Virtual Offices - The Future

With companies moving from being national to multi-national and now becoming global organizations, it has become imperative to adopt to global ways of working. Employees and teams spread across the globe managing functions across the World is truly a global way of working. Preconceived notions of management to have all people located in single location or some identified location hubs are waning out. More and more organizations are adopting to policies as work from home or flexi timings to support employees adopting the global way of working. Development of collaboration technologies supported by communication technologies are paving the path to take this movement forward. But the question is, will the offices exist 10 years down the line or will it become virtual offices giving birth to development of new technologies and new business ventures for many?

If we look back 100 years from now, let us understand why the concept of people going to offices started. We are leaving out factory setup or lab setup offices in this discussion, where you require some physical machinery to deal with for your activities. 100 years back there was no internet, there were no computers but there were processes in organizations and businesses were running. In absence of technologies, which exist today, organizations had to adopt to manual means to run same / similar processes. Instead of e-mails, handwritten or typed letter over typewriter were delivered manually to individuals through internal mailing systems in offices. Physical movement of papers used to take place from one person to another, which now takes place either over e-mail or through workflow in IT applications. Approvals were provided based on data available in thick ledger books in absence of IT applications and BI reports. The ledger books were available only in the offices. If you want to check something with someone you do not have chat facility through SameTime / Lync / other products and hence need to walk down to the desk of an individual who is also available in the same office. But with development of all these technologies – communications technologies connecting people across globe, collaborative technologies providing different means of collaboration and communication and IT systems and applications providing all types of data with access from anywhere anytime, do we really need people to come to offices?

Some people might be of the opinion that face to face discussions bring more effectiveness as compared to conference calls or video conference or telepresence. If we try to delve in details, probably people feel the absence of noticing gestures clearly through these virtual means as a short coming. It brings in the perception that effectiveness of these technologies are relatively less as compared to face-to-face discussions. It is true and probably these technologies need to improve further to bring in the effect of real-life presence of individuals physically located far off. One more improvement which I feel important is development of a collaborative white board in virtual environment. People while in discussions often want to draw / write something, maybe with a stylus, on white board to make the audience understand what he/ she wants to say. The other person should be able to make changes to what is already drawn or written in a collaborative way, sitting at a different place in virtual environment, to explain his / her viewpoint. Some collaborative whiteboard options are available today but it needs to go a long way to provide a real-life like experience with virtual technologies.

It is most likely to take 10 years from now when companies will transform the way they operate today and changeover to virtual offices. On one hand technologies getting developed to provide real-life like experience will take time, as well as in 10 years many people with old mindset will move out of the system, which is important for this transformation to happen. The way things will look will be quite different. Organizations will not spend crores of rupees in setting up offices for people to come together and operate. Instead, there will be entrepreneurs, who will setup small to big conference rooms of various sizes with all facilities of video conference / telepresence across cities and towns and organizations can take membership of those chains available throughout the country or through the globe. People normally will use the collaborative tools and technologies available in their portable devices to collaborate with teams across the globe by working from home. If they feel something similar to face-to-face meetings is absolutely essential for effectiveness where real-life like telepresence setups are necessary, they may find out which such conference room setup is available in near vicinity and book same for the specific meeting. People within a certain distance may in such cases come to the same meeting room and collaborate with people at distant places. Organizations pay as per use brining down their office costs. This will open up a new line of business for many entrepreneurs. Employees save lot of time and energy to work more effectively for organizations by saving on commute time through busy traffic in cities and towns. Organizations save a lot on fixed and variable costs for not setting up individual offices and pay only according to use for resources on a shared model. This transformation is likely to be a win-win situation for both organizations and employees and opening up new business opportunities for many.

 Let’s see how it pans out in times to come………………….