Jun 26 2018
A cross-party Parliamentary group has set out proposals for a New Homes Ombudsman to help provide better redress for dissatisfied home buyers. Poor experiences with housebuilders are common factor in many people’s perception of the construction industry; promoting better behaviours in the housebuilding sector would therefore contribute to improving the image of construction. New Homes …
Jun 13 2018
The inquiry into the collapse of Carillion has highlighted the pivotal roles played by company directors. By focusing on short-term financial goals rather than the long-term interests of the company’s stakeholders, Carillion’s board fatally undermined the business’s resilience, ruined their own reputations, and reinforced popular stereotypes of the construction and services sectors as outdated and …
Sep 22 2015
For my friend Leonie Thomas, I recently wrote a guest blog focusing, yet again, on “The image of construction”. My starting point was the the merger of the UK Contractors Group and the National Specialist Contractors Council to form Build UK, which launched on 1 September with a five-point action plan for the UK construction …
Jan 14 2015
As a member of the CIPR’s social media panel, I volunteered last year to coordinate production of a guide on “Mobile and public relations“. After persuading a few others to contribute, I wrote about half of the document, which was published on the CIPR website in November, and launched via a Tweetchat the following day. (I …
Nov 25 2014
“Leaders in construction who are either ignorant of or scornful of social media are failing the younger generation.” This is an updated and expanded version of a post – Could an app improve the image of construction? – which first appeared on my ExtranetEvolution.com blog last week. The recent Constructing Excellence 2014 national members convention attracted about …
Jun 14 2013
I have been involved with the UK’s Constructing Excellence movement for well over a decade (before Constructing Excellence was formed in 2003, I was involved in the work of several of its forerunners including the Construction Best Practice Programme, the IT Construction Best Practice Progamme, the Design Build Foundation, the Reading Construction Forum and Movement …
Apr 19 2011
As Twitter usage has grown, people have tried to quantify how influential some tweeters are, and I have started to incorporate two of the more commonly used tools, Klout and PeerIndex, into my work. Klout’s strapline is “The standard for online influence“, while PeerIndex aims to help you “understand your social capital“. The exact workings of …
Mar 31 2011
It says something about the construction industry that, given options to focus on ethics or on social media, there was more take-up for a forum on social media, but at least it meant that we had a good turn-out for Constructing Excellence‘s first social media forum, held at Arup’s Fitzroy Street offices in London yesterday. …
Jan 25 2011
Yesterday, I talked about construction industry use of social media to the Institute of Directors Built Environment Discussion Group’s monthly breakfast meeting in Maidstone, Kent.* As with other professional audiences I’ve spoken to recently, there was almost universal adoption of LinkedIn, more than half of those present had a Facebook profile, and just under half …
