Response to peers

The Future of Offices

Telecommuting and other mobile work arrangements has made working from home a feasible option. When the Covid-19 pandemic spread across the globe, companies were forced into a virtual work world, which increased the likelihood that the future of offices will be a hybrid of the current virtual work environment and the traditional work environment. Offices, in the next ten years, will look very different than the traditional office model. Bacevice, Mack, Tehrani, and Triebner (2020) stated that offices of the future should be decentralized with localized, small offices for workers to gather with other workers from their neighborhoods. Currently, offices tend to be centralized in an urban area, making it difficult for employees to access their workplace and making it less . The idea of decentralizing offices and allowing freedom of the work environment would better support employees, improving performance and culture, while also contributing to local economies (Bacevice et al, 2020). The future of offices are likely to be a blend of the current work-from-home environment created out of necessity due to COVID-19 and a possible small home office environment that would still allow for social connections, positive cultural impact, and improved communication.

I currently work in a higher education institution, and COVID-19 very quickly forced our organization to become a completely virtual work environment. This has allowed us to modify business processes and improve our technological capabilities. Very quickly, staff and faculty were forced to learn how to use technological applications to perform their daily tasks and moved our organization into the 21st century, where previously we were technologically anemic. As a result of discovering we could work from home, we have started to work on identifying which jobs within our organization could be done completely online, regardless of the pandemic. Our human resource department is working with managers to identify who could fully operate virtually permanently. Additionally, we eliminates some services on campus that were identified as unnecessary in the future, where we anticipate continuing to serve a percentage of our students online. Even student-facing positions that work directly with students will now have a virtual component, and being online has allowed us to offer these services later at night without having to expand the offices' hours on the physical campus. Working virtual has also allowed the college to save money on utilities and printing services, since everything is provided digitally now. Our offices will never be the same following this transition to a virtual work environment. Some offices will be completely virtual, and others will be a hybrid with some virtual hours and some in office hours. The offices of yesterday will no longer exist in the same manner as before, which will ultimately provide flexibility for customers and employees.

Reference

Bacevice, P., Mack, J., Tehrani, P., and Triebner, M. (2020) Reimagining the Urban Office. Harvard Business Review. Retrieved from https://hbr.org/2020/08/reimagining-the-urban-office .

Peter Bacevice, John Mack, Pantea Tehrani,

and

Mat Triebner