The Future of the Workplace – Part 1

In the first part of a three part series, we take an in depth look into the formation of a ‘modern’ workplace, how it has stood the test of time and whether we can scrap the old and confused ‘office’ altogether.

Sat in the open plan office where I work, at a faux pine desk, surrounded by 9 other identical workstations, I am sat in the office of 2012.

As well as the desks there are chairs, telephones, printers, computers, piles of paper, pots of pens and folders. Take a walk downstairs to the boardroom and you will see a wooden boardroom table, a paper flip board and a water cooler. I’m sure you can see similar sights in your office. 

If you zoom back 60 years or so, or for those of us that don’t have so many years of wisdom to fall back on, think of an episode of Mad Men.  You will notice not much has changed in the formation of a place of work. Sure, the phones now have screens and typewriters have lost out on desk real estate to an LCD screen or three, but the open plan environments,  large boardroom tables, private offices for executives and  many other concepts that make up a ‘place of work in the 50’s’ are still in place now. It’s just in the modern day office, a lot less ‘scotch’ is drunk.

The 1950’s office, look familiar?

I’m sure this is the case for most SME’s in the UK, workplaces have fallen in to a system that works, and although technological advances have dramatically changed the way  most  jobs  are  carried out, the role is being  carried out in the same old  environment that is proving to stand the test of time, until now. According to Lynda Gratton, Professor of Management Practice at London Business School, the world is currently changing at a pace faster than the industrial revolution (yet in the office of 2012 the average SME still spends £200 a month on paper, so much for the ‘paperless office’ envisioned early in the twentieth century) and workplaces will have to start being  flexible to these changes.

The workplace of the future will be born out of how facilities management professionals, HR professionals, company Directors, designers, architects and many others respond to a variety of factors that place our current idea of  an office space in a position of flux. These factors are pointed out by Matthew Gwyther, Editor of Management Today magazine as: ‘cost, carbon, technology, sustainability and culture.

workers less fixed to a physical location set a higher precedent on performance

So the first question to wrestle with is:  why can’t we just get rid of a communal office space all together?  Scrap it, everybody work from home. 40% of the average office is left vacant on a normal working day, and 40% of an average working day is unproductive anyway. In the office where I work I would say that 100% of employees could do their work from home or any space that has Wifi and phone signal. Meetings can be held via Skype, or face to face, at what Ray Oldenburg defines as ‘third space’ environments, such as coffee shops that blur lines between work and home. Call stats  and KPI’s can still be monitored in the same way.  It saves on cost and on carbon and reports show that it would result in a happier and more productive workforce. A report by tech company ‘Dell’ has found that workers less fixed to a physical location set a higher precedent on performance and feel that their ‘output’ is open to be more harshly judged. They can’t hide behind simple attendance figures and just by being seen putting in the hours sat behind a desk. Even more so than normal, it’s just about the numbers.

New administrative roles can be created from this flexible location work format, and they can be funded from the money saved by reducing the physical business space. ‘The Office of the Future Report’ lists new fangled  roles such as a ‘workflow controller;’ who would serve as a mission control to the roaming workforce, a ‘virtual meetings organiser;’ to schedule and maintain the technology enabling video conferencing, and ‘knowledge managers;’ who help enforce and maintain a consistent code of practice between the disjointed team of staff. A difficult task.

Hotdesking is Microsoft’s solution – Their Amsterdam facility has 1000 hot desks

But going back to the original five factors threatening the current workplace status quo  –  ‘cost, carbon, sustainability, technology and culture, with this proposed  ‘roaming workforce’ format 4 of the 5 factors are challenged;  except culture. No shared workspace means no coherent and consistent company culture. Even in the digital age, nothing can replace real interpersonal communication. A survey by unwork.com found that 71% employees  wouldn’t choose to start working from home for fear of isolation and lack of productivity due no office’ buzz’. Office banter serves a purpose after all, surprisingly  as the saviour of the conventional workplace. The same office ecosystem can not be reproduced virtually to the requirements of us social creatures.

This is where the current workplace conundrum comes to a head – people want to collaborate more but travel less, use current technology to lead a more flexible working lifestyle yet still feel the unification of ‘going to work’. The workplace as we know it will still survive but it will have to adapt, how it will adapt is what we will cover in the next blog of this series. So come back next time for all the things you wanted to read about in an article entitled ‘the workplace of the future’ with gadgets such as a robot that can fix your tie, and an app that can monitor your productivity and share the results with your boss and hologram desks. 2 out of three of those things are actually real. Find out which, in part two.