back to article The digital workplace transformation: Sooner than you think

What does the digital workplace transformation really mean? Will we still go to work, or will our work travel with us? How will we learn to be creative in an age of automation, and how will we be collaborate if we don’t see each other regularly? After laying out the technology changes we can expect in our Regcast on the …

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  1. This post has been deleted by its author

  2. 2460 Something

    We are a very long way off being able to ditch the core office environment, if ever. Certainly I cannot see much of a transformation over the next 3 years. As much as some people have jobs that enable/encourage them to work from home/out of the office, there are even more people who are required to be at their desk (large call centres etc). A core reason being that it is the most cost effective method for most companies. They already have an investment in the building and infrastructure designed to support staff and customers. This is not even considering that you also have management who are still going to want the same oversight of their staff as they can have in an office environment to ensure that they are at least ostensibly doing what they have been paid to do.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Call Centres: Not the Best Example

      Many of the larger call centres have relatively little physical centre any more.

      Given

      1) A decent network connection, good audio (whether over the network or a more traditional phone line) some equipment and/or programs running on a home PC for each agent and

      2) the right software and hardware in data centres (or cloud):

      Many agents can and do work from home or satellite offices.

      There are companies whose sole reason to exist is doing metrics on agent performance, customer satisfaction, etc. whether in a physical or virtual centre.

      Virtualizing some or all of a call centre is not an uncommon choice in 2015.

  3. This post has been deleted by its author

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Dystopian nightmare

    Apologies, didn't watch the video so this rant maybe misplaced.

    Whenever I see headlines like this I picture a world where people are effectively 'at work' 16 hours (or more) a day. where there is little physical interaction with the people we work with and little sense of belonging to anything. This might be fine if you are owner of the company and raking in the spondoolicks as the reward for your commitment but little joy for the rest of us 'drones' who just want to pay the bills and live our small, quiet lives with our families, friends and hobbies.

    The flip-side, where this enables us all to skive off at will, is equally depressing with no sense of personal worth or feeling of making any contribution to society. Of course there will be various logging mechanisms to make sure this never happens.

    Maybe I'm overly pessimistic but the progression of modern corporate 'life' has made me that way.

    1. Zog_but_not_the_first
      Thumb Up

      Re: Dystopian nightmare

      Well, yes. All those past promises of "so much leisure time it will be hard to fill it" came to.... well I think we know.

    2. 9Rune5

      Re: Dystopian nightmare

      I have been working extensively from home for the past five years or so.

      Roughly every month I spend a week (~3 days really) in the office, then I dive back into my cave. We have weekly departmental meetings where I usually participate by webcam. Then there is of course the usual amount of phone calls and similar, though these days we usually just shoot IMs back and forth with the odd Skype webcam session thrown in.

      The downside is that I do loose track of time. I can be quite unproductive in the mornings (not helped by my one year old who has his own ideas of what activities should be prioritized) so I end up making up for that in the evenings. But OTOH there is no time lost to commuting, so in the end both me and my employer saves quite a bit of dead time. Another potential downside is that I suspect my boss is assigning me some potentially nightmarish projects. Potential deathmarches where my self-inflicted solitude is of great help (meaning I can fully focus on rewriting big chunks of code that has extensive smell of code rot about it).

      Since I commute from a different country, I try to help colleagues in need. Cheap alcohol, soda, tobacco and even car parts is part of my luggage as I head back to the office. One colleague stopped by for lunch having used my mail address as a drop site for some parts he had ordered.

      At the end of the day, I do not feel more distanced from my colleagues. Plus: spending more time with my family at home makes more sense to me.

  5. just another employee

    How could I have a full work from home environment...

    ..with BT's best effort only being 1.43Mbs ?

    Some more fundamental fixes needed first.

    But bring it on !!

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