How will you be working in the next 10 years?  

It’s incredible to believe that as recent as 10 years ago e-mail was still more of a youth fad than a credible business communication tool. Today, it’s impossible to imagine a working day that does not involve hours spent clearing one’s ‘outbox’  and deleting copious amounts of ‘spam’. Worse still, when the internet ‘goes down’, work practically stops. Such is the importance of this technology.

In 10 years too, the mobile phone has evolved from a two-tone colour display into a true personal digital assistant (PDA), sporting every function once only available on a PC. We plan our life, buy stocks, ‘text’ our friends, roam the net, listen to ‘podcasts’

and occasionally make phone calls. All this in the comfort of our favourite coffee shop, restaurant, or even sitting on our home toilet. Ten years ago, if you had a laptop you were a high-paid executive. Today, a laptop is part of the business uniform – for everyone. Also, a laptop is now just that, small enough to sit on your lap.

Ten years ago it doubled as gym membership. And in 10 years our business language has evolved. We now ‘hot desk’ at work, Skype with our colleagues and Google our clients. We use a 3G network to ‘tweet’ our movements, MSN our staff that we’ll be late into the office, while at the same time maintaining a personal profile on social media, such as Facebook, Linked In, and Xing. Never before have we faced such huge technology changes in such a short amount of time, and all this in only 10 years.

So where will the next 10 years take us?

So where will the next 10 years take us?

There’s little doubt that China is now dictating change regarding how we do business. This country, that we call home, has changed faster than any other country in known history. In the middle of this change is Andy Anderson, co-founder of China’s ‘ideas conference’,

Spark. Network HR invited Anderson to help manage a team of industry experts, using the Spark model of combining expertise from the fields of humanity, environment, business, and science. These experts were:

Humanity – Julia Worrell of Recruit Train Retain (RTR),

Environment – Stephen Protz of Arc8X,

Business – Sherry Wan of ?What If ! and Nadia Zhu of The Executive

Centre, and

Science – Gregory Perez of Microsoft

Anderson, trained in Edward de Bono’s ‘Six Thinking Hats’ brain storming principles, ran this ‘think tank’ through a brainstorm of

the ‘Office of the Future’. Here is what we uncovered.

1.The Commute

How does one get to the office of the future? Before the team even started discussing the main theme, they had to first suggest the ‘commute of the future’. Few workers today have the luxury of a job without a carbon dioxide generating commute. Some are lucky to be able to walk to work, but the vast majority of the workforce relies on either public transport or their own car. Two issues arose in our brainstorm from this fact - ‘Green’ and ‘Work/Life Balance’.

Travelling Green

Somewhere between 1999 and 2003 the world became environmentally conscious. Sure, Greenpeace, WWF and Al Gore have been warning us of our selfish habits years or even decades earlier, however, it wasn’t until recently that the environmental issue reached critical mass, and we, as a species, began to analyse our wasteful habits and their affect on the rest of the world. Today, being environmentally conscious is no longer the domain of artists and people with multicoloured hair. Businesses know that if they ‘go green’ there’s not only an instant cost saving in most cases, but also a powerful message to clients in the form of a positive Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) image which equates to profits down the line. For that reason, the office of the future will encourage a ‘green commute’, either via public transport or better, self propelled. Here’s how:

Subsidised housing – Live within a 3 kilometre distance from your office or factory and *bam!* you get a housing allowance. These staff are more likely to ride a bike to work, or even walk, helping both the world and their own health. Office managers know that a healthy team is a more efficient team and this increase in productivity will be returned to the staff in the form of a subsidy.

Company sponsored bicycles – If you have 100 staff in your office all riding to work, then give them a company sponsored bicycle, and turn them into moving billboards. Being Green can then become part of your marketing budget.

Segways – At 20 km/hr, the Segway (www.segway.com) is a fast and sweat-free alternative to the bicycle. However, at approximately 31,000 RMB it is no competition for the 300 RMB rusty ‘Forever’ bicycle. But you’d be cool!

Carpool – It’s been around since the 1970s in the USA, and now that more Chinese are driving it’s possible to carpool here. Don’t know how to carpool? Type ‘how to car pool’ into Google and you’ll get 47,000,000 sites to help you out.

Work/Life Balance

A prolonged commute not only increases our carbon footprint, but also eats into our personal time. And for those of you who are parents,maintaining a work/life balance is vital to a healthy family. Here’s what the Think Tank had to say:

Wifi-ed busses - Gregory Perez of Microsoft explains how his company’s HQ in Redmond, Washington provides WiFi on company provided shuttle busses, allowing staff to ‘virtually’ arrive earlier, and leave later, without impacting on their personal time. A true win-win!

Flexi-time – ‘Working 9 to 5, what a way to make a liv’n’, so why not allow flexible time in your office, where staff can choose their hours. After all, from 6 pm through to 9 am the next day, your office is essentially empty, and that’s wasted capacity. For staff with children, starting earlier or later can help with work/life balance, and can even increase productivity, given the reduced stress levels.

2. Offices of the future

Out with the cubicles

Cubicles are so 80s! They also reduce communication, encourage hermit-like behaviour and discourage healthy movement, resulting in sore backs and repetitive strain injury (RSI). Offices of the future will be cubicle free, and encourage staff to gather in social spaces, say, besides the tea room. The benefit of this, says Julia Worrell, is that it increases the speed of communication within organisations, builds team work and encourages physical exercise which reduces RSI and overall tiredness. Stephen Protz concurs that RSI and tiredness will be a thing of the past in the future. Stephen, a LEEDS certified architect says tables that rise from seated to standing level will feature in offices of the future.

