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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 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.