A masterpiece called project work

Worktech 2015, Melbourne, Deakin Theatre

Worktech 2015 in Melbourne was held in the iconic Deakin Edge theater facing the Yarra River on 4^th of March 2015. A variety of presenters provided a wide spectrum of ideas and insights to future of work: from gadgets to workplace vibe, spatial typologies to unworking, sitting as a killer to sensoring people flows. The themes that were most on the table were related to mobility and recruitment, wellbeing of the workforce and community engagement.

Are we heading towards a Hollywood model of work? Harold Becker from Microsoft painted visionary scenarios of how technology could help us to collaborate in a 5-10 year timespan. His team at Microsoft interpret that the socio-cultural change taking place increasingly in the near future derives from three major shifts: connected development, replacement of hierarchies with networks and the break down of corporate offices with less than 60% vacancy rates. He suggested that we are heading towards a Hollywood model of working with which he referred to movie production-type of team recruitment and project-like approach resulting in a demand for services enabling fluidity of both real estate and HR. Consequently, he envisioned manager roles to shift towards more team empowerment and humanization of work. He saw that in an attempt to support the evolution, we need to bring people together, live smarter through focus and flow, and enable friction-free creativity and fluid mobility.

Can there be a united culture for the mobile work force? Phillip Ross talked about Jelly bean working and the internet of things, providing scenarios of buildings as physical networks, quantified self and quantified offices. Tony Armstrong from CBRE discussed the increasingly temporary nature of workforce and highlighted the wellbeing of teams and the role of managers in empowering them through culture and trust building. He also put emphasis on workplace solutions as supporters of teams and a relatively recent standard called the Well Building Standard.

So how can supportive services answer these shifts? Are effective recruitment services and extremely flexible project room leases on-demand the way to go in the worklife of high performing super talent teams? Would it make sense to integrate LinkedIn and Liquidspace to serve the directors and producers of a masterpiece called project work?

Rytkönen
Campus dude, PhD student, an inspired adventurer surfing the waves of randomness