Last week I wrote about one of the key themes that I believe are going to make up the future work, I encourage you to read that post titled: The Future of Work is About Customized Work. There are several of these themes that I’m going to be exploring in the near future and the next one is “Connect to Work.” The traditional view of working sees an employee waking up around 6:30 am, having their morning breakfast and then commuting anywhere from 30 mins to over 1.5 hours to get to work. The employee gets to their office around 8 or 9 am and usually leaves around 6 pm. This is what it used to mean to “work” or better yet “to GO TO work.”
What does it mean to connect to work?
The notion of having to go to work is dying, in fact for some it’s already dead. Work doesn’t have to be done at an office anymore. The only thing that most of us need is an internet connection that allows us to connect to the people and information we need to get our jobs done. This is what it means to “connect to work.” The many collaborative platforms out there are making this possible and what is particularly fascinating is the transition towards mobile work! We can now access virtually all of the same people, files, conversations, tasks, and other types of information on our mobile devices that we can on our computers. The power of these mobile devices that we carry around in our pockets is, for lack of a better word, awesome and it’s enabling and empowering a new type of employee, the future employee.
Connecting to work means that you can have access to everything and anything you need whether you are at a cafe, in an airplane, in a cab, or sitting somewhere on the beach. You don’t have to go to work, work now comes to you.
This shift is forcing organizations to rethink some of the core assumptions that were made during the creation of these institutions, for example, do we now need offices or a central headquarters for our company?
I’m seeing more and more organizations implementing flexible work policies and our recent survey on the future of work (which you can still take and share!) is already revealing some very telling results on this which I will be sharing soon. The giant elephant in the room is that we (including mangers and executives) all know that we have the ability and the capacity to enable this type of work to happen and we all inherently know that it is beneficial to do so. It’s a virtually palpable shift that we can’t deny when looking at the future of work.
I’ll be exploring this theme in much more detail in the future but for now I just wanted to introduce it and I’m sure many of you are already quite aware of it.
The future of work is “connecting to work.”
Comments