Future Predictions for the Workplace

PBC Sounds Music, Radio Podcasts Hello, I'm Greg Foot and welcome to Dough, the show that explores future wonder products that might rise to success and redefine our lives. Each episode I sit down with entrepreneurs and experts to discuss where the businesses of today may be tomorrow . This time we're looking at the future of the office , asking whether in years to come, we'll even need one. If so, is the conference room soon to become a thing of the past, replaced with cafes, comfy chairs and table tennis tables ? And will our future HQs be home to service robots and AI receptionists . Clocking on to present his vision for the years ahead, it is our CFO, that's Chief Futurist Officer to you. Tom Cheesewright. Hello, Tom. Hello, Greg. Look, I promise this won't be a meeting that should have been an email. I'm very pleased to hear it. That wouldn't have a great listening. Oh gosh, I'm sick of those. If you're new to Do, each episode I am joined by one of our resident futurists and after we've done some future scoping with our guests, I challenge our futurist to give their predictions on what the business of tomorrow may look like in five, ten and fifty years' time. Tom, what is the most impressive office you've ever been in? So for me, it's all about the food, Greg. How good is the canteen And I really miss the days of the sort of end of the dot com boom where companies were incredibly generous with their fantastic canteens and gourmet food and multiple stations with little chefs cooking things. For me, favourite office, probably the Bloomberg office in London where I visited once for some work. They said it was the world's most sustainable office building. It had this huge, impressive spiral ramp that kind of winds its way up from floor to floor. Let me bring on our first expert guest of the day, someone who studies evolving office trends, a professor of organizational psychology at the University of Leeds, where he's part of a team looking at the future workplace. He says his research interests include the design of physical offices and pretty much anything that helps us understand how people think, feel and behave at work. Welcome, Professor Matt Davis. Hello there, Greg. So the way we use offices, Matt, and what we expect an office to provide of course changed dramatically following the coronavirus pandemic. That of course made working from home much more widely accepted afterwards a shift it stuck around with hybrid working . However, over the past year or so , I feel like some companies have started to push back for more in person working. Do we have a sense map for what the current split is between home and hybrid and office working? Yeah absol,utely . So I think it's still shifting, but the last data we got from government said about twenty eight percent of the UK workforce, that's everybody, not just office workers, but working in a hybrid way, another thirteen percent working fully virtual as well. What's a virtual office? Is that just someone working in their spare room? It might not be just at home. It might be they're choosing to work from a cafe space, maybe the beach as well but they,'re not in a physical office. So homeworker, virtual worker, remote worker, we use lots of different words for the same thing. And just to put that in a little bit of context before the pandemic, that's about twelve percent of people who are working in some way away from the office of virtual or hybrid working . By my matter forty one percent of people are working at home or working virtually at some point. Goldstar? Yeah, absolutely. It seems like there's a pattern to when people do go into the office as well. Midwek, predominantly, right? I mean, is it complicated for employers to manage staff coming and going all the time? Yeah, massively. So it's about three days per week on average that people are in the office and most people like the midweek peak period, so Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. That's a real headache for a lot of organisations. So if you think about providing an office and you're looking to make sure you've got a space for everybody, you've got a choice to be the design ing around a peak, so maybe the Wednesday when nearly everybody's wanting to be in. Do you have an office that's half empty, maybe on a Monday and a Friday? Do you have a bit of a scramble on a Wednesday where people are fighting to get just the best seat but any seat and all the problems that come with that as well. So how do we get people to choose maybe Monday or Friday or do you start to tell people when they're coming in? Tricky. And are some types of office more in demand than others? I think particularly coming out of the pandemic, the what will be called, I guess, high quality grade A kind of office space is really in demand. So eco friendly, probably more open if we think about the fit out as well. These are probably the kind of offices you have in your mind for fancy law firms and tech firms, breakout spaces, cafe spaces, big atriums, planting maybe inside as well. There's a term called hotelification, which is this idea of trying to make particularly shared office spaces feel like a really high quality