The traditional office has died. Long live the office!

In recent years, the world watched to the emergence of centrifugal forces that have completely changed the way people work in companies, the office traditional concept, and have also putted under pressure the respective IT departments that were faced with new challenges.

Tablets and smartphones outweighed more and more the traditional computers as the main device and mobility has become a keyword. People work increasingly outside their usual work station in a traditional office. It is not by mere chance, for example, that the new Microsoft headquarter in Portugal has no fixes places and there are less work spaces than workers. Examples such as this have been widespread in recent years all over the world.

To this reality joins now another global tendency: the massification of the new work models (virtual offices and coworking). Companies of all sizes are increasingly adopting these solutions or using them as a complement to the traditional office providing more flexibility to workers and to organizations themselves.

As for technology it keeps up the pace with these new realities that came to stay. From video conference solutions, communications or the office virtualization given by global players, passing by applications to manage in real time the office activity, even at distance, such as the myOffice app, the technology has emphasized even more this path. 

In this context the office is more and  more the place where we are in each moment, whether be in the street, at an airport, or in any other place. If, on the one hand, this mobility and flexibility brought new challenges to the IT departments in terms of new solutions that accommodate this reality, it is pragmatic they foresee the end the office concept the way it has been known for decades.

According to a global study from Aruba Networks close to IT departments, the majority considers that the office traditional concept will be obsolete in coming years. The traditional work spaces we all know over the decades will evolve to share work spaces with flexible solutions which may work more as kind of hubs for workers in dislocations than the conventional work spaces. 

It is certain that there will always be certain functions and tasks which hardly be affected by this “revolution” but the majority is noticing deep changes. Companies have also realized that the adaptation to this new paradigm may become itself a competitive and strategic advantage facing other competitors moving slower in this transition. The future increasingly belongs to the organizations that know how to work in a rational and intelligent way.

Carlos Gonçalves 

Ávila Business Center’s CEO