WORKPLACE SPECIAL.............................. The Way We Will Work

 The Way We Will Work

Why build fancy offices when the work­place of tomorrow could be nestling in your pocket?

From predicting the death of the office to painting a work culture that sounds as alien as the Internet was three decades ago, futurists are coming up with zany pictures of Workplace 2020. In a sense, the workplace as we have known it for the past 200 years will cease to exist. It might well be a virtual office! So, why are trend-setting corporations such as Google and Facebook investing in gigantic workplaces where you can eat, shop, exercise, play, sleep and occasionally do some work? Why, like the Indian PSUs of the 1950s and 1960s, is Facebook proposing to build houses for its employees on its 57-acre Menlo Park campus? Why is Arianna Huffington installing sleeping pods for her staff at her Huffington Post hub, giving a new definition to sleeping on the job?

Then there is Google, whose offices give rise to envy, admiration, derision and alarm. For Googlers who are sold on the idea of a funky, snug workplace where you can slouch on beanbags, put your feet up as you work, stretch your hand and get an unending supply of chips and cola, and even bring your dog to office, it is nothing short of nirvana. But for those who believe that to get work done all you need is a desk, chair, phone and computer, such ideas may seem ridiculous.
 

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However, it’s not just about the space, design and facilities alone. It’s the whole new attitude and culture shaping the offices of tomorrow. Imagine working for a firm where you are told not to worry about shoring up the company’s bottom line, but to “make the Internet a happier place”. Where you are pampered to the extent that you never want to leave. Is that Engagement or Entrapment?

Soft New World
Welcome to the big workplace debate. Given that people spend so much time in offices, there is an almost obsessive interest in their design and policies. At one end of the spectrum, you have Jurassic Age offices in decrepit colonial buildings still operating on antique ledger systems and paper piles. But at the other end, you have ritzy, colourful, futuristic offices filled with smart gadgets where the average age of employees is in the 20s and work is fun. Drive into the suburbs of Delhi, Mumbai, Pune, Hyderabad or Bangalore, and you find quirky offices that are giving a new definition to the term ‘work’. In a way, there are still a few parallels between the modern workplaces and the world’s very first offices that trace their origins to spaces created by the East India Company to file records of their trading operations. There, clerks toiled on ledgers, entering transactions while their chiefs met at coffee shops. Sounds like networking today, doesn’t it?
 

By 2020 those soaring skyscrapers, home to corporate offices, will be ghost buildings Physical offices will shrink as the virtual office in your pocket takes over Anytime, anyplace, anyhow will be the mode of work as life and work blur

For several centuries, the look and culture of offices did not change much. But as the manufacturing era gave way to services, the big workplace shift happened. Now, in the information era, offices are changing character fluidly and quickly. Take Google, which has tinkered with its Gurgaon office design thrice in the past five years. Its Hyderabad office has seen two revamps.

“Life has changed,” explains Yashwant Mahadik, senior vice-president, and head of HR, Indian subcontinent, Philips. “When factors that influence work and life change, you have to start designing experiences or ways by which people can still work productively and live life effectively. That’s the entire notion of workplace innovation.” A few decades ago, when the closed cabin type of workplaces gave way to open offices, it was the organisation theory of the time shaping design. As firms got lean and flat, offices broke down doors, hierarchies and promoted open communication.
 

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Today, workplace innovations are not catalysed so much by organisational theory as by technology and the Internet. Smartphones and tablets have altered the way we work. New devices mean that postures have changed, so there’s need for different desks and chairs. There is also a realisation that energy will be a scarce resource, so there is need to build sustainable offices. The health of stressed out sedentary staff has become a concern, so firms have to invest in gyms and programmes to make the workforce fitter. Finally, the biggest change is in the people in these offices. Their attitudes and the way they work are totally new. As GE Capital’s president Anish Shah, says, “The employees of today have a new sense of entitlement.” A lot of these are millennials — born after 1980; a restless generation wired differently.

A Wired Workforce
At the PwC office, a few team leaders would get shirty at their young colleagues who worked with headphones on. Mark Driscoll, human capital leader at PwC India to whom the team leaders complained, asked them if their teenagers at home had headphones on all the time. “Yes,” they said. Then he asked them what they as parents had done to stop this behaviour. That made them pause. There is a generational difference in the way baby boomers or Gen X-ers and Millennials work. And that’s playing out in the workplace. PwC estimates that nearly 80 per cent of its staff will be millennials by 2016. It did a study to see what drives this generation. The results forced it to change its office design and policies. Ditto the scene at Accenture and other offices.

Millennials like to multi-task, prefer to work and learn on the go, chafe at rules, and think nothing of whatsapping superiors. As Padmaja Alaganandan, executive director of consulting, people and change at PwC, says, the biggest change brought in by GenerationNext and technology is in communication. They are happier to interact through email than in person. Many offices are redesigning just to engineer more direct meetings. Take Mindtree’s new Bangalore office. As its chief people officer Ravi Shankar explains, the design has more face-to-face configurations of working, forcing visibility and promoting personal interactions. Jason Heredia, VP, Marketing, A-PAC, Steelcase, the $3 bn US furniture maker, says, “We are moving from ‘I’ spaces to ‘We’ spaces.”
 

A lot of the changes at the workplace — in India at least — are also a function of timing. Twenty-five to 30 years after they began operations, India’s service sector firms have achieved a scale of growth that has made them outgrow their city offices. Many are consolidating offices and moving their scattered employees to one complex in the suburbs where they can work together.

Quirk In The Work
Meanwhile, to understand the new workplace, you have to first figure out what exactly ‘work’ means now. “Should you have fun at work or work at fun,” queries James Thomas, country head, Kronos, a workforce firm. His concern is that companies might be overdoing the fun bit as work is serious business. CiteHR’s Nabomita Mazumdar, fresh from attending a chief learning officers meet in Mumbai, begs to differ. For her, “work is the new sport”. Gamification of work — fun, play and passion — is the trend shaping the offices of tomorrow, she says. Certainly, employers are trying their best to make work not seem an onerous task. “Work has evolved into a full-scale engagement,” points out Mazumdar.
 

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In a way, this is inevitable. As Anand Bhaskar, chief people officer at Sapient, says, the concept of life and work has got blurred. PwC’s Driscoll feels work hasn’t changed, but people who perform it have. Alaganandan feels work now encompasses more. Networking, for instance, is something everybody from seniors to juniors are expected to do as part of work. She adds that the time, place and process of doing work has changed. It’s anytime, anyplace and anyhow. For Sahil Verma, chief operating officer, India, Regus, a company that promotes flexible working and caters to individuals and corporates on the go, the new definition of work is “work your way”. And that seems to be the future. 

Chitra Narayanan

(This story was published in BW | Businessworld Issue Dated 16-12-2013)

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