Work Anywhere


Monday, November 19, 2007


I have seen the debates and predictions over the last decade about how people are going to work out of their home, how people are going to "hotel" in spaces their company provides or rent-an-office, how cubes will go away and offices will be totally open. Well, it appears some of the predictions are sort of true and some are off the mark.

The fact is that people are working in their own office space less but when they are not working in their "office" they are working everywhere! Work is becoming mobile, but the need for an office space still exists. I think some need for people to interact in a unified space is here to stay - we are simply social creatures stimulated by the contact with each other and when contact decreases too much, it appears organizational performance suffers.

When not tethered to our office space however, technology is enabling us to go most anywhere and do work - particularly phone calls, email and other computing work. The internet is now pretty much ubiquitous, so a laptop, a smart phone and voila, you can be at work. This mobility is great but we do not yet know its overall effect on productivity.

I do think the notion of mobility applies also within the office walls. People, when not tied to their own desk/chair, are working more and more all around the office in all sorts of spaces - if the spaces are available. One of our missions at MBI is to determine the amount of mobility in an organization's culture and work process then provide the right spaces and tools to support that work and predict how much it will change in the future. With technology tools now at the center of many work processes, we will certainly see technology adapting to our ways of working instead of us adapting to technology limitations - we will see those changes as technology continues to advance.


posted by Scott Messmore @ Monday, November 19, 2007   0 comments