The Of­fice Of The 21^st Century

Re­mem­ber the days of fil­ing end­less doc­u­ments in a smoke filled of­fice with the con­stant drone of a com­puter sound­ing like it’s about to take off in the background?

For­tu­nately the evo­lu­tion of IT has al­lowed mod­ern of­fices to evolve too and now they are less clus­tered with pa­per and a more work friendly environment.

That has been the case now for many years but an­other step in the evo­lu­tion of the mod­ern of­fice has ar­rived and this one is in­spired by the in­ter­net and file shar­ing devices.

The ad­vance­ments in the in­ter­net and its wide­spread avail­abil­ity means that the world is now our of­fice, let’s take a look at how and why your of­fice should make some changes.

We Just Don’t Need To Be In The Same Room

There are lots of ex­am­ples of busi­nesses that do need their em­ploy­ees to be in the same room as each other but there are lots more that sim­ply don’t. It’s a pretty alien con­cept to most of us who have spent years work­ing in a tra­di­tional office.

How­ever if you think about what you ac­tu­ally do you’ll prob­a­bly see that you could do it from home just as eas­ily. Many peo­ple see work­ing from home as slack­ing off in some way but with mod­ern file shar­ing tech­nol­ogy and the feel­ing of a bit more free­dom it is usu­ally far more pro­duc­tive for the com­pany em­ploy­ing them.

How Does It Work?

It’s sim­ple, all you need is a good PC or lap­top and a fast in­ter­net con­nec­tion and you’re ready to work from home. Mod­ern Mi­crosoft Of­fice soft­ware is de­signed to make file shar­ing easy so you can in­stantly share your work with those who need to see it and get or give any re­quired feedback.

Then of course there’s lots of in­stant mes­sag­ing tools avail­able to ex­change in­for­ma­tion and keep in reg­u­lar com­mu­ni­ca­tion. When you add that to tra­di­tional email­ing and a com­pany phone line then it be­comes hard to ar­gue against the ben­e­fits of work­ing from home.

What If We Need To Have A Meeting?

This is a ques­tion that usu­ally gets raised by em­ploy­ers who are scep­ti­cal about adopt­ing a new ap­proach to their of­fice and it’s a valid con­cern. If you need to have a team meet­ing then you can sim­ply ded­i­cate some time for every­one to come in and meet or al­ter­na­tively there are tools such SKYPE that al­low you to com­mu­ni­cate face to face with­out hav­ing to be in the same room.

Just be­cause your em­ploy­ees work from home doesn’t mean that you never have to see them, you can still ded­i­cate days for them to come in and meet face to face if you want.

What’s In It For The Bosses?

We can see the ob­vi­ous ben­e­fits in this new work­ing arrange­ment for em­ploy­ees who can work from the com­fort of their own homes, save money on trav­el­ling ex­penses, get a bet­ter work/life bal­ance and gen­er­ally feel like they’ve been trusted with more free­dom but what’s in it for their employers?

• Firstly the em­ployer will save money by not hav­ing to run a large of­fice on a daily ba­sis which can be very ex­pen­sive when you take into ac­count elec­tric­ity costs, pro­vid­ing of­fice equip­ment, up­dat­ing chairs and ta­bles, fix­ing com­put­ers, up­dat­ing technology.
• Then there are the other peo­ple they need to em­ploy such as clean­ers, se­cu­rity staff and maybe even cafe­te­ria staff to pro­vide their em­ploy­ees with a proper work­ing environment.

It’s much eas­ier for a new start-up com­pany to hire peo­ple who have their own com­put­ers and can work from home, straight away you are avoid­ing huge over­heads. An­other ben­e­fit to the em­ployer is that you can at­tract a bet­ter stan­dard of employee.

A web de­sign com­pany for ex­am­ple will be able to at­tract peo­ple from all over the coun­try and maybe even fur­ther afield to work for them re­motely so they are not lim­ited to their lo­cal area which may not have the cal­i­bre of peo­ple that they need for the job.

Re­mote work­ing is set to be­come the norm in em­ploy­ment and so the mod­ern of­fice is set for some big changes. The age of the in­ter­net has changed the world and made it a much smaller place mean­ing that your of­fice can now stretch across the world with em­ploy­ees be­ing spread out every­where yet still work­ing in com­plete unison