Action stations: employees now in state of workplace arousal

WORK was straightforward for much of the 20th century. Workers worked Monday to Friday from nine to five. Some even worked on Saturday mornings.

Holidays consisted of four weeks leave, generally taken between Boxing Day and Australia Day. Bosses were addressed as "mister" and they prowled the workplace, scowling, looking for anything, or anyone, that might be amiss.

The workplace in this era was invariably located either in the CBD if it was a shop or office, or in the inner suburbs if it was a warehouse or factory.

Workers commuted from home to work, clocked on (literally) and made sure they were still there when the boss left after five.

Forty years later and the world of work has profoundly changed. The hard edges of the workplace have softened. Work has escaped its Monday-to-Friday confines and now claims bits of the weekend.

The same logic applies to working days.

Work claims minutes and hours outside the nine-to-five bracket: mobile phone calls are made and taken during the commute; emails are answered after dinner; BlackBerrys are glanced at during social events.

It all adds up to modern workers being in what might be termed a permanent state of workplace arousal - ready for action at a moment's notice. 

You do realise that the BlackBerry isn't a communications device at all. In fact, it's a magical machine that can teleport anyone from any situation at any time.

At a restaurant with boring company? No worries. Whip out your BlackBerry, hold it under the table until you find an engagement that is more interesting.

And why not? After all, it confers to others that you are a mighty important person and, frankly, that they are damned lucky to have your presence. I mean what do they expect, to have you attentive to their dreary conversation as well?

You see, this is the beauty of modern work. It follows you around and, thanks to the BlackBerry (and iPhone); it can rescue you at any time. In fact, "work" is like a guardian angel: it's always there to relieve you from social and family events that can be, well, let's face it, a tad boring.

Unlike the bad old days where work was riven by fuddy-duddy hierarchies, today we are far more enlightened. The workplace has been democratised. No more "mister" or even "ms". We call the boss by their first name. Even graduate staff!

And "boss" is such an unfriendly term; today we prefer concepts such as team leader or coach or mentor. And out too has gone the notion of a separate office. Today's groovy team leaders live in the open savannah of the open-plan office.

Ahh, the open-plan office, the much-loved habitat of designers and their clients. A single workspace has all that you need: telephone, computer port, lockable cupboard, and pin-board for postcards and photos of boyfriends and pets.

This format is apparently equalising since it removes the hierarchy of separate offices and it encourages collaboration because everyone is "accessible".

But the open-plan office has its drawbacks. There is no privacy. Workers who need to concentrate on writing find it difficult to do so amid a background of noise and chatter. And there's never enough space to store files regardless of designers' perennial insistence that this is the age of the paperless office. No it's not. Paper still clutters the office.

There's an inbuilt incentive for designers to find reasons why the cost-efficient open-plan format should be preferred. And their CFO clients will always agree!

Just as the protocols and hierarchies of the workplace have altered over the past 40 years, so too has the location of the workplace.

Inner-city warehouses have been flung out to the city's edge or indeed to Guangzhou in the case of factories. Offices still cluster in the CBD or on the CBD fringe.

But in the future I think there will be an increasing demand for office space in suburbia.

Not so much in the Los Angelean model, where office parks are affixed to arterial junctions, but in an Australian model, where offices are co-located with public transport and retail and support facilities in the middle suburbs.

This allows workers with children to shuttle between home, work and school. The issue will be finding and redeveloping sites that take work to the workers rather than expect workers to commute to a single central workplace. But then this is precisely the property industry's job.

In the workplace of the future, work is entirely flexible: it can be completed at the office, on the move, interstate or at home.

Office hierarchies are flat and are more likely built around connections and skills rather than age and pedigree.

Old protocols evaporate: workers turn up whenever is convenient since performance is now measured by output not by attendance. The workplace will, due to cost pressures, remain open plan although I can see a need for even greater flexibility in the arrangement of workspaces.

Perhaps this will prompt development of a "cockpit facility" that is detachable and connectable to collaborative work teams.

The workplace of the future cannot presume that workers will commute vast distances due to the rising cost of petrol and the perennial inadequacies of public transport. Part of the solution will be telecommuting, but workers are social beings; they enjoy the camaraderie that only a workplace can provide.

I don't see workers working from home ever constituting any more than, say, 10 per cent of the non-farm workforce.

I think many workplaces in the 21st century will escape the CBD and will increasingly be sprinkled throughout suburbia in key services and transport-oriented locations.

Wherever and however the workplace of the future is configured, one thing is for certain: the prowling, scowling boss will not be part of it.

But it does raise the question of what behavioral challenges lie ahead for workplaces that are both convenient and flexible?

Is there such a thing as a workplace that offers too much flexibility and is too convenient?

Bernard Salt is a KPMG Partner; [e-mail]; twitter.com/bernardsalt