Work has changed from a noun to a verb. It is no longer a place that we go to but an activity that we do. Work has shifted not just in space but in time too. “Phygital” is here to stay.
The role of staff is increasingly shifting to higher order work like complex problem solving, empathy based work and creative work and less about purely transactional tasks. Offices are now virtual and global and are now not service factories but design studios. Greater use of collaboration has meant that we are less dependent on the hierarchy to solve problems but rather reaching out to peers for inputs. Firms will need to help the Hybrid employee learn new tools and skills to thrive in a new future.
Email is rapidly losing its position as the dominant tool for collaboration, yielding instead to direct messaging and task management tools. Information, tasks, and updates are shared much more seamlessly in real time and more conversationally using services like Facebook and Twitter, WeChat, WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, Facebook messenger and iMessage, and now extend all the way to tools designed specially for collaboration such as Google sheets, Trello and even Slack. Features like blogs and online chat forums are now embedded into new collaboration tools.
Some are personal to-do lists (like Wunderlist, to.do and todoist), some are for shared task and activities (like Office 365 Planner or Asana). Some tools are specifically engineered for Agile (like AgileZen, Pivotal Tracker or LeanKit) and some are for Project management (like Planview, Microsoft Project or ChangePoint). It is now much easier for individuals in multiple regions, firms and geographies to seamlessly cooperate on the same task at the same time.
Time in the actual office will now be used to focus on human relations and co-creation rather than on transactional work. Being in the office on your own is also a wasteful exercise so firms will need to ensure that the rest of the team is in attendance too. Firms of the future will be orchestrators of engagement in both physical and virtual spaces.