workplaces of the future essay

• futureofwork

The Office of the Future Is Greener, More Social, and Might Even Include Childcare

B efore the pandemic struck, Lucy Jefferson spent nearly £50 ($57) a day commuting from London, where she had moved in 2019, to Birmingham, England where she worked as a product manager at a large U.K. bank. Although it was Jefferson’s choice to relocate 125 miles away, she believed that the 5 a.m. starts and two-and-a-half journey weren’t necessary for her to do her job well. She says the workplace culture encouraged employees to always “look busy” in the office. ”Classic corporate culture.”

When a U.K.-wide COVID-19 lockdown in 2020 forced her employer’s staff to work remotely, Jefferson was able to save time and money working from home. But, frustrated by her employer’s reluctance to guarantee the flexible work model would continue, Jefferson handed in her notice in November 2020. Fast forward nearly two years, she works full time running her own e-commerce brand, Bare Kind, and all of her six employees work remotely. “I haven’t looked back, it’s been amazing,” she says, citing benefits to her mental health—and her bank balance.

Jefferson says her former colleagues tell her it’s now much more common to work from home and as a result, the Birmingham office has lost its former buzz, with some floors no longer in use. This shift in office culture is in no way unique—offices in major U.S. cities are less than half as busy as they used to be, according to data from security provider Kastle Systems. The pandemic forced many companies to shift online, and some employees realized they preferred it. In the U.S., Australia, France, Germany, Japan, and the U.K, 18% of workers aren’t going into the office at all, according to a survey published in July by Future Forum, while patterns of hybrid working have become the norm for nearly half of the workforce.

Meanwhile, business leaders have been twisting themselves in knots over the return of in-person work, which some argue promotes more productivity and collaboration. At times this has created tensions .

Read More: Dropbox Tossed Out the Workplace Rulebook. Here’s How That’s Working

The clash in priorities between employers and workers has come amid record resignations across the workforce around the world. In the U.S., around 4 million workers have been quitting their jobs every month since April 2021, with many citing workplace inflexibility as a key factor. But being in the office could make a difference to their careers. In response to a survey published last month by workplace platform Envoy, 96% of U.S. executives said they were more likely to notice the contribution of employees in the office.

The conundrum for businesses has been getting workers to come back. Some industry leaders are viewing the pandemic disruption and shifting labor market as an opportunity to reconfigure workspaces in a way that prioritizes flexibility, wellbeing, and sustainability—and actually entices employees to travel in. The office may never dominate the world of white-collar work in the way it did pre-pandemic, but innovative designers and bosses are hoping it will add greater value to both their businesses and employees’ lives.

Making workplaces “commute-worthy”

While the new ways of working during the pandemic came as a shock to many businesses, global music streaming platform, Spotify, was well ahead of the curve. Just a month before the U.K. first went into lockdown in March 2020, Spotify unveiled its new London headquarters that would house hundreds of freshly hired employees and one of the company’s largest R&D hubs. Gone were the sea of desks typical of traditional office spaces. Instead, large booths, plush lounge spaces, production studios, and dedicated “listening rooms” gave the space, a “social club” feel, says Sonya Simmonds, Spotify’s global head of workspace design. Although employees initially couldn’t benefit from the new space—situated inside the Grade II listed Art Deco Adelphi Building in the heart of London—during the early months of the pandemic, the building was primed to cater to the blend of remote and in-person work on their return.

“We all felt disappointed not to use the new office and share the new spaces [during lockdown], particularly the stage and listening rooms with artists,” says Simmonds. As workers returned to the offices, it was set up to better suit their needs. Spaces dedicated to wellness provided a welcome getaway for workers dealing with the stresses of the pandemic, Simmonds says. “When we were allowed to return we really appreciated the wellbeing rooms.”

The idea behind the space was “very much based on where we wanted to go in the future,” Simmonds says. In February 2021, Spotify announced a work from anywhere policy, a transition that she says was accelerated, not triggered, by the pandemic. Yet, the company found that staff were still choosing to travel to the London office—the huge variety of spaces within the building offered even greater flexibility than employees’ own homes. In a post-pandemic era, workplaces must be “commute-worthy” for remote workers, says Shane Kelly, principal director at London-based architecture firm TP Bennett, which designed Spotify’s London office. “It’s about creating buildings that offer really collaborative experiences, focused on community and amenity, that you don’t get when you’re engaging remotely,” he says. Following the success of the London HQ, Spotify rolled out the design concept across its global locations.

Read More: How to Ask Your Employer if You Can Work Remotely Permanently

Swiss furniture brand Vitra took the concept of work flexibility one step further, when in spring 2021 it filled its headquarters in Birsfelden, Switzerland with customizable fittings that allow for multiple office configurations. The company’s new range, dubbed “Club Office,” includes modular sofa systems, flexible partitions, and foldable desks that fit together like a puzzle, allowing teams to tailor the work set-up to a variety of needs, moods, and even locations. By letting employees use their own office as a “laboratory” for new design concepts, Club Office fostered flexibility within Vitra’s workforce, says the company’s chief executive, Nora Fehlbaum. “Environments shape our thoughts and feelings,” says Fehlbaum. “This environment signals to stay on your toes, be ready to move.”

Fehlbaum hopes that Vitra’s products will make all workers feel connected to their office environments, even as their companies downsize or shift to co-working spaces. “The Club is the physical environment where a common mission and sense of belonging comes to life,” she says.

Blending the office with the home

Months of isolation during lockdowns around the world made workers appreciate the feeling of belonging to a team and connecting with colleagues—even when working remotely or from their homes. According to recent findings from the WFH research project , a monthly survey run jointly by the University of Chicago, Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford University, the average professional spends more than 40% of their working day interacting with others. With this in mind, Edouard Bettencourt and Malik Lemseffer, founders of French-Moroccan architecture firm Studio BELEM, have focused on designing a space where workers could connect and interact with others within the comfort of their own homes. Their aula modula apartment block design—a Tetris-like system of cube-shaped units with sliding wall panels—incorporates the collaborative elements of an office environment in a residential setting. While the block hasn’t been built yet, the firm says it is in talks with various developers.

With each block arranged around a sunny inner courtyard, the idea is that inhabitants would be encouraged to develop a sense of neighborly community, even while they work from home. “If you work remotely and just stay in your own flat or office all day, you’re going to go crazy not seeing anyone,” says Lemseffer. Creative shared spaces in the building, including shared terraces, co-working rooms, and roof tops, allow residents to network, brainstorm, and celebrate professional milestones—”all the things that can be a little bit harder to do remotely,” he says. At the same time, the architects were keen to contain the intimate living spaces and office units in different rings of the building, to allow residents to switch off from their work as they cross the physical boundary.

The blurring of the home and work environment precipitated by the pandemic forced many businesses to accommodate the unique personal circumstances of each employee. One such accommodation was caregiving responsibilities, as workers had to juggle educating their children while schools were shut or caring for elderly or sick relatives. Research published in June by the Society for Human Research Management found that, even as the pandemic subsides, workers place increasing value on jobs that offer the flexibility to care for family members.

