While thousands of employers stubbornly cling to existing modes of work, the forces that will inevitably change both the workplace and the way we work have already been unleashed on an unsuspecting world.
According to futurists Ronald A. Gunn and Marilyn S. Burroughs, for example, the influx into the workforce of younger "Generation X" people who are used to more modern ways of living, thinking, and acting will cause workplaces to be redesigned more along the lines of college campuses. They suggest we get ready to work amid multiple televisions, industrial grid ceilings, and overstuffed chairs and couches that can quickly be re-arranged to facilitate group discussions, brain storming, and ad hoc work groups.
It's undeniable that most modern workplaces have extended their long-term evolution away from hierarchical arrangements of closed-off offices, and toward flexible combinations of common areas and individual workspaces. Increasing numbers of office areas are now being set up to support a working pattern in which people spend most of their time and do much of their collaborative thinking and talking in the common areas. Only for brief periods of intense concentration on a particular task do they retreat to a private space they can close off from others.
One interesting sign of these times is an office furniture system called Personal Harbors from Steelcase. Each Personal Harbor is a compact, integrated, one-person workstation that can be closed off for privacy, or opened onto a central meeting area to facilitate communication within a work group. Each one occupies only 48 square feet, and is almost 90 inches high, with acoustic baffling, adjustable work surfaces, and translucent, not transparent, window panels. It includes lockable file and personal drawers, mechanisms for fan control and light dimmers, phone-mounting hardware, and even an optional CD sound system. So far, sales have been brisk, and companies using the Personal Harbors system appear to be extremely well-satisfied.
Another new concept comes from Johnson Controls. Its Personal Environment Manager system, when installed in a large office, allows individuals to control the temperature, fresh air, and noise level in and around their workstations.
The driving force behind this philosophy of workspace redesign is to allow greater flexibility and individual control over contact with others--the precise conditions that telecommuters find so valuable when working from outside the main office.
As a Business Week article recently described it, "Work anywhere, anytime is the new paradigm. Your car, your home, your office, even your client's office. Work alone, coupled, teamed. Work in real space or cyberspace. It amounts to a massive disaggregation of work, spinning outside the walls and confines of the traditional office." ("The New Workplace," April 29, 1996).
In effect, the redesign and reconfiguration of workspaces and work at the office are partly an attempt to replicate the same kind of productivity and morale gains already demonstrated so convincingly by today's telecommuters.
Consultants and designers are hoping to capitalize on the triumphs of telecommuting and extend the telecommuting paradigm seamlessly into more of the organization's activities, all the way up to headquarters and the executive suite.
Among the many things telecommuters have successfully proven is that much of today's work can be "deconstructed" into individual elements, accomplished by various individuals working at separate times and locations, then reassembled again into a finished deliverable with great savings in time, effort, and expense.
This "deconstruction" of work is facilitated by the advent of modern telecommunications technologies--including faxes, voicemail, email, cell phones, computer networks, various forms of conferencing, the Internet, electronic whiteboards, "groupware," and satellite links.
As people become more comfortable with various combinations of these and other devices, they are actively discarding the traditional patterns of how to work. That's one big reason organizations are finding it more and more practical--and profitable--to divorce activity and work from specific locations. Many insurance and other data-intensive organizations, for example, have saved millions of dollars by setting up systems in which keypunching of data is done in one facility, processing in another, and printing in yet a third.
This is just the start of a new wave of work realignment.
In Europe, programming teams who work in Scandinavia are looking into the possibility of moving en masse to Austria or even farther south for the winter months. After completing a long workday, they'll be able to go outside and find themselves in warm, sunny Barcelona instead of frozen, dark Oslo. Such a move will allow them to avoid the cold weather and shortened days without missing deadlines or sacrificing productivity.
Work can also be transported by telecommunications for other purposes. Microsoft, for example, reportedly had teams working around the world on its latest Windows offerings. By shifting each team's daily work-products and progress to the next team's location, the company has essentially created a round-the-clock workplace that greatly speeds overall development and testing of final products.
In the future, it'll become standard operating procedure to hook together specialized individuals and teams into ad hoc task forces without the slightest regard to their geographical locations. And from the opposite point of view, it'll be just as routine for people to shift their geographical locations without any disruption of one's participation in work teams and ongoing projects.
This reorganization and redesign of work is having other consequences. At one time, for example, bricks and mortar were an organization's second biggest expense (after payroll). But study after study shows that fixed desks normally remain unoccupied as much as 50% to 80% of the work week. It's therefore not surprising that managers have begun to wonder why they should be saddled with the cost of renting or buying, heating, lighting, furnishing, and cleaning so many under-utilized workspaces, together with all the accompanying parking lots, bathrooms, and other people-support facilities.
Driven by economic concerns, companies are moving rapidly toward a leaner structure in which they spend far less on real estate and facilities, and far more on information technology.
Of course, the vast majority of employees must still spend some time on the company's premises. This gives rise to the issue of how to support telecommuters and other workers who spend most of their time out of the office, on days when they do come in.
