Management Perspectives

If you want to get a handle on the office of the future, just take a look at what has been happening in 2022. This year, we have seen millions of workers around the world mandated back to the office by their employers after the global pandemic, but many have resisted doing so. In the UK, senior government ministers have left unsubtle calling cards on the desks of workand-home civil servants, demanding they return to Whitehall as soon as possible.

Companies have started investing heavily in all types of smart technology, including VR headsets, video suites, and even the metaverse, as they try to find ways to enable a remote workforce to collaborate more effectively in a ‘hybrid’ model.

Employers have started paying unprecedented attention to the mental well-being of their workers, not just their physical safety. And designers have started remodelling office space with a focus on hospitality, socialising, and customer experience.

After a century of rigid working life with the office building at the centre of its universe, professional workers are now moving towards a more flexible anytime-anywhere workstyle. It represents the biggest shake-up for a generation, and corporate decisionmaking bodies are struggling to cope with the enormity of the change.

To experience office life in 1922 was to be part of a machine—to be a cog in a mechanical system using the industrial technologies of the day, the light bulb, typewriter, telephone, filing cabinet, and elevator. The office was the stable, immoveable fixture of the working week.

To experience office life in 2022 is to spend a large chunk of the week avoiding it altogether, working instead at home, in a café, or at a co-working lounge, using a new set of digital technologies to connect.

We have reached such a different place in the evolution of the modern—physically, conceptually, and philosophically—that a new way of thinking is required to grasp the scale of the transition currently underway.

We describe the term ‘unworking’ as unravelling how we work, unbundling the assumptions baked into the modern office, and unlearning the habits, management styles, and workplace cultures that traditionally defined our behaviour at work.

The purpose of ‘unworking’ is to reimagine what the future workplace could be like. It is not an easy task, as companies in India and elsewhere are discovering. So, what aspects of the office should CEOs and their teams seek to unlearn? Here are three key shifts to consider:

1) From process to experience. First, there should be a customer-centric focus on providing a great workplace experience for employees who now have a choice of where to work. Company leaders should stop obsessing about what people do (process) and give more consideration to how they feel about it (experience), using techniques derived from hospitality, retail, and entertainment.

This will place more emphasis and resources on improving satisfaction and well-being across the workforce as the first step to raising performance. It will also help to build culture and purpose. We are already seeing new job titles such as ‘chief experience officer,’ ‘head of team anywhere,’ ‘chief heart officer’, and ‘head of dynamic work’ emerge in organisations. These new titles reflect how difficult it is to manage a more distributed workforce.

US tech companies, such as Google and Zappos, have studied the Burning Man Festival in a bid to find ways to build more effective teams. Burning Man is an exceptional art festival experience which attracts more than 50,000 participants each year in the middle of the Nevada desert. Burning Man’s education director Stuart Mangrum told us, “Behavioural psychology in the workplace has largely been Pavlovian and Taylorist—to get people to do what you want them to do. Burning Man is about intrinsic motivation and radical inclusion. The downside is that we are inefficient, but we are intentionally inefficient. We are building a lasting culture.”

2) From efficiency to effectiveness. This leads to our second point. The future workplace is likely to focus more on what is effective than what is simply efficient. One size does not fit all; it never did, but even less so now in the hybrid work era. Company leaders have therefore got to wean themselves off adherence to blunt economies of scale, universal planning, high density open plan, and so on, to embrace a more heterogeneous approach.

Future work-forces will be multi-generational and more diverse in terms of age, ability, race, ethnicity, and sexual orientation. Workplaces will need to be inclusive so that everyone feels welcomed and valued irrespective of their differences. There is little point in recruiting more diverse talent with a wider perspective and capacity for innovation if the office is not itself inclusive of their needs. As Kay Sargent, Director of Workplace at US architects HOK, told us: “Diversity is about counting the people, but inclusion is about making the people count.”

3) From dumb to data. In the recent past, company leaders have tended to view office buildings as dumb containers for work, a cost rather than investment because they yielded little actionable data that could be useful to the business. The office of the future will be much smarter than before. It will provide constant data flows that can inform evidence-based decision making on everything from HR policies and office redesign to corporate strategy.

Data analytics, spatial intelligence, and sociometric technologies will transform how we measure performance and engagement in the workplace. Sensors and cameras will capture every move and give unprecedented insights into company behaviour. Dashboards showing real-time data on occupancy level and environmental conditions will allow managers to ‘fine tune’ their resources.

The cover of Unworking—a graphic evoking a skyline of office towers passing down through a shredder and emerging as software code—is a fitting metaphor for the office as a software solution in the 21st century as opposed to being all about place (a 20th century idea).

The office, no longer the all-powerful setting for work, is now morphing into something else. We predict the future workplace will become more sustainable, sentient, social, and personalised, in a magnetising response to people having a choice about whether or not to come to the office whereas before there was simply no alternative.