four five star boutique hotel. So the kind of furniture, the lighting, the textiles that you feel in a really special place so psychologically , you feel relaxed. It doesn't feel like an office. You feel maybe more inclined to talk to people who sat around or that you can sit there, read a report, have a little bit of space and contemplation. So it's a different way of thinking about these shared office spaces. Tom, I've spent most of the past few years working out of a cowork space . It was an office. I rented a dedicated desk space. Other solo workers like myself had a hot desk membership so they could sit wherever they wanted. There are also companies there of different sizes and they could rent a whole office space for ten or even a hundred people. I was there both before and after the pandemic and they got way way more popular after . Yeah, absolutely. For two reasons, partly lots of people started their own businesses post pandemic so more people looking for a place to work and partly actually lots of companies decided we don't need to own the office anymore. Let's move some of our stuff out into shared office space. So we're not paying for the footprint when we don't need it. We can flex as we need to. We can pay by subscription rather than taking out a long lease. And that became very, very popular . You've got big names like WeWork out there that now host about sixty thousand companies around the world and had around nineteen million people through their offices last year. One thing that makes coworking spaces attractive as, well as being somewhere outside the house that you can go work and be around other people , is that they're also really well equipped. You often have a kitchen, sure, but you might have a table tennis table, some have a gym. The one I was at had beer taps. I didn't often use them. honest It was a very cool space. I would like to bring in our second expert guest to talk about how office space has been re engineered and where that may go in the future. She's a strategy leader and principal at Gensler, which designs and refurbishes build ings around the world, including in the past, GCHQ. Welcome, Jane Clay . Hello. What trends have you seen Jane and how office spaces have been re engineered over the past few years? Quite a few, but what they call the flight quality is a big thing . People are saying If you're going to make me come into the office and spend that money on my commute , I want a really good office. Thank you very much. I want it to be as good as I can have it at home . So they want the great coffee, they want the great social spaces . I think to be honest, the table tennis is falling by the wayside . Sorry to tell you that. Collaboration tools have exponentially changed, whether it's teams meeting, Zoom, whatever it might be. So you've got the rise of hybrid meetings where you know, it's mixed mode, somebody's at home, somebody's in the office, somebody might be at Wework, and I think the environment that an organization offers its staff has to reflect the brand and the ethos and the values of that organization , more so than ever before because younger generations are only going to go for a company that is showing that it does what it says, right? And that is reflected in how it treats its staff in how it provides the space for them. For example, Virgin Media O two is a recently completed project. Each floor has its own theme, you know, sports, music or media, and the look and feel of each floor is shaped directly by the staff working on that floor. So this again is about talking to the people and what they want. So for example , the sports floor when you walk onto it, it has like bleachers seating in a commulan area with big screens so people have the sense that maybe they're at a ball game. You know, one of the lovely things on the sports floor as well was at a treadmill desk, an actual desk with somebody on a Zoom or teams call while they were steadily on the treadmill. So these things matter. Tom, have you ever had a go on a treadmill desk? I have not two problems. One is my lack of coordination and two is that the ceiling in my home office is very low. if I started running, my head would go straight into the lounge. We talked about tremor desks in an episode of Sliced Bread on Standing Desks. Have a listen to that everyone BBC Sounds. If you're wondering whether to get one or not. Matt, we've talked about large impressive buildings for major clients. Where does this leave medium sized or smaller businesses? Is it a problem for them if they can't offer such eye catching workspace? I don't think they're ever going to compete in terms of having it a huge iconic building, but they can get a basics right so it's having the quiet space as well as social areas and so on. I think what small and medium businesses can really do is make sure the social aspect is right that people like they met people in that day, that it was worthwhile. They were doing things that added value by making the commute in. And it might be doing the stuff after work as well. So if you're a smaller organization , it's the after w drarinks or the social act ivities or the things at lunchtime that again bring people together that maybe is a