Read More: The Dream of an ‘Internet Country’ That Would Let You Work From Anywhere

Entrepreneur Keltse Bilbao recognized this need before the pandemic when, after relocating to Los Angeles with her husband, she struggled to find a space where she could work on her own projects while being close to her daughter. In 2018, she founded Big and Tiny, a daycare service that provides on-site co-working spaces for parents—one of the first to do so in the U.S. “As a parent, what I wanted was the option to choose,” Bilbao says. “I could spend all day working, or I could have a break and be close to my child.” Big and Tiny has three studios in the U.S.—two in Santa Monica and one in Battery Park, New York City. They combine soundproof study rooms and phone booths, but also common spaces for working parents to socialize and relax.

While the business took a financial hit due to the pandemic—forcing it to shutter a center in Silver Lake, Los Angeles—the shift to remote working meant that more parents needed the service when lockdown restrictions were lifted. The increased demand for family-friendly work spaces led to partnerships with co-working office provider Second Home and mall and office complex Brookfield Place in New York City, with Big and Tiny providing on-site childcare. “These companies were having issues getting their customers back,” says Bilbao, adding that employers partnering with Big and Tiny to offer these workspaces to employees have been able to “differentiate themselves” from rivals whose offices didn’t cater to the demands of modern life.

Sustainability and wellbeing

Months of mask mandates, social distancing and enhanced hygiene practices shifted many people’s understanding of what makes a healthy environment. As poorly ventilated office buildings became potential public health hazards, citizens found respite in outdoor spaces. Simultaneously, the pandemic appears to have heightened public awareness of the climate crisis, according to a survey by Boston Consulting Group, as the effect of human behavior on the natural world, and the risks to humankind, have become more apparent. This shift inspired a new wave of office design that prioritized the wellbeing of both employees and the external environment.

Read More: In Some Workplaces, It’s Now OK Not to Be OK

Turkish architecture practice Salon Alper Derinboğaz made the learnings from the pandemic central to the design of Ecotone, an innovation center at Yıldız Technical University in Istanbul. When construction is completed in late 2023, the transitional space between teaching facilities and a professional academy will be “pandemic resistant,” says the architecture firm’s founder, Alper Derinboğaz, referring to the building’s partially open air design. Istanbul’s mild Mediterranean climate has allowed Derinboğaz to permeate a series of open co-working spaces with outdoor walkways, creating the kind of passive natural ventilation system that the World Health Organization says reduces the transmission risk of airborne viruses. Ecotone’s geothermal heating and cooling system is low emission, while the self-supporting structure—featuring columns resembling stalagmites and stalactites in caves—removes the need to lay intrusive foundations in the land. Fluid, glass-paneled walls and interior foliage allows for greater connection between workers inside the building and nature.

Developing innovative approaches to reducing the office building’s carbon footprint was a priority for Derinboğaz, who notes that the construction industry produces nearly 40% of global carbon emissions. “As architects we really need to find a new way of doing things,” he says. “That’s why we wanted the university’s innovation center to be innovative in its design.”

When it came to choosing architects for an addition to its Geneva campus , the United Nations (U.N.) says it chose London-based firm Skidmore Owings & Merrill (SOM) and Swiss studio Burckhardt+Partner. The architects took an innovative approach designing the 250,000 square foot office space. Completed in November 2021, the building was constructed on the historic Palais des Nations complex of buildings overlooking Lake Geneva, the U.N.’s second largest site after its New York headquarters. Water from the lake is used and recycled to heat and cool the building, eliminating the need for air conditioning units that are expensive to run and harmful to the environment .

According to Kent Jackson, SOM’s lead designer on the project, which the firm said was for a “non-profit humanitarian organization in Geneva,” the impressive surroundings gave the architects a unique opportunity to enhance the building’s design. “We wanted to give every employee [working in the office] a 360 degree view around the natural setting,” he says—floor-to-ceiling windows stand in place of walls. “Who couldn’t be inspired in their work looking at the hillsides, parkland, water, and mountains?”

For many of the companies pursuing new approaches to workspaces, that is the ultimate goal: creating a space to inspire and motivate employees to produce their most innovative work. In an age of increasing flexibility and less emphasis on geographical location, the office space must benefit its inhabitants as much as it does the business. “It’s about going through the whole journey of the build and design process together,” says Spotify’s Simmonds. “Coming out the other end, our staff feel they really have ownership over their office.”

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The Future of Work - How Work Will Look Like by 2030

A helping hand: Technology will make the future of work better in the optimistic scenarios Image:  REUTERS/Hannah McKay

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Stay up to date:, future of work.

Will technology kill jobs and exacerbate inequality, or usher in a utopia of more meaningful work and healthier societies? What will the future of work be like in 10 years from now?

While it is impossible to know what tomorrow holds, research by global professional services company PwC explores four possible futures – or “worlds” – driven by the “mega trends” of technological breakthroughs, rapid urbanization, ageing populations, shifting global economic power, resource scarcity and climate change.

4 Different Scenarios for the Future of Work

We discuss different scenarios that will shape up the future of work in the coming decade.

The Red World – innovation rules

The world becomes a perfect incubator for innovation in one PwC scenario. Digital platforms enable those with winning ideas and specialist, niche profit-makers, to flourish.

However, PwC warns, the risks are high if innovation outpaces regulation. “Today's winning business could be tomorrow's court case.”

Projects will develop at a fast pace and specialists will only stay with them as long as they, or the business, last. There will be few in-house human resources teams, with outsourcers or automation providing the human services needed.

The future of work may see little regulation from companies that prevent them from doing what they like, while workers will enjoy fewer benefits like health insurance, pensions and long-term employment.

The Blue World – corporate is king

Corporations grow so big and influential that some become more powerful and larger than national economies.

In a frightening vision, almost worthy of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World , PwC predicts: “Human effort [will be] maximized through ... physical and medical enhancement techniques and technology and, along with automation, analytics and innovation, push performance in the workplace to its limits.”

While rewards for some will be high, the price will be people’s data, which will “predict performance and anticipate people risk [predict behaviour that may damage a business financially or reputationally]”.

In both the future of work scenarios i.e. the Blue world and Red World, people who have strong skills – and update them – will be in demand, those who do not will be discarded.

The Green World – companies care

“This is a world where corporate responsibility isn't just a nice-to-have, but it's a business imperative,” PwC says.

A strong social ethos places a heavy emphasis on diversity, human rights and the non-financial impacts of business on the planet and people’s lives.

Competition for talent in this future of work scenario is intense and financial rewards are still important, while incentive packages include “three weeks’ paid leave a year to work on charity and social projects”.

However, workers are expected to reflect their employers’ values at work and at home and travel is tightly controlled.

