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CEO : Trevor HardyCo-founder : Chris Sanderson

Editor-in-chief : Martin RaymondChief strategy officer : Tom Savigar

Head of consultancy : Letesia GibsonHead of operations : Nicole ClemensSenior futures consultants : Rachele Simms, Daniella Betts, Philippa Wagner, Laura Williams, Rebecca FlemingQuant research analyst : Stephanie ClaphamFutures consultants : Karli-Jade Fontiverio-Hylton, Ellie Osborne, Sebastien Van Laere, Darcy SummertonSenior account manager : Cinzia BrusiniAccount manager : Rhianna Cohen

Report editor : Steve ToozeLS:N Global editor : Jonathan OpenshawLS:N Global visual editor : Hannah RobinsonLS:N Global insight editor : Peter FirthLS:N Global senior journalists : Rowland Manthorpe, Naomi Leach, Daniela WalkerLS:N Global visual trends analyst : Aleksandra SzymanskaLS:N Global video journalists : James Maiki, David McGovernLS:N Global visual trends researchers : Victoria Buchanan, Jessica SmithLS:N Global picture researcher : Rachael StottLS:N Global junior journalist : Alex JordanLS:N Global correspondents : Sharon Thiruchelvam, Calum Ross

Creative director : Kirsty MinnsArt director : Joanna Tulej Production planner : Alex CrouchProduction editors : Ian Gill, Jon BillingeCreative consultant : Lucinda ChuaSenior designer : Joanna ZawadzkaDesigner : Jonathan CoxJunior designer : Queenie WongSenior creative artworker : Natasha MoledinaVisual researcher : Amy Sellers

Business development director : Cliff BuntingHead of sales : Dominic RoweNew business managers : Alena Joyette, Finn Evans, Jonathan AyresAccount managers : Trish Waters, Helena Balls, Sam SchneiderAccount executive : Thomas ReesProject managers : Tim Howard, Kristian PrevcSpecial projects manager : Carly Woods

The Future Laboratory :26 Elder Street, London E1 6BT, United KingdomPhone: +44 20 7791 2020Email: office@thefuturelaboratory.com

The Future Laboratory is one of Europe’s foremost brand strategy, consumer insight and trends researchconsultancies. Through its online network LS:N Global, it speaks to 300 clients in 14 lifestyle sectorson a daily, weekly and monthly basis.

thefuturelaboratory.com

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Work Life : Creative Villages : Mission Critical Barriers : Screen Shift : Big Data Team Building : Sharded Brands : Cultural Bottleneck

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Work Life

But by 2025, smart technology will have empowered the rebirth and rejuvenation of the office as an inspiring, interactive, convivial meeting place, controlled by voice and gesture – an environment where millions of us will be happy to work.

We are already seeing the first flowerings of Office 2.0 in 2015. Facebook’s NYC office, with its tablet app sign ins, webcam screens linked to the main California campus, and wall-mounted staff collaboration touchscreens, is one of the new breed.

Commonwealth Bank Place in Sydney is another indication of the future. More than 6,500 staff move between activity-based break-out rooms and collaboration spaces linked by state-of-the-art smart tech networks.

Clearly, there is a growing appetite for these smart tech-empowered offices among workers themselves. Three quarters (77%) of US workers believe that smart wearable technology in the office would make them more efficient and more productive at work, and almost half (46%) believe their company should invest in it, according to a study by PwC.

In the next decade, their desires will be delivered upon, as smart systems strip away administrative drudgery. Big Data analytics, not bosses, will build office teams, and all staff will be empowered to create unique work subcultures that allow them to perform at their best.

The death of the office has been predicted for decades, as the disruptive growth of connected digital technologies transforms everywhere from back bedrooms to coffee shops into virtual workspaces.

Creative Villages

Remote working will not be the way of the workplace future. Instead, the smart office will emerge as a creative village that makes staff more productive, healthier – and happier.

Innovative tech companies such as Google and Facebook are leading the way, spending billions on building offices that bring their people together in a more innovative and effective way.

‘The workplace is shifting from a rigid, hierarchical environment into a modern version of the villages we all lived in until the Industrial Revolution 200 years ago,’ says Ben Waber, visiting scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), global expert on smart sensing technologies and author of People Analytics: How Social Sensing Technology Will Transform Business and What It Tells Us about the Future of Work.

‘It will allow humans to do what they are best at – communicate intuitively, face-to-face, to consult and collaborate to solve the increasingly complex work situations that we face.

‘Smart systems in the 2020s will handle the macro-picture – all the masses of data and scheduling that makes a modern office run smoothly.