bit easier to do if you're not a large corporate. And that's often the thing that gets lost when you're in a much larger multi floor building, big corporate headquarters. It might be very glitchy and beautiful , but it can also feel a bit in person as well. And I guess for the social cultural angle, those smaller companies they don't need to have their own standalone headquarters that is exclusively theirs to achieve that, do they? Not at all. It might be thinking about cod working space, shared space, it might be budding up as well. One design element that I've seen in some offices is a meeting pod , a soundproofed cubicle which can sit in the corner of an office or even on a roof terrace. It can provide a private space to take a call, to do focused work or possibly you can get bigger ones, hold a meeting. There is a business of on the Isle White that makes these and ships them to offices across the UK and the wider world. They are aptly called the Meeting Pod Company, and I'd like to welcome Onto Do their Chief Executive Officer and Co founder, Mike Dalovs. Mike, thanks for being with us today. Great to be here. Look at this. You're joining us over video from inside one of your meeting pods it looks like. Indeed, this particular model is curved in shape. So as much as being about a functional private space , it's also very much a design statement, something that's going to be seen as a wow factor in the workplace to encourage people to come back and work in there. And I believe you got into this business almost by accident. Tell us about that. Yeah, well, I have sizable market research company and we had a lot of big corporate clients. And a big atrium area we saw the atrium area as a great opportunity to have it as sort of collaborative meeting space . So we were looking around and we couldn't find anything we wanted. And my son in law who was actually a carpenter, said to me, said, I'm going to design you something really cool and funky, this really cool curved pod . And I have to say, sounds aw ful, but I was really quite surprised. More than that, our corporate clients came over and then, wow, this is amazing. We've never seen anything like this before. It came at a time where as everyone has indicated, you know, there was a shift in demand within the office environment and actually open plan offices were delivering incredibly efficient space , but there was very few places to have a private meeting and have a private call, which is part of the reason why we managed to develop and grow at the rate we have. So you charge around five thousand pounds for a small phone booth style unit up to around twenty thousand pounds for a fully enclosed outdoor model. We started the company in twenty sixteen. So four years before the pandem ic changed the way that many people work, I expect trying to sell small enclosed spaces during the pandemic didn't go so well. Well, we all know business is hard, right? Yeah. But let me tell you what it gets really hard is when you have social distancing of two meters and you've got meeting pods that are pretty much a metre and a half in width. I'm not going to lie early in the pandemic it was really tough and the interesting part was on one side enclosed meeting spaces in private offices were very much a no no, but what it did make us think about was, wouldn't it be cool if we could adapt our meeting pods to outdoor spaces? So the inside sealed pods not going to work in the pandemic. But the fact you had some outside ones with the sides open to the elements, then that of course met the brief. Absolutely, both open and enclosed pods for that functional purpose. And of course, officers in London and certain expensive areas could be upwards of two hundred pounds per square foot. Often people that have outdoor space, it's almost like free space . So you were giving the benefit of having opportunities to meet and work outside, but also you weren't encroaching on your very expensive square footage . Jane, Mike's is, of course, not the only company to be making meeting pods like this, and they are in demand, aren't they? They really are, partly because you can lift and shift , you know? That makes a real difference is you're not building something that you stuck with. Not only lift and shift around the office, but if you move office locations, you can also lift and shift it to a whole new location. Which is yeah. Matt, you study these things. Do you think meeting pods are here to stay? Absolutely. So I think it's really important that we're giving the right spaces that people need because we know the number one complaint that people tend to have in office is too much noise and not enough privacy . So anything we can do to design that in is a good thing . Well, Mike, I'm sure that is music to your ears. Thank you so much for joining us. Really, really appreciate your time. Thank you. Matt, I think it's fair to say if anyone is wondering will we still have offices in the future? Your answer is a resounding yes . Yeah, absolutely. We know that offices are really important. They help support productivity and learning and knowledge sharing . And I think we might see this change I guess in terms of what people do in those space and