“In this world,” the writers say, “automation and technology are essential elements to protect scarce resources and minimize environmental damage … But ... technology is a double-edged sword: it allows organizations to meet their ethical and environmental agenda, but at what cost to humans?”

The Yellow World – humans come first

In the fourth scenario of the future of work, financial technology enables more crowd-funded capital to reach ethically “blameless” brands, while workers and companies seek greater meaning and relevance in everyday life.

Artisanal skills return, as do workers’ guilds, which protect members’ rights and train new craftspeople: “It's a world where humanness is highly valued,” says PwC.

Non-financial rewards are given in a trade-off for less money, work is often a fluid concept and the standard 9-to-5 working week is rare, while the divisions between home and work blur.

However, while the automation of tasks that are dull, damaging or impossible for humans continues, the writers say: “Conflicts remain around the use of technology, as people are less likely to take the downsides of automation without a fight.

“As more people are impacted by technical advances and see their skills become obsolete, disaffection and the push-back against policies that favour the elite grow.”

Which way to the future of work?

All of the four possible futures of work in PwC’s report share the common theme of increasing use of technology to assist, augment and replace human work.

Some foresee the dominance of global corporations, others predict the growth of smaller, more individual endeavours. All, however, depend on digital technology to link talent pools and customers, and create financially beneficial relationships, whether these are between individuals and corporations, or groups of people.

“By replacing workers doing routine, methodical tasks, machines can amplify the comparative advantage of those workers with problem-solving, leadership, emotional intelligence, empathy and creativity skills,” PwC says.

“Those workers performing tasks which automation can’t yet crack become more pivotal – and this means creativity, innovation, imagination and design skills will be prioritized by employers.”

Changing lanes

Any of these futures of work – or a combination of them – are possible, but how we reach 2030, and who will benefit, needs careful planning and consideration.

In the film Escape from the Planet of the Apes, a scientist compares reaching the future to a driver changing lanes: “A driver in lane ‘A’ may crash while a driver in lane ‘B’ survives. It follows that a driver, by changing lanes can change his future.”

Working out which lane will lead to a less fractured world is one of the greatest challenges facing policy makers and corporate leaders today.

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What’s the Future of Work?

Mix smart machines, businesses as platforms, and diverse teams solving complex problems, add a whole lot of uncertainty, and you have a recipe for the future of work. Jeff Schwartz ’87, a principal at Deloitte, discusses how leaders can navigate fast-approaching opportunities and challenges.

• Jeff Schwartz Principal, Deloitte Consulting

The robots are coming! A Pew Research Center survey found that 72% of Americans are concerned about robots and computers taking jobs currently done by humans—though just 2% report having actually lost a job to automation.

In a conversation with Yale Insights last year, Yale SOM labor economist Lisa Kahn said that the effects of automation are already being felt throughout the economy. In fact, the Great Recession likely accelerated the process, both by slowing demand, giving firms a chance to retool without losing sales, and by providing an excuse to lay off unproductive workers.

“We have seen the influences of automation in almost every pocket of the labor market, from the very low end of the skill spectrum to the very high end,” she said. “The future of labor essentially comes down to, where are computers going to replace us and where are computers going to augment us?”

The New Yorker said that economists have long believed that technological changes eliminate some jobs but create plenty of new ones to replace them. Now they aren’t so sure. MIT’s David Autor has found that automation fundamentally alters the supply-and-demand equilibrium. “A subset of people with low skill levels may not be able to earn a reasonable standard of living based on their labor,” he told the magazine. “We see that already.”

So what does it take to keep a job? Kahn’s research has shown that cognitive and social skills are key: “If you have one of them, and especially both of them, I think it’s very likely that you’re going to be pretty safe from automation for a long time.”

To find out more about the future of the work, and how artificial and human intelligence can co-exist in the office, Yale Insights talked with Jeff Schwartz ’87, a principal for Deloitte Consulting and the company’s global lead for human capital marketing, eminence, and brand. Q: What are the key forces shaping the future of work?

Two megatrends are driving the future of work. One is that organizations are being dramatically reoriented and restructured. The historical view of an organization as a hierarchy is being replaced by a view of the organization as a network or an ecosystem. Instead of divisions, functions, or processes, organizations are increasingly being built around teams.

The second big shift has to do with work itself changing. An increasing number of tasks are being accomplished through automation or cognitive computing. To simplify it greatly, if we can articulate the process of something, we can automate it. It’s my expectation that in the next five to ten years everyone will be working next to and with a smart machine they’re not working with today.

Q: What is the role of people in this emerging future?

The question that we’re looking at in every company and every industry is, what are the essential and enduring human skills? What are the things that smart machines can’t do? I’m not quoting it correctly, but Pablo Picasso said something like, “Calculating machines are useless. They can only give you answers.” Asking questions is an essential human skill. I’m not talking about the kind of questions a chat bot can manage. I’m talking about the sorts of creative thinking and inquiry that lets us frame a problem.

For a range of reasons, the problems facing businesses and the public sector are much more complex and multi-disciplinary. The complexity of the problems and the pace of change means we need to work collaboratively, on teams. Working in teams is itself an essential human skill.

The relationship that we're developing with smart machines is different than before. We’re getting a glimpse beyond the digital native to the AI native who doesn't think twice about talking to their phone or any other device. We're getting to the point where natural language interaction—talking to our machines, our machines talking to us—is rebalancing work roles and the ways machines and people can augment each other.

Q: What does it look like to team with smart machines?

Let me offer two examples. Both have been highly popularized, so they should be in some sense familiar. One is IBM’s Watson platform as it relates to medicine. The way the IBM team put it is that after Watson won Jeopardy they sent it to medical school. That meant they fed Watson medical journal articles and data. They developed its capability to read radiology reports and to do oncology diagnoses. At this point, in terms of diagnosis accuracy, the average doctor is around the 50th percentile while Watson is 75th percentile.

Additionally, there’s an explosion of knowledge and data. A really great physician can read a couple hundred journal articles a year, but in any particular field there are thousands of articles written. Teaming with a machine learning technology like Watson could bring all that technical information to bear in diagnosis and coming up with potential treatments while doctors decide on the most appropriate approach and explain to a patient what a diagnosis means, something that currently is very difficult for a machine.

A very different industry, financial services, offers another example. My colleagues Tom Davenport and Jim Guszcza wrote about this recently in the Deloitte Review . One of the examples they use is robo-advisors. They are algorithms, basically, to help create financial portfolios.

Some investors interact directly with robo-advisors online. But many consumers are more comfortable interacting with a person. The financial advisor can still leverage the algorithm’s ability to do the calculations involved in setting up portfolios that meet the desired criteria while focusing on how she or he relates to the customer and ultimately working with more customers.

What these two examples have in common is that there are parts of knowledge work—data sorting, pattern matching, or algorithmic calculations—suited to the machines on our team. Other things are suited to the people on our team. The idea is to work together to augment each other.

Q: How are organizations changing?

