Hello everybody,
A little side info; I'm an IT consultant in my daytime. At the moment I work for a client who's company is specialised in maintaining a 'house of the future', their core business is paid tours and renting out meeting rooms (prestige).
My managing boss there is preparing to give a presentation about the future trends of the office workspace. Although I'm more of a full stack developer, my job description with this particular client is more than just the coding, and I have also the task of helping them out with innovation. And I have been asked for help with this too.
I have done some research already on myself, but I was hoping to get some opinions and idea's from you as well. As well as trying to start a discussion about what could be and wat not in the near future.
My personal aim is more towards trend that are pretty close to us in the future, but I would love to hear more 'far away' ideas and theories as well. Anything from gadgets to trends to ways of working even.
The main trends that I have found, and are in many cases already partially in use in top companies, are these:
Flexible work
This is a trend that is already pretty popular in my home country and is still on the rise (although there has been public discussion about it as well). Internationalisation and globalisation all lead to a company that has an international workforce, across many timezones often. The need for very specific and specialist employees can also result in hiring people far away. These people don't always want to move homes for a job.
All of that leads to the desire for more flexible working hours and remote working. People want to be able to work from home and to optimalise their work-life balance.
Hot desking/ flex desking and modular desks
This is something that isn't entirely new, but for some reason isn't that big yet in my country (I live in Belgium Europe by the way). The idea of flex desks is simple and not new any more. Rather than that everybody has their own desk, there is an office pool of desks. These 'flex desks' can then be 'claimed' by employees as they come to work. This is usefull because if you offer flexible work hours and remote work options to your workforce, you won't need a desk for everybody. You'll be able to divide your workforce over a smaller amount of office space/ equipment this way.
A new trend with this is the idea of modular desks. This is something that I have seen is used in the more 'trendy' companies of today. They expand on the idea with making every desk a modular piece of furniture that is moveable AND can interlock with other modular desks. The power in this is that you can easily form the landscape of your office space. Employees can come in, take a flex desk spot and start their work. Then when they have to meet and discuss, they simply slide their desks in a bigger formation. Once they are done, they break up again.
One device / BYOD (Bring Your Own Device
BYOD has been in use for a few years already, but many say this will become even more popular. I think so too. Even though there are many security issues you'll need to work around, there are plenty of benefits.
But the main reason I think this will pick up is because of another trend I strongly believe in. That in the future, most employees will only have one device. A smartphone. ALready our smartphones are stronger, better and smarter than the computers of a decade or so ago. They are perfect computer units and capable of doing all our office work we now do on normal computers and laptops. I haven't found any good/ reliable options for IOS or Windows yet, but for Android there is Andromium already.
It is still in BETA but it turns your smartphone in a desktop environment. It is still your phone, but it emulates a familiar environment, which is often what scares away new people, to have to learn to work with a new environment. I've already tested Andromium with google docs, and it works really nice.
I can see this only going forward in the future and picking up momentum.
Now I would love to hear your opinions and idea's!
Submitted November 21, 2016 at 02:05PM by Parzival___ http://ift.tt/2fwAsqK via TikTokTikk
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