In recent months, the future has become more ominous, and the present chaotic. Work has become more fluid, and a fluid that is draining away from far too many people.
The present and future workplace itself isn’t what it was a year ago. The Covid-19 pandemic is seeing to that. Too many people don’t have workplaces at all, and that will get worse. Others are working from homes ill-suited to the task. Offices are often empty or have a pop-in/pop-out, sanitiser-saturated human presence, and whole industries and their work locations and workers are being decimated. Some of the cloud-based and other facilities developed for ‘dynamic working’ are stepping up to the plate and mitigating the downsides of change, but even they are challenged in these special circumstances.
The WORKTECH 2020 UK EMEA event (#worktech) event last week would have been booked into diaries last year, before any of this happened or was even imagined. The event at the end of those twelve plus months was what was always intended – discussions and sharing of trends and innovations in the workplace and new ways of working. What was certainly unintended in those earlier days would have been that the event would be virtual and that the discussion and developments would have been so disrupted by a pandemic.
The workspace under discussion at the event, MC’d by former BBC Media correspondent Torin Douglas, was fundamentally the modern office associated with white-collar professionals. Other working spaces like factories and farms and shops, all of which have felt their own Covid-induced challenges, barely came into it.
Adapting to uncertainty
“The certainty we have is uncertainty. Our future is to adapt.” So said Bram Kuipers, CEO of Vecos last week during a Worktech session.
The Covid-19 pandemic, the Brexit process (whatever its merits), and climate change are working in different ways to have lasting impacts like this. The words ‘U-turn’ and ‘unprecedented’ are being heard daily, and neither are welcome. Adapting is, perhaps, the new normal that we hear so much about.
Planning amidst uncertainty – rocket science?
Can the present and future be planned against this backdrop? I would argue they have to be, to slow and stop that drain on employment and the fast increasing levels of hardship and mental anguish.
The event showed that some trends, particularly around flexible working, are continuing or accelerating. Trends such as the rise of AI may provide more shocks of their own in the future. I know in saying this I am influenced by seeing the Terminator movies at a formative age. Perhaps I glimpsed a future then, but a more practical vision came with a guest speaker at Worktech, Dame Frances Cairncross, author of ‘The Death of Distance’, and a journalistic herald for new ways of working. She had years ago realised the importance of the drop in the price of communicating electronically and the rise of the internet and the impact that both would have. Hearing her talk about what she had correctly predicted and what she hadn’t was the kind of insight you don’t get every day.
Even so, my personal highlight of the event was a talk by the Chief Technologist of NASA, Dr Douglas Ternier (pictured at the opening of this blog post with event organiser and compere Nicole Barretto), whose challenges in workspace are, quite literally, out of this world. He came across, delightfully, as a man energised and excited by his work and its possibilities. He referred to issues raised by Dame Frances Cairncross and in a slightly worrying reference, given my aforementioned interest in the Terminator movies, said, “AI and robots doesn’t show up in the way we expect it to.”
Up my street
Other themes I came across have been around for a while. For example, office ‘streets’ were mentioned as informal hubs for interaction. That took me back well over ten years to the then new, (mostly) paperless, open plan, contemporary 2 Marsham Street Home Office headquarters in London where I was an internal Communications Manager communicating corporate change to thousands of staff across five ‘legacy’ buildings. So, having worn the shirt of part workspace change, here I was, a guest at one of the kinds of thought events that might have influenced architect Sir Terry Farrell when he planned the new Marsham Street building. This was unexpectedly familiar territory.
Long term and long titles
Another now well-established development, one that was new to me, was apparently started in Holland some fifteen years ago by the company Vecos – www.vecos.com/en. They introduced the technology for smart locker systems, with the actual lockers built, for example, by companies like Your Workspace in the UK – www.yourworkspace.com. Vecos hosted a session with a name that took up more space than their lockers: ‘Future-Proof Workplace Decisions in Time of Uncertainty Critical Enablers to Make Flexibility in Your Workplace The New Normal’.
