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The Jetsons at Work

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This article is more than 10 years old.

To start the new year  looking toward the future, let's talk about how the workplace itself is changing - and will likely continue to change - in the years to come.

In a November article in the Miami Herald online (speaking of the Jetsons) about the workplace of the future, Cindy Krischer Goodman, a columnist who focuses on work-life issues, spoke to a variety of people about how the workplace is evolving.  Some of her main conclusions: the office will look different, workers will set their own schedules, companies will have to create cultures that support teamwork by means other than 40-hour-a-week face-time, and managers will need to operate differently - focusing more on connecting and enabling than controlling and enforcing.

I know this is true because I'm experiencing it in my own life, and in almost all of our client companies, as well.  Because my company, Proteus, is largely virtual - only six of the sixteen of us have actual offices in our New York or Minneapolis offices - we've had to figure out (and are still figuring out) how to make that work.  We're continually exploring how to connect enough, and about the right things, and what proportion of distant communication (phone, text, Skype, videoconference, email) to face-to-face communication works best.

When we designed our new Manhattan office last year, we opted for a central conference room, with offices arranged around it, and lots of glass so there's visual connection; we decided the conference room should function as the gather-round-the-campfire space. People can elect to join together to collaborate, eat, converse - or work alone in an office when privacy's required or preferred, but still feel connected to others in the office.

I also notice, when I go to client locations these days, that even though their layout may be more traditional than ours - offices and cubicles, hallways and conference rooms -  there's a lot more ebb and flow of people than even ten years ago. Some offices are 'swing offices'; made available for those from out of town or who generally work from home.  And when I walk past a single office, it's less and less common to find it occupied by one person.  It's either empty - the occupant is off doing something with others - or there are two or more people meeting and talking about something; working together. And even when an office does have a single occupant, that person is often on the phone with others.

Certainly our technological capability has played a huge role in this shift: it's possible to work from home, for instance, and be effective in ways that simply weren't feasible even 15 years ago.  But I think  the changes in our interactions with others, day-to-day, are at the root of the change.  New technology may be enabling the changes in our work environment, but our own expectations about how we'll connect with people are driving them.

Here's an example.  Until a year ago, I had an  assistant who had worked as a high-level executive assistant for 40 years.  Now I have an assistant who's in his early 30s and spent the last ten years working in the entertainment industry in LA. In the 13 years I worked with my former assistant, I probably spoke to her a handful of times outside of 8:30-5:30 working hours...and perhaps once on her cell phone (she kept a cell phone for 'emergencies' only). When I traveled, we would generally talk by phone once a day.

Now, my assistant and I text almost daily and email back and forth all day, and fairly often  on the weekend - and he'll send me pictures on his phone to show progress on a project if I'm out of town. He sends a 'daily deets' email at day's end to wrap up any loose ends. We noodle and edit documents we're working on in Google docs.

The technology hasn't changed significantly in the year since I got a new assistant: it's just that his expectations about how, when and where work will happen are simply very different than those of my ex-assistant.

As the baby-boomers continue to segue out of the workplace (or at least into less central roles), and the subsequent generations, for whom these ways of working together seem natural and obvious, take over - it seems to me work environments will continue to evolve to be more fluid and less rule- and time-bound.

Goodman notes in her article that executives in some of the less-traditional workplaces she encountered have been surprised to note how much more productive people are when they have more flexibility and control over where and how they work. I'm not surprised at all. People like to have control over how they interact, and most people's drive toward mastery and good work will move them to find more and more effective ways of working together, if they're allowed to do so.

It will be fun to see where this goes...

Happy New Year...