Making everyone fit. Studio Romantic British employees have just received a new right to request flexible working arrangements from the first day of a new job. This is courtesy of the Employment Relations (Flexible Working) Act and supporting secondary legislation, which are in force from April 6, and represent an important change to employment regulations for Britain’s 1.5 million employers. Flexible working covers numerous arrangements that deviate from “standard” employment practices, such as part-time work, compressed hours, job shares, flexitime and remote working. British employees all r ..read more

Making everyone fit. Studio Romantic Employees in the UK have just received a new right to request flexible working arrangements from the first day of a new job. This is courtesy of the Employment Relations (Flexible Working) Act and supporting secondary legislation, which are in force from April 6, and represent an important change to employment regulations for Britain’s 1.5 million employers. Flexible working covers numerous arrangements that deviate from “standard” employment practices, such as part-time work, compressed hours, job shares, flexitime and remote working. UK employees all rece ..read more

Shutterstock Three years ago, The Conversation partnered with a group of leading universities, including UCL, Cardiff and Queen’s Belfast, on the ESRC-funded International Public Policy Observatory (IPP0). The project’s goal was initially to assess and report to UK policymakers evidence from around the world on the best ways to mitigate the devastating social impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic. IPPO has since evolved and expanded – and from January 2023 has been tailoring its work to focus on a wide range of key UK social challenges, from net zero to inequality. For example, the UK is committed ..read more

Shutterstock A significant proportion of Australian workers – about one-fifth – would be prepared to sacrifice between 16% and 33% of their salaries for the right to work from home, which works out at A$12,000 to $24,000 of those workers’ salaries. But a much larger proportion, more than one half, would be prepared to sacrifice nothing, being either not strongly convinced about the benefits of working from home or actively preferring to go into the workplace. Surprisingly, our findings are consistent with those of other surveys conducted both during and before the pandemic, suggesting the wid ..read more

Working from home has made job interviews and starting a new role easier in many ways. You don’t have to worry about a missed train or spilt coffee derailing a job interview if it’s on Zoom – but you still need to impress your interviewer. Your home surroundings help show off your personality to the person on the other end of the Zoom call. Anyone who judged the bookcases of politicians and celebrities during the early days of lockdown will be familiar with this. My colleagues and I recently conducted a study that found the objects in your digital background can affect how people view you. We ..read more

Dans un contexte d’augmentation des risques psychosociaux, ignorer les émotions au travail n’aide pas… Melissa Hogan/Wikimedia commons, CC BY-SA When asked what traits constitute a good leader, you may be tempted to list traditional qualities such as rationality, cool-headedness, and overall, an ability to detach oneself from one’s emotions. However, research has shown that the ability to feel empathy toward one’s colleagues is in fact the most critical leadership skills, and much-overlooked. Empathy is on record for boosting employees’ ability to innovate, engage with the task at hand, balanc ..read more

Girts Ragelis/Shutterstock Throughout the 21st century, teamwork has come to define the modern work environment. Driven by advances in communication technology, working collaboratively is, as management experts will tell you, how you harness the “collective intelligence”. Collective intelligence is often seen as greater than the sum of its parts: superior to the cumulative individual intelligence of the group’s members. Capitalising on it is said to improve task accuracy (finding better and more correct answers), and enhance task efficiency (finding good answers faster). This in turn leads to ..read more

At the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic, at least 557 million workers were forced to work from home. Up until a few months ago, many employers and government bodies had been extensively promoting the practice, albeit mainly for safety and security reasons. Other upsides have been amply documented by both the media and academia: more time spent with loved ones, and reduced transportation costs, commuting time, and air pollution. All in all, working from home has been touted as the best way for employees to keep mentally and physically fit), helped by the ability to work from any location so l ..read more

Julian Dik/Unsplash For eight years I have studied digital nomadism, the millenial trend for working remotely from anywhere around the world. I am often asked if it is driving gentrification. Before COVID upended the way we work, I would usually tell journalists that the numbers were too small for a definitive answer. Most digital nomads were travelling and working illegally on tourist visas. It was a niche phenomenon. Three years into the pandemic, however, I am no longer sure. The most recent estimates put the number of digital nomads from the US alone, at 16.9 million, a staggering increase ..read more

A woman working from home. Alistair Berg/Getty Images The COVID-19 pandemic has led to a question that would have been unthinkable a few years ago: do we really need to be in the office all the time? At the height of the pandemic, working remotely was viewed as a safeguard, protecting employees from the spread of infections. Over time a consensus has developed that working remotely has had benefits but has also raised health concerns. To provide some answers to the question, I did research on the experience of working remotely from the perspective of 23 female middle managers working in the So ..read more