Untethering Information Workers: Rethinking Workplace Location and Layout
By Erica Driver, Forrester Research

Throughout the past year, Forrester has written extensively about the future of work - ranging from empowering information workers with next-generation content to visualisation and simulation, to disruptive staffing changes, as baby boomers begin retiring, and millennials (those born between 1980 and 2000) join the workforce with sky-high expectations.

In fact, Forrester has been, it is fair to say, one of the leading lights in the promotion of a new way of working. Its Information Workplace (IW) series has addressed a host of questions including how IW will impact current and future physical work environments, and the social, economic, and technology trends it will prompt as a result.

Erica Driver recently authored Untethering Information Workers: Rethinking Workplace Location And Layout, the seventh report in the Forrester IW series, which explores these issues in depth.

At the core of the report is the idea that modern business will essentially act as collaborative cultures where companies look beyond people, process, and technology to include social context. The report promotes the idea that physical environments and workplace flexibility affect not only individual and organisational productivity but also workers' abilities to collaborate, share ideas, and innovate. This in turn, the report argues, has an effect on the enterprise's ability to attract and retain desired employees; and management's ability to control real estate and facilities costs.

Driver promotes the idea that workplace planning should have a knock on effect on many other areas of planning, including  Information Workplace strategy, tele-work policy, business continuity/disaster preparedness, employee recruiting and retention, and outsourcing and globalization strategy.

These are big ideas and central to them is the assertion that tele-working policies have to be a central pillar of work-place design. Thanks to technologies' ability to extend the workplace beyond the corporate firewall and into employees’ spare rooms, Logicalis finally believes we are at a point where businesses really can deliver intuitive communications systems, able to take full advantage of the modern work ideals that have so oft been talked about, but have so infrequently  been achieved.
For more information visit www.forrester.com.

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