technologies they use, but we're social creatures . So I think we want that human contact. We learn from each other, we watch each other and the physical space and spending time together is a key way that we can set the tone and we reinforce it. So we've talked about some of the features that are popular in current offices. What no one has mentioned yet is the class ic conference room , a staple of offices for decades. Jane, does your company still include conference rooms in its designs or do you think a conference room is on its way out? I think conference rooms as we know it or as we used to know them , you know, people don't want them anymore in that way. They want ultimate flexibility. What they want is rooms that can do more than one thing . You know, a conference room today could be a yoga room tomorrow , but really the drive is for more smaller, slightly more intimate spaces . Conference rooms that take twenty to twenty four people are really more a thing of the past, and frankly you can combine two smaller rooms to do that. You know, all the data that people typically find is that large meeting rooms are usually used by one or two people. So large conference rooms as we know them, I think, will die out , but multipurpose, very flexible rooms that can do a multitude of things will stay as a thing that people really need. And we have been having a very UK focused conversation here. I expect design elements like a conference room will depend on which country an office is in. Yeah, you're absolutely right. There are cultural nuances. I mean, if you took some where like Japan for instance, which has a much more traditional work style, then something like a more formal conference room is going to be important . But again, it might not be a huge conference room, but its setup might be much more formal as opposed to something say in Europe or the UK or even the states where you might find that soft seating or sofas are coming into a play So what it looks like could be very different whereas you're going to find a sense of formality in those cultures where business is a much more formal process. Before I put my final questions to you all, I'd like to discuss a couple of the hot topics that often come up in a DOE episode robots and AI. Tom, some offices around the world do already use robots, don't they? In what way are they helping? So you might see telepresence robots, which are sort of screens on wheels where you can dial in like a video core and roam around the office to chat to people. You might see robots cleaning up, picking up rubbish, emptying bins, or you might see robots greeting you when you walk into the office rather than a human being, a hologram, or actually a sort of fully featured robot sitting behind a desk. So some of these robots are in offices around the world, aren't they? They just don't tend to be here in the UK. Absolutely. I have seen telepresence robots in the UK offices. We're not quite there in terms of many of the cleaning robots ser,ving robots , greeting robots yet, although in other countries you absolutely do see them. Do you think we will hear in the future? I think to an extent, but I think we really prize having great human beings at front of house to welcome you into the building , to give you that warm sense of personality and brand and the novelty of having a robot do it wears off pretty quickly. Although absolutely for sort of the chores side of the office I think they're really really useful. Jane onto the next of the big two, AI . There's lots of talk, of course, about how artificial intelligence could transform our lives. What is your best guess for how it might influence the future office? I think really AI will start to manage the day to day aspect s of work life for many people. It'll deal with scheduling. Maybe you can sort your environmental controls before you even get to the office. It could be that AI agents as they call them these days. It's rather like a silent assistant, isn't it? You know, if you have a meeting with your colleagues , it's there in the background and it's transcribing stuff for you so that everything's ready when you need it. You know, that takes a lot of the hassle out of the work day and it can make you more productive so it can free you up to do the creative side of work. If we use it in the right way it won't take over , but it will just enable our office life and our office work to be better and better. Matt, what other use cases do you see for AI and do you think office workers will be up for using it? I don't think they're going to have a choice, Greg, so yeah, let's get on board. This can help solve one of the biggest problems I think that managers often find in hybrid working. So how do you try schedule things? We have people keep in very different schedules. That's a classic place AI can help. How do we bring people together at the right time in a way that's frictionless. So maybe we would have dynamic pricing maybe within large companies where actually you get an incentive or maybe a bonus for using underuterized space, move people around big offices . And then I think finally that point around AI becoming part of everything that we're doing . I think that's going to mean