#7-EN-Office Anywhere: The new paradigm-Avila Business Centers VideoPodcast

Avila Business Center VideoPodcast

There are things more predictable than others. Can we easily predict the office of the future? Some of the more futuristic tendencies related with workspaces and new office models have been recently presented in Lisbon, in a Conference promoted by Cushmann & Wakefield and by the OJE journal. Wim Van Hove, from Procos Group, highlighted that the office of the future will have more spaces of human interaction and that, more and more, individual work will be done outside of the company, whether at home, on journeys or simply in public spaces. Accordingly to Van Hove, a work station will only work for tasks implying human interaction, like meetings and presentations; each collaborator will be reachable in any part of the worlds, using remote communications that will be more intuitive and offices will be very different from the models we nowadays know: they will conjugate retreat areas, private areas, small meetings areas and meeting rooms for bigger groups. In reality, there will be a new office concept because there will also be a new work world – more dynamic, more efficient and based on an more open relation between leaders and collaborators, promoting social responsibility and a higher balance between professional and personal life. After all, all it is needed is to acquire new habits and to manage work in a more rational way, taking advantage of what new technologies have to offer. Currently, some companies have already adopted this model (the more known examples are Microsoft and Google), but also in the SME and micro companies world we have register a major change facing the functioning of the conventional office. In Portugal is already common for a small company with market notoriety to occupy temporarily work stations in a Business Center. Teams may work in any part of the world and workstations are rented only when work or clients meetings are necessary. If to this service we add the Virtual Office, this is, the adoption of a prestige address, distant secretariat support with personalized telephone answering and the online access to collaborative platforms, whether by the PC or smartphone, then we are talking of a new paradigm, synonym of a higher flexibility, costs contention, efficiency and productivity. The “Office Anywhere” concept came to stay and it is one of the company’s main allies.