through the regular use of online surveys the Compliance Officer will be in the driving seat, leading and not chasing compliance issues, not only circulating the information on a one to one basis but also monitoring and recording the level of awareness throughout the organisation.

The Compliance Officer’s role is a difficult one, like a parent keeping a wayward child on the straight and narrow, most employers, let alone their employees, often do not fully understand the true consequence of their, often innocent, minor discretions. Assigning a Compliance Officer is a start but enabling them to fulfil their remit will be the difference between a company being fully compliant and one that risks suffering the consequences for having let compliance take a back seat.

If you are deciding the best possible fit for your office, chances are that you have spoken to many vendors whom may ask you for a request for proposal. Responding to an RFP is an expensive and time-consuming piece of work, too. If you craft your RFP in too general a fashion, you’ll create a formidable challenge for unfortunate vendors who will have to go back and forth asking you to make the questions more specific and then answering these questions. Even thought this may be a bulky task to undergo it is in your best interest that you become as familiarized with the products’ specifications as you are with the business whom will be handling it for you. Only a really in-depth, comprehensive RFP will make it easy for potential vendors to draw up their proposals and save your own time in the long run.

Let’s get straight to the point, project management by form filling is not an effective way of managing projects. These days many organisations and individual’s whole project management strategy revolves around becoming slaves to a methodology. Don’t get me wrong, there are many very good methodologies out there and they all have their part to play but it’s not the be-all and end-all of project management.

The success of a Project Management Office depends strongly on its ability to meet the needs of the business it is working for. The different categories of Project Management Offices vary in the amount of control and influence they have regarding a companies projects, and as such are categorized into the following three types:

Doctrine of indoor management 

Memorandum of Association and articles of association are two most important documents needed for the incorporation of a company. The memorandum of a company is the constitution of that company. It sets out the (a) object clause, (b) name clause, (c) registered office clause, (d) liability clause and (e) capital clause; whereas the articles of association enumerate the internal rules of the company under which it will be governed. 

Anyone who has paid attention to the mounting credit card crisis afflicting modern Americans should not be surprised by the sudden explosion of debt management firms in the last decade. The debt management industry has grown exponentially over the past few years, assisting any number of borrowers with their financial burdens, but, as with any new business that concerns itself with debt and credit cards, a breed of predatory debt service ‘professionals’ seek only to exploit the economically desperate households by promising savings they could never deliver and sometimes even defrauding them altogether. Scam artists are an unfortunate consequence of any profession, and the debt relief industry is no better or worse. However, since word of mouth and a reputation for honesty and competence can make or break a company – especially a finance company – these nefarious loan workers don’t last long. However, just in case you’re unlucky enough to meet one of the less reputable debt management workers, here are a few tips to identify the worst sort.

If your business is in the process of development, you’ll realise that there many aspects to office expansion that you’ll need to cover. For instance, you might be building an additional floor onto your building, or renovating any existing unused parts of your building to accommodate your burgeoning staff levels and equipment. But whether you require building services or facilities management, you can be sure that you and your business won’t have to undertake these daunting tasks without support.