Future of Work - A Revolution Co-authored by Technology
The concept of 'work' in a physical workplace where you enter at 9 am or thereabouts and have meetings which are 'in person', do your bit for the day and leave at the end of the day after putting in 10-12 hours of work is changing due to the impact of Technology across the world.
Global Trends indicate the following:
- Smaller Organizations
- Enhanced collaboration among businesses wherein they outsource activities that are not 'core' to their business.
- Work flexibility for Employees: 35% percent of workforce working 'remotely' by 2022
- 20% of workforce to be contractual by 2022
- Technology playing a key role in remote communication and collaboration
'Traditionally, office sector demand has been dominated by the technology sector in India. In 2016, the Information Technology (IT) industry represented around 58% of the total office demand in India and 41.6 million sq ft of office space was leased in top nine cities. The talent pool is primarily employed in the large IT service industry and the industry usually prefers to lease large office spaces, mainly in Tier I cities. However, mobile technology has empowered an unprecedented focus on new workplace designs, work styles, and work culture. There is now a greater focus on creating more efficient and cost-effective solutions such as flexible and specialised workspaces. Business centres, serviced offices, start-up incubators, accelerators and coworking spaces are a few examples of such specialised workspaces.' -Colliers Radar,India Research (20 March 2017).
The impact of Technology can be seen in the following 2 ways on 'working':
- Plug and Play workspaces; Fully managed workspaces which give users the flexibility to increase or decrease their team with nil fixed costs.
- Self Sustaining Eco-system: Completely contained environments which have their own business support services under one roof resulting in networking and collaboration which give a 'boost' to businesses operating therein.
"We see a fundamental shift in the demand for commercial real estate, and we expect coworking and serviced offices to become a meaningful part of the office-leasing segment soon. 55% desks in any corporate office are vacant at any point. Consequently, we see distributed and flexible offices as an integral part of the workplace strategy of both early stage and mature corporations. Additionally, there are over 170 million mobile professionals in the country." - Vikas Lakhani, Co-founder, InstaOffice Strategic
By 2025, it is predicted that 42% of India’s population will be living and working in its urban centers—spelling out a larger opportunity right there for a large urban population likely to adopt shared work spaces in less than a decade. (JLL Report on Coworking)
Some of the more fundamental questions that this brings up are more to do with how Technology is 'rewiring' our brains and how we are coping with all these changes.
While enhanced productivity and reduced operating costs are clearly benefits 'for' the debate, prolonged remote working with minimal contact with 'other human professionals' and lack of discipline which is intrinsic to all of us keep raising concerns on the impact of this phenomenon on overall mental health in working professionals.