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With CFOs looking to trim down real estate costs, data centers may be the de facto gravitational center of organizations in terms of square footage (aside from manufacturing plants, that is). Companies may see a benefit in using short-term office space to handle planned surges in "on site" work, as they sublet out sections of their own offices or escape from leases in expensive office towers.
The strength of the office is collaboration, so offices will have to become collaboration-centric. That doesn't mean the open-plan office fad will continue, however. What it means is that technology is going to have to make the office more of a hub for remote collaboration—more video, more screen sharing, and more virtualization of physical collaboration tools like whiteboards. Conference rooms are going to have fewer chairs and more screens, with face-to-face collaboration via video becoming the de-facto way to do meetings.
Work that can only be done in the office—whether it be due to compliance issues, the computing or bandwidth required to do it, or the need for interaction with expensive physical objects—will also have to leverage collaboration with people who can't be there to put hands on. Tasks like rapid prototyping and product engineering and lab work, for example, require interaction with expensive gear that can't be dropped into a virtual collaboration space (yet) but can benefit from visiting and remote collaborators.
Can a mix of VR/AR substitute for a physical office for the purposes of collaboration?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by krishnoid on Saturday August 22 2020, @06:49AM (6 children)
What fraction of companies actively encourage a spirit of collaboration in the first place, over "get your own job done and let people around you struggle for hours on something you could fix in 5 minutes"?
If work environments didn't punish helpful people for missing metrics [notalwaysright.com] and promoted vigilance against silos, maybe "collaboration" tools would start evolving.
Eh, I bet having grown up with Google Docs/Sheets, the millennials will pick up this cause after they realize that the old crusties who consider information as something to be exchanged rather than as a centralized pool of contributions, or who even try to keep information from others, are a relic from an era of a non-networked world. In that regard, people who really internalize collaboration tools may start to transform the workplace into something less recognizable as an analog of the old turf-based and hierarchically-structured office.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by zocalo on Saturday August 22 2020, @09:39AM (2 children)
My office was due a refurb anyway this year, which was originally going to be exactly what you might expect; smaller desks to allow for more staff in the same floorspace, some lipservice to breakout areas, etc., more hot desking... Over the last few months we've had a bunch of staff surveys on how we want to work post-Covid and that has gone out of the window. Currently, we're still looking at hot-desking but much more ad-hoc; the focus is 100% on a place to get together and colloborate in person when staff feel that is the best way to tackle a problem, and our default position has shifted massively towards home-working and office/client visits as required as the new norm. Questions along the lines "what if 'home' is in another country?" are probably just a matter of time (seriously considering it myself). We're actually looking at reducing our office space by 50%, which is a *huge* cost saving given industry preference is towards prime downtown office space.
We're definitely not alone in this. Many of our clients are taking a similar tack, and there's a lot of information sharing about what works and what does not, establishing common collaborative tool platforms, and the like going on. It might be the travel/tourism and hospitality trades that are suffering now, but when this shakes out I suspect it's going to be inner city landlords (office *and* residential) and associated support services like catering, cleaning, and other such facilities - that are going to be next in line to suffer some serious economic pain. It's certainly interesting times, but it's not going to be pretty if you're on the wrong side of the coin when it comes down.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
(Score: 3, Insightful) by VLM on Saturday August 22 2020, @02:26PM (1 child)
Looking at who those people are, I don't think that'll be permitted.
My gut level guess is we're about to see an explosion in what amounts to convention centers. So you'll work at home "most of the time" but literally every month you'll have a couple days in a convention center like environment of meetings and group work. Nobody is going to want or need office space in the burbs because everybody is going to be at the new convention centers downtown once a month or one week per quarter or whatever. A lot of downtown office and apartment buildings will get remodeled into conference center hotels and banquet halls. Given that you only work downtown one week per quarter I suspect that office space in the burbs and rural areas is about to get remodeled into apartment buildings when the urbanites move out.
Don't forget BLM, the gift that keeps on giving. Once the city is burned down by terrorists, the rebuild with government disaster funds will make things easy and profitable.
(Score: 3, Informative) by krishnoid on Saturday August 22 2020, @07:58PM
BLM and terrorists, really? Amateurs. You want the gift that gives generously every year like Christmas in July [nasa.gov], leave some methane and CO2 out on the table tonight for global warming.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Thexalon on Saturday August 22 2020, @02:49PM
I have a simple theory about this. Offices can have a spirit of collaboration if at least one of the following are true:
1. The organization has a real risk of failure, so a failure to collaborate could easily result in everybody losing their jobs.
2. The pay and options structure is such that there is greater individual incentive to collaborate effectively than there is to undermine your coworkers.
Without at least one of those factors, a lot of what looks like collaboration is actually an ongoing effort on everybody's part to pin the blame on inevitable delays and/or failures on other people (whether or not the scapegoat was in fact the problem is irrelevant to this process), combined with an ongoing effort on everybody's part to claim credit for any successes that may occur (whether or not the person claiming credit actually did anything on the project).
An example: Any organization that demands that middle managers rate some percentage of their team as underperforming in some sort of annual review system that determines raises and promotions has just given everybody an incentive to make it look like the other members of their team suck and are uncooperative.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Grishnakh on Saturday August 22 2020, @03:36PM (1 child)
What fraction of companies actively encourage a spirit of collaboration in the first place, over "get your own job done and let people around you struggle for hours on something you could fix in 5 minutes"?
I don't know what fraction, but my current company works well this way. We use Agile (like so many places claim to these days), and the team as a whole is rated on how much they get done. The focus is on pushing work through in every sprint, so we're very much encouraged to drop what we're doing and assist others when they get bogged down, so that the burndown chart looks good. I thought lots of companies were using Agile methodology these days.
(Score: 3, Touché) by krishnoid on Saturday August 22 2020, @08:04PM
They say they're using Agile. If your company genuinely commits to the reason and intent of the methodology, *that* attitude comes from the top.