Future technology: How it will empower work and supercharge productivity

Here, it will not be the creation or adoption of any one particular technology that helps to unlock new ways of working. It will be the convergence and integration of many technologies that ultimately empowers employees of organisations large and small, to work anywhere, anytime, anyhow.

Sentient workspaces

Perhaps the single most dramatic development will be the shift to intelligent, sentient workplaces by the mid to late 2020s¹.

Sentient workplaces effectively comprise a sophisticated network of employee wearables, smart devices and thousands of sensors. This cognitive structure will enable total, seamless workspace customisation. Each individual worker’s peak performance will be maintained throughout the day through the adjustment of variables such as temperature, light and oxygenation.

Technology that organises your day

Systems such as digital personal assistants, will in the future be able to schedule a working day that is varied and optimised for wellbeing and productivity.

Detecting that a worker will have a large block of time looking at their screen, software will be able to vary their day with a meeting, some exercise or perhaps half an hour in a sleep pod. Everything will be fine-tuned to optimise personal productivity.

Critically, the system will have a view of the entire workforce meaning diaries and appointments can be coordinated to maintain maximum company productivity.

Virtual connected ecosystem

In the near future, the technological backbone of work will become virtual rather than physical thanks to secure cloud access. Interoperability and integration will take disparate office technology out of silos uniting this into a virtual ecosystem.

On a day-to-day basis, this will provide agile workers with the seamless linked experience they need, whether they are at home, at the office, or at a coworking space.

The major advantage of this advanced backbone is the same from both employer and worker perspective – connectivity.

Everything from office IT, smartphones, Wi-Fi, security access programmes and devices like multifunction printers (MFPs) will be networked and will intercommunicate².

Technology within this ecosystem will become ever more self-sufficient. For example, equipment will be able to book engineer appointments and reorder parts or spares automatically to maximise uptime, and reduce management.

Ubiquitous learning

Technology is offering something much more exciting than shortcuts, simpler interactions and narrowing distance and time – it is promising to help us overcome our own human intellectual limitations.

Make no mistake, ubiquitous learning will unlock the biggest ever changes to the way we work.

In a move that could realise huge workplace efficiencies, algorithms will soon speed up task completion by mining data to solving productivity problems humans may never even have identified.  

Currently very much in its infancy, the growing power of algorithms will revolutionise the working world in ways we are only just beginning to imagine.

_{Sources:
1 Morey Smith: The Future of the Workplace (www.moreysmith.com/what-will-offices-be-like-in-2025)
2 Quocirca Print 2025 (www.print2025.com)}