What’s an organization going to look like in the 21st century? I think it’s up for grabs. Ronald Coase won his Nobel Prize for telling us in the late 1930s that firms were largely based on transaction costs. Our ability to transact and interact on internet-based platforms has blown away some of our concepts about transaction costs. Work and jobs are being separated from companies because there’s something competing with the traditional corporate organizational form, which is platforms. Beyond thinking about the key design principles of teams, networks, and ecosystems, we need to explore what it means to be a platform-based organization and what it means to be an asset-light organization.

It’s a taxi cab company taking out ads in the Yellow Pages, hiring dispatchers and drivers, and maintaining a fleet of taxis versus Uber, which owns no cars and doesn’t have any drivers. All they have is a platform that connects people that need rides and people that want to provide rides.

The boundaries of organizations in the 21st century are going to be shaped by companies that are the intermediaries between producers and consumers. Or, for many of us today, the platforms that let us constantly shift back and forth between being producers and consumers.

Q: So much of the discussion seems to split the future into either robopocalypse or techno-utopia? Is it that much of a binary?

In 1930, John Maynard Keynes wrote “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren,” an essay on the future of work. He envisioned that within 100 years the average person would be working 15 hours a week, and we’d have an excessive leisure problem. Obviously, that’s not what happened.

Keynes was a brilliant economist, but he missed something . He missed the number of new fields and human endeavors that would be invented—modern health care, education, and the technology industries, for a start. That’s largely what has driven employment and progress. That’s one of the things that make many of us who are looking at the future of work optimistic. The future doesn’t have to be about grinding out efficiency; it can be about exponential innovation.

It’s less a question of whether robots take our jobs, and more a question of how robots and technology will change our jobs. Automation, and not just robotics, but cognitive technology and AI, natural language processing, and machine learning will take some jobs while also creating new ways of working and extended labor platforms. I think it’s reasonable to expect that all of our jobs and all of our careers will be significantly or fundamentally changed by technology and different labor options.

As that is happening, we have the opportunity to redesign organizations, work, and how we think about careers and learning. If you’re motivated by the idea of living in fast-changing times, it’s going to be pretty exciting. If you’re in fear of fast-changing times, it’s going to be tough.

Q: Today’s cars are huge improvements over Ford’s Model T, but they aren’t so different that we can’t trace the lineage. To what degree have we seen where today’s technology and innovations will take us?

The short answer is, I don’t know. But I agree with William Gibson, who says the future is here, it’s just unevenly distributed. I’m not sure we know what today’s equivalent of the Model T is yet. If we could identify the Model T, the thing that we will incrementally improve far into the future, then we could extrapolate out.

I do think we have an idea of what the 21st century’s drivers might be. Mass production was the driver that enabled the Model T. Platforms, and the way that we interact in the economy, may be one primary driver for the 21st century.

In the early 1960s, Gordon Moore postulated basically that computing power doubles every 18 to 24 months. We’re now 25 to 30 turns into Moore’s Law. When you move something exponentially 25 or 30 turns, every additional doubling is a massive increase in computing and processing power. It makes possible things that simply were not imaginable, economically or technologically, before. We’re applying that to so many domains right now, it’s hard to know where that will go, but exponential technology is a likely another driver.

A third potential driver is in some ways the opposite of the Model T: extreme customization through technologies like additive manufacturing, where the setup costs for creating a different item is practically zero, so that we can both mass customize and mass produce. I think the 21st century will be in some way driven by platforms, exponential technology, and mass customization.

But the fourth driver, which is probably the biggest, is uncertainty and surprise. I was struck by the Queen of England asking after the financial crisis how all the brilliant economists in the UK and around the world, how the profession as a whole, missed something as big as the financial crisis. I think there’s some element of this now in every field. The interaction of highly complex global systems with the uncertainty and unpredictability of human behavior on a massive scale creates the potential for surprise that can happen extremely quickly and be very pervasive. I think that’s only going to continue. It may be fascinating or terrifying—probably a little bit of both.

I don’t think we have yet seen the potential and positive disruption of exponential technologies and platforms play out. I think the next 20 or 30 years will be about new technologies and platforms coming online, but also about adoption and pervasiveness as these ideas work their way into the economy.

Q: What does this mean for individuals?

Learning is the job in the 21st century. Full stop. As Lynda Gratton and Andrew Scott at London Business School tell us in The 100-Year Life: Living and Working in an Age of Longevity , right now, we’re living on average into our 80s, but millennials can expect to live to 100. What does it look like when the average time in a job is four and a half years and the half-life of a learned domain skill, like a computer language, is five years? How many careers are you going to have?

Adaptability and continual learning are not among the core skills; they are the core skills. Learning new domain knowledge is important, but we can learn it relatively quickly and we can access it highly effectively by collaborating with smart machines. More importantly we need to develop essential human skills, and we need the skills and capacities that let us partner in a team with machines. Individuals and companies need to be organizing around learning. And the learning needs to be organized around dynamism and change at speed.

Individuals have a responsibility for maintaining and developing their own skills and retooling through lifelong learning. Businesses will be benefited by being thoughtful about how they redesign jobs and teams and find ways to facilitate learning. But there is a significant set of responsibilities for government, public policy, and social institutions.

Q: What should that look like?

I recently co-wrote an article titled “ Navigating the Future of Work ” with John Hagel and Josh Bersin. Our observation is that if work is being augmented by on- and off-balance-sheet workers along with machines, in order to benefit from the incredible exponential power of technology and get our arms around the challenges that come along with it, we need to consider how we support people in these different arrangements.

Part of that is helping people through economic transitions. That includes healthcare and different kinds of income insurance. We are going to need really good data on people in a gig economy, so we need to improve the data that we gather on employment, education, and skills.

We need to recognize that each of us will need to do some version of going back to school every decade. We need to ask fundamental questions about how communities, cities, states, and the federal government support that. We need to look at every segment of the population and ask the question: what types of tuition credits, tax credits, or new forms of community college would incentivize people to educate themselves? That includes people in their 50s, 60s, and increasingly people in their 70s and beyond.

Q: Nearly every era thinks the challenges it faces are different. Is this time different?

We all decide every day, as students, employees, as business and government leaders: are we seeing incremental or exponential and transformative change? Are you going to bet on marginal changes during the life of your career, or are you going to bet on the world changing quite significantly? Will all the jobs be taken by machines or will more new jobs be created in your life than we’ve seen in the last couple of thousand years? We’re all dealing with those questions every day.

I don’t have the answers, but I do have two daughters who are 23 and 25. I’m hopeful about what might be in front of them and what will be in front of our grandchildren. It’s going to be a wild ride. The things that we’re talking about, exponential technology, platforms, uncertainty driven by the interconnectedness of the global economy and global systems can make wonderful things happen, and there will also be real difficulties.

