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Business Trends
Extract from "Disproving Widespread Myths about
Workplace Design", Michael Brill, Sue Weidemann and the Bosti Associates:
"Long-Term, Stable Business Trends"
Trends in organisational structure and strategies
are:
- Business transformation,
leading to organisational change and the conscious development
of new employee attitudes and perspectives to support this transformation.
- Increased focus on customer needs and
expanded definitions of who the customer is (internal as well
as external to the organisation).
- Deconstruction into smaller, more nimble,
less hierarchical, more customer-responsive business units, often
autonomous in their decision-making and in their profit and loss
reporting.
- Partnering with customers and other vendors
to craft integrated customer-specific solutions.
- Continually seeking improvements - everybody
is responsible for innovating, at all levels and in all business
units.
- More work done in cross-functional teams
to reduce cycle time and time to market, substituting simultaneity
for sequentiality in decision-making.
- More resource-lean organisations, with
a strong focus on cost containment, and re-examination of the
costs and benefits of all resources used.
- More geographically-dispersed locations
(closer to customers) with this dispersed workforce connected
through technology … or, consolidation of offices, using home-based
work to serve field locations.
- More solution seeking and less "pushing
existing product," leading to more consulting and service offerings.
Trends in workforce attitudes and expectations
are:
- Increased recognition of
the asset value of employees as "intellectual capital."
- Team contributions more noticed and rewarded.
- High learning needs driven by more cross-functional
teaming (and the need to know the basics of other people's disciplines)
and more demand to innovate by customers … lifelong learning has
become a core value for many companies.
- More individual and group autonomy in
decision making, supported by just-in-time data delivery and communications.
- Many employees out of the office more,
crafting customer solutions onsite and partnering with them, with
a portion of the workforce becoming "periodic office residents."
- Much change (too much for some), causing
high stress and anxiety.
- Globalization of work affecting people's
perceptions of, and use of, time and distance.
Trends in technology and its ever increasing power
and global deployment are:
- Global deployment of technology,
its networks and the Web, enabling more remote work, telework,
and mobile work.
- Now the primary analytic and communications
tools for most employees.
- Continuous increases in capacity of techno-tools,
decreasing in size, and increasingly wireless.
- Integration of voice, data, and images.
- An enabler of best work done anywhere,
anytime (work-life and life-life blur) … supports high mobility
or "never leave the cottage."
- Very rapid pace of work expected, more
people feeling loss of control of the pace of work, needing
more
"breaks."
New recognitions about, and strategies for the
workplace are:
- Current workplaces are
often a poor fit for the new work.
- Workplace design really affects individual
and team productivity, job satisfaction, quality of worklife,
and learning.
- Workplace is a tool, not a status-driven
entitlement.
- Office work can be and should be deployed
over larger business geographics, continuing the erosion of many
downtowns.
- People can use an array of work locations
(like satellite offices) and others which are not "owned" or leased,
like employees' homes, airline clubs, and hotels.
- A workplace designed as a good fit for
the work, needs a different approach to workplace design and new
ways to manage and use space.
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