The presentation, by Vecos’s Bram Kuipers, centred on dynamic working, essentially models that aren’t the 9am-5pm with set lunchtime office-based routine. Bram referred to 70% of people adjusting to working from home struggling to do so. He also referred to the rise of fatigue and sadness, and said, “Because we are all social creatures… we need each other to be better.” That reference to needing physical interaction and the chance to spark off each other came up again and again and again over both days. The loss of face to face interaction is one of the fresh hells of the Covid-19 pandemic. Bram continued, “A dimension totally gone is the magic of teams. We need each other. We miss it very much. In my organisation we miss it as well… the office together is still our future, but not now. The certainty we have is uncertainty. Our future is to adapt.” In his view, there are four solutions to the new problems of socially distant working. Enabling people to work together. Anticipating emerging needs. Taking people by the hand and supporting them. Collating and using data to improve.
It was hardly surprising that a following session was on the future of wellbeing in the post-Pandemic world.
It also tied in with this article in The Guardian newspaper published on the eve of the event, talking about the repercussions of homeworking: www.theguardian.com/business/2020/oct/26/working-from-home-damaging-britains-creative-potential-and-economic-wellbeing. I didn’t learn any solutions, but I did learn a relatively new term. ‘Leavism’, the inability to switch off from work, which is apparently now causing a lot of harm, and has worsened from when it was just people continuing work on what should be leave days. By contrast, the oldest thing under discussion was the 4-day working week, an idea that has been around as long as I can remember and one that still seems no closer to wide adoption.
The Joy of Worktech
A notable speaker was Bruce Daisley, author of The Joy of Work, clearly a man who likes a pun. Also ex-Vice-President for Europe with Twitter. He stated that people are finding that they are mostly happier to be working from home (after the adjustment struggles Bram Kuipers mentioned), and talked about the power of connection. I’d have liked more on this, so I will be seeking out his publications.
You go to new things to learn new things. One for me was the existence of the Work Tech Academy https://www.worktechacademy.com/, “the world’s leading online knowledge platform and member network exploring the future of work and workplace.” If so, it has done well for something founded in 2016.
The Academy had recently published a topical blog post on designing your own home workspace – www.worktechacademy.com/mind-over-clutter-creating-a-mindful-home-office-space.
In a sign of the times, you could see business being done in the chat, as business representatives talked to each other and booked video calls. It was also a delight to find some culture creeping in, with poetic interludes from Matt Harvey from The Guardian’s Money section, including a reading of Works Perks: www.theguardian.com/money/2008/feb/02/10.
Companies such as Siemens, Locatee, Sony, Irisys, The Office Group, UNWORK and MovePlan were represented, and institutions such as the International WELL Building Institute and the London Business School with Lynda Gratton. EQ Lab’s Richard Claydon was good enough to answer a Chat-suggested question of mine during an expert session, which, like the ‘booths’ and the networking sessions, helped to break the event up and keep things lively.
Deja Vu, dust and rubble
In the job I mentioned earlier, I was part of storytelling change as it happened. I saw new walls and new workspaces rise from the demolition of the old towers on the site of the new Home Office, through to the fit-out of the new 6-floor building, and staff occupying and enjoying the space. I then worked on an IT-enabled change programme bringing with it new collaborative working tools. I have so many good memories, from nervously being 18 floors up as a tower was demolished around me, to helping organise Home Secretary David Blunkett at the ‘topping out’ celebration, to a Minister singing to staff in the main atrium, and to using the scale model of the building created for the accommodation project as a prop for the IT-enabled change project. Life at the moment in 2020 once more feels like nervously being 18 floors up as a tower is being demolished around me. This time, for something good to arise from the dust and rubble, once again a lot of good people need to work hard to deliver new work, new workspaces, and new jobs. Some of them, I am sure, were at Worktech.
End note
A thank you goes to the organisers and in particular Philip Ross, Founder and CEO if UnGroup, who invited me and (perhaps without realising it) gave me the opportunity to write about a new and constantly evolving subject. There was too much to report on. I could occupy far more space by reflecting on further content from the event, such as Dame Frances Cairncross’s reflections on the challenges posed by the tech giants, notably Google and Facebook, and their future control and policing. Yet come to an end I will, and on a note of optimism struck by Dame Frances. She talked about cities remaining important and, within them, theatres. Businesses will continue to support leisure, hospitailty, and the arts, as they represent opportunities to ‘see and entertain and eyeball clients’. I hope, reader, that you have enjoyed eyeballing this account.
Next up
Worktech 20 Global follows on 2nd-3rd December this year. Details and booking here: https://worktechevents.com/events/worktech-20-global-edition.
Darren Weale, Founder, In Tune PR
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