that people want more human time together. We think about authentic time . If so much is coming at us, which is being through an AI filter , then I think actually going to see an increasing desire to spend time with authentic human beings where you know what they're saying is what they think or at least it's coming out of their mouth that hasn't been through an AI bot first. And think about that authenticity. Can you trust the email? Can you trust the avatar on screen? If you're sat next to somebody and looking them in the eye, you know who's there and you've got that relationship straight in front of you. The question I need to ask could there be fewer staff in the office because some of these jobs are being taken by AI? Yeah, so we're seeing seeing that starting to bite I think in terms of reduced grant scheme numbers and so on. I'm an optimist though. So I think every technology leap that we've had so far, we've seen jobs go. We've seen whole new jobs industry services grow up around them and we've actually ended up with more employment off the back of it. So actually you don't see anybody who's a particular day trial listen, say in an office anymore, but you see a whole new job category we've never even thought of yet . Right, experts. Our nine to five is almost over, but before we head home, my final question to you both, Matt and Jane is this, when you consider the future of the office, what one thing do you think will rise to success and what one thing will fall into obscurity , Jane I think for me the success will be the office bringing out the best in people. It'll prioritise mental health and that social dimension of work life , not just productivity f,undamentally , I think offices will survive and get even better because humans are social creatures. And what will disappear? Well, you know, there won't be a boss's office. I think that'll go by the wayside . And I think we'll move away from design fit outs that are very fixed . And I think fixed furniture will go to the wayside, which should very much please anybody who designed pods. Matt, what are your thoughts? Yeah, it's a tough one, but I think what's going to arise? I think we're going to see more personalizable space. So not just the social space we've talked about, but also really well designed , really high quality, private and quiet spaces for people because we want to spend time together, but we also have to do the hard thinking work as well. Sadly we do. And in terms of falling, I think we're going to see this idea of presenteeism. So being in the office for the sake of it because we need to be seen to look like we're being productive or working, that's gonna go. I think younger generations are just not gonna wear the idea that they're going to travel into an office and go to the inconvenience of that just for the sake of it. So it absolutely has to be something that's adding value. So presenteism is going to go. Matt, Jane, thank you both so much for joining us. Time for my final question to you then Tom, what do you think our offices could be like in five, ten and fifty years time? So five years I think we'll have given up on this silly idea of the return to office mandate and accepted that flexible, more hybrid work is the way to go. We're only doing it because we don't really know how to manage people and get the best out of people when we can't see them. So that will be gone within five years. I really hope. years Ten I think, telepheasants will be a lot better, either through a robot or through wearing sort of smart glasses. Ultimately, I still think there's a little bit of an edge for humanity and do things face to face. You can't grab a coffee together if the other person's a robot , but I think it will be much, much better within ten years . And then in fifty, I think the office itself becomes a robot within fifty years. Walls that can move themselves, offices that can repurpose, move things around , dynamically reconfigure based on AI to optimise the space to the people who were there. You'll come back in the morning, the office will look different and you'll find it works better for you and your colleagues. Wow, amazing. Walls that are controlled by AI, ready for whatever you need them to be. Exactly. Well, big thank you, Tom Cheesewright, Professor Matt Davis, Jane Clay and Mike Dales for joining me today. Which of these possible offices will we see in the future? We'll just have to wait and see. Next time on Do we'll be exploring the future of IWAR. Could smart glasses with built in video cameras see past previous failures become widely accept ed. Dough was presented by me, Greg Foot and produced by John Douglass. You can find all our previous episodes on the sliced bread feed on BBC Sounds and Dough is a BBC audio North production for BBC Radio four and BBC Sounds. Hi, we're Van Tullaken, the identical twin doctor Van Tullaken's Chris and Zan. In what's up Docs, we're diving into the messy, complicated world of health and well being. We are living in the middle of what I would call a therapeutic revolution, but it can sometimes be hard to know what's really best for us. Do I need to take a testosterone supplement? How can I fix my creaky needs? Why do I get hungry?