The Millennials and the Office of the Future

The Millennial Generations worries above all to find a space on the market,  through which may add sustainable value to that same market. It is the generation that does well and knows if what they do well is interesting to enough people in order to become an interesting activity. This generation does not want high fixed costs, nor growing to the point of being Forbes cover. It might be a coincidence, never their life purpose. This generation wants to be more autonomous, to work where they feel better and with flexible working hours. Wants to feel the city's pulse, and not to be it slave or of it rush hours. This generation knows companies are choosing more freelancers, specialists in areas that are not their core business but, nonetheless, essentials. This means that there are increasingly more professional working for themselves and increasingly more entrepreneurs able to be success businesspeople.

According to a study promoted by the American company Intuit, 40% of the USA market in 2020, will be made of this generation. People who have no time to loose in rush hours, waive formalities as well as obligations in having fixed places to produce – because, in reality,  you only won't work anywhere, if you don't want to (or who doesn't know how to take advantage from the new flexible work models, such as the Coworking or the Virtual Office). For this generation, the access to data and documents, will be the least of their problems: what was yesterday on the computer and made us go to the company to print it, is now on the cloud. In reality, we can currently carry 2 TB of files in our pocket and more than 80.000 musics, without them weighting more than the same 700g.

For this generation, Office is also something belonging to the past. Many of them are in reality “Nomad Workers”: they only need back-office support for telephonic answering and mail reception, as well as a workspace used in a flexible basis, where you pay only what you use.
If, associated to all this, we think this generation has all to have a more pleasant life and more control over their personal and professional time, it is easy to think the market will fast evolve to ensure the estimate 40%, prophesied by this study, has revealed itself quite modest.

Carlos Gonçalves

CEO Avila Business Centers / Avila Coworking

Author of the book Out of the Office