Insights

Working from home seems to be here to stay: a growing number of companies are closing down their offices, allowing their employees to work from home. A hybrid office environment, combining working from home and at the office, is best designed based on the needs of the user.

Investors are currently obliged to take ESG (Environment, Social, Governance) issues into consideration as part of their fiduciary duty. As such, it becomes increasingly important to identify sustainable investments that hold financial value as well. A sector where this is especially underdeveloped is real estate. This has a lot to do with the obfuscated conceptualization of ESG. This article identifies key gaps in literature and practice, and provides a framework to further the understanding of how ESG factors can add societal and financial value in the real estate sector.

Belgium is heading for half a million long-term sick people (DS Jan. 29, 2021). For one in three, the cause is mental health problems, including burnout. Of those who return to work, 25% have a relapse. No less than 50% fear relapse. Those are tough numbers. Antwerp Management School set out to investigate and returned with four levers for successful work resumption after burnout.

There is a lot going on in the literature around 21st century skills. Rightfully so, because in our VUCA world, diplomas are expiring faster and faster. Employees can no longer manage with 'traditional' competencies. For example, now they also need to be problem solvers and cope with change. COVID-19 has only sharpened the need for such competencies for the future.

Over the last seven years, our role as Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) has drastically changed. According to our Microsoft Outlook Analytics client, more than fifty percent of our mail is spam from cyber security suppliers, trying to grab our attention by selling fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD). Over the last decade, we’ve seen this industry explode with self-proclaimed “cyber pros” and fuzzy vendors in the cyber domain. Is this because industry strategy agencies like IDC, Gartner, and Forrester predict that security spending keeps on increasing? Or is it because the cyber consumer just follows the herd?
The latest figures indicate that an astonishing 22% of the IT budget is allocated to cyber and information security. Our own experience is that dialogues with C-level execs nowadays ask: Are we doing the right stuff, and are we doing this stuff right? How do we measure and monitor our return on security investments (ROSI)? And, where do we get the ‘biggest bang for the buck’. It’s a dialogue that very few suppliers actively participate in, while interacting with their CISO customers.

Although information security has a long history, it wasn’t really top of mind of senior management, board or other employees until late 2010. A “security professional” became a real job and market demand has grown ever since. Awareness about security risks increased significantly. The thriving forces for this were major security breaches such as Snowden, NotPetja and WannaCry shocking the world, but also regulators demanding companies to protect their critical assets, including non-tangible ones such as data. As a result of this, we can now state it has the board's attention by default.

What happens in the brains of successful and less successful leaders? Steven Poelmans, professor of neuroscience & strategic leadership, measures their brain activity and combines the results with feedback from observers in real-life and emotionally challenging business situations. This shows that successful leaders can very quickly switch between diametrically opposed leadership styles. This article was written by Hilde Vereecken and appeared in HR.Square.

How do you create a fast growing market with global potential around a promising technology? That is the ambition of a new study carried out by AMS, on behalf of the Port of Antwerp. In this report, you can find our conclusions and recommendations.

How and why do employees succeed in transferring learned social skills (soft skills) from training to the workplace? The results of this study are based on a survey of 50 cases.