The Changing Nature of Work
For over one hundred and twenty years our personal lives and our workplace - the office - have been dominated by fixed technology, from the Remington Typewriter and Bell’s telephone in the 1880s to IBM’s PC in the 1980s, there has always been heavy equipment on desks that has tethered the office worker. But you can look further back into the mid-1800s at a pre-IT era when the workplace had no technology at all. Clerks with pens at simple desks or benches were the predominant model. And we believe that we are heading ‘back’ to an under-engineered, technologically sparse workplace environment, at least in the eyes of the user or occupant. As the Financial Times stated: “Fifty years ago computers were absent from office life… In 50 years time things will be much the same. There will be no machines on our desktops.”
Heavy desktop equipment has for a century tied the worker to his or her desk. But this approach to workplace technology is increasingly redundant. People no longer sit behind desks. In fact research shows that the majority of desks in an average office are empty at any one point in time. Having a telephone extension number that represents a piece of furniture or a room is archaic in an age of fast communications.
Now, with the introduction of mobile, portable technology and the ability to communicate across distance at little or no cost, many of the fundamental rules of office life will be challenged. There is something significant happening to the nature of work, and the places created to house it in the 21st Century.
The 21st Century Office
In my book, The 21st Century Office (co-authored with Jeremy Myerson) we recognised four key trends for the workplace in the 21st Century: narrative, nodal, neighbourly and nomadic. These four N’s define the future workplace and they represent a radical departure from the containers that we have created for work in the past decades. There is no doubt that people will be working in different ways and in different physical environments, driven by changing management style and corporate culture, socioeconomic factors and new technology.
Four of the most basic features of the 20th century office – its visual uniformity and banality, operational inflexibility, lack of human interaction and place-dependency – are now being subjected to a wide-ranging review. The narrative office, for example, represents a powerful reaction against the anonymous-looking, automated, over-engineered workplaces of the past 40 years. Nodal workplaces are responses to the inflexible, isolating culture of the 20th century headquarters, populated by sedentary workforces unable to share ideas with colleagues or clients on account of a status-driven, departmental, static division of space.
The neighbourly office is a vibrant reaction against the command-and-control legacy of the 20th century, which created suspicion and hostility between supervisors and staff and undermined attempts to create social communities of purpose in the workplace. The earliest offices forbade conversation and frowned upon social contact, enshrining the work ethic in a dull, monotonous interior aesthetic.
Nomadic offices represent the logical conclusion of a technology-driven trend to liberate work from the workplace. For most of the 20th century, the office was fixed in time, place and space. People commuted to and from office buildings that were located in the urban ‘business district’. The only way of communicating with a company was by physically connecting to its buildings.
Now people can work anywhere, they are free to choose and the corporate ‘address’ no longer represents bricks and mortar. IP Telephony, perhaps the most disruptive technology of this decade, will lead this redefinition of work. It will be reinforced by a new breed of mobile device that allows work to take place from anywhere. Phones become just another piece of software, available from any networked ‘on line’ device. And these so-called ‘softphones’ will drive the emergence of new workstyles as locations become blurred.
Future mobile internet devices (MIDs) will also accelerate the trend of mobility, both inside and outside buildings, and lead to new ways of using space; more collaborative and project areas, fewer allocated desks and a greater proportion of social or public space will become the norm.
Electronic document management systems, together with intelligent displays and interactive boards will allow greater use of digital media, and with the growth of extranets and employee portals, these will be accessible from anywhere.
Mobility, IP telephony, call centres, off shoring, email and the internet have changed the rules as the ‘death of distance’ allows a reappraisal of where work takes place in the 21st century. This is a fundamental and psychological change to the way business is done and, in the future, the places we will work.
The Future
Just as work is being transformed by the internet, so will property continue to be challenged by new technologies.
And what is clear is that it is not what we believe or what is discussed today in the board room, but how we meet the expectations of an increasingly net savvy generation who have grown up with the internet, with mobile devices and with smart boards in the classroom and new ways to communicate in the high street. To attract them as employees in the ‘war for talent’ will require new thinking – to attract and then retain them as customers will require lateral thinking altogether.
The internet has only just begun its transformational effect on the economics of the developed world. Yet in the developing world, signs are that they will also reap the benefits of emerging technology. A sub-$100 notebook is promised by MIT in the States, and WiMAX could bring the cheap, ubiquitous internet coverage that is cost prohibitive in a cabled world. A disenfranchised population may yet bridge the digital divide.
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Philip Ross is CEO of Cordless Group and editor of UNWIRED. He is a specialist in workplace and technology futures.
philip@cordless.co.uk
The 21st Century Office and Space to Work, both by Jeremy Myerson and Philip Ross, are published by Laurence King in the UK and are available in English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Korean and Chinese editions.
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