The end of the Office?

The recent bad weather has again given my team the opportunity to test our remote access capabilities. Yet again we've proved that remote working works well for us. Just like in Feb 2009 we suffered no ill-effects from having half the team snow-bound - we had the tools in place to enable people to do their job remotely and everything continued as normal.

These enforced remote working periods have all been relatively short periods - mostly just a few days. Whilst I've said that we continued to function as normal, as the length of remote working increased the short-comings of our set up started to show. Right now, I don't believe it's ready for frequent or long periods of remote working and certainly not adequate for a permanent remote working solution.

It's not the tools that enable my team to do their job that are missing, it's the peripheral capabilities that you take for granted in an office environment. Most are based around the need to work with others and communicate and share information whether formally or informally.

For instance, how do you edit a document in a meeting with half the attendees working remotely? Yes, of course, you can use Webex and teleconferencing. It's all possible. But if you've not planned in advance it can be a bit of a nightmare - recently I attended a meeting where half the meeting time was used up whilst people joined the online and teleconferencing element. The inevitable rush through the document was anything but satisfactory.

People quickly miss the office interaction, casual conversation, walking around, impromptu brainstorming or whatever that can happen in the office environment to get things resolved. Remote working tends to introduce a formality that you just don't get in the office, it stifles many aspects of day-to-day office activities that are essential, but often taken for granted.

It also means that managers and leaders have to systematically alter the way they manage their people - they have to trust a great deal more and enhance performance management and measurement and get far better at consistent and regular communication - it's very easy to forget someone when they're working remotely and people can quickly become accustomed to doing the minimum to get along which would not be possible in the office and productivity slips away.

How to resolve this conundrum? Create and use an on-line virtual office. Your team can join it with their avatars and bobs-your-uncle, you've got your office environment back. You can achieve the social interaction and spontaneity that you get in the real office and resolve many of the issues described above. Once more you have an environment where people can interact spontaneously, managers can once more manage by walking around chatting with individuals more or less like they would in the office. It's obvious when someone's taken a lunch-break or in a meeting - they're not at their virtual desk, just like in the real-world office. Meetings can be held in virtual meeting rooms with virtual projectors sharing documents or presentations just like they would in the real world - no more long-winded sign-in processes, you just virtually walk in to the meeting room and get going and how wonderful, there's no limit on the number or size of meeting rooms!

There are a few of these types of environment on line, but I've yet to come across anyone who's actually used any of them and found it successful. We'll see, but surely this must be the way to go? How much could you save off the bottom line if you could close the vast majority of your office-space going on-line for the rest of it. How much travel would you save if all your meetings with clients were in the virtual office, plane rides to see the overseas offices would be a thing of the past, everyone could be in one "building" - no longer would teams have to be split over multiple locations. Taken up by the majority, this would decimate the office rental market, change the look of our cities forever, save companies millions, remove vast amounts of traffic from our roads and reduce everyone's carbon footprint... By that score, we should all start immediately. I for one am going to explore it further and see where it gets me...