Abstract
“Does Place Still Matter: The Changing Role of Work and its Effect on the Workplace,” focuses on how the workplace is being impacted by changing workstyles such as distributed and mobile work. If fewer and fewer workers come to the central office to work, how will centralized offices be used in the future? Is the centralized office as a place to work an artifact of the 20th century? If the office has a future, what direction will it take?
Research issues
Examining recent academic literature, professional journals and the business media, we identified several major research issues:
- Physical place and collaboration
- The face time debate
- The meaning of distance
- Creating place through technology
- The importance of employee choice
- Open vs. closed space?
- Productivity and place design
- Place’s impact on organizational capabilities
These topics informed our discussions with industry thought leaders, where we examined workplace change in depth and discussed their predictions for the workplace of the future -- ten years from now.
Major themes
Four major themes emerged from our research and discussions:
- Place is becoming more distributed. The workplace is no longer a one-size-fits-all situation.
- Place is becoming “liberated” and less assigned through the application of hoteling and other free-range workplace strategies...
- Place is shrinking. The physical size of the individual workspace is only a third the size of the average workspace of the 1970s.
- Though place’s role has changed, its importance is undiminished. Place is being used to emphasize brand, reinforce engagement, anchor loyalties, and encourage innovation.
An appendix contains highlights of our conversations with thought leaders. The paper also showcases several innovative workplaces, including Accenture, Capitol One, Cisco Systems, Hewlett Packard, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Samsung, Sun Microsystems, and VTT Technical Research Center of Finland.