‘The net result will be a less stressed, less overloaded workforce that leaves less often, takes fewer sick days, and is lot more positive, healthy and happy.’

JP Luchetti, consultancy director at smart solutions consultant Mubaloo, agrees. ‘Future smart technology will be about maximising face-time, not turning us all into remote workers,’ he says.

‘It will manage our diaries, write up our notes, fill in our expenses forms, and book our meetings

– leaving us with a huge amount of extra time to spend talking face-to-face with our clients and our colleagues.

‘It is human nature to want to look the other person in the eye and decide whether you trust them enough to work with them, and to build a strong professional relationship with them. The idea that smart technology will move us away from that is ridiculous.’

Mission Critical Barriers

Today’s information overload and digital distractions are threatening to crush office productivity. But by 2025, smart systems that know us better than we know ourselves will shield us from the email and communications blizzard.

‘Smart technology in the office will get more and more intuitive, and one of its key roles will be to prioritise your digital existence – to screen out all the non-essential messages and distractions that stop you doing your job effectively,’ says JP Luchetti of Mubaloo.

‘It will know what messages are mission critical for the task you’re working on right now, and which ones are from a friend asking you out for a drink and can safely be delivered later.’

Screen Shift

In the next decade, computer screens will still be everywhere in the office. But they will often be invisible until the moment that we need to use them.

Interactive smart surfaces on walls and tables will become screens at the touch of our hand, or even the sound of our voice.

‘Interactive smart technology will allow us to use any surface as a screen when we need to, and the rest of the time the technology will talk to us directly as a voice in our ears, the way that our species evolved to communicate,’ says JP Luchetti of Mubaloo.

A whole new hand-signal etiquette will evolve in the workplace as staff adjust to interacting with gesture-controlled smart systems.

‘It will look and feel odd to begin with, but there will be rapid cultural change in the same way that 10 years ago someone talking out loud as they walked looked odd – now we know they are simply using their smartphone,’ says Luchetti.

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Big Data Team Building

By 2025, smart systems rather than human managers will build office teams, harnessing Big Data to pinpoint exactly who the key collaborators should be – and designing ways to get them together.

‘Smart systems will build a startlingly accurate picture of our work-life network, and that will revolutionise how and why we configure office spaces and build the teams that work within them,’ says Ben Waber of MIT.

‘All that data will let managers know where the true, most powerful collaborations are happening.’

Team building will become an office science rather than a matter of hit-and-miss intuition. ‘A true understanding of inter-team dynamics will allow us to reconfigure an office to help those teams work more closely and more easily together,’ says Waber.

‘I can see team A and team B email and phone each other a lot and create a shared eating/chill-out area where they can collaborate and hang out together in a loose, informal way.

‘It’s much more subtle – and much more effective – than the way we team-build right now because it uses bottom-up, organic connections, rather than top-down dictats.’

Big Data-driven team building will also provide a solution to the sometimes tricky business of managing hierarchy-averse Millennials.

‘It will be the perfect collaborative work environment for the Millennials, allowing them to link up, share ideas, and solve problems in a very natural, organic way,’ says JP Luchetti of Mubaloo.

‘And with all the drudge work and admin stripped away, it leaves these workers free to consult and innovate around their core roles.’

Sharded Brands

In the 2020s, smart offices will create far more bespoke organisational templates, allowing brands to beta-test, build and run dozens of different office subcultures, each individually tailored to get their best out of specific teams.

‘Smart technology will spell the end of the company-wide reorganisation where a CEO spends hundreds of millions restructuring almost on a hunch,’ says Ben Waber of MIT.

‘Instead, a business will be able to crunch the data to test and run many different work cultures across the company, fine-tuning each version to make a specific team most comfortable, happy and productive.

‘It will be utterly transformative. A business will be able to present lots of different faces to its different audiences, in the same way that Amazon has 50 different home pages for its sharded customer base.’

Cultural Bottleneck

The main barrier to this exciting smart office future will not be technological – it will be cultural.

Over the next 10 years, managers will need to unlearn 150 years of hierarchical organisational wisdom in order to effectively guide their new smart technology-empowered collaborative teams.

‘Technologically, all of this is very doable right now. And I think that lots of innovative companies – particularly the smaller ones – will be well down the path to the ‘office village’ by 2025,’ says Ben Waber of MIT.

‘But, for many, the obstacles will be cultural – a resistance to shifting away from the defunct management and organisational structures of the last 150 years.

‘Many will find it very challenging to suddenly think about using smart technology to empower collaboration, rather than as a means of control and oversight. But those who fail to make the change may not survive the next decade.’

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