Capitalism and the old-world economy has taught us that business is about profits and shareholder value and making monies for the investors while the worker bees make enough monies to live the great American dream. If money and building good products and delivering professional service defines a successful business, then most business would qualify as being successful. Successful organizations create successful economies and life goes on as it has been for many years and for many decades in the Industrial economy of the past.
With the advent of the knowledge economy and the slide into the digital globalized world we live in, where technology is advancing exponentially and at rate that organisations and society are finding it hard pressed to catch up with the change, the advance in technology is redefining the way we live-play-work. The rate of change is so dizzy that it is spearheading the requirement for us to redesign our organisations; our infrastructure - our cities; our industrial-era organizations and even our institutions. According to a recent KPMG report, 67 percent of CEOs believe the next few years will be more critical for their industry than the previous 50 years.
The survival of the fittest is the greatest business challenge of today especially as organisations do NOT know who their competition is and when it will creep on you unawares disrupting the entire industry. While organisations are addressing these whirlwinds of challenges to the business and threatening the very survival of the business, machine learning has hit the vertical part of the exponential curve of technology and created a new set of challenges with technology moving into the workplace. The role of technology is expected to free the workplace from mundane task and amplify people, and imagination would empower employees to be innovators to deliver products or services that help clients achieve unprecedented results and benefits.
The next phase of work requires an intentional focus on the workplace and the employee’s workplace experience. The focus must shift to creating an UX in the workplace to create the optimum employee experience across technology, workspace, policy and management. Organisations may say they care about their staff, but caring isn’t the same as understanding the needs and designing a workplace that creates an unique experience.
A recent article: The future of work: CIOs must play a role in employee experience indicates:
“The future of work is not about the company or the leadership or the team, it is about your employees and what they do, say, feel, and tell you each workday. If you can’t tell how your processes and technology are making people feel, you’re probably doing it wrong.”
Workplaces that place staff at the center of their decision-making will have the best chance to close the gap between what their clients need and what their team members can produce an UX for their clients in delivering products and/ or services. Building employee-centric business will make resilient organisations that can effectively adapt to market and shareholder expectations in an increasing global business environment
“The design of the workplace and the workplace settings and its elements must reflect how 21st-century work happens”
It a reality the buildings that we go to every day has not changed much neither has the tools changed much. The language to describe workplace settings and elements have not changed much either. The workplaces around us are still designed based on the industrial-era organisations. The designers of the built environment pay lip service to incorporating digital communication requirements and thus fail in creating the workplace that merge digital communication patterns with the physical space.
“The design of the workplace of the future must reflect a highly networked, shared, multipurpose space that remove boundaries between companies and improve everyone’s performance.”
Thomas J. Allen in his seminal 1977 book, Managing the Flow of Technology, was the first to measure the strong negative correlation between physical distance and frequency of communication. The “Allen curve” estimates that we are four times as likely to communicate regularly with someone sitting six feet away from us as with someone 60 feet away, and that we almost never communicate with colleagues on separate floors or in separate buildings. Many thought with the advent of digital technology this study will not be relevant anymore but a recent study by Ben Waber, show that both face-to-face and digital communications follow the Allen curve and these studies proved that the Allen curve holds and that proximity is apparently becoming more important, as distance-shrinking technology accelerates. Out of sight, out of sync.
The workplace of the future will be highly networked, shared, multipurpose space - work hubs which can facilitate impromptu groups settings, providing the opportunity for teams to be formed more or less organically and then engage in ‘sprints’ towards tacking a goal. In the workplace of the future many of the established formalised structures of what is considered ‘work’ will be done away with through the imperative of necessity, instead in its place will be a far more fluid and generally smaller groups of people who “swarm” together literally as required to tackle problems, challenges or issues and then quickly move onto the next thing when they’re needed or wanted on.
The advent of AI into the work will relieve the teams of the future from mundane activities and formalized reporting structure which will get teams working in “intellectually creative” task in highly networked, shared, multipurpose space – work-hubs that push teams to generate a greater number of fresh ideas more quickly and often in a raw and less formalised state that deals with the situation and circumstance of the business in a digital world. The workplace of the future will comprise of various work settings that are user changeable from heads-down work to highly-collaborative settings or a combination of the two to suit the requirements of the team for an assignment or a challenge of the day or the hour.
Organisations and designers of the built environment must realise that:
“The workplace is no more just physical space it is the space we are digitally communicating and interacting through technology and has further expanded into the virtual environment of the work, the area of artificial intelligence. It has become untethered”
To achieve the ‘Untethered Workplace”, we must move away from the workplace design focused on efficiency to workplace design focused on effectiveness and recognize workplace settings & elements are not just an amortized asset but a strategic tool for growth and are elements that build human-centered workplaces. This can be achieved only when organisations realise that workplace, services and settings are extensions and components of the work and the workplace settings and workplace elements must interact dynamically to the work process and the habits and practises of the team.
We should design the workplace of the future ground up - start from scratch – start from a clean sheet, developing new skills and tools to design the workplace. The vocabulary to describe the workplace must change to reflect the change of the workplace being untethered. We need to design our building and workplace as a weave; an urban fabric of spaces, a collection of buildings with a variety of “Fractal” work settings changeable by the user and user controlled. Spaces that will allow for increase in the probability of interactions and quick assembly of team that lead to innovation and productivity to quickly react to market demands and expectations for products and services in the digital era.
Many organisations think their workforces are already engaged, yet studies have shown that many are not. The engagement will come with an UX in the workplace to create the optimum employee experience across technology, workspace, policy and management.
The future designers of the workplace will not be the present “interior designers”. The future of the workplace of the future – the untethered workplace will be a “Workplace Experience Practitioner” who understand Anthropology; Human Behavior and Talent management; Wellness; Data mining and AI; Digital Transformation; Disruption & Innovation Technology implementation; Business of the Business and speak and live the language of the business and understand the ebbs and flows that business goes though in the volatile digital business environment of the future.
The workplace of the future will have an UX practitioner who will design spaces that are fractals - a repeating setting - spaces with self-similarity – where in the details of a fractal, you can see a replica of the whole - self-like the original, just at a smaller scale.
Are we up to this challenge? Are we the present designers; engineers and constructors and maintainers of the built environment deliver the workplace of the future- the untethered workplace. I would like to hear from you.