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COVID-19’s impact on work, workers, and the workplace of the future

What will the world of work look like, post COVID-19? A paper co-authored by Dyson School faculty member Kevin Kniffin along with 28 other researchers and scholars from around the world — “ COVID-19 and the Workplace: Implications, Issues, and Insights for Future Research and Action ” ( American Psychologist ) — includes a preview of how COVID-19 may change work practices in the long term and offers projections about the workplace of the future.

Kniffin and his co-authors took a broad view of the pandemic’s many impacts on the workplace, encapsulating existing research, predicting a few likely outcomes, and pointing to new questions worthy of study. “By organizing our experiences as researchers in a wide array of topical areas,” they wrote, “we present a review of relevant literatures along with an evidence-based preview of changes that we expect in the wake of COVID-19 for both research and practice.”

“‘Sensemaking’ was the first value generated by this extraordinary collaboration, which we undertook because of the extraordinary impacts associated with the emergence of COVID-19,” says Kniffin. “With so many dimensions of work and life changing rapidly in relation to COVID-19, a clear and succinct assessment was our first task—and a foundation for charting roadmaps for future research and action.”

A new normal: Working from home

When the pandemic hit the U.S. hard in March, millions of workers began working from home – an unprecedented and ongoing phenomenon “facilitated by the rise of connectivity and communication technologies,” Kniffin and his co-authors note in the paper.

The authors project that working from home will not only continue for many workers, but that “COVID-19 will accelerate trends towards working from home past the immediate impacts of the pandemic.” This will be driven, in part, as organizations recognize the health risks of open-plan offices. “As we now live and work in globally interdependent communities, infectious disease threats such as COVID-19 need to be recognized as part of the workscape,” write Kniffin et al. “To continue to reap the benefits from global cooperation, we must find smarter and safer ways of working together.” Organizations will also appreciate the cost-savings of replacing full-time employees with contractors who can stay connected digitally, note the authors.

In light of this anticipated shift, one goal of the paper is to guide future research to “examine whether and how the COVID-19 quarantines that required millions to work from home affected work productivity, creativity, and innovation.”

Best practices for high-functioning virtual teams

Virtual teams were already growing in number and importance pre-COVID-19, as noted in the paper. Now, many workers participate in a variety of remote teams, via synchronous and asynchronous digital communication. Since virtual teams are here to stay for many workers even post-pandemic, it’s important to recognize the challenges and adopt best practices. For example, the authors point out that “traditional teamwork problems such as conflict and coordination can escalate quickly in virtual teams” and offer recommendations based on prior research, including:

• Build structural scaffolds to mitigate conflicts, align teams, and ensure safe and thorough information processing.
• Formalize team processes, clarify team goals, and build-in structural solutions to foster psychologically safe discussions.
• Provide opportunities for non-task interactions among employees to allow emotional connections and bonding to continue among team members.

Greater appreciation for woman leaders?

“A feminine style of leadership might become recognized as optimal for dealing with crises in the future,” write Kniffin et al. They point to high-profile woman leaders who have grappled with COVID-19 effectively, including Angela Merkel, chancellor of Germany, and Tsai Ing-wen, president of Taiwan. And they list several feminine values and traits that can be effective in crisis management (pointing to the relevant research regarding each trait), including:

• a communal orientation in moral decision-making,
• higher sensitivity to risk, particularly about health issues,
• higher conscientiousness, and
• more attentive communication styles.

Creating roadmaps for new patterns of work

In addition to the sudden shift in working from home, “COVID-19 and the Workplace” touches on many other aspects of the pandemic’s impact on workers and organizations. They point to the economic, social, and psychological challenges and risks for workers deemed “essential” as well as for furloughed and laid-off workers. They touch on fundamental changes brought about in some industries, and new opportunities in others. Regarding impacts on workers, they discuss increases in economic inequality, social distancing and loneliness, stress and burnout, and addiction. The authors also refer to factors that moderate the impacts of workplace changes brought about by the pandemic, including age, race and ethnicity, gender, family status, personality, and cultural differences.

By drawing on existing research to help make sense of the crisis and highlighting topics ripe for new research, the authors hope to clear a path to guide studies focused on building positive, productive interactions that will aid in the ongoing transition to new patterns of work. “We hope that our effort will help researchers and practitioners take steps to manage and mitigate the negative effects of COVID-19 and start designing evidence-based roadmaps for moving forward.”

“When we started this project,” Kniffin added, “it wasn’t clear how long COVID-19 would persist as a force of disruption and destruction. As the pandemic has persisted, though, it’s increasingly clear that COVID-19 should be considered for its impact in relation to almost any work-related practice. On top of that, the many ways in which COVID-19 has variably and disparately impacted people and work around the world warrants close attention, concern, and action.”

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Tim Iorio, Ph.D.

I am working on a book concerning survival in Corporate America: Lessons Learned (my memoirs), including chapters on how COVID-19 has changed the landscape. Your research is needed and invaluable, and I look forward to following it. I will more than likely do some Qualitative Research myself on the subject. Thank you.

Rachel Frampton

From my point of view, businesses must invest in workplace covid management software that will protect their employees. Well, I agree with you that they must provide smarter and safer ways of working together. We also share the same opinion about the importance of providing virtual consultations and meetings.

Comments are closed.

The changing workplace

Learn how to write about changes in the business workplace.

Do the preparation task first. Then read the text and tips and do the exercises.

Preparation

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What skills will the workforce of the future need?

As technological innovations continue to change the workplace, we are seeing more industries entrust their operations to new gadgets, software and programs that can transform the workplace. One such technology that has the potential to revolutionise workplaces in the coming years is RPA (Robotic Process Automation). With more industries starting to embrace RPA software, RPA robots would be able to handle mundane, repetitive tasks like some of the clerical work normally dealt with by administrative staff, thereby lowering running costs and increasing productivity.

There is a common concern that companies employing technology like RPA are only interested in increasing their profit margins through cost reduction, and that this trend would eventually leave most of the workforce jobless. However, while it is true that the menial tasks of administrative and clerical jobs are likely to be taken over by automation, the demands on the average office worker will evolve to include more creative work, managerial duties and communication with clients and suppliers.

With this shift in focus, the skills required of future workers are also bound to change. Moving away from basic data entry skills, the worker of the future will be expected to have transferable problem-solving and critical thinking skills that will enable them to tackle any difficult situation and work independently to find solutions.

The ability to adapt and be agile would also be essential in a world that is likely to become increasingly volatile, uncertain and complex. Having such flexibility, coupled with the desire to keep learning and the initiative to step forward, the successful worker of the future is one who will be able to use their skills to seek out opportunities, make improvements and take on new challenges wherever they'll be working.

By equipping our future generation of workers with such business skills, we can ensure that when automation fully takes over, our workers will have the survival skills to become better employees and leaders of the future.

