The Modern Office in 201x – Will Your Business Be Future Proof?

If we can trust everything we’ve ever been told in movies, and I’m pretty sure we can, this next decade should be abundant with mind-bending technology. Back to the Future Part II taught us that flying cars that run on garbage could be here as soon as 2015 and it looks as though Richard Branson will ensure space travel is available well.. to those of us willing to part with a few hundred thousand dollars per journey. Yes, the future is  here and now that we’ve traded in our pocket calculators for iPhones, our floppy disks for flash memory and our thesauruses for Google.. what will the modern office look like in the decade to come, and, how will our work lives and interactions change as a result?

To survive the next decade, many businesses will need to stop seeing the office as four-walled technology pit stops but rather, environments that to a larger extent will be free of conventional terminals and keyboards leaving them with more time, space and energy to spend with customers.

Even more mobile.. The 80′s and 90′s saw the popularisation of the mobile phone and the naughties saw the mobile phone evolve to, an arguable term “smartphones” such as Blackberries, Windows Mobile and now the iPhone – people are coming to an inevitable realisation that being chained to your email when you’re out and about is quite possibly a good deal better than being chained to your email at your desk.

In fact, it was only the other day that it occurred to me after I had shoveled down my breakfast, thrown my still half asleep, bewildered 2 year old in the car to take him to day care and sat in traffic for an hour that the reason I like to get to work early is to ensure I’m up to speed on my emails.. and,  it suddenly dawned on me between stop-starts on Victoria Rd that I’d already done that before I got out of bed.  Yes I know.. there’s the whole work/life/balance thing but you must admit it’s tempting to forgo some life in return for a later commute to work minus the traffic jam.

Over the next decade we can expect businesses to leverage this by providing their employees access to more and more work content from outside the office. Tablet computers which have been around for some years but never really gathered momentum until now with the iPad are fast becoming the quo. Younger generations entering the workforce today will not only expect mobile access to be built into their role – they’ll want it delivered on the same devices that they’re now growing up with. This includes traditional mobile devices but to take it a step further, the numerous other devices that are now web enabled such as televisions and gaming consoles. The office of the decade ahead and beyond, doesn’t have four walls anymore.

More Wiggle Room In the late 19th century when electricity went from “hey wouldn’t it be cool if we had that at work..” to “we’re going to need to get some of this electricity stuff before we get killed by our juiced up competitors” companies didn’t have the on-demand power that we expect today in our own offices. So far removed from being able to depend on having energy in your factory, office or retail shop that many large companies had their own generators and an internal team who specialised in making sure the generator was running adequately and performing at its best. It was some years before companies began to outsource their energy to other companies or be put “on the grid”. Now, I’m sure that 19th century energy outsourcing came with its own fair share of challenges, but needless to say this must have been a great weight lifted off these organisations when they could focus their minds on their industry and the job at hand. Fortunately for them, they wouldn’t have to deal with IT issues for at least another 70 years.

Fast forward 100 years or so and we are now seeing a similar situation in corporate IT. Companies who depend on technology have implemented their own servers, complex network infrastructure and telephony systems to run their business because they’ve had to do this to survive and compete.  Sounds like history is repeating itself. But now we’re starting to see the formation of a new grid. The “cloud” offers businesses an opportunity to begin outsourcing all or part of their IT – leaving just an Internet connection and whatever modern devices are required for their staff to do their work. Benefits of the cloud are vast, ranging from the ability to scale up and scale down without the need to purchase infrastructure, ability to tap into new technologies and sign up for services based on accessibility and relevance to your own company. All of that extra space not being used up by servers can make room for more people or maybe just some modern art – perhaps a life size statue of Benjamin Franklin where your server used to be to remind you of the energy challenges of the late 19th century.

Fewer People-Blockers It fascinates me to walk into a retail outlet, showroom or virtually any point of sale type scenario only to be confronted by a large 3-4 foot high desk with the head of my sales-person-to-be bobbing over the top to greet me. If I’m really lucky I get to awkwardly lean over the counter and try to catch a glimpse of what’s on the screen as he or she bangs away at his or her keyboard searching through products or whatever it is they’re doing back there. I wonder if in 2050, other than flying around in our cars, shuttling regularly to Mars for holidays and telepathically transporting ourselves across the planet we’ll look back at these quaint customer service scenario’s and think about just how far we’ve come since we removed these “people-blockers”.

Modern technology suggests we can do away with the desk in a point of sale scenario. Not convinced? I encourage you to take a journey to the Apple Store in your nearest major city location. Not only are we seeing sales people actually physically greet customers, but they’re interacting.. like humans.. by physically demonstrating, asking questions, committing to the sale and even emailing you your invoice without the rigmarole of the standard fight with the printer and the impersonal desk/counter obstruction.

Let’s take it a step further. Now, not only do we have wireless technology which disconnects our IT from the physical plug in the wall but we actually have truly mobile devices such as the iPad and the numerous other devices bound to hit us over the coming years that will allow you to access whatever your point of sale software might be without sitting in front of an ancient desktop behind an even more archaic front-counter-type-scenario. Sure, many line of business software applications haven’t caught up yet but businesses will (and should) demand they do so that they can actually interact directly with their customers. 

The modern office has fewer people-blockers and more interaction with customers and suppliers. Handheld devices negate the need to hide behind a screen.

Office Space With the above in mind.. and with the exception of those out there who run retail showrooms and places where people need to touch and feel your product.. the question over the next decade and certainly many decades to come will be – do you need an office at all? Recently I had a discussion with an entrepreneur who had run out of office space due to the growth of his company. They had set up meetings, put together a budget, figured out exactly where they wanted their new office to be and were just about to make a real estate agent very happen when somebody had a novel idea: Why do the team members who predominantly answer phones taking sales calls, providing technical support and processing admin work need to be in the office? That profound question turned into a sensible answer – the company completely revamped their technology strategy and with the couple of million saved on purchasing new premises they now have virtually their entire team working remotely with the use of Hosted PABX (that’s like Skype but with real telephones and handsets that connect to a virtual phone system over the Internet), Remote Desktop (that’s how you connect to resources at work from a laptop or home computer) and performance metrics using their CRM software so they can be sure that the team members at home are just as productive as the ones at work.

In the future/modern office will you need office space or will you need as much office space as you might have in previous decades?  Time will tell.

It’s Not Easy Being Green This one is on mine, and I daresay many others wish lists because now more than ever we have the ability to use technology to have a greener office.

We have the capability to scan, store, email, digitally sign and archive online all of our documents so we should see less and less printing in the modern office of the coming decade. Most mainstream office printers come with amazing scan-to-email or scan to a folder on the network somewhere (even scan to the cloud is possible) which should reduce or eliminate the need for photocopying. Most documents are accepted in electronic format today and there is little, if any, need to print out an email. Couple this with the rise of mobile devices and tablet type machines and you can see where paper could finally play second fiddle to the screen.

Another important shift is the use of less energy in the office by outsourcing IT to a data centre that also has a green focus. Now that new technologies such as virtualisation are in full swing means where one might have needed lots of servers to run their business, they can now run off a single server which utilises this green technology. The modern office, we hope, uses less energy, little to no paper and avoids printing at all costs.

 Over the coming decade, whether you’re first in line to buy the FlyingCar v1, or moseying on down to your local Virgin Shuttle Station to take a short holiday to Mars – we hope your future is bright, your work is free of conventional technology clutter and your energy is well spent.

Enjoy your new modern office.