The frightening thing is that increasingly, the answer is
becoming ‘no.’ With more and more people working from home each year, taking
flex hours and even basing out of a home office… there may very soon be a day when
the answer to this question is no.
I recently read an article through CNN that talked about the office of tomorrow. It was a
very visual piece that showed 3D renderings of an office in 2022. Common place where items such as hologram
tables, 3-D printers and even office windows which doubled as computer screens
(though this one may be a lot closer than 10 years away). The article showed what
kind of technologies are coming up the pipelines and set to be in place in the
business world in 10 years. However, even this article acknowledges that there
is a massive assumption precluding the entire piece: that you will even be
working in an office in 10 years.
In my recent job hunt, I have already stumbled across
full-time positions that list their location as “virtual.” These are not simply
jobs where flex time or working from home is permitted, or even jobs based in a
city where positions such as sales and support are mostly on the road.
Increasingly, coders, consultants, writers, graphic designers and anyone else
who doesn’t really need a place to call ‘work’ are being hired from locations
across the globe. Particularly in cases where the majority of an employee’s
work is done on the computer, meetings are held over Skype and documents are
shared through the cloud, does it really make a difference if your co-worker is
down the hall or across the globe?
Instead, what I would really wish to have seen out of the
CNN article is forecast technologies to support the increasing trend of home
workers. The snowballing power of mobile technology is encouraging (and I
always loved the quote about Nasa and Angry Birds), however where will this technology lead us in 10 years? Will
desks be obsolete? Will we see living spaces better designed to handle work
flow? Will we see home innovations that
are able to replicate more of the functions of the office such as white
boarding, co-worker socializing, getting fired (though George Clooney may have
already proved that one a bad idea) and even frowned up on business activities
such as cheating on your partner with your secretary.
Are we moving towards an era where those massive, brilliant
buildings that scatter and inspire our cityscapes become obsolete?
It seems there will always be an argument for some form of
in-person collaboration. A few years ago, I read the book Blind Faith by Ben Elton.
While the book was nothing more than a futuristic, sexual-tech-theology
adaptation of Orwell’s 1984 (yes, I’m
equally confused by my own description), it
did raise a few interesting points. The book was set in an oppressive future
where digital sharing of information had become all-encompassing and
individuals could no longer have independent secrets or personal lives. With
the pervasiveness of the online life, everyone with an office job worked from
home. However, due to growing social dysfunction, fizzy coffs (visits to physical
offices) were made mandatory to encourage people to get out of the house and
interact in a face-to-face manner.
So perhaps the question shouldn’t be, ‘do I have to go to
work today?’ Instead, we should be
asking what is the right balance of office work, work from home and travel.
Also, if I do end up working entirely from home, how can I be expected to
riddle my coworkers with nerf darts?