One increasingly popular method is to shuffle them into one of many interchangeable workstations. Like rooms in a hotel, these support facilities are made available on a first-come, first-served basis. Each one offers the basic necessities of office life: a phone, a desk, a chair, some shelves and filing cabinets, and a permanent desktop computer or a generic hook-up for a laptop. All you need to add is the individual and his or her information.
Ernst & Young is just one of many large firms finding that telecommuting and the "hoteling" of office space for telecommuters on days when they work in the office can form a sensible and effective business strategy. Under the E&Y system, employees can reserve a meeting room or office when and where needed. When they arrive, they find the "concierge" has put their name on the door of their assigned office, left any supplies they requested, and even displayed a family photo on the workstation's computer screen.
The results are extremely favorable. For example, if only half your workforce telecommutes just one day a week, learning to "hotel" your office space allows you to cut the cost of bricks-and-mortar, heating, ventilating, air conditioning, parking, utilities, and all the rest by as much as 10%. These savings fall right to the bottom line.
Telecommuting and "hoteling" of offices have also produced some hidden advantages. For example, employees who are less tied to fixed workstations tend to lose their focus on intra-office concerns, such as procedures, politics, protocol, and rivalries. They stop jockeying for corner offices and turn much more of their attention outward, toward the customers they're serving and the work-related goals they're trying to achieve.
In addition, the regular flow and general openness of personal communications promoted by these new workplace designs and ways of working tend to reduce the amount of time and energy devoted to gossip, writing and reading memos, and also lessen feelings of isolation from top management. Since you may be regularly rubbing elbows--either physically or electronically--with people at all levels of your organization, isolation is actually much less of a problem than when you're stuck in a cubicle ten floors down from the executive team.
One of the problems, of course, is how to differentiate the high-status from the low-status members of the organization. If the top manager is no longer given the largest corner office, what's the alternative?
Answers are still being developed. But one approach appears to follow the philosophy of the commando team, where the commander wears no special insignia and carries the same gear as everyone else. In this situation, top managers earn their respect every day, in the "heat of battle," as it were, by doing their jobs in plain view of those they manage.
At Aluminum Company of America, for example, the entire top floor of the headquarters building has been redesigned into an open floor plan, full of open cubicles scattered around a central "communications center" containing fax machines, televisions, and conference tables. Chief Executive Paul O'Neill likes to spend his time in the kitchen, where he accomplishes a great deal of his work over coffee and lunch.
Within Procter & Gamble's new headquarters building, private offices are basically eliminated. Almost everything is on wheels, and individual workstations are designed for quick reconfiguration as team and project assignments change. The emphasis is on communications throughout a flattened hierarchy, to the point where most lunchrooms and lounges contain electronic whiteboards that quickly convert jotted notes to print and fax messages.
Some experts are suggesting that all this proves telecommuting is moving into a new phase, one in which its gains are being rolled out not only to larger numbers of people working at home, but as much as possible to people working at company headquarters, too. Just as computers first migrated from the desks of hobbyists to corporate number-crunchers, and from there to almost every desk in the organization, it's conceivable that corporate planners may be taking the first baby steps toward spreading the best elements of telecommuters' flexibility, independence, and emphasis on deliverables to the vast majority of their employees.
A recently completed survey of 260 Phoenix-area telecommuting program coordinators, conducted by WestGroup Marketing under a contract from RPTA/Valley Metro, shows that telecommuting is on the rise in that area.
According to the survey's results, more than half the telecommuting programs were begun in just the last two years. Hardly any of the newer programs bothered to go through a pilot phase, as was the norm several years ago. Instead, the program coordinators simply collected some basic criteria and policy points, screened the applicants, provided some training, got a signed agreement from the fledgling telecommuters, and rolled out the program.
Approximately 90% of these telecommuters use a computer in their work from home. Three-quarters use a modem, and more than half use a fax machine. More than half the employers pay for the equipment their telecommuters use at home. The average number of telecommuters per employer is twenty-two, mostly from middle- and upper-level management. Interestingly, about 25% of the area's telecommuters say they telecommute four or five times per week.
A particularly encouraging note in the survey results: Only 13% of the employers are experiencing management resistance to telecommuting. At one time the most important obstacle to the spread of tele-commuting, this attitude now appears to be on the wane. By far the biggest remaining problem at companies with and without telecommuters is the difficulty in finding tasks that can be done from a distance. (I'll have more to say about that in a future article.)
Copyright © 1996 by Robert Moskowitz. All rights reserved.
Personal Harbors Steelcase, Inc.
Grand Rapids, MI
(616)247-2710
Personal Environment Manager
Johnson Controls
507 East Michigan St.
Milwaukee, WI 53201
(414)274-4000
Steelcase, Inc.
901 44th St., SE
Grand Rapids, MI 49508
(616)247-2710
WestGroup Marketing
1110 East Missouri Ave., Ste. 780
Phoenix, AZ 85014
(602)264-4915