It was the tech sector that first gave offices a truly new standard to aspire to, with ‘chillout’ rooms, bean bags, ping pong tables and gourmet restaurants. The trend completely redefined how employers thought about ‘work space’ and what we need to do our jobs optimally. We ourselves at VTSL got a pool table for our new ‘hangout’ area in keeping with the trend. But now these companies are taking the modern office to its next iteration—colossal headquarters (yes more colossal than the ones they have already) that push the boundaries of both design and how we work.
Facebook has just moved into a new headquarters designed by Frank Gehry, designer of Spain’s Guggenheim Museum. Supposedly the largest open plan office in the world, it has no less than a nine-acre rooftop park. Google is moving into Googleplex soon. Apple’s spaceship office (a vast flying saucer type building) looks every bit of futuristic. And Amazon’s Seattle glass-dome biospheres, planned to open in 2016 and 2017, will no doubt look like no other office on earth.
The purpose of these new working environments is more than just to provide a lovely space for employees to get more done. It is to steal talent from competitors, help employees work in the way that suits them, and enhance opportunities for collaboration by forcing people working on very different projects to meet. For example in Facebook’s new headquarters you may find yourself having to walk an indirect, convoluted path for nearly 5 minutes just to get a cup of coffee, forcing you to take a break and pass as many people as possible.
It isn’t just the spaces themselves that are changing though. How we interact with them is too. There is a new app that lets employees find available working spaces nearby, arranged by variables such as light, ambient noise, and the number of people around. Fundamental to this app however is the assumption that offices are set-up for hot-desking with IP phones you can log into, cloud based desktops and file storage. But as more and more offices are set-up in this way, we will increasingly be able to choose our perfect work environment on any given day.
Interestingly however, the leaders in modern office space have not forgone one piece of technology some would think they might – the office phone. Virtually all of these companies still use ‘real’ phones, albeit high-tech IP phones in most instances that allow for things like mobile-twinning, Do Not Disturb, soft client applications that mean staff can use their mobile and desktop as their work phone, click to dial and multiple device registration. But it is this that I find most interesting about the ongoing office revolution. No matter how drastically we change our working environment to suit our generational-working inclinations, bio-rhythmic patterns and inherently social nature; the office phone system remains integral to our ability to communicate professionally in a work environment. In fact, even more so when open plan offices span the better part of a kilometre.
But the office phone systems we are talking about here are not traditional – they are VoIP systems run via a carefully managed network with capabilities and functionalities Thomas Edison couldn’t have even dreamed of. The good news is that while most normal business can’t afford a 9 acre rooftop garden, they can afford the same phone technology used by these cutting-edge tech giants. And with that I will leave you to ponder where you might get one…
For more information on office phone systems using VoIP technology, email VTSL at info@vtsl.net or check out our website www.vtsl.net.
