Built For People

Taking the best elements of a product-management approach and applying them to HR activity can transform the people function. This book shows you how. Written for all HR professionals and business leaders, Built for People explains how to improve workforce and business performance by developing people-centred ways of working, evidence-based decision making and a culture of continuous feedback and iteration. It explains everything from what this approach means for business professionals, what the benefits of it are and how to do it effectively. It covers how to proactively develop an employee experience which attracts, engages and retains the talent the business needs and supports them to operate at their full potential. There is also practical guidance on the importance of user research, sprint planning, vision development and how to encourage a continuous feedback loop in your team. This book includes the importance of testing and iteration and how to define metrics for success, as well as showing you how to handle organizational change, company culture clashes and how to build and improve overall business performance and employee experience at scale. Full of tools, case studies, exercises and advice from those who are already seeing the benefits of a product-management approach, this is essential reading for all business leaders needing to develop an agile, innovative and evidence-based approach to their people operations.

Book Award Finalist for Urban Design Group Awards 2020 Lighting has the power to illuminate and enhance our experience within the built environment. The light that enables people to travel around their neighbourhood or their city; the light which they see themselves and their neighbourhood under. Research into the effects of urban lighting on behaviour, environmental psychology and social interaction is developing at a rapid rate. Yet, despite the affect it has on our daily lives, the practical application of this research is a relatively untapped resource. This book explores the needs and experiences of people at night and how these can be addressed by public lighting. It will give readers the confidence to develop more sophisticated lighting plans and add value to their projects. Case studies provide in-depth analysis of real-life projects and will help the reader to understand lighting designers’ own experiences, including post-installation observations. Written in an accessible style by an array of experts, this is an essential book for practitioners, academics and students alike, that will enable you to put the research in to practice and develop better lighting for better places.

The moment you walk into Menlo Innovations, you can sense the atmosphere full of energy, playfulness, enthusiasm, and maybe even . . . joy. As a package-delivery person once remarked, “I don’t know what you do, but whatever it is, I want to work here.” Every year, thousands of visitors come from around the world to visit Menlo Innovations, a small software company in Ann Arbor, Michigan. They make the trek not to learn about technology but to witness a radically different approach to company culture. CEO and “Chief Storyteller” Rich Sheridan removed the fear and ambiguity that typically make a workplace miserable. His own experience in the software industry taught him that, for many, work was marked by long hours and mismanaged projects with low-quality results. There had to be a better way. With joy as the explicit goal, Sheridan and his team changed everything about how the company was run. They established a shared belief system that supports working in pairs and embraces making mistakes, all while fostering dignity for the team. The results blew away all expectations. Menlo has won numerous growth awards and was named an Inc. magazine “audacious small company.” It has tripled its physical office three times and produced products that dominate markets for its clients. Joy, Inc. offers an inside look at how Sheridan and Menlo created a joyful culture, and shows how any organization can follow their methods for a more passionate team and sustainable, profitable results. Sheridan also shows how to run smarter meetings and build cultural training into your hiring process. Joy, Inc. offers an inspirational blueprint for readers in any field who want a committed, energizing atmosphere at work—leading to sustainable business results.

Personal data is increasingly important in our lives. We use personal data to quantify our behaviour, through health apps or for 'personal branding' and we are also increasingly forced to part with our data to access services. With the proliferation of embedded sensors, the built environment is playing a key role in this developing use of data, even though this remains relatively hidden. Buildings are sites for the capture of personal data. This data is used to adapt buildings to people's behaviour, and increasingly, organisations use this data to understand how buildings are occupied and how communities develop within them. A whole host of technical, practical, social and ethical challenges emerge from this still developing area across interior, architectural and urban design, and many open questions remain. This book makes a contribution to this on-going discourse by bringing together a community of researchers interested in personal informatics and the design of interactive buildings and environments. The book’s aim is to foster critical discussion about the future role of personal data in interactions with the built environment. People, Personal Data and the Built Environment is ideal for researchers and practitioners interested in Architecture, Computer Science and Human Building Interaction.

Embed an agile, iterative and evidence-based approach to HR to improve employee experience and drive business results.

This book is an edited collection of seven chapters on the theme of ‘people and space interactions in different settings’. Using a variety of problems, it showcases a rich set of solutions to the global challenges of functional, sustainable and responsive habitats in both urban and rural environments. The book deals with cultural landscapes, sustainable housing settings, the environment and human response, spatial epidemiology, neighbourhood and health, and the subjectivity-objectivity continuum in man-environment research. The studies apply a variety of social research methods and strategies relevant to the study of human interaction with its environment. Collectively they serve as templates for direction in modern social science research methodology built on evidence-based scientific inquiry of the built environment. It can guide both young and seasoned researchers in considering appropriate responses to various social research problems, including assessing various options in research process innovation. A recurrent lesson from the individual studies, and significant contribution of the volume, is that each research endeavor needs to be based on a firm philosophical grounding as this goes a long way in determining the type of data to be collected, and the ways that they are analysed and interpreted. Taking a cross-disciplinary perspective, this edited collection should be of interest to scholars of geography, anthropology, sociology, epidemiology, urban planning, architecture, and above all environment-behaviour studies.

Climate change is believed to be a great challenge to built environment professionals in design and management. An integrated approach in delivering a sustainable built environment is desired by the built environment professional institutions. The aim of this book is to provide an advanced understanding of the key subjects required for the design and management of modern built environments to meet carbon emission reduction targets. In Design and Management of Sustainable Built Environments, an international group of experts provide comprehensive and the most up-to-date knowledge, covering sustainable urban and building design, management and assessment. The best practice case studies of the implementation of sustainable technology and management from the BRE Innovation Park are included. Design and Management of Sustainable Built Environments will be of interest to urban and building designers, environmental engineers, and building performance assessors. It will be particularly useful as a reference book for undergraduate and postgraduate students in the built environment field.