How tomorrow's workplace will physically exist everywhere
There is much talk of work and productivity these days. I suppose what has always really mattered about work is the ‘what’ and the ‘when’, that is, getting the job done, outcomes achieved by the stated deadline.
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Tomorrow’s workplace
The measure of our commercial success, as individuals and as nations, is assessed by quantitative output. The ‘how’ is important too. Work should be ideally carried out well and quickly if possible, in that it relates to our increasingly high expectations and performance.
But what about the ‘where’? Where does the ‘where’ sit in our productive efforts?
When the built environment is designed to support workflow for optimum productive output we recognise right away its value as a business tool. In a strictly mechanistic organisational model of production, factories, for example, represent the kind of places where work efficiently occurs within a spatial layout that matches a given, rigorously planned time-motion analysis.
These are coincidentally the environments that we sometimes associate with workers’ alienation and exploitation. That was yesterday’s workplace, deemed good when numerically correct and exact, be it a call centre or a food production unit.
Robots will work in uninterruptedly inhumane conditions
Today’s place of work aims to stir our emotions, appealing to our senses by engineering an experience designed to affect our behaviour and willingness to go beyond the mechanistic model of the past.
It is a magical kind of workplace where everything is possible if you really want it to happen. Behavioural science and occupational psychology have framed the parameters against which such an environment can be shaped to meet our preferences, to collect our emoticons and to align with our personal brand.
"Today’s place of work aims to stir our emotions, appealing to our senses by engineering an experience designed to affect our behaviour"
Hence, the cornucopia of design goodies, such as curly slides, faux-leather beanbags, hat-shaped pendants and lawn-tufted carpets, adorning our workplace, making it authentically the place where we are truly motivated.
As in Blade Runner, (Ridley Scott 1982), tomorrow’s workplace contains elements of yesterday and today but is different. There will be efficiency; the senses will be stimulated however the mechanistic or brand model of production will be gone.
This increasingly is, is about to be and will soon be a fully digital workplace, as far humans are concerned. Robots will work in uninterruptedly inhumane conditions (that’s alright; they don’t mind) in hermetically sealed unmanned warehouses with the human race interfacing with production to provide for its needs in a non-linear manner, unrestrained by the limits of human capacity or by the need for recovery time.
This will indeed be a continuum of space and time where all that can be thought, individually or collectively, can be communicated and created. Our intrinsically human creative skills will come to the fore.
This workplace will exist primarily digitally as an operating system (OS). Physically it will exists everywhere, making the notion of “going to work” obsolete.
Tomorrow’s workplace is polymorphic; it is no longer about the ‘where’ or the ‘when’ but enables the ‘how’, beyond the limits of our possibilities.
Giuseppe Boscherini is a Partner in Knight Frank's EMA Strategic Consulting team.
Knight Frank's EMEA Strategic Consulting team works with large and small business helping them to align property to business goals and objectives and, in turn, making them more competitive and fast moving.