Philip Ross: futurist says make space for the future

Australian business risks falling behind the rest of the world unless it ditches its fixation on “grim” workplace design.

Work should be free of the constraints of physical place, Philip Ross says.

Australia’s corporate community risks falling behind the rest of the world unless it ditches its fixation on “grim” workplace design and an obsession with saving space, workplace futurist Philip Ross says.

Ross, chief executive of Ungroup, says Australian corporations are stuck in the turn-of-the-century mindset when it comes to work environments, with far too much emphasis on the outdated and inefficient “activity-based working” model.

Businesses need to catch up with their more enlightened European and US cousins, he says, and introduce workplace models focused on empowering and motivating staff through work clusters and communities.

“Most (Australian) offices are pretty grim,” Ross says.

“They are containers for work; they are not much different from a factory; they are not great places for people. I don’t think people enjoy most of the hours they spend at work. All the figures show that most people are disengaged.”

Ross says Australian work environments need to focus more on empowering employees, with research across decades showing a link between worker empowerment, motivation and productivity.

“You need to try to find the right mix — a workplace that has a great vibe, which has a pulse, has the right atmosphere, encourages interaction when you need it and encourages or allows concentration when you need it,” he says.

Business leaders need to realise workplace design is not about space saving and space ratios but more about the “workers community” or cluster. A great office is one aligned to people, he says, where they have the freedom to choose where they should go and work, based on who they are, their preferences, activities and tasks, and where they can move between specialised spaces more suitable and aligned to what they are doing.

He says technology and connectivity mean the physical workspace is a thing of the past, a concept Australian corporations cannot seem to shake.

Businesses need to take advantage of the perfect storm confronting workplaces to catch up and keep up with international counterparts, centred on the cloud, connectivity and new devices.

“The office telephone is now dead. Why would you call someone’s desk? You call a person, not a desk,” he says. “And what is a computer? You are going to carry in your bag or pocket a powerful communications device that you will begin to use when you go into an office, either on its own, or you will dock it to have a richer experience. But (in the future) you won’t go to a desk day-in and day-out and log in to an old-fashioned PC.”

Workplaces in Europe and the US are generally dedicated to, or moving towards, activity-based clustering to lift employee productivity, moving away from space and space efficiency and towards performance. But Ross says activity-based clustering is being watered down in Australia.

The office of the future will be more “akin to a theatre stage” that can be morphed by its users rather than just housing technology, people and files, he says. Busi­nesses should be more inclusive, more collaborative, more about results.

“Work shouldn’t be a place we commute to, it should be something we do. It should be free of the constraints of physical place. Work is about anytime, anywhere, any place. That wasn’t possible five years ago. If you left the corporate building it was a second-class experience.

“Today there’s no difference. What’s left in the corporate building is almost irrelevant, you can connect from anywhere to the cloud. Velocity is a word I hear a lot of when I look at global innovators. They move to market more quickly than their competitors and that advantage is huge.

“Once you identify the real clusters, the real work that is taking place, you have a paradigm shift.” And that real work is different from organisational charts and the classic way of managing people at work.

Ross says the most inventive and productive workplaces are hives of activity where critical mass and clustering means workers engage, “bump” into each and create. The concept of working from home, or “distributed work”, is not the panacea, and many workers prefer the social and intellectual networking that comes from being with others.

“I think we went too far with distributed work,” he says. “It doesn’t build on the adjacent pos­sibilities. The most inventive ­places are hives of activities (and) therefore you need to get critical mass.

“We are seeing people wanting to belong. Some of that belonging will be from employers creating fantastic workspaces.

“Others will be what I call third spaces, or second homes, around the permeable city, or clubs (workers) can go into.”

Ross talks about “engineered serendipity” as being important in the new age of workplaces where technology, social networks, individuals, real estate and work collide to produce better outcomes.

“People who are in the same place at the same time and have something in common will be ‘bumped’ together (and) the building will suggest the interactions and encounters that might be powerful or productive,” he says.

“In large companies, people just don’t meet each other; it’s left to chance, it’s too random.

“Knowing people are in the same building at the same time, overlaying that with the social networks we all use, and then triggering what I call engineered serendipity, is a new big wave.”

He says the “quantified self”, once a thing of science fiction, where buildings track workers and their output, is becoming a reality. While it essentially is a move towards wellbeing at work, it can also invade an individual worker’s privacy.

“For example (an app) might measure how long you have been sitting down and suggest that standing or walking is needed.

“It would measure how many hours of uninterrupted coding has been achieved or it might look at how many emails you’ve sent after 9pm as an indicator of work-life balance.”