“There’s no reason we have to work sitting down. A lot of creativity an occur when you are standing and able to move around. It’s also good exercise for your back, and keeps the blood flowing through your body, particularly to your brain,” says Protz. Specialty office equipment stores and even IKEA now sell desks that have legs that can be adjusted, to as high as 150 centimetres – the height of a bar table.

Beam me up Scotty!

Given the trend towards reducing costs and carbon footprint, it is clear that the office of the future will involve more telecommuting than ever before. A few years ago using teleconference or videoconference equipment was an expensive luxury, but as many offices have now globalised, the number of companies relying on this technology has ballooned. As discussed in an earlier issue of Network HR, research carried out by Nemertes says that 90% of the world’s employees do not even work in their firm’s HQ. So what of the challenges that staff will face in this new world? Julia Worrell says that interpersonal skills will be challenged as employees will no longer have as much face-to-face contact with their colleagues. Developing a rapport with other business units will also be much more difficult if business is always conducted over the phone, video conference machine, or over the internet. However, says Worrell, “kids of today spend so much time online interacting with one another, that maybe this is just a problem for the generation of workers today, and not for generation of workers in the near future.”

Nadia Zhu agrees that the trend towards teleconferencing has grown. “About 80% of our tenants are multinational companies, and one of the attractions of using a serviced office is that we have in-house teleconference facilities,” says Zhu. “We’ve invested heavily in this technology in the last 5 years, and it is paying off.”

Calling in sick, a thing of the past

How do you call in sick, if you’re already working from home? In a way, this fact can ensure that productivity isn’t slashed, when the common cold hits the traditional office. However, qualifying the employees that are right for self-managed, work-from-home style employment will be a key issue.

“It is about mutual trust, but the mutual trust will not come at the very beginning. The right candidate will be very independent, but should have a very good sense of time management, so mid to senior level staff may be more suitable compared with younger staff who may have some problems in these areas,” says Worrell. And with internet piped into every house these days, there is no technology limitation. Maybe the office of the future is actually the living room? Or the coffee shop.

Spend any time in a coffee shop these days and you’ll notice that half of the customers are making business deals in between slurping their latés. Whether at Starbucks, Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf, or SPR, as long as there is free WiFi, a power-plug a spare seat then youhave yourself a temporary and comfortable office – meaning that the office of the future isn’t even an office.

But that means that in the future a company cannot maintain the ‘no-MSN’ rule. Policies, put in place when MSN was just a tool to chat with friends, will be updated to highlight the change in attitudes people have in relation to IM, or Instant Messaging. Andy Anderson concurs. “There’s no way we could maintain such a small team across China, and arrange Spark09 with key people in three different cities, without using MSN Messenger. If your company blocks its use because it is worried about staff abusing the privilege and spending all day chatting to their friends, then you should re-assess your staffs’ engagement levels. If they have time to chat, then they aren’t being managed well. If you block MSN Messenger, then you should block SMSing too! Of course that kind of thinking just doesn’t make sense,” says Anderson. At the opposite end of the comfort level is the waiting halls of airports. Cold, hard seats, packed closely together, and with no access to power plugs. Not to worry. The office worker of the future understands that technology has a solution. Today, you can buy solar panel modules and backpacks that are powerful enough to charge even your laptop. For under 1000 RMB on Taobao.com youcan buy a solar-powered charger that can recharge a laptop continuously. For under 300 RMB, solar panels that recharge a mobile phone are available. Make sure you get a window seat atStarbucks though.

Office Transformers

However, if you have to leave the comfort of your own home or coffee shop for the traditional workplace, then how will the work space of the future differ from todays?

“All our rooms are multipurpose,” says Sherry Wan of ?What If!, “meaning that we can use a room for, say, conducting a press meeting, conducting a client brain storming session, or even having our own company function.”

Wan talks about the importance of offices to “capture the culture of the company”. The ?What If! offices fill public spaces, including the bathrooms, with personal poems, newspaper clippings and interesting photos from around Shanghai. This encourages ‘ownership’ by the staff, who consider their office more than just a place to earn a salary. Wan has also packed her office full of plants that recycle the air, and add to the relaxed environment.

However, you don’t have to be an innovative company with crazy furniture and an internal forest. Think outside the box. In the morning a space can be a training room, which then transforms into a small cafeteria, and then later again into a meeting room. Sliding walls, collapsible and moveable desks, and enough storage space will

double the usability of offices, and halve the utility costs. “Offices are essentially two-third’s inefficient,” says Protz. We pay for 24 hours, but we only use 8 hours. Making offices as small as possible ensures that this waste is minimised. And of course, the office of the future would be LEED certified!”

Protz is referring to the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Green Building Rating System, which was developed by the United State’s Green Building Council (USGBC) and which provides a extensive list of standards for environmentally sustainable construction. Since its inception in 1998, LEED has grown to encompass more than 14,000 projects in the United States, however, it is still in its infancy in China, with less than 20 certified buildings. Of course, in the future, that would change.

So what is the conclusion from this Think Tank? The office of the future is actually not in the future at all. Everything that was discussed is possible today. All it takes is a little ‘spark’ and imagination, and the willingness to change. With China developing at breathtaking speed, we’re confident that you’ll be working in an ‘office of the future’ sooner than you think.

The office worker of the future

Lewie Yao is an office worker of the future. He rides his bike to work each day, except when it rains. Then he takes the bus. Around-the-clock communication is part of his culture, and he updates his Facebook and Twitter accounts on the move (Ed: when they’re not blocked). Lewie also uses Google Maps alongside his GPS mounted on his bike when he visits his clients, ensuring that he arrives on time. Tonight he will be joining a networking event, which he found using Linked In, and confirmed via e-mail. Lewie can’t remember the last time he used a pen and paper because the internet is now seamless with every part of his life.