Over the past year in Australia, it has become clear that the pressure to retain staff with in-demand skills is driving some a fundamental restructure of the workplace – and the way we think about it.
It wasn’t all that long ago that workplace design principles seemed to favour employers more than employees: the rise of activity-based working and hot-desking, and the shift of office spaces out of the CBD to suburban campuses, handed employers efficient use of space and reduced rents.
One of the big shifts in 2018 was the ongoing trend to re-establish offices in central business districts. For those otherwise stuck working in campus environments, this brings them closer to where their customers often are, allows staff to work more efficiently, and significantly reduces travel time.
The fabric of workspaces is also changing. This is perhaps no better illustrated than by the arrival of in-flight wi-fi services on domestic air routes. Where it was once accepted that employees in transit would be uncontactable, that is fast becoming not the case. The ability to connect to corporate systems from anywhere is changing the way people think about the workplace. It is becoming more common for employees to converge in an office only occasionally, but to use collaboration and productivity tools to stay connected as a virtual team.
As the traditional boundaries of workspace fall away, so do some of the restrictions. People are able to work more flexible hours or reclaim time that would otherwise be spent commuting to an office environment. They are also being given a lot more choice around the devices they work on.
The days of chunky, fleet-issue, corporate laptops and of bring-your-own-device (BYOD) when you didn’t like what corporate offered are subsiding. That’s good news for employees since we are seeing less of the kind of news reports we saw even two years ago where people commonly lugged around three connected devices every day: a personal phone, corporate phone and corporate-issued laptop.
These days, forward-thinking organisations – and particularly those battling talent shortages – are more likely to have a corporate-owned personally-enabled (COPE) policy when it comes to workplace technology choices.
COPE has taken a while to take root. It’s only more recently, however, that I have seen a wave of companies adopting it as their default standard.
The attractive thing about COPE is that it lets people make their own decisions about how they work day-to-day. So not only has the rise of mobility allowed employees to choose when they work, but strategies like COPE allow them to also choose how they work.
For example, if someone has bought into the Apple ecosystem at home, there’s no reason why they shouldn’t also be able to buy into that ecosystem at work. They should be able to mix personal and business in a single device that the company owns; these days, iOS is pretty good at being able to segregate corporate and personal data on a single device.
Some companies that adopt COPE also give employees the option to choose their own device (sometimes called CYOD), to pay extra for a more highly-specified model, and even to own the device after x number of years when the corporate lease on it expires.
Organisations that want happy employees should do everything they can to achieve that. Creating both a physical and virtual environment in which employees want to work is an obvious, low-risk step as well as one that does not require the organisation to undergo a particularly drastic change.
Gib Chan, Systems Engineer – ANZ, JAMF
