As work becomes decentralized, connection is crucial

The two leaders of ”The Agile Workplace” research project did not have to look far
to find vivid examples for their study.

By D.C. Denison, Globe Staff

Michael Joroff, a senior lecturer at MIT’s School of Architecture and Planning, spends
just one-third of his working time in a small office on the MIT campus that he shares
with a colleague. The rest of the time he’s either working in his home office in a
converted barn in Concord or logging in from remote locations around the world.

Michael Bell, a vice president at Gartner Research, lives in Noank, Conn., and has an
office in Gartner’s headquarters in Stamford. But like many Gartner employees in New
England, he has access to shared offices in Gartner’s data center in Trumbull, Conn.,
and its staff office in Lowell. He meets occasionally with clients and colleagues ”in
hotel conference rooms and coffee shops all up and down [Interstate] 95,” he said.

Now, after leading a yearlong project to study what they call the ”workplace industry,”
Bell and Joroff can reference many more data points in addition to their own
experiences. Their 150-page report, recently released, takes what they already knew –
that work is becoming more decentralized – and aggressively follows a number of
strands to predict how technology is likely to change the way we will be working five
years from now, and beyond.

Some of the most surprising conclusions proceed directly from the way Gartner and
MIT framed the study. Instead of focusing on the traditional office space industry, the
project examined trends in corporate information technology, or IT, which is
increasingly connecting workers to their jobs.

When you look at workplaces from that perspective, as a bundle of services rather
than a physical place, many dramatic changes follow.

For example, the study discovered that organizational structures tend to be less
hierarchical, and more team-oriented when it’s easier for workers to collaborate across
the boundaries of time, space, and geography.

Companies are also expected to provide much more than a workstation or office when
employees have the option to connect from wherever they are. These employees also
expect software that makes it easier to work with their colleagues.

And as more company resources move online, ”employee self-service” grows. Workers
feel empowered to take what they need from the company Web site, whether it’s
human resource-related information or accounting forms.

These developments were not dreamt up in a vacuum. The ”Agile Workplace” study
was able to attract 22 industry sponsors, many of whom have aggressive workplace
innovation programs. Procter & Gamble, Sun Microsystems, and Hewlett-Packard
were all part of the project, and shared their experiences promoting decentralized work
environments.

Some of the lessons from the front lines of workplace design are counterintuitive. Like
the idea that all this remote connectivity makes a hospitable home office less
important.

”It turns out that the more distributed we become and the less dependent on place, the
more important the quality of place becomes,” said project co-director Joroff.

Why? ”Because it’s still important for people to come into the office, to network and
collaborate,” he replied. ”And if they don’t really have to come in, you should make it
so that they want to be there. In many industries, the workplace will evolve into more of
a club, where employees come to get together.”

The home will also increase in importance, Joroff said, as it becomes the center of
more activities.

”Even now, you do some of everything in the home: whether it’s education, health care,
or work,” he said. ”That trend is going to continue.”

Eventually, according to project co-director Bell, corporations will be expected to have
a ”workplace portfolio” that includes not just properties, but a network of places, a
variety of connectivity options, and management support that enables a more fluid
work environment.

What’s interesting about these developments is that many of the ideas were once
advanced as stand-alone ”collaborative” products during the dot-com boom. Most of
these products, and companies, are now gone. But the concepts may live on as
integral parts of standard workplace IT packages.

Joroff expects that integration to continue. He noted that the MIT Media Lab and the
Department of Architecture and Planning have recently joined forces to create a
”Changing Places” research consortium to ”make possible dynamic, evolving places
that respond to the complexities of life.”

”Work is changing,” Joroff said. ”It only makes sense that the workplace has to change
too.”

D.C. Denison can be reached at [email protected].

This story ran on page C2 of the Boston Globe on 4/21/2002.
© Copyright 2002 Globe Newspaper Company.

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