STUDY: Future Workstation = 1 Person, 6 Devices, and 2/3 of a Desk
I’m always on the hunt for workplace research and today’s article seems like one worthy of sharing. According to a recent study by Citrix, a company whose Auckland offices I’ll be showing in the coming days, they’ve concluded that:
“The workplace of the future will provide just seven desks for every ten office workers, with each person accessing the corporate IT network from an average of six different computing devices.”
Interestingly enough, this trend isn’t something we’ve been blind to. A number of featured companies have implemented office designs that play directly into these stats. A few offices have used a concept called hotdesking, or hoteling, where employees are not assigned a permanent desk, but provided generic desks to sit down at to complete work (more on the concept here):
See hotdesking in action: Credit Suisse Zurich, Microsoft Netherlands, UVIT Netherlands
Other reasons for lowering the number of desks necessary in an office setting is the ability to be mobile and work from a variety of locations. According to the report, respondents noted that a third of people (29 percent) will no longer work from their traditional office.
And just where will they work? Respondents believed that mobility will continue to open up arrangements for working from home, the field and project sites, or customer or partner premises. In addition, “People are also expected to access corporate applications, data and services from locations such as hotels, airports, coffee shops and while in transit.”
With so many more employees getting work done away from the office, it only seems natural that the number of connected devices will rise.
If you had any doubt about the rise of mobile working (you probably didn’t), here is an infographic put out by Gist with some interesting statistics.
The Citrix Workplace of the Future Report was made up of polling data from 1900 senior IT decision-makers in 19 countries.