• It is helpful to start with a more general statement before narrowing it down to talking about a specific example, e.g. technological advancements will continue to change the workplace → one such technology is RPA .
• over a period of time, e.g. As technological innovations continue to change the workplace, ... /  With more industries starting to embrace RPA software, ...
• at some point in the future, e.g.  when automation fully takes over, ...
• Connect new paragraphs to what was previously written in order to achieve better cohesion, e.g. With this shift in focus, ... /  The ability to adapt and be agile would also be essential  ... /  By equipping our future generation of workers with such business skills, ...
• When talking about future trends, use a variety of phrases to show the different levels of probability of things happening, e.g. to be likely to ,  to have the potential to ,  to be expected to ,  to be bound to .
• Conclude with a summary of the main points of your article.

How do you think the workplace of the future might change? What business skills do you think will be necessary for the worker of the future to be successful?

Language level

Over the period of Technological Era, Computers and Technological device has revolutinise the way work is typically done. In fact the workplace has changed rapidly that more Industries heavily rely on computers to perform a mundane task. However Human's creativity, critical thinking skills, problem solving, and communication skills are essential skills that outmatch a computer. Considering the fact that Technological Inventions such as robot and super computer are widely utilise in a Corporate Industry. Future Generations of Worker must be equipped to adapt to ever changing workplace and must harness essential skills. Human's drive for success and recognition are vital traits that distinguish us from the rest. Therefore I conclude the future of workplace will not be entirely dominated by Automation, Human provided with necessary essential skills will always have its role in this ever competitive workplace regardless of the given field.

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Honestly, it's hard to predict how workplaces will look in the future but I think the development of technology obviously will change them dramatically. First of all, I expect fewer papers at work. I think most of them we easily can change on e-documents: this is a much faster way to deal and much more ecological. And dull work. It would be great to replace people with robots on it. No one likes boring jobs and we must provide more intellectual jobs to humans. Of course, more intellectual jobs demand more intellectual employees so we have to adjust our education to the coming conditions. And, of course, I have some words about dangerous jobs. Every day millions of people risk their lives on dangerous jobs: like miners or firefighters. I predict some serious changes in these fields in the future. I'm sure we should replace people with robots there too.

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The Future of Flexibility at Work

• Ellen Ernst Kossek,
• Patricia Gettings,
• Kaumudi Misra

What does true flexibility look like? Most organizations approach it in one of two ways: as an ad hoc work-life accommodation available upon request, or as giving people permission to get their work done on their own schedule — as long as they’re available to answer emails or put out fires 24/7. Neither approach is sustainable over the long term. The authors, who have been studying workplace flexibility for years, advocate a more balanced approach that makes employer and employee needs equal. In this article they outline the downsides of work-life accommodation and boundaryless working and discuss the tenets that organizations should follow as they develop their own flexibility programs and policies.

You can tailor programs and policies to fit your employees’ needs.

As organizations tentatively plan how to get work done amid the uncertainty of the coronavirus, both leaders and employees are touting the benefits of flexibility. But what does flexibility at work look like in practice? And how can you know whether your team or organization is using it successfully?

Advice on inclusivity, onboarding, performance measurement, and more.

• Ellen Ernst Kossek is the Basil S. Turner Distinguished Professor of Management at Purdue University and was president of the Work & Family Researchers Network. She studies how leader support of work-life boundaries, flexibility, and remote work affect women’s inclusion and career equality.
• Patricia Gettings is an assistant professor of communication at the State University of New York at Albany. She studies the intersections between personal relationships and organizational commitments and how individuals and organizations negotiate those overlaps.
• Kaumudi Misra is an assistant professor of management at California State University, East Bay. She studies the role of work-life flexibility practices as a strategic human resource lever for individual and organizational productivity.

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The Future Workplace

Compared to the past, today’s workplace is vastly different. Even though computers have replaced typewriters and machines have replaced jobs, it’s no secret that machines are taking over. The outbreak of COVID-19 has expedited workplace transformation. Because of this, people are more equipped than ever to work with each other worldwide. They’ve come up with new ways to work with computers. People are adapting to novel customs of at work, and organizations necessity to reorganize themselves to keep up.

There has been a significant shift in the workplace during the previous several decades. Using contractors and independent contractors as employees is an example of how this could be accomplished. Knowledge-based work is increasingly being done on the internet. There are various reasons why people choose to work from home, including the desire for a more flexible work environment and the desire to avoid spending a significant amount of money on real estate. Managing one’s identity while working from home can be difficult when one works from home. Before anything else can be accomplished, it is necessary to develop a virtual but apparent culture.

It is not apparent how a combination of natural and virtual surroundings could aid in the development of a culture of acceptance for ambiguity and uncertainty. Algorithms are being employed in various applications To connect people with employment, evaluate their work performance, and compute remuneration. There is a great deal of chaos, which usually spells the end of any civilization. Employees who perceive that algorithmic task allocation and payment are unjust may become furious due to these modifications. Because of this, the following workgroups would only consider them transactional participants, which might result in mediocre performance from the entire workforce. You must be aware of the number of firms that use algorithms and their employees’ attitudes toward procedural and distributive justice.

It doesn’t take long for businesses to discover that the great bulk of their information to generate new value is located beyond their traditional borders. On the other hand, companies are more likely to rely on independent contractors and consultants to complete their tasks (dubbed “gig workers”). Customer groups, open-source development, and crowd-sourced projects are examples of places where early signals of the future of work can be discovered. Workers from outside the company’s organization can join work teams, allowing for more efficient completion of tasks. Companies can form and dissolve groups at their discretion. Every work team has its distinct collection of agents, and an organization may be responsible for a large number of agents at any given time. Employees can now report to an excessive number of managers simultaneously and have resulted in a significant increase in the number of matrices groups relative to before. There are numerous reporting lines and performance evaluators to consider when operating in a matrix. Algorithms may become increasingly significant in job execution as a result. (Williams, 2021)

Work incentives must be integrated into the corporate culture of every organization. Intrinsic motivation and equitable reward for work can impact a person’s professional choice and teammates. Companies will have to use inherent motivators in the future to locate and hire “intrinsically motivated” individuals if they want to succeed. Dual incentive systems must be effective because they appeal to both internal and external motivations. It is critical to understand which intrinsic motivators are most effective in particular contexts and how they interact with one another to maximize performance. As a result, it will be easier to recruit for internal and external positions.

The underlying motives of collaboration and learning have been vital in the past and the future. Especially in today’s competitive environment, businesses must discover ways to create an environment that encourages collaboration and the generation of new ideas. For them to be able to generate new ideas, they must learn how to synthesize information. To ensure that all work is completed most efficiently and productively possible, large-scale cooperation has occurred within the organization. Consider how technology can make large-scale collaboration easier.

As robots and artificial intelligence (AI) take over more and more jobs in the future, human agents will be forced to master new skills. If you want to master these hobbies, you’ll need positive and negative feedback. It will not be easy to automate this type of information entry in the future. It is possible that auto-feedback will be seen negatively and could hamper learning, mainly when supplied in the form of ratings. Additional research must be conducted to discover how algorithmic feedback may be made acceptable. People and machines can provide input, despite little research having been done in this area. The use of human-machine synergy, for example, could assist people in predicting their future employment potential.

