The Workplace of the Future

Are you looking for a new place to work? Find all of our available jobs here. 

Look around you at your work environment. Are there desks? Are you in a cubicle or an open office? Are you even in an office? Maybe you’re in a coffee shop or working from the comfort of your own home. Today’s workspaces are in a state of flux, with a lot of attention being placed on attracting and retaining younger workers, says TECHnalysis Research president and chief analyst Bob O’Donnell.

“The move to mobile computing devices, more cloud-based applications, and internal IT support for enabling work from remote locations has had a large impact on employee’s expectations about how, when, and where they can work.”

TECHnalysis Research conducted a study of US employees across a range of industries and found three main trends to watch as companies evolve their workplaces. We asked O’Donnell to outline what we’ll be seeing in 2017 and beyond.

1. Where We Work

It’s no longer about hanging around the office water cooler. More employees are spending more time working out the office, says O’Donnell.

“People only spend about 46% of their average 43-hour work week in a traditional office or cubicle environment. We’ve been witnessing a shift away from those workspaces for a long time, but the move is likely to accelerate as most workers believe that the percentage will drop to just under 41% in two years. What’s surprising, however, is that the biggest increase won’t be coming from trendy new alternative workspaces or other non-traditional worksites. Instead, it’s working at home. Toiling in your PJs is expected to jump from 11% of the total work week to 16% in two years.”

2. Work Flexibility

As important as where someone works is how flexible that work environment is and companies seem to be devoting resources to provide the flexibility employees are craving.

“When asked to rank the importance of a company’s tech-initiatives that keep employees happy and productive at work, the number one choice on a rating of eight alternatives was work time flexibility. Not surprisingly, when people were asked in a separate question about the benefits of working at home, the top reason they cited was work time flexibility.”

3. How We Work

Group communication tools like Slack and HipChat allow for more collaboration among workers, whether they’re in the same office or scattered across the globe. And the use of video for conference calls is also growing, O’Donnell points out, allowing workers to feel more connected with co-workers across many different sites. Not surprisingly, the TECHnalysis Research study found interest for these tools can vary quite a bit by age.

“At a basic level, email is still the top means of collaboration with both co-workers (39% of total communications) and outside contacts (34%), with phone calls second (25% and 32% respectively) and texting third (12% for both groups). Among 18-24-year old millennial workers however, social media with outside contacts was 12% of all communications versus only 6% for the total sample.”

So what about collaborative messaging tools like Slack and Facebook’s Workplace? O’Donnell says, “They showed only modest usage at 4% overall, but 18- to 24-year old millennials at medium sized-companies nearly doubled that usage at about 7.5%.”

Not exactly ubiquitous yet but it bodes well for the future of these tools. “While 1/3 of total respondents said their companies offered a persistent chat tool like Slack, another 31% said they wished their companies did.”

As for video conferencing, 32% of employees said their companies had large interactive screens in their conference rooms and another 31% are hoping to see something like that installed at their workplaces sometime soon.