Over the last couple of weeks, I have had multiple discussions with different people regarding how the business world is changing and where we are moving to in South Africa.
Gone are the days of coming in to the office at 08:00 and leaving at 17:00. People are working flexi time, they come in earlier and they are leaving later, your customer facing hours are now mostly from 07:00 to 18:00.
Staff members that are not client facing are working from home offices or just remotely, and people are becoming more inclined to not come into the office at all anymore. People are working from their homes or home offices more frequently and are doing more productive work.
Although Yahoo and other big companies like the Bank of America, Aetna and IBM decided stop staff from working from home and according to these companies increased its overall productivity, will this still ring true in the future? The workforce and technologies have changed quite a bit from 2013 up to now, and I expect it to change even more in the future.
Looking ahead what would our business’s look like? Would we still have office building that house hundreds and hundreds of staff members? Or are we going to have a network of digitally linked individuals working for one company spanning the globe?
In fact if we were digitally linked, what would the need for an office building be, and why would I want to own a building if I am a medium to large business? Sure there will always be business where you need to have an office, but what if our board meetings were held in conference type rented spaces, what if we had a meetingroomforhire.com where you would only need selected spaces for selected times and you could pay for what you use? Your staff could digitally “dial” into these meetings, and you could meet with your clients face to face.
What if the world could be your office? How more productive could you be if you could work not only flexi time but from wherever you are? And if we take it a step further, would we pay our employees for time “spent” online working or would we rather have a deliverable based culture, where people work when and how they wanted? If this was possible would we still need leave or time off? If we were to assume that your time is yours as an employee and you could work when you wanted to if you met your deadlines wouldn’t our staff be more productive?
What would the cost saving be if there were no office space, leave to be paid out, phone lines, desks, water, electricity, backup power and all the other consumables that we as business owners must cover the costs for? Would we not be able to pay our employees more, and empower them to work from home by supplying them with fast internet access, and hardware that can handle Video and Voice over IP?
Even though we would like our employees to have a sense of unity in one company I am sure we could come up with more and better creative ways to bring these people together like for instance hosting social functions across regions where all employees come together and socialise and meet each other face to face, or by regular face to face meetings in the “rentameetingroom.com” space?
Imagine if one company with a 100 odd people were to disband, and starts to enable its staff to work from home, and lets assume every person on average had to travel 30 minutes one way to get to work, and then 30 minute to get back. Now let’s assume these people use that 1 hour to work rather than sitting in traffic, you are already looking at a 100 hours per day more productive time available to you as a business, multiply that by the amount of work days per year and you will soon see that there might be a benefit in your employees working from home.
With the world and technology changing at such a rapid pace, would it be naïve to think that people would prefer not to have an office to go into, and not to travel back and forth from home?
Think about it, will we still have offices in the next 5 years?
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