The inclusion of their staff is becoming increasingly crucial for businesses to be successful and run efficiently. The importance of diversity and inclusion in the workplace will only grow in the years to come. There is an increasing demand for organizations dedicated to accepting, utilizing, and benefitting from neurodiversity in our communities. In the end, there will be an increase in the number of these organizations. While businesses strive to make their workplaces more diverse, they must consider demographic factors, notably ethnicity, in their efforts. Employers who rely on algorithms are attempting to be more inclusive. Working to eliminate human prejudices should be a priority. Human biases may pose a serious threat when it comes to developing algorithms. Understanding algorithms and how they work is critical for avoiding biases that make algorithms less inclusive. Examining how virtual work has made us more inclusive, as well as how the outcomes of this experiment may influence future work practices. (Lind, Madgavkar, & Manyika, 2020)

Specific issues stated concerning future employment can be solved by utilizing two fundamental design characteristics. In terms of design, we have these two criteria to keep in mind: Mindfulness is a critical design component. To understand post-epidemic employment, these two aspects of work design will play a significantly more significant role after the pandemic. Mindfulness in the workplace has lately been a hot topic among experts looking for ways to boost productivity and predict the future of work. According to research in fields as diverse as psychology, neurology, and medicine, mindfulness is essential for designing future workplaces that encourage cognitive engagement with work and healthy work behavior. Technology and human interaction must be included in mindful work’s future production. Future workplaces will need to consider such issues as fostering concentrated thought, recuperation intervals (after technology usage), and non-technology-mediated engagement. There are times when proximal human connections must be employed sparingly to achieve mindful job design. More research is required to balance technologically better assisted and non technologically assisted aspects of future job design. Because of the Zoom fatigue that many companies have been experiencing during COVID-19, it’s clear that finding a way to balance technology and human requirements is an important step. Research is needed to build organizational norms to help maintain this equilibrium. The future of mindful workplaces will entail taking into account workers’ mental health. (Malhotra, 2021)

Another part of the future of work that must be prepared is meaningful work. Workers at a typical firm preparing for the future may use their free time to work on educational projects unrelated to their “assigned” responsibilities. An employee’s extra time can study and develop if they aren’t distracted by their primary responsibilities. Employees in the future will expect their employees to have a positive influence on society. Therefore, companies will have to make social impact a critical capability of their employees. Individuals can utilize their leisure time to have a positive societal influence even if their regular work does not. The legal and financial professions have a long and renowned tradition of pro bono service. A more significant social and societal impact might be achieved through pro bono labor in the future. Pro bono and free time work influence job satisfaction and organizational loyalty, but further study is needed. There are a lot of essential issues that need to be answered via investigation.

In conclusion, Since the COVID-19 outbreak, people have been able to move faster toward the future of work and plan for post-pandemic employment and organizations. This discussion aims to inspire further study on a lot of work and organizations. Individual reactions and future work structure must be considered in developing a multidisciplinary vision of future work. This method helps understand future post-pandemic organizational situations since other undiscovered routes exist.

Lind, S., Madgavkar, A., & Manyika, J. (2020). The future of work after COVID-19. Retrieved Deecember 2021, from https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/future-of-work/the-future-of-work-after-covid-19

Malhotra, A. (2021, April 6). The postpandemic work.  Journal of Management, 47 , 1091-1101. Retrieved December 2021, from https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/01492063211000435

Williams, C. (2021). The fight over the hybrid future of work.  The World ahead . Retrieved December 2021, from https://www.economist.com/the-world-ahead/2021/11/08/the-fight-over-the-hybrid-future-of-work

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The Nobel Winner Who Liked to Collaborate With His Adversaries

By Cass R. Sunstein

Mr. Sunstein is a law professor at Harvard and an author of “Noise,” with Daniel Kahneman and Olivier Sibony.

Our all-American belief that money really does buy happiness is roughly correct for about 85 percent of us. We know this thanks to the latest and perhaps final work of Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel Prize winner who insisted on the value of working with those with whom we disagree.

Professor Kahneman, who died last week at the age of 90, is best known for his pathbreaking explorations of human judgment and decision making and of how people deviate from perfect rationality. He should also be remembered for a living and working philosophy that has never been more relevant: his enthusiasm for collaborating with his intellectual adversaries. This enthusiasm was deeply personal. He experienced real joy working with others to discover the truth, even if he learned that he was wrong (something that often delighted him).

Back to that finding, published last year , that for a strong majority of us, more is better when it comes to money. In 2010, Professor Kahneman and the Princeton economist Angus Deaton (also a Nobel Prize winner) published a highly influential essay that found that, on average, higher-income groups show higher levels of happiness — but only to a point. Beyond a threshold at or below $90,000, Professor Kahneman and Professor Deaton found, there is no further progress in average happiness as income increases.

Eleven years later, Matthew Killingsworth, a senior fellow at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, found exactly the opposite : People with higher income reported higher levels of average happiness. Period. The more money people have, the happier they are likely to be.

What gives? You could imagine some furious exchange in which Professor Kahneman and Professor Deaton made sharp objections to Dr. Killingsworth’s paper, to which Dr. Killingsworth answered equally sharply, leaving readers confused and exhausted.

Professor Kahneman saw such a dynamic as “angry science,” which he described as a “nasty world of critiques, replies and rejoinders” and “as a contest, where the aim is to embarrass.” As Professor Kahneman put it, those who live in that nasty world offer “a summary caricature of the target position, refute the weakest argument in that caricature and declare the total destruction of the adversary’s position.” In his account, angry science is “a demeaning experience.” That dynamic might sound familiar, particularly in our politics.

Instead, Professor Kahneman favored an alternative that he termed “adversarial collaboration.” When people who disagree work together to test a hypothesis, they are involved in a common endeavor. They are trying not to win but to figure out what’s true. They might even become friends.

In that spirit, Professor Kahneman, well into his 80s, asked Dr. Killingsworth to collaborate, with the help of a friendly arbiter, Prof. Barbara Mellers, an influential and widely admired psychologist. Their task was to look closely at Dr. Killingsworth’s data to see whether he had analyzed it properly and to understand what, if anything, had been missed by Professor Kahneman and Professor Deaton.

Their central conclusion was simple. Dr. Killingsworth missed a threshold effect in his data that affected only one group: the least happy 15 percent. For these largely unhappy people, average happiness does grow with rising income, up to a level of around $100,000, but it stops growing after that. For a majority of us, by contrast, average happiness keeps growing with increases in income.

Both sides were partly right and partly wrong. Their adversarial collaboration showed that the real story is more interesting and more complicated than anyone saw individually.

Professor Kahneman engaged in a number of adversarial collaborations, with varying degrees of success. His first (and funniest) try was with his wife, the distinguished psychologist Anne Treisman. Their disagreement never did get resolved. (Dr. Treisman died in 2018.) Both of them were able to explain away the results of their experiments — a tribute to what he called “the stubborn persistence of challenged beliefs.” Still, adversarial collaborations sometimes produce both agreement and truth, and he said that “a common feature of all my experiences has been that the adversaries ended up on friendlier terms than they started.”

