Workplace of 2025 Features 17/12/2019 What will the office of 2025 look like? Paul Milligan looks at changing attitudes and developing technology to predict how our work lives could change.Disruption might be a buzzword but that does not mean it is not having a discernible impact on different facets of our lives. Take the workplace for example. The majority of us still sit in the same building every day, at the same desk, answering phone calls and responding to emails like we always have. But this structure is changing. Players like Google and Microsoft have realised that the workplace can be optimised to improve the efficiency of workers and to act as a tool to attract and retain talent. The biggest change happening in offices around the world right now is flexibility. Earlier this year the International Workplace Group (IWG, formerly known as Regus) published a survey of more than 15,000 business people from over 80 countries. It found that over half of employees globally are working outside of their main office headquarters for at least 2.5 days a week. The demand for flexible working is also increasing year on year (up to 75% from 70% in 2017). Richard Morris, CEO of IWG UK, says: “Even though flexible working is a people-driven movement (for now), business leaders are fully aware flexible working has made their business more productive (85%), but a remarkable 67% think that flexibility can improve productivity by at least a fifth.” Technology plays a huge part in providing worker flexibility. We all have smartphones and laptops which can be used wherever we are, with a myriad of free or cheap software at our disposal. What happens when you don’t have a videoconferencing app on your phone? Well you can download one while you wait two minutes for your bus. However, changing the mindset of workers who have only known one way of working (you sit at a desk for eight hours, you go home) will take decades to change. In its most recent Workplace Survey, Regus found the biggest obstacle for businesses looking to implement a flexible workspace policy was “changing a long-standing, non-flexible working culture at a company”. One aspect which could change in the office of 2025 is how they are designed. Google is always held up as the example of new thinking when it comes to office design, with bean bags instead of chairs, slides and tennis tables etc. all installed to encourage free thinking and creativity. Microsoft is another that has played around with traditional office design and has recently built two treehouses for its staff to use as meeting rooms in its Seattle HQ, to benefit from “the impact of nature on creativity, focus, and happiness”. In the last three years we have seen the rise of huddle rooms, as end users prioritise less structure and more informality in their meeting spaces and there is reason to think this trend will continue well into 2025. Collaboration will continue to be a hot topic, and we have the potential to see some real movement by 2025 with regards to holographic videoconferencing systems that are only at prototype stage right now. While it may seem a little ‘Star Trek’, the ability for a video meeting to offer life-size participants could be a huge step up for a technology where eye-to-eye contact is still virtually impossible. The rise of huddle rooms is part of a larger movement called activity-based working (ABW) which gives workers an opportunity to choose a place in the office where it is most suitable for them to complete their work tasks. This makes perfect sense says Stijn Ooms, technology director, Crestron Europe: “The biggest architectural firms we talk to are already embracing it (ABW). We have done ABW for thousands of years in our homes, but we don’t do it in the office. We have a bed in the bedroom so we have a specific room to sleep in. We have a specific room to do our work, and one to relax in (our living room). You don’t put a dishwasher in your living room because that wouldn’t be logical, but we do these types of things in an enterprise. We put several functions together in one room.” The rise of more informal meeting spaces like huddle rooms is also a reaction to traditional open plan office design. What was radical then isn’t fit for purpose now. Professor Stephen Heppell, an expert on how to create flexible work and learning spaces says ‘open plan’ conjures up images of poor 1960s design, bad acoustics and uninspiring paintwork. He prefers design to provide ‘agile’ spaces to boost learning in line with modern realities. One huge factor in how the office of 2025 will look and feel will be millennials, lots of them. By 2020, millennials are expected to make up about 50% of the workforce, and by 2025 this number is projected to be 75%. They are, by all accounts, going to be the largest generation ever to enter the workforce. By contrast the generation before them, Gen X, represents only 16% of today’s workforce. Millennials have grown up with technology and are willing to live with their parents for longer to find a company they truly want to work for. This means companies must create an environment where people want to work, rather than out of financial necessity. This also comes back to flexible working and office design. Millennials want to work in a well-designed office, to work flexible hours and to have flexible technology. To them the culture of the workplace is as important as the salary and benefits. In order to attract the best staff, companies are going to have to respond to these needs, or risk losing or never hiring the most talented workers. We have heard all about BYOD but coming next is BYOA (Bring Your Own App), again driven by millennials whose working styles are individual and customised. How they work and collaborate is based on the ability to use their own preferred apps, not what has been approved by the IT dept. In 2025 staff will demand to use their own apps and devices at work, so it is in the interests of companies to design a workplace equipped to handle this. Knowing what products will be significant in 2025 is difficult to say with any certainty. In fact, one manufacturer we approached to take part in this piece declined because it didn’t want to reveal its roadmap to its competitors. So, all we can do is look at prototypes that could gain traction in the marketplace. One such concept which could see real use in the office of 2025 is something like Mt. Rogers from Microsoft. It is currently developing a VR headset which offers its users as many virtual monitors as they want. Imagine working on a huge excel spreadsheet and being able to see six, eight or 12 screens at once, without taking up any more desk space than you already do. The applications for this tech go right across the board from data analysts and designers to mobile workers who can’t access their whole office set-up. Voice control has entered our homes in the last 12 months but has not yet made any impact in our offices. Speaking to many of the big players in the control market at InfoComm 2019, I fully expect this to have changed by 2025. AI is undeniably going to impact on our working lives in 2025. The actual size of the impact is impossible to predict because the applications AI could benefit seem limitless. In the short term we will see AI’s impact in systems like Amazon’s Alexa for Business, which can automatically book you a meeting room. AI’s ability to guide, and adapt to, workers’ preferences for noise, layout, and workflow could be its greatest asset. The technology might eventually map a worker’s ideal work environment so well that it foresees problems before they arise, potentially saving huge amounts of time and money for HR managers/FM teams.