–By Brian Pereira, Conference Architect at Hannover Milano Fairs India
New Delhi, July 16: The modern workplace is totally different from offices of the past. Fax machines, wired lines all over and a nine-to-five working hours are now confined to history. With increased Globalization, businesses no longer function from one location, but have offices and sites around the world. Businesses have an ecosystem of global partners and supply chains extend to different corners of the globe.
Let us take a closer look at the shifts that’s redefining the future workplace
1. Fragmented organization: Different aspects of the business are spread over different locations. R&D might be in one city while manufacturing will be in another. And Sales could be in different cities. This is happening because businesses are trying to be nearer to their customers. Also, they look for the best value they can derive at a particular location, in terms of infrastructure, real estate costs, space, proximity to ports, airports, railway stations, facilities, labour etc.
2. Globalized Supply chains: Gone are the days when one mega corporation made everything or owned end-to-end processes. Specialization and best of breed are bywords today, and various components within a product are manufactures by different companies around the world. Globalized supply chains bring it all together.
3. Distributed Workforce – An organization’s workforce is spread around different locations with factories and sales offices located around the country, or in other countries.
4. Increased Mobility – The workforce is on-the-go moving between branches or customer sites. And hence the increased use of mobile devices.
5. Instantaneous and Collaborative Communication – email will be replaced by IM tools like FB Messenger and WhatsApp. Group communications will be encouraged.
6. Younger Workforce – The changing demographics shows that half of the Indian population will be below 30 years by 2020. A younger workforce dominating the organization.
7. Shadow IT – democratization and decentralization of IT within the organization. Employees and line of business heads buying and deploying their own apps and services from the cloud, bypassing the in-house IT department.
8. New 4-G connectivity will enable video based tools and more video type media.
9. Specialization – The best talent will be found outside the organization. People will choose entrepreneurship over working on a payroll.
(The article was first published in CXOToday.com)