Professor Kahneman meant both to encourage better science and to strengthen the better angels of our nature. In academic life, adversarial collaborations hold great value . We could easily imagine a situation in which adversaries routinely collaborated to see if they could resolve disputes about the health effects of air pollutants, the consequences of increases in the minimum wage, the harms of climate change or the deterrent effects of the death penalty.

And the idea can be understood more broadly. In fact, the U.S. Constitution should be seen as an effort to create the conditions for adversarial collaboration. Before the founding, it was often thought that republics could work only if people were relatively homogeneous — if they were broadly in agreement with one another. Objecting to the proposed Constitution, the pseudonymous antifederalist Brutus emphasized this point: “In a republic, the manners, sentiments and interests of the people should be similar. If this be not the case, there will be a constant clashing of opinions, and the representatives of one part will be continually striving against those of the other.”

Those who favored the Constitution thought that Brutus had it exactly backward. In their view, the constant clashing of opinions was something not to fear but to welcome, at least if people collaborate — if they act as if they are engaged in a common endeavor. Sounding a lot like Professor Kahneman, Alexander Hamilton put it this way : “The differences of opinion, and the jarrings of parties” in the legislative department of the government “often promote deliberation and circumspection and serve to check excesses in the majority.”

Angry science is paralleled by angry democracy, a “nasty world of critiques, replies and rejoinders,” whose “aim is to embarrass,” Professor Kahneman said. That’s especially true, of course, in the midst of political campaigns, when the whole point is to win.

Still, the idea of adversarial collaboration has never been more important. Within organizations of all kinds — including corporations, nonprofits, think tanks and government agencies — sustained efforts should be made to lower the volume by isolating the points of disagreement and specifying tests to establish what’s right. Asking how a disagreement might actually be resolved tends to turn enemies, focused on winning and losing, into teammates, focused on truth.

As usual, Professor Kahneman was right. We could use a lot more of that.

Cass R. Sunstein is a law professor at Harvard and an author of “Noise,” with Daniel Kahneman and Olivier Sibony.

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Excel Dryer’s blueprint for healthy and sustainable workplaces of the future featured in new CEU program

• Updated: Apr. 09, 2024, 3:11 p.m. |
• Published: Apr. 09, 2024, 3:00 p.m.

Excel Dryer's Reception Area Third

• The Republican Business Desk

East Longmeadow - Excel Dryer , the global leader in touchless hand hygiene solutions, recently unveiled a comprehensive office expansion and renovation project. This initiative, rooted in the company’s mission to lead through innovation, aimed to merge beauty, health, wellness and sustainability into its workplace. The project’s insights and methodologies are set to educate through a unique continuing education unit (CEU) course, offered by Architectural Record magazine in its Continuing Education Center , serving as a detailed roadmap of Excel Dryer’s innovative journey.

Guided by the WELL Building Standard ® as a principal framework, the renovation serves as a case study showcasing Excel’s commitment to integrating the latest and most effective products in support of occupant well-being, productivity and environmental sustainability. This initiative aims to inspire and educate not just architects, designers and the construction community, but also owners and facility managers, offering insights into the practical application of sustainability and health-focused principles in commercial interiors and demonstrating Excel Dryer’s leading role in the movement toward more responsible workplace design.

William Gagnon, COO of Excel Dryer, said, “Our vision was clear from the start - to craft the most beautiful, healthy and sustainable workplace imaginable. We are thrilled with the results and proud of how our own latest product solutions were a perfect fit for this lofty goal.”

Katherine Brekka, senior associate/sustainability practice leader at Fennick McCredie Architecture, praised the initiative: “Being a part of this groundbreaking project was an extraordinary experience. The innovative blend of space, beauty and wellness achieved is something I’m incredibly proud of. It represents a forward-thinking approach to workplace design that I was thrilled to contribute to, and see come to life.”

The Architectural Record’s CEU course provides a focused overview on the intersection of modern design, health standards and sustainability in commercial architecture. It provides information on the multiple innovative products used to achieve WELL certification, including what points they qualify for as well as LEED credits including the D|13 Sink System featuring the XLERATORsync® Hand Dryer , in earning WELL points and LEED credits. This curriculum explores the evolution of hygiene and sustainability post-pandemic, highlighting the importance of touchless technologies in public restrooms to prevent illness. Ultimately, the course showcases how integrated design solutions can promote health, efficiency and environmental stewardship in commercial spaces.

Get more information on this CE program and register .

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NASA has been asked to create a time zone for the moon. Here's how it would work

Kai McNamee

A new lunar time zone has been pitched for the moon. John Raoux/AP hide caption

A new lunar time zone has been pitched for the moon.

As the world prepares for a new space race , the Biden Administration is calling on NASA to create a moon-based time standard. That's because time ticks by faster on the moon relative to Earth.

The difference is very small, but space flight needs extreme precision. And when lunar spacecraft and satellites operate on an Earth-based time standard, that difference could create problems, according to a memo issued by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy this month.

If daylight saving time seems tricky, try figuring out the time on the moon

The new lunar time zone, Coordinated Lunar Time (LTC), is all about ensuring the success of future, multinational missions to the moon, said Michelle Hanlon, the executive director of the Center for Air and Space Law at the University of Mississippi.

"It's not just the U.S. going back to the moon by itself. We are going as the Artemis partners — right now, 36 nations — and they are spread out across the globe. So we've got to figure out one way where we can talk to everybody in the same time," she said.

The LTC would not be like a regular time zone on Earth. On Earth, those zones are set using Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), which reflects a weighted average measurement of hundreds of extremely precise atomic clocks placed around the globe.

The creation of a lunar time zone would require international agreements. NASA Johnson hide caption

The creation of a lunar time zone would require international agreements.

Due to the moon's lower gravity and its motion relative to Earth, moon time passes 56 microseconds faster each earth day . As a result, an atomic clock on Earth would run at a different rate than an atomic clock on the moon.

Similar to how UTC is determined, the memo suggests "an ensemble of clocks" deployed to the moon might be used to set the new time standard.

The memo also notes the creation of the LTC would require international agreements.

Hanlon said taking this step towards a unified approach to space travel is important for establishing international collaboration on the moon.

"I hope that this is the beginning of a collaboration. When we think about the geopolitical circumstances down here on Earth, it doesn't look particularly hopeful," she said.

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Researchers say time is an illusion. so why are we all obsessed with it.

Hanlon said that because several players in today's space race are looking to land near the moon's south pole, figuring out an international standard will be crucial.

"We all agree that space should be exclusively for peaceful purposes. We all agree that we have free access and freedom of exploration and use," she said.

"Let's all agree on how we're going to tell time on the moon."

• space exploration
• White House

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