2020 and the Future of the Workplace

As it turns out, Arthur C Clarke and Stanley Kubrick were pretty good at predicting what the future might be like: personal voice assistants, space stations, tablet devices and video calls. Perhaps the timescale was 10–15 years behind schedule, but not too far off.

Our personal lives have been transformed since the ’90s and ’00s by technology and service experiences. But it might feel like our work lives haven’t kept up with that rate of change. Sure, we all have the latest laptops, tablets and flat screens instead of those huge beige desktop machines. But the majority of us still travel into work daily to sit at our desks and perform tasks by ourselves before passing them onto another person, or attend training courses to learn some new complex piece of software. When was the last time you had to take a course to learn how to use your new mobile phone?

Technology has the potential to make our working lives simpler, more connected and agile, but only if we use that technology for our advantage. We need to give ourselves a good work experience and not become slaves to technology for technology’s sake.

Of course, we’re now all considering what the workplace is going to look like in a post-Covid world. The cat’s out of the bag in terms of working from home, and when we do go into the office it won’t be back to the offices we knew. New ways of moving around buildings and interacting (or not interacting!) with other people are here to stay.

When talking about ‘The Modern Workplace’ what we’re really talking about is several threads of technology that come together in our working lives:

The Cloud

While many of us might still not be sure what the ‘cloud’ is or what it looks like, it’s widely viewed as the most important part of the modern workplace. Using programs that are delivered over the internet, the cloud, has enabled us to all work from home during the global lockdown, collaborating on the same documents with remote coworkers, and having your secure equipment updated with the latest software releases.

The key to using the cloud is having fast and reliable internet access. Today, so many homes and businesses have fast connections that we don’t depend on going into the office for internet. Add strong 4G connectivity on our mobile devices, and 5G on the horizon, and fast internet is becoming ubiquitous around the world within urban areas. It’s even an important factor when looking to move house – lights, sound speakers, thermostats and home security are now all connected to the cloud.

Flexible Workspaces

In the Post-Covid world the days of huge open plan floors in office buildings are long gone. But whatever its replacement looks like it will need to support the way projects, teams, departments and individuals want to work.

Office buildings should provide a variety of workspaces to meet how people will be working today. If a team does need to come together in physical space how’s that going to be arranged? How’s social distancing going to be maintained, and what impact and risk will it have on other people in the office? Does a team need to come together from different departments in order to deliver an urgent project? Do relaxed meeting spaces give a better working environment for remote workers to check in with team members? When collaborating with colleagues working from home or across time zones using video conferencing, are there quiet places to have video calls? Are there people with disabilities that need special lighting, noise control or fewer distractions for them to be more comfortable at work?

The workspace should be tailored to how your teams want to work and how to keep them safe, not imposing its own rigid structures. In the modern workplace, a variety of spaces are available, or can be created by moving partitions, desks, meeting rooms and spaces as needed.

Workspace Usage

Alongside flexible workspace, the modern office needs to allows companies to monitor how workspace is used so that it can be kept safe, performs better and is more efficient.

Building sensors can check area occupancy, if lighting and heating need to be turned on or off, if windows blinds need to be opened or closed, and if cleaning staff need to pay particular attention to an area. Sensors can help keep heating and lighting bills down by only providing heat and light in areas of the building being used.

Reporting from these sensors can indicate how people move around a building, perhaps identifying areas of the building that are underused or could be better used (or even removed altogether). Desk sensors can show which desks are most used, when they need to be cleaned, if someone rarely uses their desk or if rolling out hot-desking might help with building costs.

The same sensors can be used to report on available office space across companies. If one office needs a space for a short time, for example after a power outage or flood, spare desks can be flagged instantly. We could all have our own version of WeWork and Spaces.

The Digital Workplace

The concept of a workplace connected through digital platforms ties the whole modern workplace together, whether that workplace is in a building or at home. Technology working together can make everyone’s working day easier and free up time to be more creative. There isn’t one silver bullet solution that delivers all the benefits. But if departments can articulate their needs with their technology teams then digital platforms that work together can be rolled out.

People have begun to realise that they may have been wasting a large part of their day commuting to offices that they no longer need to go to. Instead of standing waiting for delayed or cancelled transport, can the time spent commuting be better used? Or can a business tell you whether it’s better for you to work from home if your commute is particularly bad today? Access to your company’s cloud applications means that you have access to the latest information, wherever you are.

When you do have to get to the office, can automation help you find which meeting rooms are clean and available to book right now? Perhaps you could ask a nearby Alexa, type a question to a bot on MS Teams, or check with a screen in reception that shows which rooms are currently available? That may save you 10 minutes of wandering around a big building looking for a clean and empty room, with a screen and a phone with enough seats and social distancing facilities for your meeting.

Collaboration platforms also help deliver a modern working environment. Working together on documents and presentations in the cloud, designing and coding in platforms in the cloud, moving out of email’s asynchronous communications into threaded chat applications (such as MS Teams). If we include clients in these collaborative work practices then rounds of feedback and opportunities for misunderstanding can be dramatically reduced.

Smart assistants, machine learning, data and behaviour analytics, chat bots and microapps should all work together to create moments of magic to help employees in as many situations as possible. Take these and put them into the corporate intranet and we can have a centralised portal to launch these capabilities.

The Future?

Workplace change is happening right now. Covid-19 has massively accelerated it and some organisations will be found wanting when people start to emerge from lockdown. More importantly for businesses is that employees are making decisions on who to work for based on the workplace experience policy. Some potential employees have quite advanced digital experience in retail or at home, and if a business wants to hire and work with the best, then it needs to already be on a digital workplace journey.

The journey might have to start small; perhaps digitising corporate policies, staff communications and the lunch menu, but it needs to become a part of any corporate strategy. How will the business meet the needs of future employees, and how will it interact with employees when and wherever they need?